Tag Archives: annual report

Churchfunding: 2022 Year-End Report

Another year has passed, so it’s time for another update on our house loans. Thank God, our experiment is still going well.

(Background: As many of you know, we purchased our Atlanta house on March 25, 2016, paying the seller in full immediately, thanks to loans and gifts from nearly 90 individuals or families. Since this crowdfunding effort was the work of Christ’s church, we coined a new term: “churchfunding.” Here is the post that officially launched this adventure.)

At the beginning of 2022, we owed $21,232.50 in house loans. By the end of the year, we owed only $14,507.50.

Here is how that $6,725 difference breaks down:

  • We repaid $6,200 in loans, at more than the promised rate of $500 per month.
  • We were forgiven an additional $525 in principal and interest by two generous lenders.

In total, our house debt declined by $725 more than expected in 2022.

There are 14 lenders who have not yet received any repayment. If you are one of those 14, don’t worry. Your turn should come soon. God willing, at our promised repayment rate of $500 per month, we should have all our loans repaid by May, 2025.

Each month I use a random number generator to select a lender to repay. But first, I pray, asking God to glorify himself through the selection. So, if you need repayment soon, ask God to choose you! But if you need to, feel free to also let us know and we’ll do our best to repay you quickly.

In the first half of 2022 our house value hit a new high, just in time for the city to update our property assessment and increase our taxes. In the second half of the year, our property value steadily dropped, losing most of the gains of the first half of the year. (Thank you, rising interest rates and slumping economy.)

It looks like we missed our best chance to sell, so we’ll probably stick around here for a while yet. 🙂 To be clear, we have no dreams of leaving Atlanta any time soon. This is where God allowed us to settle, and we’ll stay here until he brings clarity that we should be elsewhere.

I don’t have time for a full family update, but here are some things I’m grateful for from 2022:

  • A wife who faithfully homeschools, keeps house, connects with ladies from church, cares for neighbors, reads over 100 books in one year, and endures up to four musicians practicing at once in one house.

  • Youngest daughter, who completed my Beginners’ Bible Reading Plan for the first time and is learning to like math.
  • Middle daughter, who wins first prize in our family for diligence and organization in daily duties and who dearly loves animals.
  • Oldest daughter, who grew by leaps as a cellist and all-round musician this year and is responsibly navigating her first year of high school.

  • Family game nights on Fridays.
  • Enough piano students that I rarely find space for new ones.

  • A new pastor at church, who is also my new boss at Choice Books, blessing me through both roles.
  • Fellow church musicians who gladly help the saints worship–and the volunteer soldier below who helped me with my sermon.

  • A great fall string orchestra concert (the conductor said it was the best in 14 years!) where our daughters participated and I even got to accompany at the piano for one piece.
  • Time for more blogging than in the year before, and for light and peace as I study, write, and interact with my readers and their varied perspectives.

  • Random blessings, like a mostly-positive experience fostering a shelter dog, a brand new lawn mower (yay!), vehicles that keep running, a couple visits from my mother, and a trip to Iowa to see Zonya’s family and skate on the farm pond.

Thank you, again, to everyone who helped us buy our Atlanta home, and to all who have supported us in so many other ways. We remain very grateful for “the house that God bought” and invite you to come visit. 

Let’s be faithful to Jesus in 2023. He is coming soon!

For Christ and his church,
Dwight Gingrich

Churchfunding: 2021 Year-End Report

At the turn of every year, as an act of thankfulness and accountability, I like to give a report on our house loans. This year I’ll try to keep it short!

(Background: As many of you know, we purchased our Atlanta house on March 25, 2016, paying the seller in full immediately, thanks to loans and gifts from nearly 90 individuals or families. Since this crowdfunding effort was the work of Christ’s church, we coined a new term: “churchfunding.” Here is the post that officially launched this adventure.)

At the beginning of 2021, we owed $28,782.50 in house loans. By the end of the year, we owed only $21,232.50.

Here is how that $7,550 difference breaks down:

  • We repaid $7,000 in loans, at more than the promised rate of $500 per month.
  • We were forgiven an additional $550 in principal and interest by a generous lender.

In total, our house debt declined by $1,550 more than we expected in 2021.

At the promised $500 per month, we should have all remaining lenders repaid within about 3-1/2 years—by about July of 2025. As promised, we are using a random number generator and prayer to select who is repaid each month. If you have a financial squeeze, let us know and we’ll see what we can do!

In Other Developments…

In many ways, 2021 was a pretty ordinary year for us (apart from you-know-what). We didn’t do any significant repairs or improvements to the house, getting distracted in part by vehicle needs. Our van passed 250,000 miles this summer! Repairing a leaky portion of the roof is apparently next, hopefully followed soon by that leaky shower.

Besides my work, most days our family stays busy with homeschooling, driving the girls to their weekly string classes, taking hikes with homeschool friends, hobbies like reading and music, and doing things with our church family. I’m still responsible to schedule church musicians, and I lead music about once a month, usually helped by our oldest daughter (now a teenager!). I’m also in the rotation to preach a sermon every several months.

In our local neighborhood we aim to be good neighbors for Christ’s sake. Lately this has included taking a neighbor a Christmas meal, having a neighbor boy come over to play basket ball, and helping another neighbor look for a missing family member. We’ve also been reminded recently of the crime that occurs around us, praying for those who have been touched by tragedy.

I’ll mention two trips. In July our family spent a day at Edisto Beach State Park in South Carolina. It was our first family trip to the ocean since moving to Georgia, and we really enjoyed it!

A highlight of the year was finally visiting my mother again, in Canada. It was our first time seeing her since the start of COVID–the first time since our trip to my dad’s funeral. The trip was an answer to many prayers. Family ties are so precious!

In Blogging (Lack of) News…

As you may have noticed, I haven’t done much blogging lately. I got stalled on reporting the history of Mennonites and divorce, and now I’m wrestling more deeply with my own understanding of the biblical teaching on the topic. Recently I read a long book chronicling a journalist’s attempt to solve a murder case. The web of leads he got sucked into, some helpful, some dead ends, reminded me of the many exegetical rabbit trails I’ve run down as I’ve waded through varied interpretations of all the relevant biblical passages.

I invite your prayers as I continue to study—that my heart will be open to God’s truth, that I will be granted insight, and that God will guide my desire to serve the church by writing more on this topic. Maybe, at some point, a book? Surveying Anabaptist history and also sharing my own biblical exegesis and pastoral reflections?

Meanwhile, here’s a quick completion of my answer as to why American  Mennonites adopted a stricter no-divorce position. I’ve already suggested that a spirit of separatism lended itself to adopting increasingly rigid doctrinal positions, that American Mennonites had lost touch with early Anabaptist documents affirming remarriage in case of adultery, and that the switch from German to English may have affected their interpretation of Jesus’ divorce sayings.

To complete the picture, I’d want to discuss at least these additional points:

  • The topic of the “divorce evil” was in the air across the nation at the end of the 1800s (very much like “social justice” has been recently), troubling everyone from the President on down, so the Mennonites simply joined a larger political and ecclesial conversation, some of which was moving in a stricter direction.
  • New Mennonite periodicals, founded by John Funk, alerted them as never before to differences in their own ranks on the question of divorce and remarriage, leading to brisk debate.
  • In the periodicals there were calls for annual conferences, partly to resolve such matters of difference; it was at such a conference that a stricter position was officially adopted in 1905.
  • Before this conference some Mennonite leaders, especially some activist younger leaders like Daniel Kauffman, began to say that the only sufficient response to the “divorce evil” was to give no exception whatsoever. This stance seems to have been adopted for pragmatic reasons as much as for biblical ones, for it was only after the 1905 conference that more fully developed doctrinal explanations were published in support of the stricter position.

That’s a quick survey! Each of those points deserve a book chapter, and I’m sure I should add several more.

(And, to be clear, none of that history proves whether the adoption of a stricter position was good or bad; that would require a separate conversation about exegesis, theology, and pastoral care.)


Our family remains deeply grateful to everyone who helped us buy our Atlanta home, and to all who have supported us in so many other ways. Thank you! 

God is faithful! Please pray we, too, will be faithful, and that we can bear fruit for him in 2022.

For Christ and his church,
Dwight Gingrich

Churchfunding: 2020 Year-End Report

It’s time again to give witness to God’s faithfulness in providing for our housing needs. As many of you know, we purchased our Atlanta house on March 25, 2016, paying the seller in full immediately, thanks to loans and gifts from nearly 90 individuals or families. Since this crowdfunding effort was the work of Christ’s church, we coined a new term: “churchfunding.” (Here is the post that officially launched this adventure.)

At the beginning of 2020, we owed $35,062.50 in house loans. By the end of the year, we owed only $28,782.50.

Here is how that $6,280 difference breaks down:

  • We repaid $5,180 in loans, at a little more than the promised rate of $500 per month.
  • We were forgiven $1,100 in principal and interest by several generous lenders.

In total, our house debt declined by $280 more than we expected in 2020.

At the promised $500 per month, we should have all remaining lenders repaid within five years—by about October of 2025. As promised, we are using a random number generator and prayer to select who is repaid each month. If you have a financial squeeze, however, let us know and we will consider prioritizing your repayment as possible.

Cash Flow and House Happenings

Ironically, given the coronavirus economy of 2020, our cash flow was slightly bigger than previous years. A temporary end to piano lessons and slowdown to my Choice Books work were both offset by government stimulus efforts, and after I transitioned to teaching piano online (mostly), my student pool has ballooned to 35 as I head into 2021.

A nearly-empty Concourse A at “the world’s busiest airport” during the height of the coronavirus scare in spring of 2019. I used to service Choice Books displays two days each week at the Atlanta airport. Currently I go there one day every two weeks, though more stores are gradually reopening.

On the other hand, our vehicles are now 15 and 18 years old (go, Toyota!) and we are still years away from having saved enough for a dreamed-of western trip as a family. But, as I often pray with thanksgiving, God is meeting all our needs, which he identifies as food and clothing/shelter, and much more besides. We are grateful.

Our main house improvements this year involved windows. First, I used my spring coronavirus “vacation” to finally strip and repaint the big original steel window in our living room.

We also got the windows replaced on the northern side of the house, in the piano studio and the laundry room.

The originals were single pane and one was broken.

Other projects included painting the front door and some exterior trim…

…building a cabinet in a bathroom…

…and painting the laundry room and installing coat racks for the girls.

Next projects? Well, a dishwasher is on order. Perhaps after that we’ll get the shower in the master bedroom working? Or build more closet shelves? Or make the basement entrance functional?

Meanwhile, we’re thankful for what we have–and that God protected our house in October, when we saw the worst flash flood in our backyard that we’ve seen yet.

Water pouring over our backyard bridge. The manhole in our side yard was spewing hundreds of gallons of dirty water down our driveway, too.

Other News

Our public and private lives continue much as last year. We continue to worship with Cellebration Fellowship, where I am now responsible for scheduling music leaders for each Sunday. I take my turn leading, too, sometimes with the help of my daughters. This year we have met variously in a building, online, and in a campground.

I am thankful for the devotion to Christ that is evident in the words and actions of so many in the “Cell Fell” group. Here’s a photo of most of us from a little over a year ago:

On our street we aim to be good neighbors in Jesus’ name. Sometimes that means sharing food (which Zonya often does) or tools (as I just did now). Over Thanksgiving we loved our neighborhood by spending several hours clearing a nearby hiking trail.

Often our service is through the ordinary means of faithfulness in raising children, loving students, selling Christian books, and writing the occasional blog post.

I’ll end with four 2020 happenings that were noteworthy for our family.

First (in every way), my father passed away in February. Though we have not traveled back to Canada since his funeral (thank you, coronavirus), I miss him. He left a legacy of gentle integrity, hard work, and dependence on God’s mercy. I especially think of him while working with my hands around the house, since he was a master craftsman.

Here is a photo of my family, taken at Dad’s funeral, which happened about two weeks before the Canada-USA border started shutting down.

Second, we finally managed to go camping somewhere besides our backyard. Here is an amazing sunrise we saw from our north Georgia campsite.

Third, we got our first pets! We raised chickens from eggs this spring and bought the girls a cat for Christmas. Having animals around complicates life, but is good for all four of my girls.

You could say our pets have been babied just a little.

Fourth, my wife’s brother got married in December, and my daughters and I provided the special music. Preparing for this occupied much of our time for a couple months.


We remain deeply grateful for all our churchfunding supporters.  We want to faithfully steward this house for Jesus in 2021. Please pray we will walk faithfully in the Spirit of Jesus. May God bless you and make you salt and light in your own community!

For Christ and his Church,
Dwight Gingrich