Support Update

Ministry gets very hard and discouraging at times. It seems like for every success, there are ten disappointments. I think what keeps me going outside of God's grace are the friends who support and pray for us. Thank you for prayers and support of our family’s ministry.

By God's grace we have been able to maintain our support level over the past months. We have had a couple who have had to decrease their support because of financial issues, but we have had some larger one-time donations that have made up the deficit. I am amazed month by month as we have seen God so graciously provide for our family over the past 14 years that we have been in missions. I am very thankful for each of you who has sacrificed to help us, and we appreciate your prayers for us. We need to raise about $200 per month in additional support, so if you’re interested in being a partner with us, we will welcome your partnership.

God bless you,

Michael, Jane and Benjamin Erwin

Donate to The Erwin Family Ministries Support Fund

Erwin Family Going to India November 2011

We have made the decision to go for the gold and make the effort to go to India as a family this November. It will cost about $5300 to go, and we will need to raise the money. The good news is that God has enough.

The dates we plan to travel will be November 14-21. I will be staying a couple of weeks longer, hosting some donors and pastors who will be coming about the same time, and Janey and Benjamin will be coming back by themselves.

Janey, Benjamin and I will be able to meet many of the Indian leaders and visit many of the churches we help. The highlight of the trip will be visiting our headquarters in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu. On the way to India, we will try to spend a day in Paris because it is a major connecting hub for Delta Airlines. Benjamin has loved the idea of visiting Paris, and maybe God has given him a specific burden for this nation to preach the Gospel. It definitely needs it. We will be keeping you updated, and many of you will be getting a personal invitation to invest in our travels to India. :-)

July and August Schedule

With Brother Ebey's travels here in the USA in May and June, there were many meetings that will need to be followed up. We still need to find about 150-200 sponsors between now and the end of the year, so it will require many more church meetings. Most of the meetings that I have found for Brother Ebey have come from relationships that I have had over the past 14 years of ministry. It is important that I take as many opportunities as possible to speak at churches because it costs a lot to bring Brother Ebey from India, and the U.S. staff has to pick up the slack as much as possible.

Right now I am trying to schedule going to the following areas:

• Texas - July 11-14
• Ohio and Indiana - July 22-24
• Texas and Oklahoma - July 30-31
• Iowa and Minnesota - August ?
• Indiana and Kentucky - August ?
• South Carolina and Georgia - September?

80 Teen Agers Visiting our Mission Field

We will especially need prayer for next month as there is a lot of follow up needed from Brother Ebey's time here in the U.S. during the months of May and June.

We have 80 teenagers who will be going to our mission field in India with a group called Teen Mania (www.teenmania.org).

Here is the facebook link for the group going to India:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Global-Expeditions-India-B-2011/165066606844812

Please be in prayer for them and our India leaders. Brother Ebey’s daughter Andrea will be the primary contact for the group. Andre is 23 and has recently completed her MBA. She speaks excellent English, and I am sure she will have 80 very good friends when the trip is over in late July.

This will be a tremendous amount of work for the India leadership, but we realized that this is a very important time in these young people's lives and if they can have a powerful experience on the mission field and see our village pastors in ministry, it will impact them for the rest of their lives. With the impact on these teens that their experience in India will have, they will be great advocates for Serve India Ministries and will have a lifelong love for India. This group will be in India for nearly three weeks, and they will be doing outreach in many public schools and working with our village pastors, helping them set up Stepping Stone Centers for village children. The area to which they are traveling has a population of 2.5 million people-- in an area the size of one of our rural counties in the USA! The landscape is littered with huge Hindu Temples, so there will be a lot of opposition.

Before they go to India, I will be traveling to Texas and speaking with the group to brief them on the area where they will be working and tell them about how Serve India Ministries is working to plant churches in the area. They will be a benefit to the village pastors as they minister to children, and this will open the door for the pastors to bring the entire family into the church and hear the Gospel.

As I have mentioned in earlier letters, this generation of young people called the Millennial Generation (those born after 1984 and before 2001) will be the dominant generation in five years. The Millennial Generation numbers 100 million people, which is larger than the baby boomers. It will be up to this generation to fulfill the great commission over the next 30 years. Right now Baby Boomers give 90% of giving in the USA, and in five years that will drop to only 22%. The problem for ministries is that the Millennial Generation donors will grow only to 10% of giving in five years; right now it is only 1%. As you can see from the attached graph, there will be a 59% deficit of giving.

Seeing these figures, I see that it is urgent that our ministry find young donors to partner with us, and we need to grow their involvement over the coming years. Thank you for praying that we can minister to these young people and build relationships with them as they return from their missions trip.

Jane's Update

Janey continues to cheerfully serve at Costco, where she brings a joyful attitude to customers and management. We are very thankful that she is able to work at Costco and provide our family with very good health insurance as well as supplemental income. It seems like it is costing more and more for everything, so these are days when we need to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. I have found that when things look impossible, just focus on Jesus and the vision or calling He has given us and things will eventually work out.

We have been keeping you updated on Janey's treatment for TMJ, which we believe is the primary contributing factor to her migraine headaches. It has been a 20-year struggle for her, and we hope that soon we can turn a corner.

Thank you for praying for Janey, and you might give her a call or just drop an email or card to encourage her. She is my number one fan when it comes to ministry, and I could not accomplish anything worthwhile without her.