Where things stand

Kingdom Guild is stopped, and I would rather tell you why.

I am not taking on partners or projects, nothing here is collecting money, and I am not working on this. This page said paused until September 2026. Stopped is the accurate word.

Four things stopped it, and none of them were about whether the idea was good.

  1. Getting money from supporters here to a pastor in another country brings obligations I was not willing to accept before I understood them properly.
  2. Vetting the people who receive that money, and going on vetting them, is work I could not do well from Ohio.
  3. The model asked me to travel constantly to stay close to a small number of pastors, which is not a life I can build right now.
  4. Every dollar given here was meant to reach the work itself, with nothing coming out of a gift to cover running costs or to pay me. Holding that line means the running costs have to come from somewhere else, and I did not solve that. This is the one I care about most.

I will write to the list once more before the end of the year, as I said I would. This page stays up so the reasons are here rather than nowhere.

Further down this page I have set out what a second attempt would look like, because the idea underneath it has not gone away.

What it was

A gift you could follow to the end.

Kingdom Guild was going to connect you to one specific pastor, missionary, or ministry and the project they were building, costed and named wherever naming was safe, so you could fund the work and stay with it until it was done. You would always know where your gift went, and where a name was being held back to keep someone safe, you would know that too. It never opened for giving. What follows is the one project I funded myself, and what it taught me.

Where this started · the first test

My first $100, and what it taught me.

I sent $100 of my own money to a small chicken project, given through a registered nonprofit that has done this kind of work for years. At first I got what I hoped for, a look at the coop and photos of the birds, and I could tell it was a real thing.

What I wanted after that was the steady version: what the money bought, what happened next, and what changed over the following weeks. It never came, and the reason is mine. I never agreed any of that before the money moved. I did not say what an update should contain, how often it should come, or who would be paid for the time it takes to produce one. I sent money and quietly expected a record to follow on its own. Almost no one in missions giving, including good people doing real work for years, is set up to hand you proof you can check yourself, and nobody had agreed to do it here. That gap is the whole reason Kingdom Guild exists.

So this one closes here, with no more money from me on it, and nothing in that decision counts against the people doing the work.

David Fearn, founder of Kingdom Guild

The person building it

Who is behind this.

I am David. For fifteen years my work was moving real value across borders and making sure it arrived exactly where it was promised. That work comes down to one thing repeated thousands of times: agreeing precisely who delivers what, when, at what price and under what proof, and then verifying that it actually happened.

It is the same discipline that missions giving is missing, and it is what I thought I could bring to it.

I started Kingdom Guild because giving should never require a leap of faith about where the money went. I funded the first project with my own money before asking anyone else to give, and that is the part I would do the same way again. Whether it comes back in some form is still open. The section below is what that would look like.

If it comes back

What a second attempt would look like.

I have not given up on the idea underneath this, which is that a person should be able to give to one specific piece of work and follow it to the end. What I would change is the shape.

I would pick one place and stay there, rather than supporting pastors spread across many countries. One location makes almost every hard problem smaller: the money moves to a single destination, the people receiving it are people I know, and staying close does not require living on a plane.

What I picture is a single piece of land with a children's home on it. Children who have no parents, and children for whom home was not a safe place to stay, living together and brought up by people who teach them and care for them and open the Bible with them. A school on the same land, so that they are taught where they live.

The land carries part of its own cost: coffee grown and sold to the people who come and visit, cows for milk, and cattle for meat, so that some of what is eaten is grown where it is eaten and some of it earns its keep. Clean water comes first, which in the middle of nowhere means wells and purification.

There would be two ways to be part of it.

  1. You could sponsor a child, and know which child and what your money covers.
  2. You could come for a week and build something the project has already planned and costed, a schoolroom, a store, a shelter for the machinery, and go home having seen the thing you paid for standing up.

Buying land and raising children is not a six-month project, and I have other things to take care of first. Part of it may be funded by another business of mine, if that business works. This is a direction, not a plan with a date on it. I am writing it down so that if I do start, you will know it did not come out of nowhere.