Don’t Settle for Getting People to Give; Instead, Help People Become Habitually More Giving

Posted on May 27, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Best book I’ve read so far this year–Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics, a gem from 2004 by Church of England priest and Christian ethicist Samuel Wells.

(As usual, the best books on giving, discipleship, and fundraising are never the books on giving, discipleship, and fundraising.)

Writes Wells:

Virtue ethics has become a shorthand term for all the writers in the field who have grown tired of the conventional emphasis on decision and the neglect of the character of the person or “agent” making the decision. The emphasis on virtue in Christian ethics has shifted attention from the deed to the doer. It is the agent who matters, more than the action: ethics is about forming the life of the agent more than it is about judging the appropriateness of the action.

As I noted in Monday’s post, this is the shortcoming of fundraising–even Transformational Giving. The focus is on getting individuals to give rather than on helping individuals grow into more habitually giving people.

Wells isn’t writing about fundraising, but his take on moral formation has everything to do with giving. As you read Wells, you recognize that the decision of whether or not an individual will give in response to your request has already been made long before you ask:

In every moral “situation,” the real decisions are ones that have been taken some time before. To live well requires both effort and habit. There is a place for both. But no amount of effort at the moment of decision will make up for effort neglected in the time of formation.

Question: When do fundraisers engage in pre-ask moral formation of their champions?

Answer: Mostly never. Which is why they mine churches for givers. Churches do less pre-ask formation than they should, of course, but odds on there is a weekly ask of some sort, and the topic of giving comes up now and again to buttress it.

Re-read that last sentence from the Wells excerpt above: No amount of effort at the moment of decision will make up for effort neglected in the time of formation.

Prescription: Don’t settle for getting people to give. Instead, help them become more habitual givers. As Wells notes, for Christians the place that happens is worship:

For Christians, the principal practice by which the moral imagination is formed, the principal form of discipleship training, is worship. Worship is the time when the conventional rules of the fallen world are suspended, when God is at last addressed as Lord, when time and heart and voice and posture are directed toward knowing God and making him known, toward experiencing the glorious liberty of being his child, when need and expectation are focused on their true source…

If you haven’t been trained through worship to be generous, then no amount of effort at the moment of decision (of whether or not to give, for example) will make up for effort neglected in the time of formation.

That ought to be equally sobering news for our trinity of churches, Christian nonprofits, and individual Christians. If in our worship all we’re doing is not talking about giving but hoping people give, or raising particular needs to meet but not teaching generosity as a general virtue–and if a growing percentage of Christians are forsaking the assembling together of themselves for worship altogether–then is it any wonder that getting (habitually less generous) people to give is getting harder and harder these days?

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An Open Letter to David Platt and Kevin DeYoung: Let’s Help Kevin’s Loan Officer Get Truly Radical

Posted on May 25, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Dear David and Kevin,

David, Radical: Taking Back Your Faith From the American Dream was a fun and worthwhile read. My congratulations.

Kevin, your review of David’s book was just about as fun and worthwhile as David’s book itself. And you were very respectful and encouraging, too, even in your disagreements with David–a rarity these days.

Gentlemen, Kevin poses a challenge in his review which deserves further consideration. He writes:

I don’t worry for David’s theology, but I worry that some young Christians reading his book might walk away wondering if a life spent working as a loan officer, tithing to their church, praying for their kids, learning to love Christ more, and serving in the Sunday school could possibly be pleasing to God. We need to find a way to attack the American dream while still allowing for differing vocations and that sort of ordinary Christian life that can plod along for fifty years. I imagine David wants this same thing. I’m just not sure this came through consistently in the book.

I think this is a great subject for discussion, Kevin. “Consistently” may be the key word in your analysis.

David, I appreciated your honesty in the book that you are in fact still wrestling personally with this question. Maybe that is what Kevin is sensing when he raises the consistency question. On page 93, David, you wrote:

The more I read the Gospels, the more I marvel at the simple genius of what Jesus was doing with his disciples. My mind tends to wander toward grandiose dreams and intricate strategies, and I’m struck when I see Jesus simply, intentionally, systematically, patiently walking alongside twelve men.

I can sense the struggle on page 83, when you write about what radical abandonment to Christ looks like in ordinary lives: “It sounds idealistic, I know. Impact the world. But doesn’t it also sound biblical?”

It does, yes. And yet…

I read a fascinating article by Shannon Craigo-Snell in the October 2000 issue of Modern Theology magazine (“Command Performance: Rethinking Performance Interpretation in the Context of Divine Discourse“–sorry no link; alas, it’s subscription only) at the same time I was reading Radical. It proposes a different–and, I think, even more compelling and intriguing–definition of biblical. Shannon writes:

We act within the words and images of the Bible and strive to understand our present and envision our future inside the very fabric of the text (emphasis mine).

That’s a definition of biblical that is altogether rare these days, gentlemen.

Shannon adds:

Readers no longer fit themselves into the unified and accurately depicted biblical world in order to understand the stories and orient their lives. Instead, they began to try and fit the biblical stories into a larger and more general framework of meaning.

That, I think, is what makes “impact the world” ultimately a less radical notion of biblical than the one to which Jesus calls us in Matthew 7:24:

 Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock.

Hear the Word. Do the Word. Repeat. Or, as we say at the beginning of our .W Church meetings:

Beloved, we are brought together in faith and united in the common mission of receiving deeply and passing on fully the grace of God.

What I’m suggesting, gentlemen, is that a loan officer truly hearing and genuinely doing the word of God daily in his own sphere of influence is often far more radical than the retiree who heads to Sri Lanka to cook meals for the hungry in the middle of rebel fighting.

Example: This past month I received emails from four people who want to pay their way to the China border to smuggle Bibles into North Korea. Setting aside for the moment why it’s a supremely bad idea to have non-Korean speaking Caucasians endanger underground NK Christians by leading the police right to their door through their romantic Bible couriering escapades, I note that when I ask these would-be radicals “Have you previously hand-carried a Bible to any of your neighbors on your street?”, they all frown and walk away like the rich young ruler. Of course they haven’t taken Bibles to anyone on their street. That, after all, would be embarrassing.

On page 19 of your book, David, you exhort us, “We need to return with urgency to a biblical gospel.”

Biblical gospel–David, I think that may be the best phrase in your book. Someone may say, “Isn’t ‘biblical gospel’ redundant? Of course the gospel has to be biblical. If it’s not, then it can’t be called gospel.”

But I think that phrase is the key to unlocking the truly radical for Kevin’s imaginary loan officer. Maybe it’s even a helpful way for you, David, to resolve the personal wrestling you mentioned on page 93, which I noted above.

Returning to a Biblical gospel means stepping back into the Bible story without reference to the impact that has on the world.

Now, that doesn’t mean that we insulate ourselves from the billions who have not yet heard the gospel, or the twenty-six thousand children that will die of starvation today. By no means.

It does mean that, like Jesus in John 5:19, we turn the world upside down without ever looking at it, because our eyes are riveted on him:

So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise.

Hear the Word. Do the Word. Hear the Word. Do the Word. Never look around to consider whether we’re impacting the world or not. We’re called to be faithful, after all–not radical or impactful.

And that may be the most radical and impactful way of life of all.

With genuine warmth and appreciation from your brother in Christ,

Eric Foley

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A Transformation from Transformational Giving to Whole Life Offering, or Why the New Look for the Blog?

Posted on May 23, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Somewhere around 1920, Robert Frost wrote:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
and sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler , long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth…

Somewhere around April of this year, I stood in a yellow wood looking down two paths as well. My own yellow wood for the last twenty-some years has been the question, “How can we get people to give?” And for twenty years I’ve followed a well-traveled path that has given answers like “through direct mail,” or “at a banquet,” or “by wearing a sandwich board while tweeting in the middle of a flash mob using compelling, impactful, and emotionally cathartic storytelling quantifying the social capital market valuation of one’s nonprofit.”

…Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same…

But over the three year life of this blog I’ve noticed myself becoming less and less interested in those kinds of tool-and-technique answers, and less and less possessed of the fundraiser’s inveterate faith that they still “work” (and, well, less and less convinced that that kind of “working” is morally acceptable anyway, teetering as it does–constantly–on a precipice of manipulation).

Please don’t misunderstand. I’m still as keenly interested as ever–perhaps even more so–in the question, “How do we get people to give?” I’m just keenly convicted that the better (and far more profoundly biblical) answer is one that begins, “By helping them to become more giving people.”

…And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back…

Writing a book and planting a church in 2011 have made me especially conscious that the answer, “By helping them to become more giving people,” is actually provisional and incomplete. It yields to an eminently more fascinating–and eminently more biblical–reply:

We help people to give by helping people to become fully formed in Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, since financial giving is but one of several characteristics that arises proportionally to other equally important characteristics in the mature believer. It cannot–must not–be separated out for special attention and appreciation and concern if our concerns are truly for the same things with which God concerns himself in us.

With that as the lodestar, I opted to purge this blogroll and my personal RSS feed and my del.icio.us bookmarks of the sites devoted to providing tips and tricks on how nonprofits can write better thank you receipts and achieve greater success in loading up on foundation dollars. I decided to let this blog burst its banks and leap joyfully to where it’s been surging anyway, which is to the confluence of three streams–the Christian nonprofit, the church, and the individual Christian.

In short, I have concluded that helping Christians grow to full maturity in Christ ought to be the purpose of every church and Christian nonprofit that desires not only to stay in the will of God but also to stay in business.

So I plan to write only posts that Christian nonprofits and churches and individual believers can make sense of and act upon together–posts that churches and nonprofits wouldn’t be embarrassed to be caught reading if ordinary Christians showed up and looked over their shoulders at their computer screens. Posts where individual Christians drive the discussion and the process at least as much as Christian institutions do. Posts that individual Christians find personally as valuable and practical and stretching as the institutions that should be helping them to grow to fullness in Christ, but all too often do not.

If you’re a nonprofit or a church and that seems less practical to you than, say, a post on how to boost the average gift at your next fundraising banquet, that’s only because the strangeness–and jaw-dropping beauty–of this new world of joint discipleship into which God is ushering us and our institutions still hasn’t yet registered fully with us yet. So even if what we’re really after is just to grow our nonprofit’s budget, tips on how to write better thank you receipt letters just aren’t–aren’t–going to get us there anymore.

On the old site we used the tag line, “From Today On, Heads, Hearts, and Hands Come Attached to Donations.” But what we’ve been convicted of over the last three years is that there’s more that comes attached to heads, hearts, and hands than donations–far more–and that when we segment donations out for special consideration and downplay or disregard everything else, we work stubbornly and naively against the process of whole life development and growth in which the Holy Spirit is engaged in the life of each Christian.

So from today on, we recognize that heads, hearts, and hands come attached not to donations but rather to bodies–bodies that are to be prepared and presented as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God. That’s what a whole life offering is, and it’s a whole new way to think about the joined-at-the-hip relationship God intends for churches, Christian nonprofits, and individual believers.

Whole life offerings are what we’re going to talk about henceforth on this site–specifically, how churches, Christian nonprofits, and individual believers can partner together with the Holy Spirit to prepare and present to God believers maturing comprehensively in Christ, not just in their wallets and in our pet causes.

So that’s what’s up with the new look/name of the blog today.

…I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the road less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

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