Because we want to keep you in the loop. At least, as many of you who choose to stick around and do not hurry to the bottom of this page in search of the "unsubscribe" button.

The reason we want to keep you in the loop, is because this whole project belongs to you. We are merely charged with administering your funds. We are the last people to handle it before it goes into the bank account, and the last to handle it before it goes out to attend to some need.

Thankfully, not everyone who calls on MUA for assistance is doing so because of an unforeseen catastrophe. One cause to which MUA applies your money is that of providing loans to congregations and other church organizations. Currently, we have some $4,000,000 out on loan to congregations and mission programs across Canada. Most recently, we funded a loan to CPS to help them purchase a larger facility for the expansion of our Montréal boys' unit.

We hope that by sending out a periodic newsletter we can do our part to keep you current on MUA's operations, demonstrate transparency about what we are doing here, and thereby let you in on what is ultimately your project. We do not know all the potential outcomes of this new venture, but we are at minimum saying hello, and inviting you to follow along.

What to expect going forward

There are a couple things which we think will appear in this newsletter, as follows.

• Elaboration of the rules. The MUA rule book is brief by design. Many of the rules have a context, what might be called "precedent" in legal jargon. This means that something happened in MUA's history that needed to be dealt with by implementing a rule, should this particular thing occur again in the future. The implication is that even though the rule makes sense to those who created it, how and where it ought to apply is less than clear to the wider MUA organization and the policyholder.
• Notification of rule changes. MUA tries to accommodate the needs of its policyholders, which sometimes includes changing and updating the rules. These can be changes that are made to keep pace with inflation, while it can also mean making new items eligible for coverage as our policyholders move into new territories with new and diverse livelihoods.