Just a brief background: "Igniting Ministries", a project of the United Methodist Church, gives matching grants 3 times a year to churches who do movie, TV, radio, or billboard advertising (see ignitingministry.org for more info). There is an application process and some limitations on what you can do, but it's a good deal. In our case, the grant was not quite a matching grant because the movie ad company we were working with changed their quote after we applied for the grant. The key to the grant is that we have to use ad material provided by the General Church and we have to start the ad during Lent, Back-to-School, or Advent. For grant purposes, the length of time the ad runs does not matter. With movies, by far the most economical deal is to run the ad for a full year. So that's what we did. A couple details: - roughly half of our cost came from the grant. The rest except for $150 came from our endowment fund. If we decide to do this again it would not meet the criteria for the endowment, so our portion would have to come from the budget. We can apply for a matching grant as often as we want. - The ad runs from March 31, 2006 through March 31, 2007 - We can change the ad whenever we want for a fee. Igniting Ministry customizes the ad for us for $50 and there is also a fee the movie ad company charges us - I think $300. The ad does not list our locations - just the website - so there is no need to change it when we move to the Celebration Center. We may want to change it at Back-to-School time to coincide with the new theme of the national TV advertising. If I can be of any more help, let me know!

Blessings, Rev. David Livingston Associate Pastor, First United Methodist Church