the SLE Christmas Giving Project!

adapted from last week's SLE email:

Here's some more information about our SLE Christmas Giving project (as announced on Sunday). It's a really exciting endeavour and we're really keen to see our whole congregation (including kids!) get in on it.

If you'd like to check out the Gift Catalogues online in preparation, feel free! But hard copies will (again) be on your chairs at church this Sunday when you arrive.

CMS - Church Missionary Society
GFA - Gospel For Asia
Compassion
TEAR

In short, we want to encourage every SLEer (including kids!) to purchase at least one gift from any one of these four catalogues (ranging from $1.50 to thousands).

For every gift purchased, please fill out one of the cardboard baubles (Christmas tree decorations available next to the Christmas tree out front at church) and hang it up on the tree. You don't actually provide your name - it's entirely anonymous to encourage you to actually fill out a bauble and hang it rather than to just buy the gift without decorating the tree! Hopefully we will have a hundred or so decorations hung by Christmas time, representing the love and generosity of SLEers towards the poor and unreached of this world.

You can either go ahead and pay for the gift online or by mail yourself (you can even pay online at church after the service using the laptop out front!), or leave money in one of the pre-marked envelopes inside the letterbox in front of the Christmas tree, and it will be administered for you under SLE's name.

The key thing is that the tree has lots of decorations on it representing lots of gifts; how the gifts (money) are processed is flexible.

There's something great about visual representations. We could have not put up a tree and not prepared baubles, but the idea behind doing both is so we can encourage each other with our corporate giving. It's a project we're participating in together as a church family, and SEEING the results grow in front of us will be uber cool ;)