What is Mission Support?

Mission Support is the money you place in the offering plate that is then shared with your synod and the churchwide organization for ELCA ministries beyond your congregation. Mission Support is undesignated giving and it provides the staff, networks, and relationships that enable the ELCA to carry out God’s work in this country and throughout the world.

When we work together as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, we are doing God’s work in ways that no individual or none of the 10,549 congregations can do alone. By sharing our time, talents, and possessions generously, God’s Spirit inspires others to give generously! Your Mission Support dollars support the whole church, including:

• Your congregation and leaders
• Congregations seeking new pastors in the call process
• 25 new congregations started in 2006
• 172 congregations under development
• 150 existing congregations in a transformational ministry process
• 264 missionaries in 48 countries
• Ministry and projects in over 90 countries
• Eight seminaries
• 28 colleges and universities
• 185 campus ministries
• 145 camps and retreat centers
• Social ministry organizations serving 1 out of 50 people in the United States and Caribbean every year
• Long-term community development
• Lutheran World Federation, World Council of Churches, and the National Council of Churches in Christ

From Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson

The ELCA – including more than 10,000 congregations, 65 synods, and the churchwide organization – is a church that is on the move. We, the members of this church, are the hands and feet of God:

• when we share a meal with those living in poverty in rural North Dakota
• when we rebuild homes and lives in the Gulf Coast
• when we provide free training for nurse’s aides in Denver

Mission Support provides the staff, networks, and relationships that enable the ELCA to carry out God’s work in this country and throughout the world:

• so that women in Keur Massar, Senegal, learn how to read and write
• so that families in Lima, Peru, receive the food they need
• so that villagers in Morogoro, Tanzania, can dig new wells for drinking water

Even in difficult times, we remember the abundance God has so freely shared with us. “And God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that by always having enough of everything, you may share abundantly in every good work.” (2 Corinthians 9: 8) There’s more than enough good work to be done – people to feed, homes to be built, faith to be nurtured, and lives to be transformed. And God has entrusted this work to our hands – our human hands. What a gift, and what an opportunity!

Adapted from the ELCA 2008 planning guide for Mission Support