ANNOUNCEMENT / JANUARY 2012 I am seriously considering putting a "PASTOR'S WIVES ONLY" CONFERENCE TOGETHER THIS YEAR.  I need some feedback from you all.  Is it something you would be interested in?   What would you want to see in such a conference?  One thought that comes to mind is to have an anonymous question & answer forum with seasoned pastors wives on the forum.  We would have sheets of paper for the questions to be written on and unsigned and let the panel answer those questions.  Also thinking of separating Senior Pastors Wives and Assistant Pastor's wive because there are things that each group deals with that the other group doesn't.  Are there topics that you would want addressed?  Time wise I'm thinking of a Friday night & Saturday morning & early afternoon.  Would really appreciate some input.  Also Thanks....Samantha  This whole page is for ideas that you think other pastors wives (pw's) would like to know about. Those ideas can be on anything and everything that we deal with. Ideas on how to keep romance in the home, juggling children, work and pastoring, just whatever strikes your fancy that you think other pastors wives will appreciate. Just keep the ideas coming. Don't think that your idea is too simple and not worth sending. More often than not it is the simple ideas that work the best. So any ideas that you have just send them via the CONTACT PAGE e-mail site and we'll be happy to publish them. The idea page, problem and question and answer pages will be updated once a month or more depending on feed back. We will be compiling a booklet for pw's called "The Pastor's Wife Helps Book" We'll take the best of the ideas sent and and put it in the book and sell it for a nominal amount. The proceeds will help fund this web site. So if you have any ideas, get them to me and we'll get them up on this page.	It's that time of year again!  FUND RAISING!  YEA!!  I don't know about you but I know that sends shivers down the backs of most pastors' wives I know.  We've done EVERYTHING you can think of.  Cake and cookie bake sales?  Oh yeah!  The infamous car wash! Ughhh...definitely tired of that...too much work not enough return.  Our kids help raise the funds to send them to camp.  We have a wonderful camp that they go to, but the cost is $350.00 per teen so it has become necessary to raise some serious funds.     Paul came up with something that has been a gold mine for us.  Depending on how many kids we have to send, we've raised as much as $8000 which sent some 20 plus kids.  You just have to check to make sure it's okay in your state.  What is it???  We sell raffle tickets.  When you do that, you have to make sure that you have a prize and or several prizes people feel are worth taking a chance on.     One year we sold tickets on a personally signed OU football by one of their famous players...don't remember who but boy did the guys go for it!!  For the girls that year we did a really terrific digital camera.  That also got a great response.  The last couple of years we have sold the newer large 32 or 42 inch color TV's.  Now that got a huge response.  We have gone around to different business' in town and they have donated items.  Everything from a free haircut to car parts.  We just made sure they got lots of advertising for having donated the items.     A secret to doing a raffle Paul has found is to be generous with the tickets.  The kids sell them for $1.00 per ticket, but if they buy multiple's, such as $5.00 worth then they'll give them $10.00 worth and so forth.  At first I thought...hey...don't give 'em away...but Paul said, we only draw one ticket for each prize and this gives them extra incentive and it's true...it does.  We have found them to be very generous.  In our case, Paul knows half the town and is related to the other half so we have a built in group to relate to and they're always generous, but he gets the kids together and they all go around together to sell.  Sometimes he has taken the younger kids along because the teenagers were babysitting and we stumbled on to a built in ... guanranteed sales person.  Adults LOVE little kids and we've had our little kids outsell the big kids....go figure.     Anyway...does anyone out there in pastor's wives land have any good fund raising ideas you want to share?  E-mail them and I'll post 'em.  You can do it on face book...although I'm not sure how to work that real well yet.  I am on it...but still trying to learn my way through it.  I think you just have to type in my name.  Samantha Roach
Church Activities: Activities in a church are very very important. Some ministers discount them, but really shouldn't. When you think about it, a church is a family. A family of believers. Many of the people that come to church are changing lifestyles dramatically. Before they got born again they went out, drank, partied, had lots of fun. Now they've turned their lives over to the Lord and there is a great need for them to realize that Christians should have more fun than non-Christians.