February 2023 Monthly Status Update For Social Media Ministries Progress Report

Hello everyone, welcome to the February 2023 Social Media Ministries monthly update and status report. February has been a great month for us. We haven’t accomplished a lot, but we have got the groundwork going, and I know you have heard that before, but seriously this has been a good month. A lot of answered prayers, still a lot of prayers that we need answered, so pray for us.

What have we accomplished? Continuing to post our sermons every single week, Wednesday at 6:30 PM Central Time, so tune in to those. If you don’t like watching, you can listen to the podcast. Subscribe and follow everywhere; help out our numbers.

Number two, of course we have continued the podcast. That is going out all over the place on pretty much every podcast platform. If there is a platform that you like that we are not on, comment below and we will see about getting on that platform as well.

Number three, we have continued our ministry minute. That is every single morning we post a daily Bible verse and then a little devotional about that verse. It is a minute long, so you have no excuse not to listen to it every morning.

It goes out at about nine or ten Central Standard Time, so at your lunch hour or on your drive to work depending on where you live. Punch it up, listen for one minute; it is on social media, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and then also out on podcast platforms.

Take advantage of that, and we welcome your feedback. Put in your comments, engage in some discussion as well. What else? Well, number four, one negative aspect of the month of February is that Amazon discontinued Amazon Smiles.

For some reason, they decided that giving half of a percent of people’s purchases was too generous, so they stopped it altogether and they decided they are no longer supporting charities through Amazon Smiles.

They are shutting down the entire program. It is a disappointment; it is a detriment, but it is not that big a deal. We have other revenue streams—well, we don’t really have any other revenue streams—but the point is that with Amazon Smiles we were making maybe twenty dollars a year, so it wasn’t that big.

It was something we were trying to push for and promote, so I guess God is just saying, “Hey, stop with that. Don’t even worry about that because there are other things to focus on,” which is very true. So we lost Amazon Smiles. If you see any of our old Amazon Smiles content, I will pin a comment on there saying it was shut down; discontinued, so you can’t shop with Amazon Smiles anymore. But that is okay.

They did say that we would have the ability to have an Amazon wish list, but they have also taken that away as well, so they lied in that aspect. There is no Amazon wish list for charities; our Amazon charity lists are gone, pretty much everything regarding Amazon charity is gone.

So look in the coming months, I will try to figure out a way to create a gift registry, almost like a baby registry or a wedding registry, but I will just choose and put different Social Media Ministries’ needs and then we will have a gift registry. I have to wait probably for our charity thing to evaporate, and it will be in a month or two.

But stay tuned; there will be an announcement on that and we will have a registry that you could purchase items and then they will be shipped directly to us at Social Media Ministries. We are still going to figure out a way for you to be able to support us through Amazon if that is something that you would like to do.

Another thing, this has probably been the best thing that has happened to us in the month of February, if not the past several months. It is a great blessing, one we have been praying for for many, many months. We finally have some solid, steady, and reliable volunteers.

Now we have a volunteer that is helping us with our Google advertising, getting our website and our YouTube videos and the Google ads all synced together through tracking and tags and all of this kind of stuff. That is just beyond me, and I don’t have time to focus on it, because I need to be focused on preaching sermons, and so this has been a huge relief.

For you, if you are watching this video, thank you so much for all your help and support. I look forward to working with you a lot more, and I really appreciate everything you are doing for Social Media Ministries. We really hope and pray that what you are doing and what is happening is going to lead more people to the sermons, which will lead more people to Jesus, and that is the goal.

The other thing is we have a great volunteer that is helping us with our transcriptions. The text, the spoken words that are in this video are going to be transcribed, and he does this for us. He has been really knocking out tons of our videos, getting all these transcribed, which is going to help with our YouTube search, which hopefully then we are going to also be putting them on the website, which will help boost our SEO on the website.

So all of this, again, I don’t have time to transcribe all of these videos. YouTube provides me automatic captions, which it spells my name wrong; it has other problems, there is no grammar, there is no punctuation. So he is going through and he is fixing all of this stuff and making them look nice, which then we can use as text on our blog posts as well, and then also on YouTube.

We are going to eventually be getting those translated into other languages as well so we can expand our reach and expand our territory. So pray for us that this would continue, that we have two great volunteers who are really helping us.

Pray that they would stay with us, that they would be encouraged, that they would see the positive results of their work, and pray that the things that they are doing would really help bring more people to Social Media Ministries and ultimately to Jesus because that is our goal.

Then we also need some more volunteers. We have other opportunities that we need help with, so if that is something where you know someone or you want to check out our volunteer opportunities, we have linked to it before, but it is on VolunteerMatch. I will put that in the description below as well.

Check that out, and if there is an opportunity that you know someone or that you could help with, or you just want to share that on your social media to see if someone else sees that and could help us, that would be great. The other thing we need is, of course, prayer for just stamina and energy and the ability to focus in and get this done and really to accomplish more.

Now that I have some help, I should be able to divert my attention more to sermons and preparing and preaching. Just pray that I still have the energy and the desire and the drive to do that. We haven’t had a problem yet, but energy helps, and life is tiring.

We also need financial support. That is probably one of the biggest things we need right now because I haven’t been working. Now I am probably taking on work and trying to pay the bills and do the ministry. It is good that I got some help with the ministry, but it would be really nice if all of a sudden I stopped all that other work and focused 100% on the ministry again.

Then the ministry could start generating its own revenue so that I don’t have to start working to pay for stuff in the ministry. That is really what it is. I mean, ultimately, yes I would like the ministry to pay me, but that is not the point.

Right now the ministry is still in debt; we are still making payments, we are still trying to pay things off, and I am trying to work a job to pay for this, and it is getting to be a little bit too much.

So pray that we find some generous people who want to support this cause and that we can get the ministry to be self-sustaining so that I don’t have to be working to try to support the ministry. I can just work on the ministry and the ministry will support itself. So pray for all of that.

If that is not something you want to do, give, then don’t worry. I mean, I am not asking you for money, but if you want to give money, that would be awesome. I am asking you for prayer. Pray for us that we would find the right people, that we would get in front of the right audiences, that we would be able to reach people for Jesus.

That is the goal. That is the goal and we need your help to do that. Whether it is through prayer, liking, subscribing, sharing, donating, you name it and we need it. Another thing is that we have a lot of stuff in the pipeline coming up for March, so I hope to have a lot of great announcements.

Pray that this would just be accomplished, that it would come to fruition, and that the Lord would work through us to accomplish great things. Stay tuned for more updates, more sermons, and more videos.

God bless.