In 1962, I was nine. I vividly remember my mother, Manorama Richard, taking us kids to church and praying nightly for my father’s safe return from helping air-drop food to the front lines of a major war in the region.
In 1971, my father, John Richard, once again delivered practical help—hand-carrying cash—during a massive buildup of humanity on the Indian border. In my late teens, I heard his stories of dog and man fighting over the same scrap of food, of a baby sucking at its dead mother’s breast.
Just a few years earlier, my father had held a prestigious and well-compensated job in an economy where unemployment rose on occasion to 40 percent. He sensed, however, God calling him into vocational Christian service. With my mother’s glad consent, he obeyed God and moved into the risky future of full-time ministry and a huge pay cut.
Although I now understand (but would still find his bold move hard to imitate), at the age of 13 I did not appreciate the changes in my food, clothing, social networks, and mode of transportation. Yet during those tender years, God began sensitizing me to the economic needs of Christian workers.
And I have tried to do something significant about it.
What is The ENLARGE Fund?
RREACH serves many pastoral leaders living in difficult conditions. Not only that, these pastors uncomplainingly put their congregations’ needs before their own. We established a Pastor’s Family Care Fund to strengthen such leaders in situations of extreme poverty, social persecution and natural disaster. We temporarily ease their personal financial responsibilities in defined, specific, measurable and accountable ways.
Over the last 30 years, RREACH has financially helped pastors’ families, including widows and orphans, with immediate and/or transition relief in places such as post-earthquake Haiti, tsunami-hit Sri Lanka, war-torn Liberia, and Ebola-struck parts of Africa.
Several years ago, after my mother’s graduation to heaven and because of her evangelistic role in my salvation and encouraging role in ministry, we developed the Mother’s Care Fund as an extension of the Pastor’s Family Care Fund. Memorial gifts in Manorama Richard’s honor helped pastors’ wives and children in economically deprived situations, providing care for their physical and educational needs.
Now, after my father’s heavenly home-going, I come to you, in the name of the One whom John and Manorama Richard served with humility, integrity and simplicity, to ENLARGE the boundaries of similarly faithful servants who serve despite deprivation and disaster.
What is the goal of The ENLARGE Fund?
Our financial goal for The ENLARGE Fund is $1m in 2018, to be given away over the next 10 years (or earlier) to pastors and their wives and children, and to pastors’ widows and orphans, as applicable needs and opportunities present themselves. We have a short window of opportunity, because my parents’ legacy will soon be forgotten by many.
I carry a great burden to relieve pastors of some of their personal needs so they can focus their spiritual energies on ministering to their congregations and communities in economically destitute situations.
If God has given you the ability to give ahead of your eternal reward…If you would like to prioritize the household of Faith and her first-responders with tangible, financial help…If you wish to entrust financial resources to an organization which Only God has protected, I invite you to give to The ENLARGE Fund.