We were just starting to raise support ahead of moving abroad and had, with the help and advice of our sending organisation, put together a provisional budget. We felt it was realistic and certainly well within the bounds of what we'd been told to expect by our organisation. The elders and deacons of our sending church had come over that evening to talk through our financial needs. I made everyone a cup of tea and pulled out a box of homemade cookies. My husband handed out copies of the draft budget. As everyone started to digest the contents of the sheet, one of the deacons skipped straight to the bottom of the page. As his eyes alighted on the total figure at the bottom, he almost fell off his chair in shock and surprise.
It wasn't the most auspicious start to gathering financial support, even if it does make for an amusing story now. Yet by God's grace, we have been and continue to be well supported financially in our work here. But in Western cultures (or, at least, British culture), where we often try as best we can to skirt around the subject of money, financial support for cross-cultural workers never seems like an easy topic to talk about.
A couple of weeks back we had another worker family come and spend a few days with us. They're good friends in a similar life position to us and we talked openly and honestly about a whole number of things, including issues surrounding financial support for workers.
The details of these conversations aren't pertinent and I don't want to expound on them here but I want to flag them as questions that we pondered and discussed. No issue has a clear right or wrong answer but comes down to how to apply wisdom depending on the person and situation.
- Different support models: salary; raising support according to a budget; partial self-support
- Saving and investing for retirement, particularly coming from a culture where there is the expectation that individuals fund their own retirement in one way or another.
- Whether and how much to save for our children's futures, so as to be able to contribute in some way towards young adult expenses such as driving lessons, weddings and university education.
- The pressure to make sure that holidays don't look too luxurious, including avoiding or limiting photos on social media.
- Consciousness of how spending decisions 'look' to supporters back home, for example getting paid cleaning help in the home.
- Feeling the need to justify certain decisions, for instance how what might have looked like an extravagant holiday was actually a thrifty option.
- Balancing the cost of different education options (private schools, national schools, home education) for children with other factors.
- The interaction and balance between 'secular' work (where that is required in order to get a work visa to stay in the country), 'ministry' work, the salary for that secular work and additional financial support from ministry partners.
- Whether and how much to explain to supporters about the particular pressures that come about from living and serving in a cross-cultural context and how that impacts spending decisions.
We are fortunate to have generous friends who urge us to remember our human frailty and to invest in looking after ourselves so we can keep serving. We're grateful for our partner churches' and individuals' support, for our sending organisation and for older, wiser cross-cultural worker friends, who have helped and advised us on some of these areas. We also know others who've struggled with one or more of these areas.