One of the appeals of traditional/transaction fundraising (ttf) is that it’s so easy to measure. It’s all about the Benjamins, baby! You know if your ttf efforts are succeeding or failing by looking at your gross and net incomes and your cost of fundraising. Simple.
On the other hand, Transformational Giving (TG) appears to require more complex, softer measurements. After all, in TG we’re concerned about more than giving. In our P/E/O charts (which in and of themselves are a measurement), we’re seeking to measure each dimension of growth required for a person to grow from being what I call a pukey face fall down in the mud gentile that doesn’t know nothin’ from nothin’ in relation to the cause…to a disciple comprehensively shaped in the image of Christ in that dimension of Christian service.
That sounds like TG might need a few more measurement gauges than ttf.
Or does it?
Let me unleash a little Randy Maddox on you, from his amazing tome, Responsible Grace. The air will get a little thick in here for a second, but crack a window and resist the urge to skip ahead:
I have come to believe…that what gives consistency (if there is any) to particular theological traditions within a religion are not unchanging doctrinal summaries, or a theoretical Idea from which all truth is deduced or given order in a System; it is instead a basic orienting perspective or principle that guides their various particular theological activities….
I want to make clear that it is not simply one theological concept or metaphor among others. It is a perspective within which one construes (or a ‘worry’ which one brings to) all of the various types of theological concepts….
Its role is not to be the foundation from which doctrines spring or the pattern into which they must fit, but the abiding interest which influences the selection, interpretation, relative emphasis, and interweaving of theological affirmations and practices.
Sum it up and say:
As we contended in our TG seminar (click here to download a complimentary PDF of the seminar workbook), ttf and TG are both, at root, theological systems. And theological systems are built around a basic organizing principle or ‘orienting concern’. Given our focus this week, you might say that the orienting concern is the fundamental measurement employed in the system.
For ttf, the orienting concern is the financial health of the nonprofit. As you’ll see in the seminar workbook notes, there’s a biblical term for that:
Idolatry.
Let me state it flat out:
Making decisions about how to relate to people/donors/champions based around an orienting concern of the financial health of a nonprofit is idolatrous.
Let’s return to something to which we alluded earlier this week.
There are three entities involved in development:
- The champion or partner
- The nonprofit
- The cause
What ttf does is to split these up into two distinct and independent sets of measurements:
- Champion/partner-nonprofit income measurements
- Nonprofit-cause impact measurements
This is why ttf so frequently leads the nonprofits that practice it away from their cause:
Because the income and impact measurements are two separate sets of measurements.
Raising money is one thing, impacting the cause is another. It’s why the so-called ‘program’ folks at nonprofits look down their noses at the ‘fundraisers’.
In TG, it turns out that the orienting concern–the measurement–is simpler, not more complex. There’s only one measurement, not two disconnected sets of measurements. The measurement is this:
- Is the champion/partner being shaped comprehensively in the image of Christ in relation to the cause?
The orienting concern that underlies the measurement is this:
- The champion/partner is called to walk in works prepared by God for the sake of being shaped in the image of Christ, to the glory of God.
Because that is our orienting concern, every other measurement becomes subsidiary.
(Yes, even income measurements. With this orienting concern we can distinguish between ‘good income’ and ‘bad income’ for an organization based on whether that income is the product of growth in the cause–fruit produced from the giver being shaped in the image of Christ–or not.)
With these principles in mind, tomorrow we can lay out a truly TG system of measurement–transparent, collaborative, and built around God’s fundamental orienting concern…which is most assuredly not a nonprofit’s balance sheet.
Do the Word 
I don’t disagree with this as it applies to theology of fundraising (and don’t really disagree as it applies to theology). It seems though that the modern church does not distinguish theology anymore from actually meaning Biblical truth.
So what?
So, if I was a modern American Christian, I might interpret Maddox’s comments to say that it is my perspective and my interests that determine what Biblical truth is since, at least at churches I’ve been to lately, there is no difference between Biblical truth and the pastor’s theology.
Good caution, Crusher. The key is to understand that Maddox is saying that unless we know our orienting concern, we’re likely to confuse it with the Bible itself. In other words, we fail to distinguish between our theology and the Word of God.
So Maddox would never advocate (a la Woody in Toy Story), “An orienting concern: If you don’t have one, get one!” Instead, he’s saying that we all have an orienting concern, and we need to know what it is. It’s what causes Luther, Calvin, and Wesley to all read the same scripture but emphasize it differently. If we don’t know our orienting concern, we’ll mix up Luther and Calvin and Wesley and God.
Maddox makes clear that God’s Word is the measure of all things, not our perspective. Even though Luther called James “an epistle of straw”, it didn’t make James an epistle of straw. It just showed the degree to which Luther’s orienting concern didn’t encompass James.
I’m all for the measurement of TG, which you state as: “Is the champion/partner being shaped comprehensively in the image of Christ in relation to the cause?” My question though, is how indeed do you measure this? Doing more in relation to the cause or giving more wouldn’t be the right answer as there are many who grow to be very active and generous people with causes they love yet have no relationship with Christ whatsoever.
Seems to be a question we can ask, but only the champion can help us answer. And, how would they recognize or define growth in this (that is, being shaped in the likeness of Christ)? Does this then become a subjective measurement? Possibly you could try to add more objectivity to it by developing a series of questions (a survey perhaps) to uncover this?
Hi Suzanne!
The key is the phrase “shaped comprehensively in the image of Christ”. Surely we would not say that a person is shaped comprehensively in the image of Christ by being active and generous but without a relationship to God, would we? That would run counter to most of the New Testament, let alone the Old.
You’re right on that these are collaborative measurements, done with champions and impossible to do without them. They ought to be as interested in them as we are, wouldn’t you think?
As far as measurements being subjective or objective, we’re really looking at a combination of both, since that’s the way growth really is. The key is going to be grounding them in the biblical attitude toward measurement, which we’re going to explore next week.