Westminster Presbyterian
Church of Worthington, Minnesota, was facing the challenge of
a deficit budget when a member of the pastor’s previous
congregation sent a check for $1,500 along with a newspaper
article describing what the church had done with a special gift.
The pastor added $500 to the amount. So began the presbytery’s
experience with Kingdom Assignments.
During worship twenty volunteers were given $100 and commissioned
to invest it in expanding God’s kingdom. Based on Jesus’
parable of the talents (Matt. 25:14–30), the volunteers
agreed to three conditions: understand the money belongs to
God, invest it in doing God’s work, and report the results
in ninety days.
Those stories of investments yielded a variety of positive
outcomes. They included aid to patients who did not have immediate
insurance coverage for needed pharmaceutical prescriptions;
purchase of children’s books for the church library to
be read to hospitalized children; construction of a barrel train
to represent the congregation and its ministry in a community
parade; donation of a motorcycle and printing of raffle tickets
to generate funds for the church’s ministry; payment for
printing a booklet used to train the staff of European Campus
Crusade for Christ; financing the production of a community
presentation of Handel’s Messiah (with freewill offering
given to a food pantry); purchase of a PowerPoint projector
for worship and educational use; support for clean water projects
in Guatemalan sister presbytery; purchase of T-shirts to promote
a congregation’s Web site outreach; donations to support
Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library program for preschoolers;
and support of a children’s orphanage in Guatemala.
The experiences of these volunteers were a witness to what
God can be doing through any one of his servants.
The Presbytery of Minnesota Valleys has 9,909 members in 65
churches. |
