Testimonies
From Pastor D. Stone, Pastor of Maranatha Community Church, Kempton Park
We used to give about 10% of our income to Missions, from a sense of guilt and responsibility. We tried thereby to soothe our conscience and the heavy, negative, guilt-laden appeal from the missions to do our duty to help reach the world, but missions was to us like a dull headache. You can't cut off your head and get rid of the problem, but keeping it is a constant burden! To put it bluntly, we were more negative than positive about missions.
We caught the vision for missions when we began to give sacrificially and by faith!
We began a Faith Promise giving programme in our church and suddenly found ourselves responsible every month to distribute quite a lot of money. To be responsible stewards of our congregation's money, we had to investigate various missions to determine how our money was being used. Suddenly, we became aware of what a great job these missions were doing. Our vision and excitement for missions grew greatly and so did our participation in prayer, support, encouragement and part-time involvement.
Missions has now become a reality to our church, and missionaries now come regularly to our church to report to our people what they, together with our participation, have been able to accomplish.
Today, our church feels part of all that God is doing in our country and beyond our borders. Our vision has been enlarged from our local involvement to an international opportunity for us to establish His Kingdom.
When we first started our Faith Promise programme in 1980, we were afraid our tithing would drop; just the opposite happened, it went up. Other churches who had experienced the same thing encouraged us not to be fearful, but to trust God and be obedient. We did, and we will never regret it. During the past five years, we received an average income 95,4% of what was promised.
Our involvement in missions has made us feel part of all that God is doing worldwide. There is positive excitement among us, to help reach all the unreached and "to hasten the coming of the Day of our Lord" (2 Peter 3:12).
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From Pastor Christo Walters of the AGS Church, Witbank
The Blessing Generated by a Faith Promise Offering
On 10 August 1992 we took up our first Faith Promise Offering. It was R4 000 per month. By April 1993, during our first Missions event, this amount increased to R150 000 per annum, with a phenomenal increase to R300 000 per annum during our May 1994 missions week. The past two years 1996-1997 & 1997-1998 we were able to give every year more than one million rand to the cause of World Evangelization.
Before our involvement in world evangelization, our congregation employed three pastors. Now we have 10 full-time pastors. In addition, we have been able to buy an old Salvation Army complex for homeless people, comprising a seven-bedroomed property on one hectare of ground for only R55 000. The land alone is valued at R40 000 and the house has been assessed at R70 000. We have been able to erect a 130 sq. meter house on this property for only R40 000, which has been valued at R120 000. Today with all the improvements the property is valued at more than R500 000.
Not only has God blessed the church, but He has also wonderfully blessed those members of the congregation who contributed to the Faith Promise Offering. Month after month, these contributors bear testimony to the wonderful financial miracles taking place in their lives.
We never again want to revert to our former selfish pattern of giving to God's work. Witbank Central will never again want to function without the Faith Promise Offering programme, and is presently striving to increase the spirit of sacrificial giving, in addition to ensuring better stewardship.
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From the Missions Commission, Dutch Reformed Church Moreleta Park, Pretoria
The "NG Gemeente Moreletapark" has for a long time strived to be an active missionary-minded congregation, but due to a history of inherited activities, it took a complete redefinition of "the way we do things" to really set the ball rolling along God's Kingdom Program me. As an initial part of this redefinition, the congregation decided to swart with a missions week, which ended with Pastor Willie Crew launching our first Faith Promise Offering in October 1997. The resulting promises from this Faith Promise Offering, both in terms of finance and people committing themselves, surpassed our wildest dreams and forced our committee to prayer fully adopt and follow the following principles:
- To strive for an equitable distribution of funding in Pretoria (Jerusalem), South Africa (Judea), Southern Africa (Samaria) and elsewhere (the ends of the Earth)
- To direct our activities primarily at the unreached people groups, with evangelization of reached peoples as a secondary objective.
- To strive for personal, sacrificial commirmens from church members not only in terms of finance, but specially in terms of time.
- To strive for responsible stewardship through active involvement and feedback.
The released finances, people and energy also allowed us to start systematically planning our missionary activities, training programmes, training itself and longer term strategies more effectively.
Amongst others, we have grown our support of missionaries front full support of six full-time missionaries in four areas, to full support of twelve plus partial (but regular and significant) support of six missionaries, covering ten different areas in total. In addition we have sponsored numerous missionaries, agencies and outreaches in ad-hoc short term and other ways.
Our mission training of "ordinary" church members has been attended by around forty people over the first 16 weeks course (Feb - June 1998) and the majority of these are now being mobilized in sending cells supporting the full time missionaries.
This remarkable expansion has come about by the grace of God, through sacrificial involvement initiated by our first Faith Offering. ( Thank you for your part in this, may God bless you in all your activities directed at the expansion of His Kingdom on earth.)
