Big News for Servants Unite!

God is Good! Man! I can’t put enough exclamation marks after that this week. Amazing things are happening and we’re in the middle of it! Our Lord lives and is moving among His people! I’ll keep this concise and put some of the stories behind it on the blog for you to read if you have time, but we do serve a mighty King in whom all things are possible.

Today we’re moving to the next level with Servants Unite, long delayed, but planned from the beginning. For the last year, we’ve been at status quo: Continuing to send teams to Louisiana with many volunteering more than once. The numbers you’ve likely seen by now: more than 600 man weeks of labor, 20 teams, thousands of uncountable families touched by Christ in their darkest hour through your willingness to serve. And our contribution is only a small part of the effort. We have comprised around 10% of the total volunteers at Tammany Oaks and Hilltop, two of dozens of organizations like them who sprung up to answer the call to serve in this crisis.

We have more of the same planned. Over 140 students and chaperones are scheduled for the 5 spring break trips and 8 more groups from Cleveland to Huntington WV are scheduling summer trips already. An even larger response than last year! Westerville South IB is making their third trip in June.

In addition, groups outside our planned geographic scope are asking for guidance on how to participate. New hosting organizations are opening with different needs. Other supply side organizations like ours are forming and need to be nurtured to provide mutual aid to one another. The work we are doing now, reconstruction, requires more training and more skilled volunteers that must be recruited.

Even with this success and increasing demands of our existing effort, there is so much more in our plan. I’ve been managing the teams, logistics, and communications, a 20 or more hour per week job, around my paying jobs which themselves have been quite demanding. I haven’t had the time to build or grow our membership or our services and can just keep moving teams through the process. Many times I’ve dropped the ball from lack of focus only to see God take up my slack.

This week this situation changes and I need all your help in small ways and big ones to make it work. I’m turning to Servants Unite as my full time job and consulting as my side job, something I’ve planned and prayed about from the beginning. I’m moving to a new job which is akin to independent IT consulting to give me more flexibility, time, and business hours to spend on Servants Unite. There are several points to this plan:

• Paul funded his ministry as a tentmaker in a world that needed tents. By trade, I’m an IT consultant and security professional in a world dependent on technology. Any work your business, church, or friends’ businesses or churches direct to me will directly benefit Servants Unite by allowing me to make this move.
• The more direct sponsorship I can raise from the individuals and churches who have been involved, the less time I must spend consulting and the more I can spend on Servants Unite. I hate asking for money, it’s the hardest part of missions, but my attitude is finally adjusted to this reality.
• I’m funding myself separately from Servants Unite which makes this even harder because it is even more personal. The benefit to this plan is to allow the organization to receive funding from sources that require 100% of their donations to go to the mission. It also removes any possible perception of shadiness that the accuser may use against our efforts.
• This has made me concerned as you and your churches have been the organization’s source of funding the past year. Funding is limited and my funding should not diminish the funding for SU. The growth of the organization I can drive over the next couple months to more churches, however, will increase our overall funding base.

At this link, you will find a bulleted list of the accomplishments and goals yet to reach so that you can get a picture of what I envision for the organization. Some of these require more volunteer work from you. Once plans are made for the next large response like Katrina, many of you will be required to be ready to serve, here or there, to collect and package supplies, and distribute them. Even working on this full time, I can’t do it on my own.

This organization’s name is Servants Unite. We’ve come together as one body from different churches or maybe no church to meet the worldly needs of disaster victims and we’ve shared in their pain. We’ve found places like Slidell, and Chalmette that now seem like second homes where we have brothers and sisters, friends and neighbors. Together, we’ve seen God do miraculous things in people’s lives and meet physical needs where no worldly explanation exists. Isn’t this so cool to be a part of?!

Because we live in a fallen world, we’ll meet more friends and neighbors, find more pain, witness more miracles, and live, a week or so at a time, in the Kingdom we were made for. To give more people this opportunity to serve, and to serve more victims of calamity, even in our own back yards, requires your increased financial support and willingness to take on roles here at home.

I thank the Lord for you all constantly. Thank you for all the encouragement you have given me personally, much of which you may not even have realized as you just served your part. And thank you in advance for your continued and increased support for this effort.

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1 Peter 4:10, Mark 12:30-31, Mathew 9:36-38, Romans 12:4-8

John McGuire
www.ServantsUnite.org
614-523-3996 home
614-404-8610 cel