Greetings

I trust that you are having a blessed day. Thank you for taking time to read our update. We are so blessed by the generosity of God’s people to help us serve India with the love of Jesus!

The scripture that has blessed me recently is Habakuk 1 verse 1 “The BURDEN which Habakkuk the prophet did see” KJV. The letter begins with the Habakkuk petitioning God about the evil and sin around him; the injustice and oppression. God would spend the rest of the letter answering Habakkuk’s concerns and revealing God’s vision (Hab 2:4) to bring justice to Israel and eventually restore Israel. So the lesson that I learn from Habakkuk is to talk to God about the things of the world that bother us or grieve us; it may be that God wants us to do something about them.

Family update

Our family continues to grow in the grace of God, we are studying the book of Judges together along with reading the daily proverb. We are also reading through the biography of Adoniram Judson, the first American missionary who gave his life and family for the nation of Burma.

Jane’s Birthday

August is birthday month for our family with Jane’s, Ben’s and my mom’s birthday and this year we were able to travel to Minneapolis MN for Janey’s birthday where I was able to visit with the ministry of John Piper called Desiring God Ministries and share with their outreach director what Serve India Ministries does. I was also able to speak at a church on Sunday evening. During our time we were able to visit the Mall of America. What an enormous place that is. I guess you could say it represents America’s materialistic culture and need for entertainment and stuff.

Ben’s Birthday

Benjamin will celebrate his 9^th birthday on August 26^th and we will begin his 5^th grade curriculum September 1^st. Also on September 6^th will begin his violin lessons. We appreciate his love for classical music and we hope it will translate in a love to apply the disciple of learning the violin. Then for physical exercise, Benjamin will be in a local flag football league and he will be able burn some energy off.

India – January 2012

Later this week we will be sending out a letter asking for help raising the funds for travel to India. We 3 of us going, it will cost between $5500 - $5800. We have already been given $600 toward our goal and we thank everyone in advance for their generosity toward this project.

Ministry Update

Brother Ebey coming in late September

Brother Ebenezer Samuel will be coming to the US on September 22^nd and will arrive in Minneapolis where we will attend the Desiring God Conference hosted by Pastor John Piper. Pastor Piper is one of the best missions teachers in America and has inspired many to give their lives for the unreached world. Later in October Brother Ebey’s wife Angel will fly to Chicago and accompany him on the last part of his tours. Please pray for us that we might have favor because we have 300 unsponsored pastors.

Barnabas Group Meetings

On August 27^th I will be traveling to Los Angeles to attend two banquets hosted by The Barnabas Group which is a gathering of businessmen who invest in different types of missions and ministry work. Our hope is that we will be able to connect with key businessmen that might partner with Serve India Ministries by providing resources, services or networking that will help us advance our mission.

Web Project

Over the past few months, I have been keeping you updated about our Web project to bring our website up to industry standards and our goal is to bring 30 – 50 new sponsors per month through our web site and this will allow us to keep up with the growth on the field and we won’t have a surplus of 300 unsponsored pastors that we are scrambling to find partners for through church meetings and traveling.

Please be in prayer for this web project as it will take a lot of detail and finances to complete but net result will have a major impact on India.

Thank you for your generosity.

We love you,

Michael, Jane and Benjamin Erwin

Support Update

Support Report

Thank you again for all your generosity, sacrifice and love for our family. As many of our supporters are struggling with decreased finances, retirement and loss of jobs we don’t take for granted the gifts that God’s people so graciously give. Before the summer began, we were able to build us a reserve so that our support would be consistent but now we have depleted most of our reserve through the summer so please pray for us to raise new support and one-time donations that will help us continue. We would love to bring new partners into our ministry because there are 100,000 villages that are waiting to hear the Gospel and be blessed with a local church. Thank you for your generosity.

We love you,

Michael, Jane and Benjamin Erwin

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.

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.