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This morning I woke to (you
guessed it) rain. But it was
deliciously cool and I had to sleep under a sheet for the later part of the
night. I spent some time working on
pictures for the website. They are
the full number of pictures from the digital camera so far (there’s a link
to them from the main journal page but I’ll put one here for you lazy guys).
Shadrach came in about 7:00
and asked what the schedule was for today.
I mentioned Pastor Wesley’s conference but we decided to go tomorrow
as there were a couple of pressing needs.
I called Michael Ossege of World Hope (look at their website for a
great model of MicroFinance. He made
time for us to come by all 11:00am so that went on the schedule. After that I called Rev. Wheiger of the
Wesleyan church for a follow up visit at 3pm today. I also called Lincoln Brownell and we
have an appointment with him at 4:30 today.
Lincoln just arrived back from the U.S.
last night so I wanted to give him a little time to sleep before
calling. However Daniel, his
assistant, called to let me know he was ready, and able, to talk.
G. Mango
Bay, he assistant pastor for Commission Baptist Church,
came by before we left to hear about the Crown conference and to discuss my
speaking at Commission Baptist this Sunday (the pastor is at the Children’s
Village in Sinoe as we speak). Mango
is a graduate of Liberia Baptist Theological Seminary with a degree in
Christian Education. He wants to
start a school for children one day.
As to the sermon topic, after hearing about the Crown Seminar, he
said, “our people would benefit from hearing that”. So that’s what they will hear this
Sunday. Pray for me.
We left the house around 10am
and stopped by the cold water business to pick up Shadrach who had gone
over earlier. Owen Garnett was there
laying out the area for the foundation.
They really squeeze a lot of stuff into a small space here (about
like San Francisco
but at 1/10,000th the price). From there we drove into Monrovia to meet with Michael. The distance is not far but the time to
drive is long. You know you’re not
going very fast when you see the same person pass you over and over again
(and they’re on foot).
It was a real pleasure to
meet with Michael. He said that
Norwood Davis of Crossroads Community Church had emailed ahead to tell him
to expect me (thank you Norwood). I went through the brief presentation on
Service To Servants and then tied in the Crown Financial Ministries conference
ending with a request that he serve on the Business/Governmental Committee
and use his influence to bring other business leaders to the
conference. He was very agreeable
and is now on the committee. I am
most impressed with the way their microfinance operation is run, especially
in the control aspect of records, low defaults, etc. Hopefully this relationship will expand
into one where he will share ideas on how STS might carry out our
accounting goal for ministries in Liberia.
Just as I was typing this
Shadrach came in and said that the Christian man that owned the internet
café that I’m using is a friend of Jeremiah’s and, seeing the Business By
the Book book that Shadrach was reading, asked about it. So now I have another opportunity to tell
the story and recruit. As they say
here, “God is good, all the time.
All the time, God is good.”
We drove home and arrived
with about 1 hour to eat and then meet with Rev. Moses Wheiger of the
Wesleyan Churches of Liberia. We discussed the Crown conference in
greater detail and he agreed to serve on the Pastor’s Committee. After leaving there we made our way to
the Baptist Compound where we were to meet Lincoln.
He ended up with a meeting running longer than anticipated at the
Seminary so his assistant, Daniel Kolubah, gave us a tour of the compound
and then took us to the Seminary where we met some of the students and had
a conversation in Lincoln’s
office about additional contacts and about a place to hold Monday’s
meeting.
After that he took us to his
home at the Baptist Compound where we enjoyed a dinner of delicious
sandwiches and French fries (for the non-Liberian in the group) and rice
with potatoes and greens (for the Liberians in the group). One of the things that we discussed is an
issue that is important to me, the amount of time spent by ministries in Liberia
raising enough funding to sustain their work. Lincoln
has just returned from 6 weeks in the United States where his primary
mission was to report back to those who support the Seminary and to gain
new funding for its continuation.
This is common to most of the ministries doing work in Liberia and
distracts substantially from the
ministry leader’s ability to actually do the work that God has called him
to. One of the 4 methods by which
STS will support God’s work within Liberia is by helping
ministries gain self-sufficiency through business enterprises. Part of the STS plan is to secure a
capital investment fund from 100 individuals willing to invest $10,000 each
to create an “at risk” pool of $1,000,000.
These funds would not be available for “normal” ministry expenses
nor for capital infrastructure projects.
Its sole use would be for business startup capitalization. These funds would be used to capitalize
business endeavors for different ministries which with STS providing the
feasibility review, startup assistance, accounting services and continuing
management oversight until the business has repaid its investment capital loan. This is an upcoming emphasis by STS after
the Education/Training and Logistics portions of our goals are better
developed.
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