Twenty Cents a Week for Missionary Funds by William Covert

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · May 21, 1914

Twenty Cents a Week for Missionary Funds

By William Covert

WM. COVERT

THIS amount may be large for very poor persons or for children; but it is not excessively large for the average adult, and it is very small for the person whose income is one hundred times that amount. Suppose we count only one week at a time, and then pay it in, and keep doing so through the entire year; we have then paid only $10.40, and the same amount paid by one thousand would be $10,400. Many of our people are investing sums ranging from $500 to $1,000 or more each year in houses and lands or other property which does not, as a rule, help forward the missionary work very much. But if as much could be paid into the missionary till, it would enlarge the financial ability of our Mission Board in a marvelous degree. Why not do so?

If there should come a great missionary awakening among us, so great as to cause all our surplus funds to get into the soul-winning channel, what a stir it would make! Something will come to pass before another decade of years rolls by, to accomplish this very thing. It may come through the furnace of affliction, or it may result from a special outpouring of God's Spirit upon his people; but it certainly will come, and our attitude toward God's work will most likely determine how it will come.

We should not hesitate about doing our duty. There should be no holding back nor niggardly giving when God opens the way to do a liberal thing. The providential openings among the nations should be to us the voice of God to go forward. These openings in all lands are to God's commandment-keeping people now what the opening of the Red Sea was to Israel when Moses stretched forth his rod and pointed it toward the opposite shore. The harvest is ripe, and ten thousand reapers are needed to gather in the grain while the day is waning. An intelligent understanding of the situation will be obtained only by those who are liberal with their funds, and who study our missionary reports to acquaint themselves with the world-wide field.

The progress of the work as reported in every issue of the REVIEW AND HERALD is soul inspiring. Each time the REVIEW comes from the press, we get news from many lands, telling anew the blessed message that Jesus is coming soon, and each time it tells us to hasten the work if we would be ready to enter in while the door is open. Read and ponder over these reports; talk of them in the home; repeat them in the social meetings; write about them in scores of letters; get them published in the papers; and, above all, live as if you believed in the soon coming of the kingdom.

Think about the small amount of work that had been done in giving the third angel's message to the world forty-five years ago, and then view it as it is now. Our people have been doubling in numbers every ten years, and facilities for the propagation of the work have increased in about the same ratio. If the next ten years witness the missionary extension of our work as much as the ten years just now closing, where will the outposts be then? We are sure the Lord wants it to expand in the future as rapidly as it has in the past. Ten years ago we were trying to get our people up to ten cents a week for missions, and now we are reaching forward to the mark of twenty cents a week. We shall not retrograde on this line of advancement in the future. Shall we be given another decade in which to lengthen our cords and strengthen our stakes? What does the reader think about it?