Session 6
Where Are We to Give?
Session 6 Videos
Testimonies
“It gives me great pleasure to endorse this curriculum, and I endorse it because of the two men who conceived and constructed it. I know few people who are so committed to truth and believe that God provides wisdom for every financial decision and every decision in life. Russ and Ken are two Giants of Faith and I endorse them in this curriculum with total confidence of its powerful message that will transform lives.”
“I’m grateful for Ken Boa and Russ Crosson writing their book, Leverage, which provides very practical ways of living and giving generously. What a blessing to also have this interactive Study Guide and video-based curriculum to encourage each of us in our own financial stewardship & generosity journey as we hear inspiring stories from people who are leveraging their time, talents, treasure, and influence to bring more of God’s Kingdom here on Earth as it is in Heaven.”
“What a wonderful joy and privilege to be a part of the Leverage series. The focus of this important resource is on the faithful stewardship of the resources God places in our hands in such a way that leaves a legacy of generosity while placing the spotlight on lasting, eternal values. This is such an important, timely, and helpful gift. So grateful for the emphasis and message of the Leverage series!”
Leverage Tips
Leveraging Temporal Resources for Eternal Gain: A Spiritual Perspective
The focus is on leveraging today’s resources to make a difference in others’ lives, emphasizing obedience to God and the concept of present giving. Personal experiences of witnessing poverty and the impact of giving are shared. Inspiration is drawn from Pastor David Platt’s encouragement to give to those in need rather than saving for the future. The importance of using resources for others’ good with an eternal perspective is highlighted.
Read Stories of Generosity
Kathy & Curt Smith
How does living in the heart of an inner-city neighborhood transform a couple’s ministry and deepen their faith?
"Living in Their Heart’s Project" - Kathy & Curt Smith
Adescription of the location where Curt and Kathy Smith* are deeply invested in the work they feel called to do does not paint a pretty picture. They don’t walk alone in the area after dark. Some areas they don’t walk in during the daytime. About 20% to 30% of the houses are boarded up. The area has one of the highest crime rates in their city. Many homes are owned by “slum lords” who don’t maintain the properties. Renters move in and out of homes, often only able to pay the initial deposit and first month’s rent, and then are evicted. Some residents have no water and very little food. Sometimes, residents are there one week and gone the next. One child the Smiths know was in nine homes and nine different schools between starting kindergarten and finishing second grade.
At the end of the day, the Smiths don’t retreat from this area to a large, comfortable home in the safe suburbs — they also live here. And, says Curt, “We love it. It’s awesome.”
Curt and Kathy, parents of grown children, have now been involved in their inner-city ministry for more than 10 years. Originally, they did live in the suburbs, but began to realize they could have greater impact if they moved in to the area where their ministry operates. Says Kathy, “When you live with others who are ‘just like you,’ you read the Bible and nod your head and say ‘Yes, that’s true and that’s true, too’ but then when you confront issues of real life that others are facing, you think: ‘Wow, maybe I was a little more sheltered than I thought. So how do I feel about driving somebody to the hospital who smells bad? How do I feel about living among felons?’ I never thought I’d be comfortable doing that, but now I consider our neighbors some of our best friends. Sometimes it’s just realizing you have to be the hands and feet of Jesus for a person asking to do laundry in your house.”
The seeds of being hands and feet of Jesus started with a family mission trip to the Caribbean in 2006. “It was obvious we were supposed to go on that trip,” says Kathy. “We just listened to the Holy Spirit and He spoke to us. We do that often and if we hear something we’re told to do, we do it — even if it seems crazy. At the end of the trip, the leader said, ‘This is great and you’ve all done good things. Now what are you going to do when you go home?’”
One of the Smiths’ daughters had never felt like she fit in at church, but when the family returned home she accepted an invitation to help with an after school program at an inner-city church. Curt began to accompany her and eventually the Smiths found themselves there more and more “We just kept being drawn back to that neighborhood,” says Kathy. “Before we knew it, we were coming to the neighborhood two or three times a week, a 30-minute trip each way from where we were living.”
The Smiths prayed for several years, seeking to discern whether they were being called to move to the neighborhood. They always felt the answer was no, especially since their children were still in good schools in the suburbs. But one day as Kathy was driving home, she remembers exactly where she was on the interstate, she felt God say, “You are done. I have released you from the house.” As she walked into their suburban home, Curt looked at her and said, “You just need to know God released me from the house today.”
The Smiths relocated to the inner-city neighborhood and became an “anchor” family for the expanding Christian community ministry, primarily because they are living in their ministry. They’re investing in and rehabbing homes in the area, which are provided to those in need at an affordable cost. They’ve run Bible studies for youth in their garage. They have fed children who come to play on their porch in the evenings. They’ve shared the Gospel with single mothers and their children and they have helped support and encourage these families and their neighbors. God put it on their hearts to create a wiffle ball field. “It’s just wonderful how He keeps providing,” says Kathy. “People showed up and all of a sudden we had stands for the wiffle ball field and then a little shed that became our concession stand, a scorer’s table and an irrigation system — certainly the only one in the neighborhood! God just keeps bringing people to do things.”
And they’re going to church with their neighbors, many of whom are “baby believers.” “We now have an amazing group of brothers and sisters in Christ who are unlike us,” says Curt. “We are from all different races and socioeconomic backgrounds and speak different languages. We’re learning so much from each other.”
One of the most unique things that the Smiths have planned for their inner-city neighborhood is what Curt calls the “maker space.” A software engineer for his entire career, Curt also developed an interest in robotics and micro-controllers, as well as an idea for how to get neighborhood kids involved. He plans to create a space where kids can come and start with Legos, working their way up over their school years to complex robotics. He hopes to eventually partner with a philanthropic organization in their city that is training high school graduates to be software engineers, bypassing a college degree, and helping with job placement. Even though the partnership is still in “the dream phase,” Curt and Kathy went ahead and purchased a house in the neighborhood, renovated it, rented the top floor to a single mother, and have plans to put the “maker space” downstairs. The Smiths have actually purchased and renovated several homes, each one of them with either a
specific ministry group or specific person or family in mind. “We really didn’t know that we were risk takers, but we’ve learned that we are,” says Curt.
The Smiths are thrilled when, as recently happened, people visit the neighborhood and “catch the vision for it.” They bought a house and rented it to a couple who now lead worship at their church, but the couple feels so invested in the neighborhood that they’ve now bought their own house and plan to stay and raise a family there. “The best part is they’re only 26 years old,” says Curt. “It’s so exciting to us that young people want to put down roots here.”
Most of the residents in the Smiths’ neighborhood have just never had a break, says Curt, nor the resources and opportunities to create better lives. “We see the reality of poverty up close, but whether we’re playing wiffle ball together or delivering cookies to everybody on our block or decorating neighborhood Christmas trees or involved in rehabbing neglected homes for families in need, we’re doing it together, alongside our neighbors and church family, sharing the light of Christ with each other. Kathy and I are now doing what God has put on our hearts.”
William Lee
How did a chance mission trip lead to a lifelong commitment to transforming the lives of abandoned children in Mexico?
"Embracing a Dream: La Familia-Style" - William Lee
For his first 30+ years as a working adult, Bill Lee built businesses. His career took him from selling roofing products in Alabama and Mississippi to part-ownership of a $640 million-in-revenue company to his own 10-employee consulting firm based in Greenville, South Carolina. “I always felt like I was in the right place at the right time,” says Bill. That could also be said for Bill’s slightly impulsive decision in 2000.
At an annual family reunion, a cousin who at the time was a Methodist minister in Chattanooga, Tennessee, asked Bill — again — when he was going to go with his church on a mission trip to Casa Hogar La Familia, an orphanage in Mexico. “I always had an excuse not to go,” says Bill. “But when he asked me that year, I said, ‘Where do you go and what do you do while you’re down there?’ Next I heard myself saying, ‘I think I’ll go this year.’”
During his first visit to La Familia, Bill and a group of young college students from Tennessee did glamorous and exciting things like . . . cleaning out a damaged cistern. It was hard work but he had fun with the children in the orphanage. When he decided to go back the next year, he was surprised that the children remembered him. “It was just delightful to feel like I meant something to a group of kids so far away from my home,” says Bill. After his third trip to Mexico, Bill thought he had it all figured out and decided to put together a mission team from his own church. “I made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot, particularly what not to do, but I was off to the races. I decided I was going to make a serious commitment to La Familia.”
He sold his company to two of his key employees, although he remained part of the consulting team, survived prostate cancer, and then turned his attention to some abandoned children in the state of Puebla, Mexico.
Originally founded by the Mennonites, the orphanage had been turned over to the direction of a Methodist church in Puebla. Methodist churches in the U.S. provided financial and hands-on support. But Bill felt the various groups didn’t have a real relationship with each other — “The right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing,” he says.
Bill organized a group meeting in Memphis and the representatives of each church gave themselves a name: Amigos de la Familia. Just like that, and very much like his days in the professional world, Bill became co-leader with a friend named, Marshall Sansbury. The two took an eight-day, 3,000 mile trip through Mexico together, sharing their dreams and visions for La Familia. And also just like that, Bill decided to set up Embrace the Dream, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, to get commitments from more people and organizations. “I didn’t do any ‘official’ fundraising,” says Bill. “I just told everybody I knew about La Familia and what we do there. I built a website, wrote a blog, and created a newsletter. Slowly but surely we
started generating more interest.”
Embrace the Dream’s commitment is to teach the orphanage’s children about the love of Jesus and to give them an education so they can make their own living as adults. “The children often come from backgrounds in which education is just not part of their culture,” says Bill. “The area is very rural and a job working in the fields is common. We committed to paying tuition for the children eventually to go to a university or technical school and to taking care of the property and the children while they were at La Familia.”
A steady stream of donations to keep their promises was only the first of many challenges Bill and his ministry partner had to overcome — “more obstacles than we ever dreamed,” admits Bill. For one, the town is in a part of Mexico where
nobody speaks a word of English, so Bill hired a Spanish tutor. “You can get along okay with smiles and hugs if you’re there on a short-term mission trip, but to really lead and run something you have to speak Spanish.”
Eventually, the two men and the church agreed they would part ways. “We had 18 months to find a place to go,” recalls Bill. They found temporary quarters, which they would need for two years, in a town about an hour away — two small houses side by side, offering very cramped quarters. Land, even in the middle of nowhere, was running about $25,000 an acre — without utilities or a sewer connection. But one of the children’s grandmothers went to the mayor of her own small town, Quecholac, and persuaded him to donate two acres of land. “It was just a miracle,” says Bill, “as were the unexpected large donations that came out of the blue to help pay for building the new orphanage.” At one point, we had finished the first floor but didn’t have enough money to build the second. We needed big money, not just $500 or $1,000 but $50,000. A “chance” meeting with a friend resulted in a substantial donation, which would allow us to complete our dream for the new orphanage.”
The new building, finally completed in 2014, also hosts twice-weekly church services, Pentecostal-style. “They sing for about an hour, preach for an hour and pray for about a half hour,” says Bill. “You know you’ve been to church when you come out! The most important thing is that the children and the community are part of each other and about 160 previously unchurched people have been brought to the Lord through La Familia.”
The children at La Familia are not “orphans” in the typical sense of the word. Many are simply abandoned — their parents have walked away from them or have moved very far away to find work. Bill noticed a family of five children on his first trip; four of them are still there. “Before they came to La Familia, they were living in cardboard boxes on a vacant lot,” says Bill. “Workers from government agencies pick children up off the street and bring them to us, to their new home.”
Bill has found what he believes is the right number of children — they can take up to 47 — and says if they start another orphanage it would be in a new town. “The need is certainly great, but we’ve found that we have an excellent and strong community with this number of children. We have 35 right now, from infants to age 21. Many of the older ones are still with us because they didn’t go to school when they were younger, so we homeschool them, get them up to grade level and then they go to the local public school, from which they can graduate.” Alumni of La Familia are now in universities or technical schools studying architecture, design, cosmetology, and cooking. Two beloved directors, husband and wife, and four volunteers keep the place running.
Back in Greenville, where Bill still lives and does his consulting work – he goes to La Familia six times a year — he’s teaching Spanish to teachers in an inner-city Greenville school and teaching English to the mothers of the Spanish-speaking students. “It’s a lot of fun for me,” says Bill, “but my first love is La Familia. When I look back at what we’ve accomplished, my faith has been the primary recipient of our work. We know God wanted us in Puebla because we could have never made it through all of the obstacles we faced had God not been with us.”
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