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Door to Door Support Raising

Add this to a long list of things God has gotten me into that I never imagined I would ever be doing: door to door support raising. I didn’t even realize that’s what I’d be doing when we set out to implement our newest, and to date, craziest, support raising strategy, but sometimes God has His own plans (technically He does all the time, sometimes I just forget it).

The idea was to save money on postage. At least that’s what I thought the idea was. Tomo and I were recently preparing our June newsletter, which includes a DVD, when we realized that it would cost about a $1.50 in postage to send each one. About 60 people on our mailing list live in the South Orange County area, so we figured we could save some money delivering those ourselves, and hey, it might be a good chance to say hi to some people we haven’t seen in awhile. After plotting the day’s deliveries in Google Maps, we set off. By the end of the first day I was blown away by how much better God was at organizing things than I was.

People are busy, and I’ve often been a little discouraged at how difficult it is to get an appointment to go talk to someone about our Japan. I usually play phone tag with people for a few weeks, exchange emails, texts, then they go on vacation, and when they get back, sometimes they can squeeze in a time to get together with us. And that’s just how life is here in California, we’re all busy people. So, I figured we’d show up, hand over the envelope, exchange small talk and be off. But instead we almost always found ourselves invited in, and asked about how things were going, and what we were up to. Turns out driving to someone’s house and knocking on their door is often the best way to talk to them.

Last week we spent four afternoons doing this. It was probably the most fun I’ve had support raising since I started. We got to know some of our supporters better, reconnected with friends I hadn’t seen in years and even meet new people for the first time. Sometimes we just caught up on what we’d been up to, sometimes we just dropped off the envelope, often people wanted to pray with us, and a few times we gave a full on support presentation and left with people promising to pray about financial partnership. Having something to hand over turned out to be the perfect excuse to drop by for a visit. No one minded, in fact almost everyone said they appreciated that we took the time to stop by in person to talk to them. But if they were busy we just gave them the newsletter and DVD, and went on to the house on our list.

We’re still waiting to see what God will do as far as raising up actual financial support, but regardless of that we had an encouraging and enjoyable time. We’ve still got about thirty or so deliveries to make, and I’m excited to see more old friends and meet new ones. So if we show up on your door step in the next few weeks, don’t be too surprised.

Side note: How many friends do you have that live within ten minutes of you that you haven’t seen or talked to in the last five years? Try stopping by their house some time and saying hi. It’s kind of fun.

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So how exactly do you raise support?

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.

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Support Raising Lesson #1

Doing is secondary to being. I tend to forget that. Doing what God wants me to do is a good thing, right? It’s obedience, and obedience is simple: “do these things, don’t do these other things.” So I try my hardest to obey, only to fail time and again. The reason I fail is simple: there are many things God wants me to do, that I don’t enjoy doing. I can only force myself to do things that are unpleasant, frightening or just plain boring for so long before I turn to find some comfortable, time wasting, fun distraction. If I focus on doing what God wants me to do without being the person He wants me to be I’m doomed to failure from the start. Who I am determines what I will do. But how can I focus on being something I am not yet? If who I am determines what I do, then there’s nothing I can do to change who I am. Left to my own I am doomed.

Thankfully God does not leave me alone. Only He can transform my heart and my desires so that I long to do the things that He commands. I can’t transform myself any more than I could make myself be born again, but I can go along with the transformation. I can chose not to resist it. I can get rid of the things that might slow it down. I can surrender the things that my flesh desires, and cast off any hope or dream that would distract me from doing what God wants me to do. I can find refreshment and encouragement and wisdom in God’s word. I can come before Him in prayer asking Him to work in my life, begging for a new heart that longs for His glory, and finds the greatest joy in His presence and in obeying His commands. And I can do that every single day, in fact I have to, because “my heart is prone to wander.”

But doesn’t doing all that land me right back where I started: with a focus on my own actions and exercising my own weak will? I don’t think so. In this case it is not about God giving the instructions and me following them. It’s about inviting and trusting that God is in the middle of those actions, giving me the strength to do them, that He is in me and working through me, that He commands, and then gives me the desire and the ability to obey, and for some inexpicable reason rewards me for doing so.

What does all this have to do with support raising? Support raising requires a lot of actions. I have to make phone calls, give presentations, speak at churches, write letters, and do many other things that are incredibly difficult for me. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the task before me, or to equate being a successful fund raiser with being a successful Christian. I presume that any ministry can fall into this same trap.