1. Meet local needs by partnering with local agencies/ministries
2. ARC for local churches in the states
3. Overseas/missions

As I read all 41 comments before mine, I am filled with joy to see so many wonderful brothers and sisters with visions and plans to reach and serve the world.

Let’s all start praying for a million bucks…

Pray about a destination, say introductory mission trip to Cozumel. Ask for an entire family to go together. This is as much about a family developing a Kingdom mindset as it is missions. Then pay for the whole family to go.

Ask for as many families that are willing to go during:

1) Spring Break (emphasis on prayer and preparing the location)
2) Summer (emphasis on Evangelism)
3) Fall (emphasis on discipling the new believers and equipping them)
4) Winter (emphasis on building or renovating and finding a church facility)

The great thing is, in one year, hopefully all families have seized an opportunity to participate in missions and grow much closer together as a family with their church Family and planted a church to boot!

After an introductory place like cozumel or cancun (101 level) other trips can be taking place on a 201-401 level to other places that normally wouldn’t have appealed to families but now that the missional bug has bitten them and finances are not an issue, every family every year can be part of a movement.

But what if it worked in one church? And now 100 churches are sending out multiple teams each year? Within 20 years, there would be no unreached people group or country left unreached!

And now the early church plants are reaching their native folks with hopefully the same missional dna instilled in them.

Lastly, I’d set up partnership with Christian Colleges, Seminaries, and churches to help train the pastors God raises and train them in sermon prep, small groups, leadership, and equipment use (how cool would it be if each new church plant pastor could be connected via internet so churches around the world can give to each other as any had need?)

Call me an idealist but, this is my vision and part of the dna I’m trying to instill in our new church.

In what ways do I separate the mission from everything else.
My initial response was, everything is and must be missional. To separate mission from any other part of the church is to do an injustice to the gospel. (imo)

Everything is missional to me means, that everything we do is for people outside of us. It is for their benefit, not ours. In other words, I’m personally having trouble thinking about seperating being missional, from staff, building and advertising. I think to compartmentalize it might teach something to people I might not want them to learn.

Also, I’ve never been a fan of hiring a missions pastor, because every pastor is a missions pastor, or at least in my mind they ought to be.

All this is nice in theory and it causing me to think through the process in which people are brought into staffing relationships and motives for buying buildings etc.

I do disagree in part with Natalie. Sometimes the “locals” aren’t necessarily the best and other times there aren’t any/many local believers/leaders yet, so missionaries from other lands must carry the torch until local leadership can be raised up.

I agree with everyone who says that the planting and multiplying of churches is the priority. Everything flows from that. Great topic.

I pray many of you are blessed with such an opportunity one day!

(It is interesting to me that we had more discussion on how to invest $25k than on how to give $1 million. Just thinking out loud…)

No doubt you would have heard of ‘THE KINGDOM ASSIGNMENT’ (http://kingdomassignment.com) where a church gave out money to individuals in the congregation.

They had to use the money in what ever wat they could to serve the community and expand the kingdom.

We copied the idea but gave $100 to each of our small groups. The results were fantastic… One group used the money to serve the homeless. Another used it to raise $1000 to get prostitutes off the street. Another served kids in a hospital. Another ran an event for the local high school chaplain…etc.

Benefits…
> It really raised the value of generosity
> It really raised the value of compassion
> It brought our small group members together
> It is not run top down which means little administration, and massive amount of ownership.
> It inspired people to do stuff above and beyond the activity

Therefore - to answer your question, I would allocate some of the money to give to small groups every six months for what we call the ‘$100 project’. We have just done this with our budget.

Mark

Another idea would be to provide a place where free health care would be provided. I’m sure there are Christ-following doctors, nurses, and administrative assistants. I would love to have a place for people to come and be provided with free health care.