Just getting ready to head to a meeting with the Executive Team of World Gospel Mission to walk through the launch of the radical reorganization of their structure to provide maximum support for and encouragement of partner and champion maturation.

In Transformational Giving nomenclature, “champion” refers to individuals, whereas “partner” refers to organizations, like churches.

In the past (though there have been flashes of other things) many of us have inadvertently treated churches and other organizations either like rock quarries or charitable foundations.

In rock quarry mode, we saw churches as huge repositories of raw materials (“donors”) that we would go in and mine (through presentations in which we would gather names and addresses to our mailing lists). The job of “refining” these donors for the cause we saw as belonging to us.

This notion is consistent with the way we’ve worked overall with donors—plucking them out of their sphere of influence for a one-to-one (solicitation) relationship with us, overlooking the vastly preferable method of leaving an individual in their tribe and working with them to equip their whole tribe (which is the approach you see over and over again in the New Testament).

When we did work with churches as a whole, this often took the form of seeing them as a foundation—a funding source to which we made a presentation and, when funds were granted, a follow-up report. (We did do follow-up reports…didn’t we?)

With the launch of a whole division devoted to champions and a whole division devoted to partners, World Gospel Mission is signaling a vastly different approach to their work with churches and other organizations (like camps and universities). They’ll be taking everything we’ve talked about related to champion maturation strategies and applying it to partners.

Imagine sitting down with a church and saying, “Let’s collaborate on a plan that grows your congregation in the cause of missions. Some of the pieces will involve WGM. Some won’t involve us at all. Some areas you’ll be familiar with and love to do. Other areas will be brand new and a real challenge. But all will be essential to maturing your church in the overall cause of missions. And we’ll do this collaboratively.”

Instead of the church being a quarry or a foundation out of which we draw things, this transforms it into a bank or a garden or a story (pick your analogy here, hopefully less clichéd than mine) where we deposit things. Our role is transformed from solicitor (which causes churches to be wary) to a coach (which will initially cause them to be even more wary, because at first they’ll just think we’re really skilled solicitors).

In the next post, I’ll share with you about WGM’s champion-side reorganization, in which all of the functions that relate to individuals—from financial donations through short-term mission trip participation to recruitment for long-term missionary service—are handled by generalist “champion development officers” who, along with missionaries, interface directly with champions and coach them through all the phases of their involvement in missions, rather than divvying up those phases among different specialized divisions within the organization.