The Mystery Donor
Media ministry takes a lot of faith. You can count the number of baptisms that come from an evangelistic series. You can tally up all the churches and schools an organization helps to build. You can calculate how much money a fundraiser brought in, but the impact of media ministry cannot be measured in numbers. its main purpose is seed planting.
Thousands could be impacted, or millions, and we’ll never know until we get to heaven; we can only have faith that God is working in ways we cannot see. From time to time, God does reveal, and those people’s stories remind us why all our time, energy, resources, and faith, are worth it.
Here is one of those stories:
In 2014, Ramon and Shandy Tengkano, the missionaries who founded Indonesia TV Ministry, began sharing donation information on the satellite channel so that viewers who feel blessed by the programs can contribute to the ministry. Usually, only around $50 will come in each month.
Soon after, the ministry received a somewhat unusual donation. The donation was tiny, only 20,000 Indonesian Rupiah, or about $1.50, and there was no name or bank account information on the donation statement from the bank. The only way this could have happened is if the donor brought the cash donation to the bank and deposited it.
The next month the exact same donation showed up in their bank account, and the next month, and the month after that. This went on for years. Ramon and Shandy always wondered who was giving this faithful donation, but they had no way of finding out.
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Ramon and Shandy Tengkano the Indonesia TV set
Ramon and Shandy are frequently asked to speak at churches and hold meetings throughout Indonesia. On the last day of one of these meetings, a man came to the tent where they were staying. “Hey,” The man asked. “Are you available this morning to pray for me?"
Ramon invited him into the tent, and the man asked him to pray for his mental illness. As Ramon prayed, the man started crying. Then he pulled out of his bag a pile of receipts of bank transfers.
“Have you noticed a small donation come in every month?” The man asked. Ramon and Shandy were surprised, but excited, to finally meet the mystery donor who they had been wondering about for years and years.
The man shared how he watches the ministry’s programs every day, and how much the programs mean to him. Because of his mental illness, he is not able to earn much money, but he wanted to give what he could to the ministry that shared Jesus with him.
“It’s things like this that get us excited about working for the Lord,” Ramon later told us.
Please continue to keep the Indonesia TV Ministry, its viewers, and the Indonesian people as a whole in your prayers. Indonesia has such a great need for the Gospel, and we are so thankful for those who are already praying for the ministry and the work there.
For a long time, Indonesia TV Ministry has been running on an inadequate income, testing Ramon and Shandy's faith like few ever experience. They have not been able to replace or upgrade their equipment for many years, and some of it has stopped working altogether.
They need to be on the air, and the Gospel message they provide deserves good equipment that actually works. We would like to help them so they can create new and better programming to bring the hope of Christ to the people of Indonesia.
If you feel God leading you to help provide this ministry with new equipment, and to help share the Gospel message with the people of Indonesia, click the link below.