We’ve had a lot to celebrate in 2024! Join Rev. Dr. Jack Jackson, president, and Rev. Dr. Heather Lear, vice president for grants, as they review the last year and look toward 2025.
TRANSCRIPT:
Jack Jackson: Hello friends welcome to this year in review for 2024 if I haven’t met you before my name’s Jack Jackson and I’m the new president of The Toundation for Evangelism as of August. We’ve had so much happening over the last 12 months and I’ve just stepped in here in the last few months since August and I’m so happy to be here and so honored to be with you. And before I even mention anything about what’s been happening I want to thank Jane Boatright Wood who’s been a faithful servant to the Foundation for 20 years and been your president for the last 12. And it’s just such an honor and privilege to have followed her. We’ll always be thankful for Jane’s work in ministry here at the Foundation.
As we think back on 2024, the Foundation continued the good work that it’s been doing in so many ways through the years. But a number of special things happened this year and I want to share with you about them just briefly.
First of all in January we celebrated the beginning of our 75th year as an organization and what a great journey it’s been. We were on site in person with a number of key gatherings from General conferences from the A.M.E. Zion to the A.M.E. to the United Methodist Church to the General Conference of the brand new Global Methodist Church and many other groups. We’ve just found a special time to celebrate with each of these groups that we serve as part of the Wesleyan tradition and over the course of this year we’ve gathered in so many ways through them.
Another very significant aspect of this year for the Foundation was that we received two significant grants to help us launch new work through the Foundation. The first comes in the form of a partnership with the Lily Endowment for the Thriving Congregations Local Church Cohorts Ministries that we have begun. We also were privileged to receive a Reynolds Ministry Grant from the United Methodist Foundation of Western North Carolina that is also helpful to us in the same way of providing grants and resources to churches that are trying to do catalytic ministries in their communities.
In November we celebrated the 75th at a banquet in Charlotte with many of you, including our trustees, our staff, previous people that have been very involved, and other significant supporters for the Foundation and everyone that was there. It was a wonderful time of reflection and celebration about what the Foundation has been about for the last 75 years and what we’re looking forward to in the future.
As we come to the end of 2024 I want to take this short opportunity to simply thank a number of folks who have been instrumental to the Foundation and its work this past year from our wonderful staff to our fantastic board who is hard at work helping us be the institution that God is calling us to be to people who have supported us financially or partnered with us in other ways. We simply wouldn’t be here without you. Your support matters – it matters to the work of the Foundation itself and it matters to the Wesleyan tradition for us helping each other share this good story.
We’re in now 30 different states through our grants. We are in now four continents across the globe. The Foundation is seeking to truly be a catalytic ministry itself as we seek to help Wesleyan tradition denominations, and there’s eight of whom that we really focus on right now and we’re also looking for additional partners who are seeking to be Evangelistic within this broad scope of what it means to be Wesleyan today here in the United States and abroad.
And now I want to turn it over to Heather Lear, vice president for grants, so she can share with you just a little bit about what the Foundation’s been doing through our granting ministry with local churches around the country.
Heather Lear: This truly has been a tremendous 75th year for The Foundation for Evangelism and our grants are helping to draw the circle wider across the Wesleyan family. We currently live in a cultural climate where we’re asked to divide into groups and to say what we’re against and to buy into to a narrative of scarcity, but the Foundation for Evangelism is telling a different more compelling story. It’s a story of working together, of focusing on what unites us and that we have a common mission and identity as children of God.
We operate out of our values and we work to address the changing needs of pastors and churches, often before they’re even aware of the need for a change. We know that transformation happens on a personal level and personal relationships are central to the work of evangelism and to all of our grants. And so now I invite you to meet some of our grant recipients and see what God has done through the work of the Foundation this year:
[Music]
Local Church Grants – concluded 51 grants for the 2023-24 cycle. Awarded 50 grants for the 2024-25 cycle. These were from 7 Wesleyan Tradition Denomination in 30 U.S. States.
The Wallace Chappell Lectures were held at Trevecca Nazarene University featuring Rev. Dr. Tod Bolsinger as the featured speaker. Over 750 students, faculty and guests attended in-person or online.
[Music]
The Foundation invited pastors and lay people in Western North Carolina to engage in trainings and workshops on forming evangelistic ministries in their communities.
The Evangelism the Foundation supported instructors who are thought leaders in Wesleyan evangelism, like the E. Stanley Jones Professors of Evangelism. These instructors help students innovatively share the gospel with their congregations and equip disciples to share the Good News of Jesus Christ.
Hannah Grace Injamuri is a Ph.D. Student at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary and served twice as the teaching assistant for the Foundation-supported Evangelism for Non-Evangelists webinar, led by E.S.J. Professor Dr. Mark Teasdale and Rev. Dr. Heather Lear. Her dissertation focuses on implications of Christianity for the Dalits in India. She will return to India when she graduates, using what she’s learned in her ministry. Here is what she said about the training…
“Everyone would benefit from this [evangelism training] even if it’s lay people or clergy because…it gives a model that helps people reflect on their theology, strengths, aspirations, internal and external factors, and I think all of this is very useful for any person who wants to spread the Good News and love, but in a way that can be well-received by the receiver.”
[Music]
The Foundation awarded its second “So That The World May Know Jesus Grant” from the Dr. H. Eddie and Mary Nell Fox Endowment for Evangelism to Wesley College in Mwanza, Tanzania, for evangelism curriculum in the Tanzanian context.
[Music]
Thriving Congregations Local Church Cohorts were launched with support from Lilly Endowment Inc. Additional cohorts are scheduled to begin in 2025.
[Music]
Jack Jackson: Hey friends as we come to the beginning of 2025 I just want to share a few things that I’m really excited about as we look forward to the new year. First of all in January we’ll have the Equipping the Local Church Grant cycle for 2025 start up and we really are looking forward to working with a new group of churches. Come later in the spring we’ll start our Thriving Congregations Local Church cohorts and begin that cycle of ministry with them as they seek to discover ways that the spirit will be working through them to reach their local church communities. And finally we welcome our brand new vice president of development Bonnie Hollabaugh. who we’re so excited to have join the team and to start working with all of us as we seek to develop the resources for what it means to be the Foundation going forward into this next season of life. We here at the Foundation hope you have a blessed 2025 and we look forward to continuing our work together to make the name of Jesus Christ known within this beautiful Wesleyan tradition. Thank you and God bless us as we work together.
[Music]
Thanks for your prayers, support and gifts in 2024.
Learn about how the Foundation’s grants and resources make a difference at https://foundationforevangelism.org/stories.
To make an End of Year Gift, go to https://foundationforevangelism.org/YEGiving.
Have a Happy and Blessed New Year!
