Leverage and Synergy - the Secret of Partnership!

Dear Friends,
Thank you for your partnership in the Gospel. Effective partnership creates leverage and synergy. Much is said in the business world about these these two powerful concepts of leverage and synergy but there is much that can be applied in ministry as well.

Not only when you help our family serve but in every way that you partner with anyone fulfilling the great commission, your support should be multiplied. Our family helps us serve 1007 pastors in India that are working in over 5000 unreached villages, thats multiplication.

Leverage: The ability to influence a system, or an environment, in a way that multiplies the outcome of one's efforts without a corresponding increase in the consumption of resources.
In other words, leverage is the advantageous condition of having a relatively small amount of cost yield a relatively high level of returns.

Synergy: A state in which two or more things work together in a particularly fruitful way that produces an effect greater the sum of their individual effects.
Expressed also as "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts."

The Apostle Paul was greatly strengthened by believers who supported him with finances and hospitality and these gifts were a major part of reaching of most of the Roman Empire with the Gospel in the 1st century. Even more so, this partnership that Paul had with the Church of Phillipi has an even greater impact today.

Phil 4:18 Indeed I have all and abound. I am full, having received from Epaphroditus the things sent from you, a sweet-smelling aroma, an acceptable sacrifice, well pleasing to God. An my God shall supply all your needs according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus.

The Philippians created great synergy and leverage for Paul by their partnership and it was a great struggle for this small church to give and an even greater struggle to send Epaphroditus 1000 miles to Rome to deliver the gift. We are still reading about them 2000 years later and are encouraged to support the Gospel; now their gift is impacting millions of Christians all over the world!

Just like the little boy who gave 5 loaves and 2 fish that fed 5000; your gifts are multiplied and God brings the increase. God isn't interested in just adding to to His Kingdom, He wants to multiply His Kingdom!

We invite you to partner with the Erwin Family as we work with Serve India Ministries, your donations will strengthen us to serve India more effectively and eventually we can see 100,000 villages reached with the Gospel.

Support Erwin Family Ministries Monthly or One-Time Donation

Family News

Janey and I are very pleased with Benjamin's progress in school. He has completed 4th grade and we have purchased his 5th grade curriculum. This fall he will be adding to his regular instruction beginning violin. A home school orchestra is starting up in September and Benjamin is very excited about playing. Along with the music lessons, he will be able to make new friends which he is very interested in doing. He usually is a social butterfly. What is interesting is that Benjamin loves classical music and doesn't care for any of the contemporary style. When he visits his grandma Erwin, they listen to classical music and it has had a very positive influence on him. Bennie dreams of one day being a conductor of an orchastra; I don't think he understands the extreme complexities of being a conductor but we will let him dream and save the complications for later.

Janey continues to serve our ministry by working at Costco where she is able to get our health insurance as well as enable us to pay our bills and get out of debt. We took a big hit on selling our house in Dallas several years ago and we are still trying to get out from under the money we lost. When I joined Serve India Ministries, I took a 50% pay cut from the ministry I worked at before which was subsidizing my salary along with what support I raised. Now that I am with Serve India Ministries, we are having tremendous success reaching thousands of unreached villages but I have to raise every penny of my support. Continue to pray for us as we trust God to be debt free and more able to serve un-hindered. Our dream one day would be that we could raise our support level to a point that Janey would not have to work and we could still get health insurance.

Ministries will always come and go and God's work will be done God's way in God's time but he only gives us one family and I want to make sure that I take care of them. My pastor from Arkansas, Pastor Tim Phillips always admonished me to "take care of your family!" Don't neglect them for the sake of ministry or your will loose both.

We will be traveling to TX for a couple of days next week to greet the Teen Mania team; we want to give them t-shirts to commemorate their mission trip as well as lots of information about Serve India. It would be nice to see many of these young people continue their love for India by supporting a pastor or some children and best of all, becoming a staff member or volunteer for us!

Later in August, our family will have the wonderful honor of traveling to Minneapolis and visiting with John Piper's ministry. John Piper is one of the most inspiring teachers of today and is a real strong advocate of world missions and fulfilling the great commission. Pray that somehow we might be able to build a strong partnership and this church might help reach thousands of villages in India through supporting many pastors. After the meeting with John Piper, I will be speaking at a church and then we hope to stop and drop some materials off at BILD International www.bild.org ; our partner that has developed the curriculum our pastors use. We are now the process of translating the 1st 4 books in 8 different languages. This will be 32 booklets that need to be translated and then printed for pastors all over India to use.

Teen Mania Group Ministers on Serve India Ministries Mission Field

We are very encouraged by the results of the outreach being done by 80 teenagers that are currently ministering in South India. The group will be in India for 3 weeks and they have a jam packed schedule of ministry both is public schools and in rural villages. We have seen these young people show tremendous maturity and a strong work ethic and they are a great inspiration to our village pastors. These teenagers have learned the secret of washing the feet of these village pastors; the clarion call that Brother Ebey has been proclaiming for 5 years of our history. By humbling themselves and serving these pastors and working to build their ministries in these villages, the Lord has brought several miracles among the group with a deaf girl that was healed in one villages which prompted her mother to accept Christ on the spot. This miracle lead to the salvation of many in that villages. Another man who couldn't walk was healed and walked with the group throughout the village inviting everyone to hear what they had to say. A few days one of the teams did their outreach right in front of the village temple and 17 people gave their lives to Christ. God is moving powerfully and I will be honored to meet with the group when they return to the Teen Mania headquarters in Lindale Texas early next month.

You can see hundreds of photos that are posted on the group's Face Book Page; they are amazing photos. Here is the link:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Global-Expeditions-India-B-2011/165066606844812?sk=photos

July is in the Books - August Awaits!

Greetings,

We have made good progress in our ministry since we last communicated. Brother Ebey's tour went well with sufficient support raise to help many of our pastors continue their outreach. We have some key ministry tours planned for August to MN and TX. Lord willing, Jane and Benjamin will be able to travel with me to both of these meetings.

Web Development Project Underway
We were also able to get additional funding for our web development project which will bring our web site up to a standard with our contemporary ministries. Currently we only have about 200 visits to our website each month and very few of our pastors have been sponsored via the web. Our goals after our web development project gets off the ground will be to see 30 to 50 pastors sponsored per month. This kind of response will enable us to keep up with the growth in India and allow Brother Ebey to add 300 - 500 pastors each year. These pastors are the key part of reaching 100,000 unreached villages in India. As you may well know, we currently have 1007 pastors working in over 5000 unreached villages.

As we have been talking with our web development consultants, they are amazed that we have been able to accomplish what we have without any web presence. All the donors we have found thus far have come from church meetings and personal contacts. Word of mouth will still be a major emphasis for Serve India but by bring our web site up to standard, our growth will be accelerated. Right now we have 300 unsponsored pastors and we do not have the church relationships to find enough sponsors for them. The web site can be an important tool to help us.

If you are familiar with web development, you know that it is can be very expensive. If we decide to go cheap or try to get work donated, we find that we usually get what we pay for. We have had a couple of key donors who have given so that we can get a feasibility and a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) study done. These are now complete and we have a writer, a graphic artist and a web developer working on all the changes. Our goal will be that we can bring in 5000 new visitors per month and the nice thing about utilizing the web for our donor acquisition is that people coming to are web site are actually looking for our type of ministry but they would never find us if we didn't have the right search engine rating. They would not respond to us if our web site was confusing without a clear call to action. Once the changes are implemented, people coming to our web site should quickly know what Serve India Ministries is all about and they should know how to partner with us in planting churches with clear action points.