God's mission needs you

It has been an interesting week here at The Mission Society. Every morning, the staff gathers for devotions at 8:00 to focus on God’s Word and to pray for our missionaries, supporters, and other needs. Normally, we rotate the day’s leading of the devotional time among the various staff members. This week, however, all of our devotional leaders are pastors with whom we have a connection and none of whom will be physically in the room with us. All will lead devotions via telephone from their offices or homes in their respective states. If the first three days are any indication, this approach will be wildly successful and one we will repeat in the future.

Creative ways to serve
The success of this method of engagement caused me to think about the valuable support these pastors are providing to us at The Mission Society. Generally, when we think of supporting missions, we think in terms of prayer and money. These are vital and especially so in these difficult economic times. However, there are other ways an individual or church can support The Mission Society in addition to (note I did not say in lieu of) prayer and finances.

John Pearson loves the Lord and he loves missions. He has been a long time supporter of The Mission Society through both prayers and finances. John also has a servant’s heart. If you were to visit us at the Norcross office, it just may be on one of the days John has come in to volunteer his time to help out. You may find him filing records for the financial group, working in the mail room, or some other needful task. John is an example of someone who supports missions in ways beyond praying and giving.

John happens to volunteer here in the office, but there are many ways in which one could support missions wherever they may be. So in many respects we are not bound by location when it comes to serving. Below are a few examples of how an individual or church could bring valuable expertise to The Mission Society and its ministries among local churches.

• Drama team – We have scripts for missions related skits for churches to use as promotional pieces for their upcoming missions events. Many of the smaller churches we work with do not have drama teams. If we had one or more drama teams offer to do our skits and have them put on video, these skits would be available to a much wider audience than they are currently.
• Host – If you have an extra bedroom you could provide a valuable service by offering housing and fellowship to missionaries and staff as they travel about the country. All visits would be prearranged and you would designate the missionary unit(s) you could host (i.e., single, couple, family, male, female, etc.)
• Church multimedia team – As we produce promos and other videos for use in a church setting we often have questions as to optimal format, sound quality, types of applications being used, or just what can we do to make it easier for churches to use our materials. Church multimedia teams are generally on top of these questions and could be a helpful consulting resource to us.

Notice that the examples above do not necessarily require a great deal of time or undue effort. This would be true of most of the opportunities we would have. In some cases it may be a short project and in others it may be simply giving advice.

The desire of the church ministry team is to build a database of volunteers who would offer their skill or knowledge in support of The Mission Society’s efforts among local congregations. Being in the database would not obligate you to respond when you are contacted. You need only to respond when it is convenient for you. Below is a list of skills that we would like to have included in the database. If you are interested, simply send us an email at cm@themissionsociety.org with the subject line: “Database.” We will contact you to get additional information.

Skills/knowledge needed
Below is a more complete list of skills that the church ministry department could on occasion utilize. Please contact us for further information.
• Audio/visual experts
• Children’s lesson planners
• Children’s support teams 
• Drama teams 
• E-learning developers 
• Fundraising consultants 
• Graphic designers
• Host 
• IT/computer specialists 
• Joomla designers
• Language translators 
• Management consultants
• Mission representatives 
• Pastors with counseling skills
• Photographers 
• Photoshop experts 
• Powerpoint experts 
• Proofreaders 
• Video editors 
• Videographers