World Gospel Missionary Kelly Hallahan  does a nice job sharing Transformational Giving (TG) with her champions on her blog this week.

Building the piece on Elijah’s encounter with the widow in 1 Kings 17:8-16, Kelly notes how God might be seeking to fund His work in the current recession:

How humbling and scary for Elijah to ask this poor, starving widow for food. And at times, I confess, I am not eager to ask people to support missions financially. But as I was studying the Word this morning, and seeking God’s heart in prayer, He opened to me the upside-down equations of the kingdom! There is nothing logical about asking a widow for material support. But God delights in using the weak things of this world to put the strong to shame. And in an economic crisis it does not make any sense to ask people to give above and beyond their tithe to foreign missions. Except for the fact that God doesn’t change- His call to us remains the same- His faithful provision remains the same. And in the upside-down kingdom kind of way, Elijah calls the widow to give him food first, and then survive on the rest. What faith!

What I appreciate about Kelly’s approach is that she’s coaching her champions in TG principles outside of the context of a specific ask.

More than once (!) I’ve had a ministry leader say to me, “Oh, we tried talking about Transformational Giving in our last appeal letter, but it didn’t work for us.”

Here’s a big clue that your approach to TG is on the wrong track:

You’re trying to introduce TG to your champions in an appeal letter.

That’s a no-no.

TG is not an appeal letter theme. It’s an unconditional commitment to support your champions as the Holy Spirit grows them comprehensively in the likeness of Christ in relation to the cause to which God has called you both. It’ll impact–dramatically–what you write, to whom you send it, and what you ask the recipient to do.

And…

The more your relationships with your champions explicitly discuss and embrace Transformational Giving (TG), the more successful and impactful those relationships will be according to every measure.

That being said, I would not advocate that you recruit champions by talking to them about TG either. Scripturally, recruitment happens best through P- (Participation-) level projects. Explicit discussions of TG are best done at the E- (Engagement) level.

(Note that this is a significant difference from the “Christian Stewardship” movement approach, which begins with the general concept of stewardship and works from that into specific causes. In TG lingo, we would call that a passing strange move from E back to P.)

When you share TG like Kelly has in her post, you’re installing (or updating) the “software” on which your E-level champion relationships runs.

Unless you and your champions both have that software installed and updated, you’re not going to get much past P…