Love First Offering
Love First Offering Tally to Date
In keeping with our Love First theme, we will be receiving a Love First Offering (Miracle Offering) at the 2008 Annual Conference session. I invite each of our nearly 1,200 congregations to begin preparing, even now, to participate in this miraculous outpouring of love. The offering will be shared between the Nothing But Nets initiative to stamp out the killer disease of malaria and the emerging United Methodist Church in Vietnam and the Methodist Church of Cambodia, with whom we in West Ohio have a covenant partnership. Our Love First Offering goal is $210,000 – a miraculous outpouring of $70,000 for Nothing But Nets and $140,000 for Cambodia and Vietnam. Unless otherwise designated, 1/3 of the offering will be allocated to Nothing But Nets and 2/3 to Cambodia and Vietnam.
In the fall of 2006, The United Methodist Church formed a partnership with the magazine Sports Illustrated, the National Basketball Foundation, the United Nations Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to form Nothing But Nets – a campaign to eradicate malaria. The primary way to save persons from malaria in poverty stricken areas is to be sure they sleep under a chemically-treated mosquito net during the evening hours when the malaria-bearing mosquitoes are active. The principle behind this campaign is simple and straightforward – “send a net, save a life.” Each net costs $10.00. This covers three things: (1) the net itself, (2) the distribution costs and (3) educating families on how to use the nets properly.
The United Methodist Church is growing rapidly in Southeast Asia, particularly in Cambodia and Vietnam. There are now over 150 congregations in Cambodia and 35 in Vietnam. Individuals and families are attracted to the United Methodist Church because it teaches that disciples of Jesus Christ actively work to transform their communities and the world to be more and more like God’s Kingdom on earth, as it is in heaven. As one young person in Vietnam told our recent West Ohio Volunteer in Mission team, “United Methodists do good things for people – they provide education, job training, medicines, food, clothing, homes for orphans…they do lots of good things.” Southeast Asia is a vibrant mission field for the transforming gospel of Jesus Christ.
Our goal is to raise $140,000 to support the exciting and life-transforming work underway in Cambodia and Vietnam. The first $40,000 from this portion of the Love First Offering will be used for Education and
The other $100,000 will be used to establish the United Methodist Church Center in Vietnam to serve as the church’s headquarters, training and resource center. At the present time, people of the United Methodist Church are forced to meet in an atmosphere of secrecy in house churches, always concerned that local government officials may close the ministry or harass and even imprison its leaders. In spite of these challenging circumstances, the United Methodist churches are growing, especially among college students and young families. The headquarters must be established before The United Methodist Church can be recognized by the Vietnamese government, before the people of the United Methodist Church can worship and do ministry openly and freely.
I believe in the miraculous power of Love First. As the author of I John writes, “Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another…; if we love one another, God lives in us, and God’s love is perfected in us.” (I John 4:11-12) I believe that our Love First Offering for Nothing But Nets and Southeast Asia will be a channel through which we can love our neighbors and through which God’s love can be perfected in us.
Bishop Bruce R. Ough