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March Newsletter

New Year, New Goals
Every new year provides another opportunity to set new goals and to grow in new ways. Last year was a great year for both of us in many ways, but by God’s grace, this year will be even better.
As we made resolutions and set goals for this year, we made the usual goals of working on our physical and spiritual health. Beyond that, we set for ourselves a bigger, more audacious goal: to raise 100% of our needed missions support for Camino Global. Our desire is to be leaving for Mexico by next January, and to do that, we have set a goal to be at 100% support by the end of September. To be sure, it is a challenging goal, but we believe that this is what God wants for us, and so we have made it our goal.

Ministry Presentations
Over the last couple months, we have had opportunities to do large group presentations. We were able to present our ministry at our home church, Bible Baptist, in mid-December.

We were also able to share our ministry with our church youth group. This opportunity meant a lot to us, since both of us began serving in missions during our teen years. We both went on several missions trips while we were in high school, and it was during that time that we felt the Lord calling us to do full time mission work. Because of our experience, we think that it is important for teenagers to get involved in missions, and we especially enjoy sharing our ministry with them.

Individual Partnership
Something we have both been impressed with over the last few months is the opportunity for individual ministry partnership. The traditional support model we grew up hearing about is that missionaries travel around to dozens or even hundreds of churches and almost exclusively partner financially with churches. While we would agree that the local church should still certainly have a large part in the process of sending a missionary, there seems to be a shifting paradigm in the way missionaries raise support. Several missionaries on the field told us that over 50% of their support is from individuals. Currently for us, over three-fourths of our committed or verbally committed support is from individuals.

Have you considered personally partnering with missionaries?

We believe there are some definite strengths to individual partnership in addition to partnering with the local church. Partnership is all about relationship—relationship to God and to each other. It is difficult to have any kind of long-term or serious relationship with someone you don’t know. Missionaries don’t just need churches or individuals to give them money; they need a relationship—to work together with churches and individuals to advance the gospel. We also believe there is a high level of accountability with individual partnership. When you are personally investing your resources into someone or something, you will tend to check regularly on your investment. Of course, we don’t advocate giving to missionaries instead of the local church. But most of us can afford to give more than we give to our church. How about you?

Would you pray about partnering with us?

If you would like to partner with us financially, you can do so online at
https://www.caminoglobal.org/give/give-now/?project=082560

Prayer Requests
-pray for continued growth in our spiritual and physical health
-pray that we can meet our goal of reaching 100% support by September
-pray that we would trust God but also work hard at raising support

Thank you so much for your prayers and support!

Your fellow servants,

Chris and Sarah Collins

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