Good questions, Salty. Appreciate it.
I am speaking of individual promises. This gives our church a heads up on what we can do through the year for missions. Each person who chooses to participate decides how much he will be giving. Most people choose to divide their giving into either weeks or months but that is their choice. Our promises just consists of a card that says something like - I will be giving X amount towards missions weekly
monthly, or other. There is no signature space on our missionary cards. It is strictly between the giver and God. We just finished our missions conference and we know we can take on additional missionaries and missionary projects because of the increase in giving. We have already taken on 4 additional missionaries. We give our missionaries no more than $300.00 monthly but no less than $100.00.
For instance, our missions fund last year allowed us to send a presentation of the gospel to every residential mailbox in our zip code last fall. The cost was something around 20k. This was from our missions budget. We help numerous projects and ministries and people as well as funding missionaries.
The church missionary budget for the year is determined by adding the amounts of the promises. The givers believe God is in it and will provide the funds and the church leaders believe in the faithfulness of the membership.
Most of the people in our congregation are not wealthy but they do ok financially. Therefore, we do not have two or three who gives large amounts to our program but we have many who gives what they can. In this way, if there is a failure or a sickness or a death then the whole budget is not so adversely effected. For instance, last year we exceeded the faith promise by something under $10,000.00. If my memory serves me right, we had about 80 promises turned in for the coming year.
We have helped numerous other one time causes through this fund over time.
