The newsletter itself was a typical church youth group newsletter. It had the feel of a form letter that a youth pastor printed up, and emailed to his group with instructions to change their names to personalize it. It contained info on the specifics of what the group would be doing, as well as information on the country that the group was headed to. This is one of my bones of contention. In this day of the Information Age, I am well aware of a lot of different social, political, and economic scenarios in many different countries. As someone who travels and works in many of these same places, I try as much as possible to stay informed on current conditions. Many times, I have friends in those countries who are deeply affected by said conditions. I don't need a formfed newsletter to tell me what I should know about a country. It sounds to me like Mr. Youth Pastor copied the Wikipedia article about the country. Not very inspiring. Next, the letter is worded to boldly ask for me to "consider supporting" this young person. Here's the thing. Knowing this young person wants to go on a mission trip is very inspiring and exciting to me, because I have a heart for missions, and a heart for that young person. It comes from relation-ship with this person, and my desire to see them experience the world beyond their doorstep. So, asking for money in this newsletter is pointless. If I have relationship with this person, then I will support them with everything I can. If I don't, then I honestly have no interest at all in supporting them.
Anyways, the newsletter goes on to detail how we can support this person in their endeavor. In fact, the largest chunk of the newsletter is spent on what we need to "prayerfully" do and how we can do it. This one goes so far as to challenge with specific amounts. "We need you to give a one-time gift of $250, or $100, or blah blah blah." Which is to say, "we want you to pray about what God would have you give, but we already know what He's going to say."
Ok. I'll stop blasting this stupid letter and focus on what I think the real point is. While I was working with YWAM on a full-time basis, I had to raise my own support (which I was gloriously unsuccessful at...) to cover my monthly expenses as well as my traveling. I hated it, because it felt so corny. My parents were full-time missionaries for 18 years, and, through their home church in Canada, had a network of many people who had supported them. I spent the first couple years of my YWAM career working on a newsletter that I sent out quarterly to over 200 people. Of all of those newsletters and money spent on printing, stamps, etc, I had 4 people who supported me during my YWAM time. One of those were my folks. After a couple years of sending out fancy full color newsletters with return envelopes and prayer cards, I stopped. The funny thing is, the people who were supporting me kept on supporting me. So it caused me to stop and really take stock of the whole support thing. It dawned on me that the real key to support is relationship. If I know and love someone, and they express a heart to go and do something, of course I will support them. Automatically. Not only that, but I will go out of my way to tell others about what they're doing, so that other people can get stoked on it too. Ask me sometime about my friends Justin and Hella Song. Seriously. Priscilla and I support them because we love them, and we love what they're doing, not because they put together a great newsletter (which they did).
You see, newsletters are for accounting firms and schools. They are designed to give certain information to certain people. Newsletters are impersonal and they don't speak of relationship. My little revelation in YWAM really helped me. While I traveled with YWAM, we mostly stayed in host homes. If it was a nice host home, where the host family was quite well off, the discussion often turned towards finding a way to get them on board as supporters. This never sat well with me, and I got tired of being made to feel like I was missing out by not dropping hints, leading conversations, and, well, manipulating our hosts into supporting us. There was one guy in particular whose monthly income from supporters was over $4000. He was unbelievably manipulative, and used every opportunity he could to make people feel they were almost sinning to not support him and his family. To make matters worse, he worked a job outside of YWAM to augment what his supporters brought in. What interested me about this guy in particular was his approach with supporters. He gained supporters quite rapidly, but lost them just as quickly. He told me once that if you focused on gaining more supporters each month than you lost, you were ahead of the game. It felt like a sales pitch. There was nothing there that spoke of relationship. Only dollar signs. It still disgusts me to this day.
Social media is another aspect to this whole thing. Facebook and Twitter gives us the chance to keep up on a daily basis (if we choose) with the ones we have some level of relationship with. All of the people who we support as missionaries are good close friends of our on Facebook. This has eliminated the need for a newsletter almost completely. It caters to relationship. You don't have to sit and write a letter, take it to the post office, and figure out postage to Brasil. You can hop online and often times you can chat live with your friend even though they're halfway across the planet. Awesome!
So - my advice to the young person headed out on a mission trip. Instead of writing a newsletter, TALK TO YOUR FRIENDS. If they're able to help out, they'll be stoked to do so. If they can't, they'll tell you. And when they say they will pray for you, it is genuine. If you are facing needs, financial or otherwise, then communicate that to your friends. If it needs to be a letter, or an email, or whatever, then write it from a perspective of relationship. Write it as if you were sitting in a coffeeshop talking face to face with the person. Leave out all the BS. If someone wants to know more about the country you're going to, and what their median income is, they will ask. They don't need to know all the crap. They don't need a sales pitch. They need (and want) to hear your heart. That's it. Be yourself, talk to the people who love you, and let God do what He is best at.
