Even as you read this post, I’m happily typing away on my second book, entitled The Whole Life Offering: Christianity as Philanthropy.

I’m writing the book with the goal of equipping individual Christians, pastors, and ministry leaders with a thoroughly biblical perspective on philanthropy.

The core idea is this: philanthropy is so much more than financial giving. It originates with God’s gift of Christ to us and comes to fruition in each of us as we offer our whole lives to Him by comprehensively mirroring to the world His love and care.

The book is due to be released in January 2011, Lord permitting, but over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing with you excerpts from the book’s Introduction so you can see why I’m so excited about what I’m learning and writing.

I debuted some of this material in Toronto during a retreat with my dear brothers and sisters from Voice of the Martyrs/Canada, and in September I’ll be teaching the first seminars on it in Cambodia (at Child Evangelism Fellowship’s Asia/Pacific Conference) and Memphis (in a one day event for the Memphis Leadership Foundation). I’d love to have your prayers for that travel and for both events, as well as for future events in the planning stage to share the material more broadly.

I hope you enjoy and are challenged by the excerpts over the next few weeks. They’ll culminate in my sharing a new “Whole Life Offering Ten” list to replace the “Transformational Giving Ten” I wrote a few years back. The TG Ten list has worn well, praise God, but I’ve had a desire since I wrote it to create a list that could be equally useful to individual Christians, pastors, churches, and Christian nonprofits rather than just, as in the case of the TG Ten, Christian nonprofits.

Good times, these. I’m counting on your prayers and comments over the weeks to come, so thanks in advance for your generosity in sharing both. You know that I pray regularly for you as a practitioner of Transformational Giving—for the fruitfulness of your own ministry as well as for your reproduction as you share the TG principles in your sphere of influence. You and I are tied together at the hip in this work, and for that I am especially grateful to God.