Where things stand

Kingdom Guild is stopped, and I would rather tell you why.

I have stopped working on Kingdom Guild, so I am not taking on partners or projects and nothing here is collecting money.

Four things stopped it, and none of them were about whether the idea was good.

  1. Getting money from supporters here to a pastor in another country brings obligations I was not willing to accept before I understood them properly.
  2. Vetting the people who receive that money, and going on vetting them, is work I could not do well from Ohio.
  3. The model asked me to travel constantly to stay close to a small number of pastors, which is not a life I can build right now.
  4. Every dollar given here was meant to reach the work itself, with nothing coming out of a gift to cover running costs or to pay me. Holding that line means the running costs have to come from somewhere else, and I did not solve that. This is the one I care about most.

I will write to the list once more before the end of the year, as I said I would. This page stays up so the reasons are here rather than nowhere.

What it was

A gift you could follow to the end.

Kingdom Guild was going to connect you to one specific pastor, missionary, or ministry and the project they were building, costed and named wherever naming was safe, so you could fund the work and stay with it until it was done. You would always know where your gift went, and where a name was being held back to keep someone safe, you would know that too. It never opened for giving. What follows is the one project I funded myself, and what it taught me.

Where this started · the first test

My first $100, and what it taught me.

I sent $100 of my own money to a small chicken project, given through a registered nonprofit that has done this kind of work for years. At first I got what I hoped for, a look at the coop and photos of the birds, and I could tell it was a real thing.

What I wanted after that was the steady version: what the money bought, what happened next, and what changed over the following weeks. It never came, and the reason is mine. I never agreed any of that before the money moved. I did not say what an update should contain, how often it should come, or who would be paid for the time it takes to produce one. I sent money and quietly expected a record to follow on its own. Almost no one in missions giving, including good people doing real work for years, is set up to hand you proof you can check yourself, and nobody had agreed to do it here. That gap is the whole reason Kingdom Guild exists.

So this one closes here, with no more money from me on it, and nothing in that decision counts against the people doing the work.