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