News
Update on Ministry Financial Status
Posted on 07.13.2010 | Filed as Urgent
“I am the Lord your God who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it.” Psalm 81:10
Sorry to be filling your inboxes with messages from The Shepherd’s Crook, but we felt that it was important to keep all of you updated on the status of our financial situation during this crisis, and especially as things have unfolded during the last couple of days. God has been moving in mighty ways, and in this case we have been privileged to see some of the outworkings of that moving. I’ll be as brief as possible in this update, but fairness to those involved requires that I tell this story as completely, albeit as succinctly, as possible.
Sunday morning, we had the honor during our worship service of being prayed for by a long-time prayer warrior and friend of this ministry, Dick Shaw. As Dick prayed, we sensed God’s protective and loving embrace. We were handed a couple of checks by some dear Believers during the service, who had apparently decided to make their donations even before hearing Dick pray for us. Following the service, a man came up and said that he was going to make a significant contribution through a local managed charitable fund and that we should receive it by Thursday. He told me that the amount of the donation would be $10,000! Needless to say, I was blown away. Just the day before I had written to all of you to let you know that we were at about ten percent of our goal, and suddenly, because of the gifts we received and were promised, we were closer to seventy-five percent of our critical goal. It is difficult to describe what that felt like, except to say that i t seemed like we could breathe fully again, and that we just wanted to dance. (If you know me, you know how extraordinary that would be.)
While all of this has been going on, we at TSC have actually been praying for considerably more than the $20,000 needed immediately, to meet our critical financial needs. We’ve been praying that God would bless us with an overflow so that we could meet all of our expenses and commitments for this month, but also so that we could keep going beyond this month. As I said in a previous e-mail, the amount of donations we receive on a regular, committed basis is quite a bit less than our monthly expenses. We operate on a cyclical basis—approaching a sawtooth waveform, for those of you who might be interested—in which we sort of go down and down and down in terms of available operating funds, and then God blesses us with some extraordinary gifts and we rise back up to the top of the wave. We then begin drifting down again, waiting till God sends us another unusual cash infusion. We have been praying that this will be one of those times when God shoots us back to the top of the waveform, so we can know we will continue in operation for some months to come now.
Yesterday morning, I got a call from the bookkeeper at our church, telling us that a couple more checks had been left in the offering plate during the worship service. One of those checks was for $20,000!! Thus, it now looks like God has seen fit not only to deliver us from our current financial crisis, but also to make sure that we have enough operating funds to be able to keep going for at least a few more months. We are just elated, and we are praising God for confirming for us that He, indeed, is not finished with The Shepherd’s Crook yet, and that He is blessing us through answered prayers.
Finally, I have some thoughts about all of this. We have received a large number of responses to TSC’s financial crisis, and many of you have sent in monetary gifts to help us survive. Some of those gifts have been very large, in terms of dollar amount, and some have been small. I want to make sure that neither I nor anyone else associated with this ministry ever conveys the impression that we value large gifts more than small gifts. Such an outlook would be both uncharitable and unbiblical—and actually, pretty ignorant. When Jesus told the story of the poor widow and her gift of two small coins, He made it clear that the heart of the giver is what determines the value of the gift, and we have the same attitude at The Shepherd’s Crook. We pray that all gifts given to this ministry come as a result of the prompting of the Holy Spirit and from a desire to serve God, and not ever from a sense of guilt or any other impure or unholy motivation. And I assure you, as the Director of the ministry and as her spokesman, that a five dollar gift given to this ministry, when given from pure motivations and as an expression of service to God, is just as valuable, just as important, and just as welcome as a fifty-thousand dollar gift would be.
As we think about these times of trial and difficulty, we are sometimes given to wondering why. What purpose could God have in mind for such times as these, whether as individuals or as a ministry? A glimpse into the answer is given to us in the book of Isaiah, in chapter 41. Isaiah talks about the suffering of the poor and the needy, and the fact that they often struggle for their very existence. Read the words of God’s prophet:
“The poor and needy search for water, but there is none; their tongues are parched with thirst. But I the LORD will answer them; I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them. I will make rivers flow on barren heights, and springs within the valleys. I will turn the desert into pools of water, and the parched ground into springs.”
And then, in verse 20 of chapter 41, we read the key verse in all of this: “. . . so that people may see and know, may consider and understand, that the hand of the LORD has done this, that the Holy One of Israel has created it.” God tells us that He sometimes takes us through times of trial and suffering so that we, His people, will again know our utter dependence on Him, and so that the deliverance we receive will clearly be seen to have come from Him and from Him alone. That is what we see in this financial crisis the ministry is coming through: that the LORD God has delivered us, and that to Him alone belong the praise and glory.
I have more thoughts than these concerning this crisis and God’s goodness and the faithfulness of His people, but they will have to wait for another time and another format. This message is already too long.
We continue to pray that God will bless The Shepherd’s Crook with the financial resources to keep doing the work He has called us to do. We continue to pray for additional monthly donors, to help us stabilize our operating budget and make more concrete plans for projects and areas of ministry. I can’t stress enough how important that is for us, and how we beseech the Lord for this need. While we wait for His answer in this area, we continue to thank Him for His deliverance over and over again. I want to thank all of you who have prayed for us, all of you who have sent us encouraging notes, and all of you who have supported us financially, both during these crises and on a regular basis. We are deeply, deeply touched by the sacrificial giving we have seen from so many of you during this crisis. We are truly thankful for the hearts of compassion for this ministry and the work we’re doing.
We will definitely continue to keep all of you posted, though our updates will diminish in frequency now. Yikes! I just remembered that Kathy and I have to head to China in a little more than seventy-two hours to pick up our new son—and we’re not ready yet!
Thanks be to God for all His benefits! We’re definitely dancing here, even if only on the inside.
Scott (& Kathy)