Key Hope Project update: Hope Project Easter 2025 will include social media, but not TV or a booklet delivery. The development of media for future Easter efforts is planned for the second half of 2025. Funds are still therefore needed for both of these things – while no help with a delivery is needed this year. More details below.

Hope Project – understanding the big idea

An overarching goal: Hope Project desires to see something of the ‘Christ’ staying in our cultural festivals of Christmas and Easter, in recognition of our nation’s history. These efforts are wide reaching and widely celebrated – as our annual report can reflect. These efforts were initiated to fill a gap that nothing else in the wider efforts of all NZ churches was achieving.

Understanding the purpose of cultural festivals – a foundation: Cultural festivals exist to remind a people of things that are significant to who they are culturally speaking. While Christmas and Easter are timed around historic commemorations of the birth, death and resurrection of Christ, their cultural purpose is as platforms for storytelling, to remind us of the significance of Christianity to our cultural values (noting our amazing levels of freedom, prosperity, equality and charity as a culture.

Whose responsibility: Governments, public education and public media should teach citizens about their history, to preserve good culture. This is not happening in our nation through any of these mechanisms – with only one small (although important) exception. It therefore rests upon (1) all NZers who love this nation and the remarkably good aspects of its culture to now tell this story – while concurrently upon (2) Christians to tell the stories of Jesus, around which the dates of these two cultural festivals were occasioned.

Hope Project: Hope Project is an intentional public voice regarding both of these things – with three media efforts envisaged, supported by a multifaceted approach to communication as applied through the wider work of the Shining Lights Trust.

Our faith-goal:  THREE annual media efforts purposed to (i) Keep the Christ in Easter, (ii) Keep the Christ in Christmas and (iii) tell the story of what churches are doing to help within communities – by promoting and offering available help (called ‘HeLP Project‘). Only the first two have been initiated at this point.

What has been achieved?

At all levels, Hope Project has enjoyed high levels of connection and engagement – whether with the public through public media or with churches / united churches through networking, resourcing and the booklet delivery coordination. Our beautifully designed annual report here best-reflects the work going on, as also a summary of some individuals stories here. Result are wide-reaching. For a wider picture of results, prior reports can be accessed via ‘Hope Project The Journey‘.

How do finances work?

As a ‘united Church’ work, all aspects of the work of the Shining Lights Trust are donor funded. For Christian terminology on this, we are ‘faith-based’. We are widely connected, leveraging those connections to advocate for a clear focus on the Christian mission. We do not therefore leverage these connections for funding as we could, so our own mission can be pursued largely uninterrupted. For us this is a matter of integrity in what we do. Financial involvement involves about 4% of partnering churches and 5% of those receiving prayer updates in any 12 month period. We view God as our primary provider, while being sincerely grateful to every  individual and group he works through in the enabling of this work. Accounts are audited annually.