Proud of an Offering

It’s not a mega-church, nor even a large church.  It’s medium-sized church, that has yet to fully recover from the effects of COVID.  When the long-term Pastor retired over a year ago, some members were still wearing face masks to worship services.  It is a church full of wonderful, loving people, with a great location, a challenging opportunity for growth and if I were twenty-five years younger . . . well let’s not go there.  But the church had seldom set a mission’s giving goal.  This past month, they set their first-in-a-long-time such goal of $1500 for the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for International Missions.  For several Sundays in late November and early December we hosted live missionaries, and supplemented sermons with brief video tapes of missionaries from their fields of service, made personal just for our church, as a favor to me – either as their former professor or as a friend who had visited them in their country.  When the gifts had been counted, they had given $3745 – more than double their goal. No, it doesn’t match the hundreds of thousands given my mega-churches, nor the tens of thousands given by large churches, but it is a significant step for a post-COVID congregation, still searching for their next pastor. I am so proud of them.