<p>8:19 <i>And not only this but he is the one who was appointed by the churches to travel with us in this act of grace, which is administered by us to the glory of the Lord and to show our own willingness to help</i>- Paul carefully doesn't define which churches had appointed this brother Timothy? to carry the collection. We can assume they were churches founded by Paul and loyal to him. What would have added to the credibility and success of the project was if those &quot;churches&quot; included the Jerusalem church and other Jewish churches in Palestine. The group of brethren who took the gathering to Jerusalem in Acts 20:3 were certainly pro-Paul loyalists and include no &quot;circumcision&quot; Christians. So whilst Paul was right to seek to glorify the Lord and to administer the project with integrity, placing himself beyond reproach as to financial mismanagement, the whole approach was forcing something on to others which they were clearly not supportive or nor willing to support. This is the problem with obsessive enforcement of projects upon others. Paul was clearly the administrator of the project, as he says himself here. And he simply lacked credibility with the hard core circumcision party who dominated the Jerusalem church; this was not his fault, indeed there was likely nobody who had the confidence of all the various factions to be able to pull off a project of this scope and scale. &quot;To show our own willingness to help&quot; is an attempt to translate two Greek words which literally mean &quot;your ready mind&quot; (as AV). The text could be stating that the &quot;act of grace&quot;, the giving to the Fund in response to God's grace, would glorify both the Lord Jesus and also their willingness to assist in His work. But offering glorification of self as a reason to donate is really getting desperate.</p>