Your MIF investments are at work every day as loans to more than 750 ELCA ministries throughout the United States, in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, supporting the church's mission of spreading the gospel.

Messiah Lutheran Church in Moundsville, W.V., uses at least 10 percent of its budget to support ELCA churchwide benevolence and causes such as social service ministries, scholarships for kids going to summer church camp, and emergency funds for local people in need. Generally, there’s no shortage of worthy causes.

When Messiah recently received a $1 million gift, congregation member Bob Johnston already had a worthy cause in mind. He encouraged Messiah to make a $20,000 gift to the Mission Investment Fund.

Johnston said that in the congregation’s early days, the Lutheran Church in America, one of the church bodies that merged to become the ELCA, gave Messiah a long-term low-interest loan and a monthly stipend. When the ELCA was formed, Messiah renegotiated the balance of the mortgage and reduced its debt by $18,000. “The church invested a lot of money in our congregation, and I had it in the back of my mind for years that if we ever got some extra money, we ought to do something to help some other congregation,” Johnston said.

After consideration, the church council raised the amount to $25,000, and the congregation approved the gift.

In a letter accompanying the contribution, congregation treasurer Karen Yoders thanked MIF for supporting Messiah’s early ministry growth, saying, “We benefited greatly from your support and could not have functioned without it. We want to help young, growing churches as we were helped many years ago.”

Moundsville is a small town of 10,000 located 15 miles south of Wheeling, W.V., on the Ohio River. Messiah was a mission congregation of St. Matthew Lutheran Church, just south of Wheeling, and was organized in 1963 when coal mining and glass manufacturing drew new residents to the area.

Messiah’s gift has been added to the Mission Investment Fund Endowment, which enables the Fund to make grants to congregations that need special assistance to further their ministries. Four grants to ELCA ministries from the MIF Endowment were recently approved. Details on the grant program and the congregations that received grants will be included in the next issue of “MIF In Action.”