Often I’m asked for the specifics of what we do to raise support. The simplest and truest answer is probably “stumble around trying things and pray God does a miracle.” Support raising is not something I’m naturally gifted in. But that’s fine, even sometimes glorious, because when it works I know it’s not me, but God. It’s a wonderful feeling to succeed in something you know you’re terrible at. I imagine Peter really had a good a time walking on water because he’d never had much of a talent for it till Christ told him to come out and join Him.
The standard support raising strategy we have is to call people up and ask if we can meet with them. If they’re willing we go to their house (or have them come to ours), we talk with them for about an hour, sharing what God’s calling us to do in Japan, and how they can partner with us to do it, and then invite them to support us. We also call churches for about the same reason, except in addition to asking the church to support us we ask if we can speak at a Bible Study, or even the main service. And we’re always trying to meet new people, and ask for referrals.
We’ve got two new things we’re trying. The first is this video that we made into a DVD. It’s a ten minute presentation and our contact information. We’re in the process of sending out about 200 of them. Our hope is that people will watch the DVD, and that God will move them to join us in reaching the Japanese for Christ. We also hope that people will give the DVD away to a friend to watch. Ideally each of the 200 DVDs will be passed around to many people, so that potentially thousands might get a chance to hear about what we’re doing.
The second new idea we have is to hand deliver the DVD and our latest newsletter to people living close by. The reason we came up with this was to save on postage, as it would be expensive to mail 200 DVDs out, we thought it would be good to hand out as many as we could. We’re hoping to spend a few days driving around and delivering them to people ourselves, both to save money, and to say hi. Many of the people on our mailing list are old friends that I haven’t seen in a long time, and many have never met Tomo, so it seemed like a great opportunity to reconnect. If we show up on your door step, now you’ll know why.
Please be praying that God uses this DVD project to call more Christians into a deeper involvement in missions, and ultimately to take the Gospel to Japan and that God will call more Japanese to salvation through Christ.