
When You Have to End Support

Enter your email to receive our newsletters.
Thank you for subscribing.
Something went wrong.
"The years of our life are seventy,
or even by reason of strength eighty;
yet their span is but toil and trouble;
they are soon gone, and we fly away.” Psalm 90:10
So straighten your back. Open your eyes. Brace your shoulders. And cry our, “I will not waste it!”
World Team is a global mission agency dedicated to church planting among unreached people groups.
Our goal is to make disciples and equip the local church to grow and multiply.
We do this by sharing the hope of Christ in word and deed.
What Part Will You Play?
World Team specializes in helping people find a place to serve in global missions where their unique skills and passions can be a blessing to others. From short-term to career missions, we’ll help you find the right team or form a new one.
Dave and Stacey Hare met at The Master’s College (now The Master’s University) in Santa Clarita, CA. They then went on to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY where they each received their MDivs. Also in Louisville, they adopted four kids from Ethiopia. Their first term on the field they spent learning French and Kwakum. For their first home assignment they each received a Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics, Bible Translation from the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics (now Dallas International University). They currently live in Cameroon, Africa where they serve as Linguists/Bible Translators among the Kwakum (aka Bakoum) people.
Copyright © 2021 Hare Translation Journey
Thank you for your transparent and honest post to a difficult subject. God bless you.
Awesome article – sharing with all my supporters. Very well articulated.
Great points! I would also add give them adequate notice. I would suggest at least six months if possible.
Thanks for the helpful article! When donors have had to stop giving, another helpful approach has been when they give us notice instead of ceasing right away. That gives us time to either raise new support or adjust our budget to cover the difference. Some donors have given us 3 or 6 months' notice; another went as long as 3 years. But that's always more helpful than the notification that comes effective immediately (or that it happened 2 or 3 months ago and I'm just finding out about it now).
Also, I offer three cheers to your statement "If you say nothing; we learn nothing." How disheartening it is to have a donor stop giving because "things are tight," only to hear months or years later that the donor actually had concerns with the work or agency. Perhaps those concerns could have been cleared up with one or more conversations; perhaps not. Either way, we had no chance to hear the criticism, learn from it, and make changes.
On the other side of things, if missionaries do not receive support from one of their faithful supporters for a while, they need to check with the supporter. I've had 2 cases where my support was directed to another missionary I was supporting, and I didn't notice it on the receipt. The missionary finally contacted me and I straightened it out. Yes it's awkward, but if a faithful supporter stops supporting you, please speak up or check with your organization to be sure an established pattern of giving was not changed accidentally.
As a pastor I have had to close a ministry and dissolve the church. With the sale of the church property by our regional office, we stipulated that our missionaries receive a guaranteed five (5) years of support out of the proceeds of the sale.
When you as an individual or a church run into financial difficulties you should share that with your missionaries in your regular communications. Give your missionaries the opportunity to partner with you in prayer as well. Too often missionary communication is only one-way. If we are partners, they should be hearing from us regularly as well.