Missions Resources
Prayer Resources
The Joshua Project: According to their website, “Joshua Project is a research initiative seeking to highlight the ethnic people groups of the world with the fewest followers of Christ. Accurate, updated ethnic people group information is critical for understanding and completing the Great Commission.” My family uses the Unreached of the Day App to get information about a different people group each day that we can pray for.
The International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention has multiple resources to help connect you to missionaries, countries, and people groups. This is a good way to shape your prayer life and keep up with where and how God is moving throughout the world.
A helpful book resource is Project World, which gives sociological data and prayer opportunities for people groups throughout the world. It is updated periodically. The children’s version of that resource is Window on the World, which I recently reviewed in depth here.
4. Wycliffe Bible Translators provide periodically updated resources about how to pray for the work of Bible translation around the world. They also offer helpful (and free!) tools like this 30 day prayer calendar, that can help teach you how to pray. They have another program that will send you updates and reminders to pray for a Bible-less people group.
Giving Opportunities
The primary way we should give is through our local church. A tithe (10%) is a good place to start, but for most of us—especially middle-class Americans—it is far from the limit of what we ought to be giving to God’s work. Examine your church’s budget and see what percentage of the overall budget is directed to various missions efforts.
One way to help families redeem the giving spirit (instead of the getting one) at Christmas is to spend a portion of Christmas Day picking out items from the Compassion Gift Catalog. You can do this from anywhere online, and once you become a regular giver, they will send you a hard copy of the catalog, which can be interesting to examine and especially for children to pore over. It is also possible to make a gift in honor of the family member who insists they need nothing. You may also consider sponsoring a child with a monthly donation, so that a child can receive material resources while hearing the gospel.
The IMB has about 3,500 missionaries on the field right now. If each member of a Southern Baptist Church gave an additional dollar per week, then we could double our missionary force. This is the recommendation of the 1 for 7 campaign. Such a small gift could have an outsize impact for the work of the gospel around the world.
There’s no reason to doubt that Jesus was nailed to the cross. Ultimately, I trust what Scripture says about Jesus’s crucifixion because I also trust what it says about his resurrection. And that’s what we should be celebrating this week.