Freedom. Funding is the missionary's freedom to use their time to serve other people. Funding permits missionaries to purchase better tools to accomplish more work. In ministry that translates to lives saved for eternity.
Time. With funding, missionaries can spend their efforts on leading people toward eternal life rather than using their time to make widgets, fix cars, or repair equipment. With funding a missionary can hire someone else to fix the old car, or to purchase a car or equipment that rarely needs to be fixed.
Life. With funding, a missionary can use a helicopter for an hour or two instead of spending three weeks hiking through the jungle and another week recovering from illness and injury. Funding enables missionary teams to establish a church in ten to fifteen years rather than thirty to sixty years. Just think of how many people might be saved physically and spiritually in those decades of time.
Churches. The tasks missionaries work to accomplish are:
- Going where Christ is unknown to preach.
- Making known the glory of God in Jesus Christ by preaching, baptizing, and teaching obedience to Christ.
- Establishing in each place thriving communities of Christ-followers as ongoing witnesses of God's glory.
Help. Each task requires resources beyond ordinary means.
Work. Money is the transfer of work. When you give money for missions, as unto the Lord, you are transferring your work to be leveraged by someone else to accomplish the desired objective that you cannot or will not accomplish yourself. For Ethnos360, that would be work to establish thriving churches of Christ-followers where Jesus Christ has been unknown.
People. Some things cannot be purchased with money. That's why we focus on finding people who will give their lives for others.