Well, welcome to 2024. Whenever I think about the new year and all that we’re trying to do I think of partnership, otherwise the job is just too big. We’ll be sending teams off to Cuba this month as well. It looks like we’ll also be headed back to India in February. I’m not quite sure what my personal schedule is going to be, but we’ve got a growing team that’s ready to go out and to proclaim and teach the gospel of life in the places of this world that are in desperate need.
Honestly, I could use your help. I’m not really talking about finances right now. I’m really talking about becoming an ambassador of Passion Life. The truth of the matter is we have individuals that support us. We have a few foundations, but we have very few churches involved with our work with only about a handful or so. What we really want to do is to see Passion Life known among a lot more people and a lot more churches who want to stand for life and want to stand for world missions.
One of the things that we’re trying to do is look for people who might become an ambassador for Passion Life and I just want to introduce this idea to you today and find out if that’s something that you would like to do. We would like to help you accomplish it. So my invitation is to become a life ambassador. What does that involve? If you wanted to be an ambassador, it means that you could host one of our Storming the Stronghold fireside chats as we call them.That is an opportunity for you to invite 10-15 people into your home, you serve them a nice dessert that evening, and we sit around together and we talk about China, Vietnam, Cuba or how we go about spreading the gospel to the neediest places in this world. It helps us get an idea of how to train up the church to start pregnancy help centers in their area that rescue the innocent and do it in a life changing way.
This is a situation where I’d actually come out to see you. We’d spend the evening together with your friends, most of them are going to come from a home group or from your church. That’s what it means to be an ambassador. Wouldn’t that be fun to do together?
Another meaning of this role is to develop a relationship between Passion Life and your church. If you have a Sanctity of Human Life Sunday or you have some sort of special pro-life event at your church and you want to bring in Passion Life to help the church understand how they can do this, then you would be the connection between us and your church.
Sometimes you have a missions conference and the angle isn’t so much pro-life as it is world missions and you can help in that way. The point is that you serve the interests and the mission of Passion Life in your church as an ambassador. You can also organize a four questions training for a small group of people in your church with your leaders and we’ll do in your church what we do all over Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia. We do take time, upon request, to bring to specific churches our four questions training. It’s a one day training session. It’s usually done on a Saturday from nine to about one. It’s just a great opportunity for you to bring to your leadership and to your community the very same training that we use to spark pro-life work all over the world.
Another way that you can serve as an ambassador is that you can help us with some of our regional events like the ones we have in California, Texas and Georgia. We have opportunities in North Carolina and we’d like to expand one into the Chicago area and Florida as well. We would like to be able to host some regional banquets with about 75 to 100 people and really help them understand the history and the point of our mission and give people an opportunity to get excited and partner with us. We need organizing committees to help us plan those events.
Mark or I would come and join you for that event in your area and there are probably some other ways that you can serve as a Passion Life ambassador. Those are just the main ways. My point is this: as you think about 2024 and what you want to give your time to please think about serving as a Passion Life ambassador. Wouldn’t it be great if our community of partners were to grow and include a lot more churches. I don’t really have any way to get into local churches. They don’t really want to take my phone calls. They want to hear from their own people. They don’t want to hear from strangers. If I was world famous, they would take my phone call. But I’m not. So we are really relying on our partners to serve as an ambassador and say, “Hey, I’d like you, my church, to learn about something I’m excited about supporting and that is Passion Life.”
Jump in any way you can and if you’d like to learn more about how to be an ambassador, contact me or our office through our website at passionlife.org. I will call you and talk you through some of the things that you can do as well as mail you a brochure of what all we do. Thank you very much.