Birthdays for Buildings
Birthdays for Buildings is a plan for raising money for building churches on our various mission fields. In the service in which we presented the plan at New Hope, we asked a few people to testify about what they liked about our church buildings and facilities. After those testimonies we shared the fact that in many places on our mission fields that our people have no real church building, just a roof without walls or unfinished walls and uncompleted construction. We challenged our people to help make possible adequate church buildings in other lands.
Most people think about receiving on their birthdays……..why not give on your birthday and help build a church. We challenged each person to give a dollar for each year of age; if not a dollar at least a quarter for each year. We prepared birthday cards. Some years we have put a stamp or coin from one of our fields in each card. We built two wooden church banks to receive the offerings (for design, see “Build a Church Bank”).
Select someone to be responsible for the Birthdays for Buildings program in your church. Once a month in the Sunday morning service we recognize all the birthdays of the month. We have the people with birthdays come up front, we give them a card, sing “happy birthday” and they place their offering in the wooden church bank. The second bank is used in our Children’s Church and they recognize the birthdays every week. The children have really been excited about giving their offering and receiving a card with the foreign stamp. In the adult service we use power-point slides during the regular church offering the Sunday before we receive the Birthday offering to remind the people that it is coming up and to prepare to participate.
I hope this gives a sufficient overview of the program. I will join you in prayer as you prepare to participate in Birthdays for Buildings. If I can answer any questions or be of help please email me at [email protected]. God bless!
– B. Rex Ludwig
Please send Birthdays for Buildings offerings to IFBC headquarters monthly or quarterly. This helps us keep tabs on our progress, and it enables us to give our churches a periodic overview of how the program is coming along. Just be sure to mark your offering with the letters “B4B” or “Birthdays for Buildings” so that we know where the offerings should be sent. Offerings of any kind can be sent to Fellowship of Bible Churches, PO Box 1222 , Bethany , OK 73008-1222 . Thanks, and God bless you and your church for your participation in Birthdays for Buildings.