This is my first year in a parish, and I ran across the Advent Conspiracy website with very little time to prepare. The leadership pulled together, however, and we were able to present the call to live a more simple Christmas season all four advent Sundays. On Christmas Day we held a single offering to be given to the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee to purchase wells for communities that do not have access to clean drinking water ($250 buys one well). Our church of 220 active members raised just over $50,000. God is good.

Chad Vandervalk - Pastor
Charlettetown Christian Reformed Church
Charlettetown
Prince Edward Isl, Canada

I wanted to take a moment and share with you Neighborhood Church’s journey with Advent Conspiracy.  To do so I must begin by telling you our church for the past several years has been very committed to putting on a very well done Christmas program that is mostly for us and our friends.  It is costly but entertaining.  This fall however was born a desire to do something different or as all of you have put it a belief that, “Christmas can still change the world” (very cool by the way).  So, we began to ask the question, how can we make a difference in our community and world this Christmas? 

Well, to make a long story short here is what happened.  We still did a Christmas program but this year we rented out a local jr. high school and invited the homeless, the teen moms, the Rescue Mission residents, all the marginalized that we could possibly think of and we ate, sang, and played together as one community.  Over 600 people from our community attended.  We partnered with Project Angel Tree and threw a party that provided gifts for 150 children whose parents are in prison.  We raised $3,000 for Living Water to build wells.  We raised another $10,500 for a missionary that we support in Laos who has in the last 15 years in spite of being imprisoned for his faith has led 35,000 to Christ and helped to plant over 100 churches.  And finally we partnered with an organization in our community called Christmas With Dignity, which takes over a store front and fills it with new gifts and clothes and discounts the prices by 90%. Instead of just giving people handouts Christmas With Dignity provides parents the dignity of purchasing presents for their children. 

There are too many stories to share with you about how God changed hearts and lives in our people.  You are right Christmas Can Still Make A Difference!  It really has in Visalia, CA!

Forrest Jenan - High School/Fuel Community
Neighborhood Church
Visalia, CA

Our community has had an awakening in the past year to the poverty next door.   Homeless relief and homeless prevention has moved to the forefront of churchʻs priorities and the advent conspiracy gave us an opportunity to make a significant statement over the Holidays.  We did a talk on transformation and showed the AC promo to illuminate that it often starts with the day to day shift in awareness of how you and others around you are living.  So we wrapped a huge cardboard box as a giant present with a slot on the top and asked the people that over the next 4 weeks they would consider giving up one gift and putting those funds in the box w/ the $ going toward homeless relief/prevention.  We counted the money and wrapped the number in a smaller box that we opened on Christmas Eve, $21,000 was raised.  We were able to present the check the following Sunday to the designated agencies as well as have our mayor and county supervisor come out and share their gratitude to us as a faith community leading the way in caring for our city. 
Anyway...it was really good.
And we’re doing the same thing for valentines day.

jesse p. giglio - community life pastor
ventura . missionary . church
ventura, ca

My name is Andrew Arndt.  The church where I’m the associate pastor (Sanctuary here in Tulsa, OK) decided to join the Advent Conspiracy this year, and we were blown away by the way in which our folks responded.

Coming off of a November in which the congregation stepped up to the plate in a HUGE way both financially and with their time to help with a Thanksgiving project we put together, we decided that it would be best to set “modestly aggressive” goals for our Advent Conspiracy campaign.  First, we decided to participate in a local coat drive to help provide underprivileged kids with winter coats.  200 coats we felt was a realistic goal.  Second, we decided to see if we could raise $5,000 to drill one clean water well through Living Water International.

Each week coats kept rolling in, until we had finally pulled together 275 winter coats by the end of the month.  We were just blown away by that.  But what was more surprising was the way in which people gave for Living Water International.  The first week, over $6,000 came in, surpassing our monthly goal in ONE WEEK!  We were suspicious at that point that we had hit our high point for the month, and that giving would drop dramatically the next week and slowly taper off throughout the month.  We were SO wrong.  The next week we collected over $5,000.  The week after that (the Sunday before Christmas - while people were in the THICK of holiday shopping) we pulled in another $9,000!  “Surely,” we thought at that point, “we’ve seen the best that our folks have to offer.” That assumption notwithstanding, the weekend after Christmas (with many of our people out of town), another $6,000 came in.

When all was said and done, we pulled together nearly $27,500, which we’ll be using to drill five clean water wells in Guatemala through Living Water International.  The Advent Conspiracy impacted our congregation in a way that will not soon be forgotten, inspiring us to pursue a “get your hands dirty” kind of Christmas spirituality that worships Jesus as it remembers the poor.

Thanks for letting us be part of the story.

Andrew Arndt - Staff Pastor
Sanctuary
Tulsa, OK

About 13 months ago, I read the article by Rick McKinley, through the link on pastors.com about advent conspiracy.  I thought it sounded really cool, but by then it was well into December and too late for us to envision our church for wells.  This year, I think the Holy Spirit prompted my memory when we began to do some Christmas planning in September.  I dug out the article and we began a process of deciding if our church wanted to do this project.  The answer was a big yes.  We brainstormed several possible projects and decided on the well drilling.  Since we have a missionary family living in Liberia, I contacted them and asked a few questions.  They had just had a well drilled on their own property.  As a result of their answers, we began the process of envisioning (using some of your downloadable resources) our little church (about 50 people) for providing for a well in a village in Liberia. Our friend was born in Liberia and his mother’s village has only a hole in the ground for their water - much like the holes you show on your video.  Even before we took the offering just before Christmas, people began designating, so it became apparent that maybe we could fund 2 wells.  And after the offering, this is the case.  We took in a little over $6000, perhaps not a lot, but still very exciting for our little church.

Lifewater has gone out to the villages and conducted their seminars about well maintenance.  Within a couple of weeks, I’m hoping the wells will be drilled.  What a privilege for us!!!

Charmaine Kelder on behalf of
Aldergrove Vineyard
British Columbia, Canada

I am a Pastor in Stony Plain, Alberta, Canada.  It’s about 20 minutes west of Edmonton.  We are a mid-size church of about 600 people.
We began last year (Christmas Eve 2007) dropping hints about Advent Conspiracy through your promotional video.  But this year (Christmas 2008) we started at Advent and promoted the snot out of it, especially since this is so in line with the direction we are headed as a church (blessed to be a blessing, social justice, sharing God’s love with the world etc.)
We partnered with an organization called WORLD RELIEF because they were building clean water wells in some of the most deprived parts of rural China.  A great bang for our buck was that through a Canadian grant with WORLD RELIEF, every dollar we raised would be matched by this government grant.

We promoted using your great videos through your website and through our WORK OF THE PEOPLE membership and our pastors were very passionate communicators of this We took the approach of “sponsorship” (the way compassion international and others have narrowed it down to a child sponsorship). We worked out how much it would cost to “sponsor” a household to have clean water.  It cost 115$ per household in a county of 400 families.  That would have been well over 40,000k which seemed a little steep for a church our size but we ended up raising 30,000$ which really delighted us.  That’s 60,000$ thanks to the grant).
We represented each sponsored family with a water bottle at the front of the church to keep track.  We had 252 water bottles on the stage by the end of the “campaign”.  People really caught this vision and we plan to even raise the bar next year and live this “simple” Christmas even more so.

Short stats

Where:  Stony Plain Alliance Church, Alberta Canada
Water Project:  China, wu feng county
Organization:  World Relief
Church size: 600
Money raised; 30,000 Canadian (60,000 with government grant)

Jonathan Gonyou - Pastor
Stony Plain Alliance Church
Alberta, Canada

We sent a check to Blood:Water Mission for $3944.75 this year due to our experience of [AC] this year. It was a great experience. There was something very freeing for us in the youth group to know that us being missionally minded meant we made some moves and actually DID things and not just talking about them. I found myself planning to teach a lot about what [AC] could/should look like so we all understood what and why we were doing these things, but then I found myself packing boxes of stuff & cards for soldiers for Christmas, and working on other things that got in the way of my teaching. I realized though that this whole thing is about movement and about DOING things that God is doing rather than talking about them. It was actually quite wonderful to have these experiences, and it’s got us questioning a LOT of how we structure and plan things.

Our greatest challenge was shifting the mindset of those involved, that it was a worship experience and not a fundraiser. I don’t know how well that part went, but we encouraged people to focus on the good of giving time, and we’re hoping the seeds take root and grow from there.

Thomas Riffey
1st UMC Edmond
Edmond, OK