"A lot of pastors and full-time workers do not earn high salaries. Most of us have enough just to survive monthly. We have no savings for emergency use. Some Christian organisations can’t even afford to pay their staff full salary. Others even ask their workers to raise their own salary or part of it. By looking into our needs, the foundation will help full-time workers to serve without anxiety."

"When a pastor faces an emergency that requires hospitalisation, he and his family should have the assurance that they do not have go around borrowing. The world views health care as a legitimate provision for every employee. Every company has a health care programme for its workers. Even the government looks after its workers. What about the church? Pastors and full-time workers contribute to the growth of their churches, and if the churches have benefited from the energy of their workers, it is only right and proper that their workers be given proper care. The foundation is a tremendous thought that will go a long way to give pastors and full-time workers fulfilment, so that at the end of their service, they don’t feel they have been used and after they have given their best and the last drop has been squeezed out of them, they are dumped."

Most of the families in the Tamil congregations are poor. They cannot afford to pay their pastors well. Sometimes, they can’t even pay the rental of their church premises. If something unexpected happens to a pastor that requires substantial money, the pastor usually turns to other pastors for help. I personally don’t agree with borrowing money, because it affects our integrity when we can’t pay back, but this is unavoidable sometimes. So I really appreciate the NECF Foundation. However, the people administering it must ensure that the money goes to genuine cases."

"Finally, something is being done for full-time workers. For so long, many of our churches have not been paying their staff well and their monetary needs have not been adequately met especially in the area of their children’s education. Some children of full-time workers may not be able to further their education because of insufficient finance, and this may cause them to be resentful. You know, God is not stingy but people are stingy. But thank God for the foundation."

Lee Chee Loi (Executive Director, Christian social organisation) 

"Lack of financial support and a secure retirement plan have contributed to the resignation of many full-time workers. The foundation is an encouragement and an assurance to smaller Christian para-church organisations and churches where funding is a major concern. It also encourages full-time workers to be honest about their real needs. Many of them, especially pastors, find it hard to go around and ask for help.   

"Many churches, especially the indigenous and smaller churches, can barely afford to pay the basic salary for their pastors and staffworkers, what more fringe benefits such as children’s education, health and medical insurance, accident and death insurance, EPF contributions, or pension schemes.  One Christian organisation that I know has a scheme for the staff’s children’s education where the staff and the ‘employer’ contribute towards it.  The foundation will be very helpful during emergency situation."

I believe the first thing I did when my father became a full-time pastor in my early teens was to ask if I needed to take a part-time job to help out. Even at the vague age of 13, I was dimly aware that something called money factored rather large in daily affairs. The money worries didn’t stop there of course. When less-than-stellar SPM results left me choices of repeating Form 5, working, or going to a private college in Kuala Lumpur, and my parents opted for the latter, I screeched, "But we can’t afford it on Dad’s salary!" I felt guilty for being such a tremendous expense on our limited budget. I’m sure that somewhere out there, some other pastor’s child can identify with this!

I still remember how mortified I was when I found out that, to send me to college in America for the last year of my undergraduate degree, they had, after much prayer, sought out an old friend and raised the funds. I recall saying to them, very vehemently and loudly, "If I’d known you had to do that, I wouldn’t have gone."

Silly of course. Rather faithless in retrospect, even if well intentioned. God provided miraculously for all of that and saw to us. I don’t know if I would have felt differently (maybe less guilty) then if the NECF Foundation had already been established. But I do know that I wished my parents had more job security, a retirement pension, something to fall back on if they were no longer in the ministry.

The foundation would definitely have helped with that. As a daughter living overseas worrying frantically about their welfare, it would have been a tremendous relief – an assurance that they would be looked after financially, especially when circumstances prevented me from being able to do so.

This foundation is practical and very necessary. Like the Levites in Israel, full-time workers and pastors dedicate their lives to taking care of God’s people.

Like the Levites, it is only fitting that the people of God help to take care of these precious, often-overlooked servants of God when they are unable to do so for themselves.