Twelve years in: Great victories and a lingering challenge …

When Scott Free Clinic launched as an international ministry 12 years ago, we started with decades of experience, a proven method for helping people change their lives with comprehensive Christian counseling – and no funding.

Today, we are overwhelmingly grateful to God for thousands of changed lives. That includes helping individuals, couples, and families with mental health issues; providing a holistic approach to comprehensive counseling that includes brain health coaching, and fitness and fitness nutrition coaching; helping marriages reconcile; resolving marriage, family, and church conflicts; providing Pastor Care to scores of church leaders; training couples in the world’s number one communication program; providing advanced coaching to help people move forward in their lives and flourish; providing consulting services to help churches and Christian organizations better accomplish their missions; and providing evangelism training, sharing the Gospel, and baptizing and discipling new believers.

The result is thousands of changed lives and a lot of “victories.”

With that, though, remains one lingering challenge. The same challenge we’ve had since we started — no funding. Before launching, I visited dozens of churches but not one would talk about supporting the ministry. We’ve had to function on seeking support person by person by person. And because anything related to mental health is still strongly negatively impacted by stigma, we’ve barely survived. We have always operated at the lowest possible level of functioning — for example, for the first nine years, we didn’t have an office so we operated between a coffee shop and the ministry’s car (I’ve conducted thousands of hours of counseling online from the driver’s seat of our ministry car). We’ve had an office for three years now, but in our “Save Our Office” campaign for this year, which we just concluded, it actually failed to raise the needed funds. If the office building owner had not offered to let us stay for what we raised, we would have lost our office.

Now, we have a new – but old – financial challenge that threatens to temporarily shut us down. For months prior to our “Save Our Office” campaign, we had an ongoing fundraiser to replace our car. We’ve spent three to fours times the initial purchase price just on repairs and the car is in the shop right now, this morning, draining our operating fund. The car is as essential to this ministry as the office is; it is vital that we replace it with a “as new as possible” vehicle” so we can be free of repair costs, and we need to do this as quickly as possible.

Our first 12 years have demonstrated that not only does Scott Free Clinic have a fruitful and successful model of ministry, it’s also a vitally needed ministry – few organizations anywhere do what we do: remove the barriers of cost and access to quality, effective services to help people change their lives.

We’ve never had to seek out a single client, we have always had more people to serve than we could serve at any one time. What we desperately need is for people to financially support this work. We need it in two ways: One, as Care Partners, who are people who support this ministry on a monthly basis. The reason we have to have an annual “Save Our Office” campaign is we don’t have the monthly flow of support to simply pay rent each month, so we have to have a specific campaign to keep a very simple, small office. Two, we need the occasional donor capable of giving larger gifts to help us with the greater financial challenges – replacing the ministry car, keeping an office, paying the ministry car insurance (our second biggest annual expense), just covering the cost to function, and we eventually need to upgrade our computer system.

As I write this, we are literally on the brink of our operating fund being drained by car repairs or even losing the vehicle – or both. We need followers and friends of this ministry to pray for us, and if possible and willing, to step up and support us. Any donations of any amount are greatly appreciated and helpful. You can donate online directly from our website by clicking here.

One project we’re involved in is developing and writing a pastor education program for a fellowship of 30,000 churches in Uganda. Our reach is truly international, and our heart’s desire is to help, and to serve. To try see lives changed for the better and God’s glory, and to see churches and Christian organizations thriving in their ministries. Your support of this ministry directly makes that possible.

In His Service,

Dr. James Scott, Jr.
Founder & President.
Scott Free Clinic