Imitation is How Humans Learn to Give. So Why are Churches and Nonprofits Doing Away With It?

Posted on June 3, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Tip of the cap to Peter Leithart for his post on mimetic humanity, or how humans are wired to learn just about everything through imitation far more than through explanation or training or emotional stimulation.

The issue is absolutely crucial for those of us who teach giving. We’ve written in multiple posts over the years about the importance of imitation as a strategy for training givers, most prominently:

But setting aside for a mere moment the nearly ironclad theological basis for advocating imitation as our core discipleship strategy, consider Leithart’s observation that humans are biologically built to learn through imitation, more than through newsletters, sermons, and tear-jerking Powerpoint presentations.

In Children Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do. Chimps Don’t, science writer Carl Zimmer describes an experiment by Victoria Horner and Andrew Whiten, two psychologists at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland:

Dr. Horner and Dr. Whiten described the way they showed young chimps how to retrieve food from a box.

The box was painted black and had a door on one side and a bolt running across the top. The food was hidden in a tube behind the door. When they showed the chimpanzees how to retrieve the food, the researchers added some unnecessary steps. Before they opened the door, they pulled back the bolt and tapped the top of the box with a stick. Only after they had pushed the bolt back in place did they finally open the door and fish out the food.

Because the chimps could not see inside, they could not tell that the extra steps were unnecessary. As a result, when the chimps were given the box, two-thirds faithfully imitated the scientists to retrieve the food.

The team then used a box with transparent walls and found a strikingly different result. Those chimps could see that the scientists were wasting their time sliding the bolt and tapping the top. None followed suit. They all went straight for the door.

The researchers turned to humans. They showed the transparent box to 16 children from a Scottish nursery school. After putting a sticker in the box, they showed the children how to retrieve it. They included the unnecessary bolt pulling and box tapping.

The scientists placed the sticker back in the box and left the room, telling the children that they could do whatever they thought necessary to retrieve it.

The children could see just as easily as the chimps that it was pointless to slide open the bolt or tap on top of the box. Yet 80 percent did so anyway.

Zimmer goes on to detail follow-up experiments done by Yale grad student Derek Lyons that produced the same results:

Children really do overimitate. [Lyons] has found that it is very hard to get children not to.

If they rush through opening a puzzle, they don’t skip the extra steps. They just do them all faster…

Mr. Lyons sees his results as evidence that humans are hard-wired to learn by imitation, even when that is clearly not the best way to learn.

Combine the theological mandate to imitate with the biological wiring that predisposes us humans to do so, and one is left to ask:

  • Why do we pull children out of “big church” and put them in “children’s church” where they are robbed of the ability to imitate us? Is it any wonder that kids drop out of church when they hit college age, since they’ve had no experience imitating adult Christians?
  • We’re so worried about offending newcomers that we stop passing the offering plate in church. But how better for newcomers to learn to give than by observing and then imitating the behavior of those sitting next to them? Is it any wonder that we have so many freeloaders in our churches?
  • Why is donor development in nonprofits done as a one-on-one activity between the development officer and the donor, where the nonprofit is asking and the donor is (typically) saying no? Why not place donors in a peer context with individuals like themselves who are giving so that they also can imitate generous behavior?

As we privatize giving and treat it as an individual, deeply personal activity, we neutralize the greatest force we have for growing people in generosity: imitating one other, particularly those among us who are mature givers in Christ.

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The Biblical Way to Get Church Freeloaders to Give

Posted on June 1, 2011 by Pastor Foley

A blog site for ARDA–the Association of Religion Data Archives–sounds about as exciting as a visit to http://www.watchingpaintpeel.com. (Oddly, by the way, that URL is still available.)

But trust me: RSS the feed. ARDA’s David Briggs posts every two weeks, and he never hits a clunker.

His post this week, ‘Free riders’ and the recession: Churches face hard economic choices attracting new members, talks about the drag created by “free riders,” who Briggs defines as “individuals who are content to enjoy their services without making a significant commitment to their upkeep and mission”:

The issue is most problematic with new members, scholars say, particularly in an age when more people are choosing churches based on the services they offer as opposed to denominational loyalties.

Part of the success of megachurches is that they generally offer more services from sports teams to Bible study groups to multiple worship times than smaller churches, some scholars say.

For newcomers who find a good fit, the initial low cost gives way to a higher price in terms of expected giving and volunteering once the quality of the experience is known, they state.

It can be a risky and costly investment in newcomers, McBride said at the religion and economics meeting.

But congregations “must allow non-contributors today to help them become committed affiliates tomorrow,” he said.

Somewhere down the line, enough free riders have to be persuaded to become contributing members of congregations, to pay their share of the private costs of offering public goods.

But getting people in the door is still a necessary first step. Offering an electronic invitation that assures newcomers they will be welcomed without any financial obigation may not be a bad place to start.

Or, as we talked about in our post earlier this week on the North Korean underground church, it may be exactly the wrong place to start.

Alternative proposal for avoiding the “freeloader” problem:

Stress, even in your advertising, as a distinctive of your church, giving.

Just not to your church.

That’s our .W church practice, as detailed in this prior post:

Rather than taking an offering each Sunday, we as a congregation prepare to make our offering once a month, on the last Sunday of each month. A month’s preparation has a way of keeping the offering from being a tip for services rendered (literally).

But what I’m most excited about with regard to our offering is that each member commits to offering a tithe, of which 30 percent is given to the church (with a third going to the church, a third going to our denomination’s regional conference, and a third going to the denomination) and 70 percent is consecrated at the altar…and then immediately received back again by each member, to be disbursed personally by that member as the church’s minister within his or her own sphere of influence.

70 percent of the tithe, in other words, is not tax deductible because it doesn’t go through the church. It’s consecrated at the altar and then given directly by the church member to those to whom the members learn to personally minister. (Training in giving embedded in service is a key part of what the church program is all about, even for the congregation’s children. Giving and serving should be done by the family jointly, after all.)

Make sure the message to potential congregation members is this:

Of course this Jesus discipleship stuff is going to involve a radical change in the way you spend your money.

But you can trust us to guide you in it well, since we’re not the beneficiaries.

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Advice from the North Korean Underground Church: Stop Making it Easy for People to Become Involved in Your Church or Nonprofit

Posted on May 30, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Last week we had a handyman, Jeff, at our house giving us an estimate on some home repairs. We quickly learned he was a Christian seeking a deeper experience of church. I spent more than two hours with Jeff talking about our .W congregation. He was clearly fascinated, and we ended our time with him pledging to come on Sunday.

Of course he never showed up.

On Sunday, however, I read the following excerpt from the third century document. The Apostolic Tradition by Hippolytus. It sheds light on the practices of the young, underground, persecuted church in the generations shortly after the apostles. The following section in particular caught my interest:

Let those who will be brought newly to the faith to hear the Word be brought first to the teachers before the people arrive. And let them be asked the reason why they have given their assent to the faith. And let those who have brought them bear witness as to whether they are able to hear the Word. And let them be asked about their life: What sort is it?

It reminded me of how underground NK Christians respond even to family members who express an interest in learning more about Christ. In NK, as NK scholar Marcus Noland notes, “Newlyweds will not be informed about their spouse’s family’s religious practices for some time until sufficient trust has developed.”

What a far cry from how I approached handyman Jeff! Imagine how different our conversation would have been had I said, “Jeff, in the early church, before individuals were invited to worship with a particular congregation, congregation leaders would visit them and talk about their lives and why they wanted to follow Christ. If you are interested in getting involved in our church, the first step would be me dropping by your house to meet you and your family and to learn about your lives and your interest in Christ.”

  • How might our churches change if instead of begging people to come, we treated attendance at the assembly as a precious privilege and examined those professing an interest to ensure they were really serious about following Christ as part of our congregation?
  • How might our nonprofits change if instead of begging people to give, we published a gift acceptance policy that said, “We only accept donations that arise out of a larger discipleship process you are undertaking in this cause – either with us as the nonprofit or through your church”?

This post originally appeared in the Prayer Partner Update that Mrs. Foley and I do bi-weekly for the people who donate to our Seoul USA nonprofit for North Korea. If you want to get added to that list, of course, the next step would be for you to email me just so I can verify with you that this e-newsletter will be fitting into a wider discipleship process for you related to the Work of Mercy of visiting and remembering, either with us or with your church…  

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