This year the Church of God in Northern and Southern Ohio are combining their efforts to reach eight nations in four years. Northern Ohio will take the east coast of South America while Southern Ohio will focus its efforts on the west coast.
With a holistic approach to missions, both Northern and Southern Ohio will plant four new churches each in strategic areas, advance education, reach out to the abused and neglected women and care for little children.
Here’s how it works:
Northern and Southern Ohio each have approximately 120 Churches of God in the state with more than 10,000 regular attenders. The month of May has been named “Missions Month.” Every Sunday during the month of May, each pastor will give those in attendance the opportunity to give $20.10 annual missions gift for this year’s state missions project, Peru and Uruguay.
Once the funds have been collected, all Ohio pastors have been asked to bring the gifts of the people to the state camp meeting missions service during the month of June.
Terrell Brinson, supervisor of mobilization and missions representative, recently returned from Northern Ohio working together with Administrative Bishop Bill Isaacs and members of the state missions board. They met with 22 handpicked pastors to present the state missions project for Uruguay (2010 for Missions).
Every pastor seemed very excited about this new way of doing missions and pledged their support from each of the assigned local churches.
Brinson says, “Our new slogan is this – when the team plays, the whole team plays. If we can get every pastor to simply present this to his congregation, and each attender, and contribute $20.10 this year toward their missions project in Uruguay, our combined goal of $200,000 will be met.”
We are encouraging each local missions representative (LMR) to speak with your pastor about this project. Find out as much as you can to help your pastor on this during the month of May. Each pastor has been provided a packet of information including DVDs with short clips that can be shown each Sunday during the month of May along with other pertinent information about the state project. All pastors from both Northern and Southern Ohio will soon receive their packets in the mail and the state office will be showing the DVD clips on their state websites. We are also encouraging every pastor and LMR who belongs to Facebook to show one of these clips on their personal Facebook account.
This is a new day and a new way of doing missions. We are calling on your help by joining your fellow ministers and LMRs promoting these worthy missions projects. With our combined efforts, we are truly celebrating what God does through us as we partner with South America for lasting change.
. . . . .
© 2010 Church of God World Missions