My dear friend Greg Stier, President of Dare2Share, the youth evangelism training ministry on whose board I serve, tells Dare2Share champions and potential champions:

Look, my cause is not Dare2Share. My cause is youth getting trained to share the Gospel with other youth. If you can accomplish that better through Campus Crusade or Youth for Christ because of your connections and relationships, by all means go for it. All I know is the Bible is calling you to do that somewhere. Where are you doing it?

That is one of the best representations of Transformational Giving I’ve ever heard. (Part of the reason I asked Greg to write the forward to my book, Coach Your Champions.)

Greg understands implicitly one of the core TG truths that is exceedingly hard for us ministry leaders to put into practice, namely:

The cause is not synonymous with our organization.

We all assent to that mentally. But putting it into practice? Muuuuch harder.

You know by now if you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time that I believe that we nonprofit leaders are perpetually at risk of setting up our nonprofit organizations as idols. Anytime nonprofits treat ourselves with a sense of permanence and as the locus of God’s activity in relation to the cause, we assume for themselves the position of false ultimate.

(I was telling Jon Hirst from HCJB Radio today that I’m enamored with Wille Cheng’s proposal that all nonprofits ought to be chartered for a set number of years and then automatically go out of business. It’s always good for us to be reminded what is permanent in God’s eyes…and what is not.)

When we start talking about Owners (‘Os’) in TG as those champions who are comprehensively owning the cause in their own sphere of influence, the natural tendency of ministries is to think of these Os as representatives of the organization, spreading the organization’s work and needs in their sphere of influence.

Oops.

There’s a difference between cause and organization.

Cause is the work that God has prepared for the church to do. Organization is a platform designed to coach the church in walking in those works and accomplishing God’s purpose. Check out yesterday’s post for more on this thought; what we want to emphasize here is that when you’re training champions, you’re equipping them to impact the cause in their sphere of influence, not toot our horns and sign up supporters.

Remember: we support champions to grow to full maturity in Christ in relation to the cause. They don’t give to us so that we can do ministry. They give through us because we provide the best platform for them to accomplish what they are called to do biblically.

You can see a perfect illustration of what I’m talking about here, with the story of Carolyn Cooper.

We will inevitably raise up champions who are a reflection of us. If we do our job well, however, what they’ll be spreading in their sphere of influence (as per their biblical responsibility) is the cause, not our business cards and brochures.