God’s Sovereign Supply in Support Raising

Growing up, my encounters with support raising were somewhat confusing. A missionary or sometimes an entire family would show up at our Independent Baptist church in Orange County, CA. They’d explain what they were doing and then answer questions after the service. It wasn’t clear to me as a kid why they were going through this rigamarole. My wife, on the other hand, was a toddler when her family started support raising. While neither my wife nor I imagined that we would be raising support for our own family to serve overseas, I’m thankful to see a glimpse into how God sovereignly works to accomplish his purposes. God wants missionaries to be sent, and he is sovereign over their going. Therefore, we can trust him in support raising.

I’m so thankful for those who paved the way for us as we began to ask churches and church members to partner with us. We have a big family and are going to a developed city, which means we have to raise more support than most missionaries I know. Thankfully, wise counsel and regular encouragement strengthened our faith in God. We trusted in God’s sovereignty. We knew that if he wanted us on the field, he could accomplish what we needed. We also believed the opposite: if we were unable to raise support, then we should take that as the hand of providence.

But we didn’t want support raising to go poorly due to our faithlessness or lack of effort. Some have compared support raising to evangelism, and the comparison is apt. God uses means for the conversion of the lost, and he uses means for the sending of missionaries. So, trusting in God’s sovereignty, we got to work. We compiled spreadsheets of people we wanted to contact, we got in touch with friends, and we researched churches to email. We had been trained about how to do this. But our training had some unhelpful elements that could be summarized by the following sentiment: “Yes, God is sovereign. But in case he isn’t, here are ten easy ways to make sure you are fully funded in six months.” We really wanted to avoid any “disgraceful, underhanded ways” (2 Cor. 4:2). We didn’t want anyone to feel like they held our fate in their hands. If someone couldn’t support us, we trusted that God would provide in other ways. We wanted people to know that’s how we truly felt.

Along the way, there were various points when we were unsure of who else to reach out to or what else to do. We were discouraged and tempted to despair. During one of these seasons, we received some timely advice from friends who had come before us in raising support. We wanted to double down on our efforts, but they encouraged us instead to take the time we would normally spend in support raising and instead spend that time praying. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of self-reliance. But God wanted to deepen our dependence on him. 

Reflecting on the last year and a half, I’m thankful that God provided for our needs. Of course, the season of needing to trust him is not over. As I write this, someone in a consulate in Washington D.C. is reviewing my family’s visa applications. I’m not in that room, but God is. And if he wants us to go, then he is more than able to move the pieces around the board to make that happen.

Not every support-raising story ends with someone getting to the mission field. Close friends of ours were able to raise what they needed in what felt, at least from the outside, like record time. Then COVID hit, and their target country completely shut down. After a long period of waiting, they made the difficult decision to stay. 

Why does God do things like this? I don’t know. But I know that because of what God has done for us in Christ, we can completely trust “that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). Support raising is a season in a series of seasons that enables us to experience God’s faithfulness to his people in all circumstances.