Kingdom Investors
Multiplying investor impact
Investing in Kingdom collaboration has a multiplying impact because it empowers not just one program or one organization alone, but many organizations working together.
VisionSynergy is supported by a group of generous financial investors who appreciate the leveraged power of collaboration.
Our financial investors are hundreds of individuals, churches, and Christian foundations who want their resources to have the greatest possible impact on critical areas of world mission. The majority of our funding comes through large grants from major Christian foundations and high-capacity individuals.
Duplication dilutes investments
Major donors often receive requests for grants from different Christian ministries who are working in the same areas, with similar goals, yet without any cooperation or even awareness of each others’ work. No Kingdom investor wants to see their donation diluted through inefficiency or duplication.
In fact, many philanthropic groups (both Christian and non-Christian) now include specific questions on grant applications wanting to know whether or not the ministry or organization is working in partnership with anyone else.
Collaboration maximizes investments
Partnership maximizes the use of resources.
For example, giving to one of 30 mission agencies working in a Middle East partnership initiative assures the donor that the resources of the other 29 agencies are coordinated for maximum effectiveness without duplication of effort. If donors give to a media broadcasting group working in partnership with others in the area, they know that the efforts of others doing local church planting, healthcare development, or education are all working together with the media ministry.
Investing in organizations who are working in partnership with others is a way to leverage the stewardship of resources. Likewise, investing in the partnership itself is a way to multiply the impact even further.
Those who invest in the work of VisionSynergy are giving not just to the work of one organization, but to the building of collaborative work that impacts numerous organizations.
What Kingdom Investors have said about our work
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Hugh Maclellan Jr.
President
Maclellan Foundation
“For years I have believed in and supported Kingdom partnerships. Partnerships that clearly define roles and outcomes increase effectiveness and reduce duplication. To conserve resources and get the most effective results, it is increasingly important that ministries work together. Because of this, we strongly support the work of building effective partnerships for evangelism and church planting.“
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Fritz Kling
President
Kling Philanthropy Group
“Next week, I’ll be speaking to a group of missionaries, and I’ve been told that one of the main topics for the conference will be partnership. It occurred to me what progress has been made, for partnership to be a central theme and one which everyone recognizes as a priority. For many years, you were leading the charge on this topic, and receiving only blank stares or even resistance. How things have changed!
I felt then, and feel more strongly now, that you were ahead of your time in seeing the importance of partnerships, or what I call “mutuality” in The Meeting of the Waters. I’m often asked which one of the trends I wrote about is the most important, and I think it may be Mutuality. It’s invisible, it slows efforts down, it’s frustrating … but it’s God’s way and impossible to ignore. Thanks for sounding the alarm so broadly, loudly, consistently and insistently. The good news is that reinforcements have arrived!“
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Rob Martin
Director
First Fruit Institute
“For more than 25 years I have been engaged in granting to Muslim outreach and I can say without equivocation that the most impactful granting I did in the area of Muslim evangelization and church planting came from our foundational granting to VisionSynergy and its predecessor organization, Interdev. It was this granting that made possible so much of the direct field granting that I later was able to accomplish.
The model is familiar to you: put all of the ministries interested in a certain Muslim people group in a room, give them some basic guidelines and training in partnership, nurture their nascent efforts towards cooperation, and the result is that you will see incredible God-led results occur. I witnessed VisionSynergy, from its beginning, take that model and grow another powerful version of partnership – that of networking ministries’ individual models into effective forces to help drive the results of partnership towards even greater impact.
The grants were hardly ever easy to make. My board, like yours, had real questions: Does this really work? How can we know? Why can’t it pay for itself? For us, finally, the proof was in the results. In our case, seeing was believing. We witnessed the results in Interdev partnerships we had underwritten and in the VisionSynergy networks we had helped underwrite.
The granting to the ‘logistics’ of missions is hardly the stuff of legend – except to the missions who depend on mission aviation, radio, training institutions, and partnership facilitation for the success of their fieldwork. The funding paradigm of the logistics missions and the field missions has proved to be the single most effective way of getting the work to where the need is.
Let me sum up this, perhaps, overly long endorsement this way: Like any good investment portfolio, a certain amount of diversification is necessary for the overall success of the investor. The work of VisionSynergy is necessary so that the fieldwork, where the rubber meets the road, can be accomplished.“
Want to leverage the power of partnership?
We believe that God is always at work around the world, moving His people toward community and collaboration. That’s why we so often find that the dreams stirring in one person’s heart are the same dreams stirring in another person’s heart. If you want to learn more about how to leverage the power of partnership in your own ministry context, or how to get involved in the work of bringing others together to advance the Gospel, contact us!