Texas hunger offering helps support development projects around the world_101804

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Posted: 10/15/04

Texas hunger offering helps support
development projects around the world

By Ferrell Foster

Texas Baptists Communications

BANGALORE, India–A 4-year-old boy in Bangalore, India, who was born with his feet turned backwards can walk today because of a ministry supported through the Texas Baptist Offering for World Hunger.

That boy no longer faces a future as a man with useless legs, unable to support himself and subject to poverty and hunger, said Joe Haag of the Baptist General Convention of Texas' Christian Life Commission.

ProVision Asia, a ministry to handicapped and hungry people in India, provided the boy's surgery for $300.

The ministry in Bangalore, led by Chip and Jean Kingery, is set to receive $5,000 next year from the Texas offering. ProVision Asia, however, will receive only a percentage of that if Texas Baptists fail to achieve the $750,000 offering goal.

Texas Baptists churches are encouraged to set aside the four Sundays prior to Thanksgiving each year to emphasize the hunger offering, Haag noted. Many churches collect the offering throughout the year, but 40 percent of the funds is given in the final three months of the year.

Funds for the offering are collected during a fiscal year that begins in October each year. They are distributed during the calendar year that lags three months behind.

In the fiscal year that ended in September, Texas Baptists gave $774,344 through the offering. That is an increase of 19 percent above the $648,841 given the previous year. But it still fell short of the $800,000 goal. Consequently, ministries did not receive 100 percent of the planned funding.

The CLC changed the way it handled hunger relief beginning in 1996, moving away from lump-sum contributions going to other agencies and toward a system that provides more accountability, Haag said. Now, the CLC spells out which specific ministries the offering supports before Texas Baptists ever begin giving to it.

Five percent of the offering goes to administrative costs, Haag said. The rest is divided generally: 60 percent international, 25 percent Texas and 15 percent the United States beyond Texas.

As in the India ministry, the Texas offering “doesn't only feed people, but it helps people to feed themselves by attending to the long-term causes of hunger and poverty,” he noted.

The international funding requests come primarily through three sources–the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, national member bodies of the Baptist World Alliance and BGCT's Texas Partnerships Resource Center, Haag said.

In the United States, the number of states receiving hunger funds from Texas has grown to 10, plus the District of Columbia. “The states are applying to us because they're getting less funding” from the Southern Baptist Convention, Haag said.

Ministries seeking funding through the offering must reapply each year, and the CLC receives four times as many funding requests as it has money to support, Haag said. “And we hardly ever fund at the level people ask for.”

But Haag sees the potential for much greater giving. If one in 20 Texas Baptists gave $10 to hunger relief each month, the result would be 15 times greater than what is now being given.

Ministries supported by the offering are varied and wide-ranging. In Texas alone, $187,500 is earmarked for hunger relief efforts in Amarillo, Austin, Brownwood, Conroe, Corpus Christi, Dallas, Decatur, Del Rio-Uvalde, El Paso, Fort Worth, Freeport, Houston, Midland, Mineral Wells, Odessa, the Rio Grande Valley, San Antonio and Weatherford.

In other states, $112,500 will be spent. The ministries vary greatly, because the needs vary greatly.

In Iowa, for example, there is food distribution, literacy training and job skills developing in the growing Hispanic community of Denison.

There is food distribution, after-school tutoring, job and life skills classes, parenting training and crisis counseling in a part of Des Moines with an increasing number of refugee immigrants and the accompanying high crime, poverty, school dropouts, unemployment and drug abuse. In eight rural areas, the offering helps support crisis hunger relief, after-school projects and job training.

Overseas, the hunger offering reaches to ministries in Puerto Rico, Brazil, Romania, Congo, Malawi, Israel, China, Thailand and many other places.

For complete 2004 and 2005 lists of supported ministries, see www.bgct.org/hunger.

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