Budget and Support Raising
Servants is a faith mission and all workers raise their
financial support from their local churches and friends.
Most Servants workers need to raise significantly less than
other missionaries because we live simply amongst the poor.
The appropriate Servants field team will provide you with a
sample budget and an indication of living costs and your mentor
will be available to discuss with you how we can assist in your
personal support raising. Since we do not work on a
pooling system, you raise whatever
you need to live on.
Friend Raising: Building a Missionary
Support Team that will Last (2003: Betty Barnett)
In this highly
recommended book on support raising, Betty Barnett discusses four pillars
that undergird the process of missionary support raising –
friend raising, generosity, communication, and prayer with
promises. She emphasizes that caring for people as friends is
more important than looking at them as sources of funding; that
a lifestyle of giving with friends and supporters is a right
foundation for support raising. Communication is God’s design
for interdependence, and people really want to be involved in
the missionaries’ lives. Her book is filled with practical
suggestions the missionary can pursue in support raising.
Funding the Family Business by Miles Wilson is
an excellent and more recent resource from a British perspective.
Also,
click here to get a free 40 page booklet on the
Spirituality of Fundraising by Henri Nouwen.
In
Servants we are passionate not just about serving the urban
poor but also about prophetically challenging Western
Christians to reorient their lives with the poor in mind.
This includes everything from the basics of helping Christians
understand God’s heart for the poor and what that might mean
for them, to mobilising fellow sojourners to serve the urban
poor incarnationally in Asia and in the West.
Over the years each of us have given sacrificially to see this
happen at the home ends and at the international leadership
level.
We
each give a simple
"tithe”
of ten percent of our
support
to the pursuit of these ideals. This contributes to
the international leadership functions, the support team
functions and some of this is also set aside to assist those
amongst us who are struggling.
We do not see the tithe as a financial transaction, where a
fee is paid in return for a list of services, (although many
services are provided sacrificially and on a volunteer basis
by home and support team members). Rather,
the
tithe
is
an offering towards the
collective
pursuit of our unique calling as Servants and the advancement
of God’s Kingdom amongst the urban poor.
A typical budget would include the following items: food,
transport, rent, language, medical insurance, flights,
holidays, tithe, etc...
