GENEROSITY AT THE END OF THE YEAR
Many of us think about giving at the end of the year — some for tax purposes, some because of year end bonuses, others because it just gives us a chance to evaluate and see if we invested what we intended to invest in God’s work over the past year. It’s an exciting time to be a part of Redemption Church, and your generosity makes an enormous difference.
A couple of weeks ago, we had 205 people in attendance, which included about 60 kids. We went back and looked, and the same week in 2013, we had 65 total people in our core group getting ready to launch our new church. We are still in our first year and just now three months from our Sunday morning launch, and we are seeing great progress in every area. This time last year, our giving came from about 60% external sources (meaning people that believed in us and invested in us, but didn’t actually attend our church). Now, that number is down to about 33%, which means that 2/3 of our giving comes from our regular attenders. That’s great progress. We want to continue to grow and see God working in the life of our church as we prepare to enter a new year.
Our ability to advance our mission is almost always connected to the resources we have available. We need your help as we continue to grow. As you consider your contributions, I wanted to let you know about some of our needs and some of the exciting things that we are anticipating in the next year:
Close out 2014 Strong and Replenish Savings
We need about $50-55,000 in the next six weeks to meet our expenses for this year without dipping into our savings. That’s about twice as much as is given in a normal month.
Grow our Worship Ministry
Many of you may not realize that our worship pastor, Chris Clark, is part-time. We would really like to move him to full-time as soon as possible. He’s such an asset to our team. I know this past week he worked well more than 40 hours. He’s been coordinating a video shoot for us that you will see soon. This month you will get to experience the work he’s put into Advent and the Christmas season. We love the Clark family, and we want to free Chris up to develop this ministry. This will help us deepen our worship, develop our band, create new songs for the church, tell more Redemption stories, develop a prayer team, and more.
Advance our RedemptionKIDS Ministry
We love what’s happening in our Kids ministry. We are seeing children come to Christ and grow as followers of Jesus. And we also are seeing more and more kids. We need to add two new classrooms very soon. We’d also like to hire a couple of part-time Kids coordinators to help with the administration and organization. Kids are a hugely important part of who we are as a church.
Launch our Student Ministry
We are now putting together a ministry team to help launch our student ministry, and hope to have student redemption groups start in early 2015.
Expand our Portable Church Investment
Portable Church is what we call all the gear that it takes to turn an elementary school into church each week. 2 Sundays ago, Chris Clark told me that we had used every microphone and every cord we own to pull off worship. Also, we need to add new Kids classrooms, which means that we will need more cases and play panels and toys and everything that makes our Kids classrooms great. Together, all of this means purchasing a second trailer, as well as more gear to create a great space for us to welcome people into on Sundays. For a specific wish list of needs in this area, see this post.
Develop Church Office and Ministry Hub
We currently sublease a few offices from another business, but this is a temporary space. We need to find a more permanent office situation, put our name on the door, and have a good space for volunteers to come and serve. Potentially, this could also include some weekday ministry space for students, marriage seminars, parenting seminars, theology classes, and other ministry events.
Supporting New Church Plants
Ten percent of our internal giving goes to support new church plants. We plan to make our first kingdom investment in other congregations in 2015!
Thanks so much for partnering with us to make redemption happen!
In 2014, we launched a new outpost for Jesus in our city, and we are now building a foundation to reach new people and make disciples for years to come. This will not be possible without each of us contributing to the cause of Christ in our church. As we prepare for all that God wants to do in 2015, would you help us to finish this year out in a strong financial position?
You can give online or read about our other giving options by clicking GIVE.
– jdl