(To Translate the title from Hindi to English click here)
As the missions pastor, I have been praying to know where God
wants us to go as a church to reach people.
Over the last few weeks he has been guiding me to India. I was thinking Aruba or maybe the Virgin
Islands but God seems to be pushing me more and more towards Northern
India. I have been speaking to the Sr.
Pastor and he wants to help out by sending supplies and direct aid to our
Northern India contact church.
To maximize our impact we want to bring 25 people. We would like to bring 50 but we think 25
people are a much more manageable number because the trip to Burma last year
was impossible to manage. We had 3
spreadsheets being updated by 4 people with money coming in from a dozen
places. Besides Donna in accounting said
that she would quit if we tried to do that to her again.
The cost per person for the trip is more than the average
person at our church can afford so we are going to ask people to raise the
money by asking friends and family members to support their trip. Last year we printed letters and they mailed
them to family and friends with return envelopes addressed to the church. We want to do something online because we
have a terrific mission’s website but it has to be easy to track and we don’t
want 2 systems to track the money through. Can we say 21st century?
There are a few required documents that we would like to
track for each traveler and we need a way to store the information
electronically so that we know who has turned in what. We need to track vaccinations based on the CDC’s recommendations
for India. We need a copy of the first
page of every person’s passport. We
definitely don’t want another Ruth McMaster incident where she lost her
passport in Burma and was stuck trying to convince the consulate that she was
an American citizen.
That is why I have come to you… the Fellowship One Champion Obadiah
Juan Gonzalez to please
tell me there is something we can do to make this easier to track and flexible
enough to handle our unique issues. Help
me Obi Juan you’re our only hope!
That’s easy… just download these documents and they will
guide you towards a chaos free trip to India.
The smart people in Delivery Services at Fellowship Technologies have
worked with hundreds of missions ministries since January 2004 and have come up
with a brilliant solution that will not only make tracking donations towards
the mission trip a breeze but also give you a mass communication tool and the
reports necessary to quickly and easily communicate with the people going on
the trip. Their solution will easily integrate
with your existing mission’s web page and give you all the capabilities you have
asked for and more. Using their proven
process we can have 50 or 100 people without overwhelming your administrative
capabilities. To help you with this
process I would like to be the first person to register for the trip.
Perhaps God will select Aruba next year but alas
India is where I am needed now.
Matthew McMaster
Delivery Manager (Missionary Wannabe)