We had a Skype conference call on Friday with our Ops interns to discuss support raising, as all of them (and I) are going to be working this summer on finding people to give financially towards our ministry of helping reach campuses of the NW. As you might imagine, ministry partner development (our preferred term to "fundraising", in part for it's broader scope) can be a challenge. It's my role to help our interns move forward and be pro-active in the process.
This is good, because in coaching them I am coaching myself. There are some friends we have been considering inviting to join our support team for several months, but have been reluctant to ask for a variety of reasons (risk the friendship, know they give to others on staff, etc.). Every worst case scenario had run through my head, despite years of experience telling me that wouldn't be the case.
As I knew I'd be telling our interns to be bold in asking and to trust the Lord for the results, I had to take action myself. Last week I asked these friends to join our team, and tonight I got a Facebook message from saying they want to begin giving towards our ministry. So encouraging.
There is a talk posted online we are all (Ops team for next year) going to listen to called "From fear to faith to courageous action". I'm good at the first one (fear), hit-or-miss on the second (faith), and a total work in progress on the third (courageous action). But what I've found is that not only does faith lead to courageous action, but courageous action can lead to greater faith...and on to more action.This principle certainly isn't confined to raising support.
[Update: For more talks related to Ministry Partner Development, click here. Note this link requires a GCX login.]
Hey Darren, are you able to provide a link to this talk?
ReplyDeleteI updated the post with the link to that talk as well as some others on MPD.
ReplyDelete