As I have mentioned before, I am the Overseas Missions Motivator.

Our church has introduced a new structure also, and I am also part of a Missions team, which is really exciting, because I have a few ideas for our local community and meeting their needs.

Back to Overseas Missions.

At the start of each year, I choose a project or in Christian speak, I pray and ask God to lead me to a project our church needs to support. I love the practical causes. Last year we raised funds to open a Women’s Refuge Centre in Fiji. We were one of 4 churches to take on the project and we hit our target !! The year before, we raised funds for medical books.

This year, we are supporting our church in Papua New Guinea. People from NZ have visited and have put a 5 year plan intop place that will see the church as self sustaining. We are helping raise funds to build a Day Care Facility for AIDS sufferers.

Did you know:

According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, PNG remains one of the least developed nations on earth and the UN’s 2006 Human Development Index ranked it 139th of 177 countries surveyed, lower than any other country in the Pacific. Life expectancy in PNG is 55.3 years, the infant mortality rate is 69 per 1,000 live births, and maternal mortality is 300 per 100,000 live births. Only 57.3% of adults are literate, and 40% of the population is aged 16 years and under which has placed additional stress on the already stretched Health and Education services.

According to the Australian Overseas Aid Programme, PNG has the highest incidence of HIV and AIDS in the Pacific region and is the fourth country in the Asia Pacific region to fit the criteria for a generalised HIV/AIDS epidemic.

I am currently doing a fundraiser by selling Christmas cards. We have an extremely talented artist in our church who designed 4 amazing cards. On Friday, I picked up 3000 cards and proceeded to fold and pack them for sale. The boys helped. Their homeschool lesson for Friday was “Serving”.

I had already pre sold some, and am very happy to report that when I handed over the cheque for printing costs, had pre sold enough to cover the cost !!

I have talked at every service for the last 2 weeks and people have been very supportive. If we sell all the cards, we will have raised NZD$3000.

Bringing our total for the year to $5,500.

My aim was $6000.

We haven’t even had our Christmas services which have collections for Missions.

This is exciting !!!