Erwin Family Update

Dear Friends,

I pray that you have made it through this spring weather without any damage. It seems there have been more flooding and tornado damage than we have seen for a while. Here in Gardner, we have missed the severe weather and received only seasonal rain.

Ministry Update

Ministry is going at a frantic pace for the next 5 weeks. I will pick Brother Ebey up at Los Angeles airport on May 24th. I have been spending a lot of time on the phone and email the past month trying to schedule as many meetings as possible. The biggest challenge is finding churches that will allow Brother Ebey to speak on Sunday and Wednesdays. Once I have found church meetings, we fill in the rest of the time with visits to key donors, missions committees, pastors, businessmen and partner ministries. In all the 5 weeks will require about 60 appointments to be scheduled. Along with the appointments, travel schedules must be set and each night to find a place to sleep. Our goal is that each night we are able to stay in the homes of friends of the ministry. In the 5 years of Serve India Ministry we have only stayed in a few motel rooms.

This will be a very important summer because we are really behind on getting our pastors sponsored. We currently have 450 pastors that are not sponsored but they are going through the training and doing outreach to the unreached villages. We will need to raise an additional $150,000 of new support each year to fund the growth on the field. We are praying to raise some general missions funds along with getting100-200 new sponsors, that should be enough to get us well into next year. Thank you for your prayers for this spring tour so we are able to keep up with the rapid growth on the mission field. There are now 1007 pastors we are working with and they are targeting over 5000 unreached villages.

Benjamin and Jane Update

Benjamin in all done with AWANA and finishing up his 4th grade school work. He is very excited to begin a band class this fall but he hasn't decided what instrument he will play. He is leaning toward trumpet but hasn't actually played one yet. In early June the music store will host a week long band camp. The band camp is simply meeting for 5 nights and the students will test several types of instruments so they can find which one they would like to learn. The actual band lessons will start in September.

Janey is still going through TMJ treatments and it will be a slow process of gradual improvement. Our last appeal to the insurance company to cover the treatment was denied. They said is was not medically necessary; I guess who ever made that decision has never had migraine headaches? Either way, we will trust God for healing and financial provision for the treatments.

Support Report
Thank you agian to everyone who has so generously given to support our ministry. Please pray for us as we seek to find partners who will provide that last bit of our monthly support. We are closing in on our 15th year of full time ministry and God has provided year after year, month after month even when so we give Him the praise. Many doubters don't believe that missionaries can raise support these days but we keep seeing God's provision.

Family Fun

Our family is doing well. I thank each of you who have sacrificed to help bring God’s provision for us while we minister on behalf of India. We give God glory and thanks for your prayer and concern.

Benjamin completed his AWANA for the year and did very well, he also traveled with me to South Carolina to help with a home school conference booth that we had for Serve India Ministries. As a family we will be able to attend “School Day at the K” and event hosted by the Kansas City Royals in conjunction with a local tv station. They will be doing science experiments along with teaching about weather related subjects. After the presentation, we will be able to see the Royals play baseball.

Janey also completed her time with AWANA where she taught the 1st and 2nd graders and really enjoyed working with the children. She is a great help and encouragement to me as we work to support the development work for Serve India Ministries.

I am planning to lead a donor tour to India in November and I would really love to take Janey and Benjamin with us but finances will need to be raised, for the three of us to go it will cost at least $4500 so we will make sure we have God’s leading and from there we will have His provision.
Support update.

Here Come the Millinnials !

There is a major shift that is about the hit all charities in the next 5 years. As you can tell from the graph above, the baby boomer generation (those born between 1946 – 1964) will begin retiring in droves. Currently this generation is retiring at a rate of 10,000 per day. The problem that is pending is that the baby boomer generation accounts for 90% of current charitable giving while the upcoming millennial generation only accounts for 1% of giving. As you can see from the graph, there will be a 59% shortfall in charitable giving in just 5 years. Ministries like Serve India must adapt as quickly as possible and find a way to engage the younger donor. This is a real urgent dilemma but knowing that God has called us to a specific task, may we have the faith and wisdom to prepare for this major shift.
At Serve India Ministries we are working to upgrade our web site and rapidly increase our ministries presence on the web in order to introduce our ministry to millennial Christians who have a heart for church planting. Please pray for us that we will have wise council and financial provision to make these changes and keep pace with our mission field growth.

Faith vs Planning

Faith vs Planning Ahead
As I contemplate the future of donor relationships with Serve India Ministries, I realize that planning is needed along with wise council. We as a ministry have this amazing goal to plant 100,000 churches in unreached villages. Only God can accomplish this goal but he expects us to have faith and “plan” for our success. Our success will require 20,000 trained pastors and it will require 20,000 financial partners that God leads our way and believe in our vision.

Proverbs 15:22 tells us: “Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed.” Where does that leave faith? Hebrews 11:1 also tells us “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.”

Faith asked us to do the impossible, to dream big dreams. With this bid dream, God wants us to trust Him to provide the provision for the goal or vision He has set for us. Nehemiah had a God-given burden to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem but with that burden took tremendous leadership and planning along with God’s miraculous provision provided by the king of Persia.

Happenings with Janey

Janey is starting to see some improvement in the frequency and intensity of headaches cause my the TMJ in her jaw. There is still a long way to go and we are still appealing to our health insurance for a reversal of their denial of coverage for her treatment. Janey was born in Pennsylvania and is a lifetime Pittsburgh Steeler fan so she is very excited that they are in the Super Bowl. has been going through TMJ treatments for a few months now and is enduring a lot of pain in her jaws and the dentist is working to realign her jaw. We are having difficulty with our insurance company as they publish that they will cover up to $2,000 lifetime for TMJ treatments but they are not paying anything because they say that the treatment is medically unnecessary. As long as the treatments help, it will be worth the cost of the treatment and like He has done for our 14 years of ministry, God will supply.

Happenings with Benjamin

It was really fun to take Benjamin to California. From the time we got on the airplane and arrived in LA, it was a new adventure for him. We began by taking him to the Ronald Regan Museum in Simi Valley north of Los Angeles and then the next day he was able to visit Disney Land. The weather was great and the park wasn't crowded. On Wednesday, I had serveral ministry visits to do so Benjamin and Janey went to the Richard Nixon Museum since we were staying right in Yorba Linda. On Thursday we were able to take Benjamin to LegoLand and he really enjoyed it the most because it was build specifically for kids and they can enjoy the simplicity of the park and as parents, we enjoyed the many park benches that they had so we could rest along the way. We are very grateful for the family that gave us the tickets to go to these parks; it was a great blessing.

Benjamin is doing very well in his schoolwork, he has 4 chapters done on all 5 of his subjects and doesn't seem to have any difficulty with any of the subjects even though he is a grade ahead for his age. He is enjoying AWANA and will participate in the Bible Quiz competetion next week and he also plays Upward Basketball each week as well. It is much harder for him in basketball now because they have a 10' basket and the defense can steal the ball off of the dribble.

Ministry Update - Both USA and India

January has been a very busy month in that I have spent 10 days in California and in Oregon introducing Serve India Ministries to key churches and potential partners. We are talking with 3 churches and one business in LA that are seriously considering sponosering a mission field each. This would represent 60 pastors working in 300 villages. I then traveled to Portland where I had a booth at the Missions Connexion which is a major missions conference in the Northwest. Taking advantage of being in the area, I stayed over in Portland for 3 more days and was able to have a serveral more church visits with a church in Corvallis and a 5000 member church in Portland. The church in Corvallis is very interested in sponsoring a mission field in India and while I was there, they were spending an entire week as a church fasting and praying for God's direction for their church. If they do decide to sponsor, it will definately be because God is leading them. The church in Portland is actually already working in the state of Karnataka in India and we have 3 mission fields right in the same vacitnity so they were very interested in learning more to see if they could expand their church planting in the area. This is the same area where there are many Devadasi Temples and they have a burden for these little girls that are being offered to the temples.

In India, Brother Ebey and the ministry leaders are putting the finishing touches on adding 300 more pastors to our 5 year church planting/training program. This will put us at 1100 pastors working in 5500 villages. It is exciting to have a part in this great work.

One of the major challenges for our US office is to raise enough adminstrative support to serve all the pastors in India as well mission field supporters here in the USA. It is very important that we expand our US administrative fund so that we can properly keep up with the rapid growth on the field. I am currently working with a communications group that will help us get our messaging out on the web and drive thousands of potential supporters to our web site. It will take considerable investment to be sucessful but hopefully in a years time we will have a sustainable growth of our US admin fund as well as 20 - 50 new pastor sponsors per month. If we can find these new sponsors via the internet, this will keep up with the growth we need to reach our goal of 100,000 churches by 2020.

Thank you for taking a few minutes to read this letter. Our family is doing well, completeing a busy January. I was scheduled to travel to the West Coast to visit key partners and churches interested in Los Angeles and then travel to Portland for a missions conference and then return to Kansas City on January 26th.

Not wanting to be gone for 10 days without being with Janey and Benjamin, we were able to purchase tickets for them so they could go with me to California. We were very blessed that some friends of our ministry was very generous to us and bought tickets for us to visit Legoland and Disneyland. It is such a blessing as parents to be able to take our son to some fun places while keeping him introduced to the mission field. Our next travel I hope with be to India as funds become available.

Photos from our family vacation

Erwin Family News -Lord Willing, the Erwin Family is Traveling to India in September!

We are settling in very well in Gardner, Kansas, about 40 miles southwest of Kansas City. This is a small town that is growing but still has that country charm. Benjamin is able to walk across the street to a swimming pool so we are excited about that. We go bicycle riding along a nice trail that is close by and hope to go camping at Hillsdale Lake, which is 10 miles south of here. Janey is looking at some new treatments for headaches that look promising so we will keep you updated after her first consultation.

We ordered Benjamin's curriculum for next year. It is calledSwitched on Schoolhouse and is an online curriculum that will fit Benjamin's needs very well. It is a five-subject curriculum of math, language arts, science, Bible and history/geography. We also got a typing tutor module as well. We are excited to start him with this curriculum in September.

India September 2010
We are working on the details for our family to travel to India in September. Janey, Benjamin and I will travel first to our headquarters in the south in Tamil Nadu. Then I hope to travel to Rajasthan in the northwest of Inida. Plans are still being confirmed and, of course, we will need to raise about $4,000 for the travel. Where God guides, He provides, so your prayers for us are very helpful. I will be telling you more about our trip and how you can be involved in the coming months.

Influence! What does Amy Carmichael and Joesph Stalin have in common?

I have been researching a lot of world evangelism lately as I prepare to do a presentation at next month's Colorado Home Educators Conference (CHEC). I am finding some interesting statistics about the population of children throughout the world. In almost every country outside the U.S., Canada and Europe; children make up 50% of the world's population, but I find that only about 15% of mission dollars are spent to specifically reach children.
I believe we are living in a day that paradigms are changing rapidly. Greater efforts must be made to reach children throughout the world because they are #1 more open to the Gospel and #2 they have more time to listen. Most importantly is the fact that a child that accepts Christ at an early age and is properly discipled will mature with a Biblical worldview and influence their cultures for the cause of Jesus Christ.
As we look at history, every leader that has impacted this world, both evil and good, has been influenced by someone. Karl Marks, Joseph Stalin, Osama Bin Laden, Adolf Hitler and Napoleon were influenced by someone, and that influence caused massive destruction and death.
What if these men would have been influenced by Christ? What a different world we would live in. In the coming decades there will be voids where God's leaders must influence societies. Look at the impact in India of pioneers like Amy Carmichael and William Carey. There are many generations of Christians who have followed in their footsteps.
Serve India Ministries President, Brother Ebenezer Samuel, comes from the very state (Tamil Nadu) that Amy Carmichael ministered in and Brother Ebey descends from 5 generations of Christians and now is leading an effort to help plant 100,000 churches in the nation of India. As a young man, Brother Ebey attended Serampore College in Calcutta, the college founded by William Carey.
As I travel around the U.S. sharing the vision of Serve India Ministries, I hear from many people who are so overwhelmed by the world's needs that don't feel that they can make a difference. If you really want a good bang for your buck, look at children's ministry both here in the U.S. and in the world. Serve India Ministries is helping 4,000 children through its Stepping Stone Program. $3 per month per child goes a long way to impact a child's life forever and enable him or her to influence their community or their nation.
May God grant us the grace to influence our cultures for Christ with our work and our resources. May He give us the grace to raise our children to be influenced by Jesus so we can be salt and light to our communities and to the world.

Erwin Family News - March, 2010

We are moving next month to a small town south of Olathe called Gardner. We were very blessed to find a two-year-old home that will cost us about the same as the rent we are paying right now but a more rural setting. Benjamin and I are planning a garden when it warms up and the soil dries out. We already have some tomatoes and peppers growing indoors.

Benjamin is almost finished with 3rd grade math and is able to understand fractions and decimals very well. Janey is working with Benjamin with English and grammar, which he understands very well, but he doesn't like to write sentences so we have to find creative ways for him to write stories and journal.

We look forward to visiting family for Easter weekend in Harrison, Arkansas, and I will also be able visit one of the churches in town that supports our ministry. Janey continues to work at Costco, which gives us health benefits as well as extra income. She is continuing to receive treatment for her neck, which is the possible cause of migraine headaches. We are beginning to think that there are multiple causes of her headaches ranging from her neck to sinuses. Either way we are praying for wisdom and provision.

Benjamin and I will be setting up a booth at the Kansas City Home School Conference April 16 and 17. I will be doing two workshops for parents titled "Preparing Our Children to Fulfill the Great Commission."

We hope to move to our new home before the 15th of April because after we're done with the home school conference, I will be traveling to Pennsylvania for a week to help Brother Ebey during his speaking tour.

Please be in prayer for us during the months of April and May because we are hoping to raise support for 200 pastors that are working to plant churches.

Thankful

Romans Chapter 12 verse 1 tells us, "Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God--this is your spiritual act of worship." This has always been a very challenging scripture to me and I think even more so in the days we live in. When I think of the majority of people in India, they live day to day, many traveling miles each day just to carry water for the family use, with no transportation other than their feet and no guarantee that there will be food for that day. There are 150 million children working in sweat shops, and many never do anything else the rest of their lives.

As I think about these things, I realize how ungrateful I can be and how forgetful I am of God's great mercy. But for the mercy of God I would be struggling to survive in India!

How do I respond to the scripture "in view of God's mercy?" How do I make myself a "Living Sacrifice?" I have two ways that I can respond to this scripture: I can give God a Guilt Offering (Leviticus 5:1-19) or a Thank Offering (Exodus 29:39-41.) The difference between the two offerings is that one (guilt offering) is obligatory and the other (thank offering) is a freewill offering.

God no longer wants or requires guilt offerings from me because Jesus paid it all so my response should be a thanksgiving offering of myself to God.
As I see our son Benjamin and as each of us see our children, we are often perplexed by the fact that they take their blessings for granted. It has been my experience that if our children are not thankful, it is because we the parents are not thankful to God and we do not live a life of thankfulness to God.

Children are wonderful that way; often, the way they behave is a reflection on the way we behave because they learn their behaviors somewhere. Thank you, Father, for your great mercy that does not give me what I deserve and thank you for your great grace that gives me eternal life, that which I do not deserve.

Father, I thank you for our friends who support us in our ministry because of your grace working in their lives. May our partnership bring glory to Your name and fruit for eternity!

Here are some more recent photos of India

Support Update

We are so blessed for the support so many of our friends have provided. You enable us to serve Jesus according to the burden He has given us for the lost of India.

Please be in prayer for us as I continue to find new support for this exciting ministry. I plan on speaking in several area churches this year, hoping to find friends to partner with our ministry. Our prayer goal is to see $500 of new support in 2010 as well as work to reduce our living expenses. If you remember back in March of 2009, we came to Serve India Ministries with a 50% pay cut, and we have been able to both increase our monthly support and lower our expense. Janey’s work at Costco has also allowed us to retain health benefits along with providing additional income as well.

I am so amazed at the generosity of our partners, knowing the difficulty of today’s economy. I give God the glory for each of you as your generosity reflects the goodness of Christ. We have an exciting 2010 ahead of us.

We Love You!

Michael, Jane and Benjamin Erwin

Donate to Erwin Family Ministries

Please Pray for AOTW video editing process

As you read last month, Ian Skelly of All Over the World (http://www.aotw.tv/), a Christian TV program about different mission organizations, filmed three of the Serve India mission fields in Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan, India. The 30-minute TV program will air in March or April. After it airs, we will have a high-quality video that we can give to our current and future donors.

Please pray for Ian Skelly as he works with Susan, our operations manager, to edit the many hours of film down to a 30-minute broadcast.

Brian Slater Photos

You can see more of Brian's Work at http://forwardsbackwards.com

Brother Ebey’s Spring Tour

I continue to spend most of my time in coordination with Gene Mackie to schedule Brother Ebey’s speaking tour when he visits the USA from April 1–May 9. We are seeing many breakthroughs with new churches that are opening their pulpits and allowing Brother Ebey to share the vision of Serve India Ministries.

As I shared last month, Brother Ebey has also been invited by the U.S. Center for World Mission to attend the “Global Mission Consultation and Celebration,” a world-wide mission conference in Tokyo May 11–13. Brother Ebey has been asked to submit a strategy paper to the conference leaders who want to know more about Serve India Ministries' strategy working with existing independent pastors. The group will be focusing on finishing the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20) and how ministries might be able to coordinate their efforts.

Erwin Family News

We have been looking and praying for the right opportunity to take Janey and Benjamin to India to see the work. When it comes to a long-term vision for world missions, seeing is believing. Our family would like to dedicate many years of our lives to the mission fields of India and are so honored to have a major part of the church-planting effort in this great nation.

Our lease is up on our rental home in Olathe in May, and we are praying about what we should do. We would like to move to a less expensive home, and we are even considering moving to the Springfield, Missouri, area, where the cost of living is much less than the Olathe, Kansas, area.

Janey continues to be a blessing at Costco Wholesale, and Benjamin is just about done with 3rd grade math and 2nd grade English. He made his first basket of the year during his upward basketball game a couple of weeks ago and really enjoys playing the sport.

Please be in prayer for us that we find the next rental home here or in Springfield, Missouri. In Springfield, we will be closer to my dad and Janey’s parents, which will be better for all of us. If we move to Springfield, Janey will need to find comparable work because she also provides our health insurance along extra needed income.

February 2010 - Greetings Friends :)

I have just returned from a round-trip to Sarasota, Florida, to attend a ministers’ conference. From there, I traveled to Philadelphia, where I attended the Lancaster Mission Fest.

I always try to schedule church meetings on the Sundays and Wednesdays when I travel as this is better stewardship of ministry resources. I was able to meet some key contacts who are interested in Serve India Ministries as well as an interest in having Brother Ebey speak at their church when he is here in the United States.

We rely heavily upon Brother Ebey’s sharing the vision of Serve India Ministries, but our goal is to be effective in finding sponsors for our pastor-missionaries even while Brother Ebey is in India. During the past two months the Lord has provided around 40 new sponsorships and a good potential for another 40 before Brother Ebey returns in early April.

Pastor's Intervention Stops Man from Committing Suicide

Sudhakar was looking for a good place to kill himself, wandering on the mountainside, carrying a piece of rope. Having cancer gave him unbearable pain. No relief had come from what medicine he could afford with his limited finances. No relief had come from appealing to Hindu gods and goddesses. He knew of only one other way to end his suffering.

But he happened to meet another man on the mountainside, a pastor making his way toward a nearby village. The pastor, learning about Sudhakar’s suffering and what the rope was for, prayed for him and told him the good news of the gospel. Sudhakar was comforted by the prayer and responded to the gospel by giving his life to the Lord. Now he has a hope with which to carry on living.

Please Pray for our Serve India Ministries Christmas Letter

I have spent the past two weeks working on writing and mailing our annual Christmas letter to our donors of Serve India Ministries. Our heart is to build a long-lasting relationship with our donors and to always encourage them with stories and updates. Whenever we mention needs of the ministries to our donors, we want to be sensitive to allow them to be led by God in their giving. If we accomplish this with all of our communications, then we will be successful because God will be our supply, not a fancy written letter.

Here is a copy of our annual Christmas letter. I hope it encourages you as much as it did me as I wrote it:

Merry Christmas

As the end of the year approaches, we pause and reflect on the goodness of God. 2009 has been an amazing year for Serve India Ministries. We can imagine the smiling faces of the people whom God has granted us the privilege of serving. The message of the Gospel has penetrated the darkness of their world with its beacon of hope. As we approach Christmas, we rejoice knowing that many people in India will be celebrating their first Christmas as believers. And many more will be hearing from their village pastors about the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

We can also imagine the faces of children that will be learning the Christmas story as they attend their local Stepping Stone Program sponsored by Serve India Ministries. These centers are serving the children of India because of the generosity of many of our donors.

Read an update about Shanti, one of the children from one of our Stepping Stone outreaches in India. It is not just the hearts of the villagers that are opened up by a Stepping Stone Tutoring Center, which provides the children of the village with care and education, but the hearts of the parents are opened up as well. Bible verses, one each day, are given to the children, who enthusiastically learn their meaning and memorize them. On Saturdays, the day of the week when songs and Bible stories are used to bring the gospel to the children, the children are encouraged to recite the verses that they learned during the week. They are also urged to develop a personal walk with God, to pray for their needs, and to share their testimonies about answered prayers.

Shanti, a Hindu girl who had learned a Bible verse one day, attended a prayer meeting that night in her neighbor’s house. When the pastor spoke at the meeting, he used the same Bible verse that the girl had learned earlier in the day at the Stepping Stone Center. Shanti, struck twice in one day by the same verse and feeling astonished by this and puzzling over its significance, described her experience to a woman attending the meeting. God’s word is living and active. When we store it up in our hearts, it speaks to us. After the woman had explained this to her and had given her encouragement, Shanti felt that she had been spoken to by God. Feeling excited and happy, she rejoiced the whole night.

The struggles of our daily lives sometimes overwhelm us, but the realities of what God is doing everyday in India overshadows any hardships we face. India is a nation with 500 million children, and each one can be changed just like Shanti. There is nothing more precious than helping a child learn about the God who loves them and wants to be their eternal savior. Serve India Ministries has channeled your support to pastor-missionaries who have, in turn, spread the message of the Gospel and the love of God. A simple “thank you” seems so inadequate. You have faithfully stood with us. Because of your help, there are new smiles on faces, new hope in hearts, and lives forever changed. Thousands of people in hundreds of villages now have a new eternal destiny. Your gifts of time, talent, and financial support made it possible.

We, the USA staff, thank you along with Brother Ebenezer Samuel and the 638 pastor-missionaries that are part of Serve India Ministries. This is “the body of Christ” in action, the fulfillment of His mandate, and the light of His love that so brilliantly shines in darkness. At this time of the year it’s good to remember.

Thank you so very much for your faithfulness. You mean so much to me and to our ministry.
Yours in Christ,
Michael R. Erwin, Development Director, Serve India Ministries

P.S. We are so grateful for your generous support that has enabled us to accomplish great things for the glory of God. As our work in India continues to grow, our cost in our U.S. office is going up. We are praying that we might see an increase of $800 per month for our U.S. general fund. Your one-time donations or monthly support of our “Where Most Needed” fund will be a great blessing to help us serve on behalf of our pastor-missionaries in India as well as our friends here in the United States.