That means that of all the income given to us, we give away 10%. We can hardly ask our people to do the same, if the PCC does not, itself, set an example.
Where Does This Money Go?
In addition to our main partners – like Bible Society and Paraguay – we support a number of smaller projects. And on top of that, we have an extra slice of the financial cake, which we reserve for emergencies and special requests. As a result, we were able to respond to Jenny from Birmingham Christian Union, who have just run a mission. This is from a report she sent me. (Not written by Jenny herself)
“Here at the University of Birmingham Christian Union we are hugely encouraged by everything that happened. We haven’t had a mission quite like it for a long time. Our events had large amounts of students attending, reaching a peak in our apologetic lunchtime talks of about 180 people. In the evenings we had 160 one night. Our Mark Drama event had roughly 160 people along too. We estimate 2000 people came and heard about Christ during the week!
Something that happened this year that I’m not sure has happened before at Birmingham was the sheer amount of conversations happening after a talk. Normally people would leave quickly after a talk, but this year nearly every time you looked around the marquee you could see a conversation happening.
Our speaker Pete Dray also says that on average, 90% of the people who become Christians because of an Events Week do so in the weeks that follow so we are praying for more fruit to be harvested. We also saw the CU really uniting on mission, so many people helped out at events, everyone was giving flyers out and it was great to sees lots of people inviting their friends to the events.
This is just a glimpse of everything that happened during the week, it was truly amazing seeing everything God was doing. And thankfully it didn’t all end a week ago. So many people are reading the bible with their friends, discussing big questions and coming along to church for the first time! We also have a course running on Monday evenings called ‘Real Continued’ where we have a series of talks for people to come and search deeper. The first session last Monday was fantastic and it was great to see so many discussing God!
Thank you all at St John’s Haydon Wick for partnering with us. We really tried to step out in faith this year to make the events bigger and we couldn’t have done it without you.”