A Must-Have For Every Church in America: A Do-Good Bus

Posted on May 9, 2011 by Pastor Foley

The exact date when your church is going to go out of business has recently been charted by mathematicians, according to CNN’s Belief blog. So add this item to your church’s bucket list of ministry things to do before it goes under:

  • Acquire a Do-Good Bus to aid you in executing your responsibility to grow all the believers in your care to fullness in Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

As with many great discipleship ideas, this one didn’t come from the, um, church. In fact, as Alissa Walker at Good explains, The Do-Good Bus is a standalone nonprofit organization in its own right:

Co-founder Rebecca Pontius had always been involved with nonprofits, but in recent years she became flooded with questions from friends about how they could participate. “They’d say, “I want to volunteer, but I don’t know how,'” remembers Pontius, an event planner. For her birthday, Pontius organized a party bus and noticed the camaraderie created amongst her friends just by traveling to a new location together. Teaming up with two of her friends, Hannah Halliwell and Stephen Snedden, the trio decided to combine the fun of a party bus with a service trip as a way to make volunteering easy and accessible.

Part of the fun of a Do Good experience is that each destination is only revealed once volunteers board the bus, which Pontius thinks removes some of the anxiety from volunteering for the first time. “It takes away the preconceived notions or judgement about what you’re going to do,” she says. But participants don’t go into the experience blind: They’re briefed en route and also receive a training session from the organizations themselves.

In my new Whole Life Offering book, I lay out the ten ways–what the church has historically called the “Works of Mercy”–that the Bible calls us to mirror the love of Christ to our neighbors.

Why not a monthly “Works of Mercy Road Trip,” where church members board the bus (in lieu of Sunday services? Just askin’…) knowing only the name of the Work of Mercy they’ll be undertaking but not the specific destination for their service?

Of course, as the Whole Life Offering book recommends, we’ll want to train participants in that Work of Mercy in the month preceding their boarding of the bus.

Maybe if we undertake such an intentional plan for growing Christians in their love of neighbor and their love of God, then the mathematicians may be forced to revise their calculations predicting our imminent demise?

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Why the Wealthy are Stingy, and How a Nighttime Stroll Through a Dangerous Neighborhood is the Cure

Posted on May 6, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Another great post from Joanne Fritz grabbed our attention this week–Are the Wealthy Stingy? And What You Can Do About It.

Joanne’s answers:

Yes, and have them walk down a dark alley at midnight.

More on that latter answer in a moment.

First, the research. Fritz notes the 2002 Independent Sector survey we’ve talked about previously on this site, which shows that those with incomes over $100,000 a year give away 2.7% of their income whereas those with incomes under $25,000 give away 4.2%.

But what Fritz shares that is new is that wealthy people are not only stingier; they are also “less helpful and compassionate”: 

Paul Piff, who is a doctoral candidate in social and personality psychology at UC Berkeley, noticed that rich people seem to be ruder. He videotaped them in a lab situation as they got to know a stranger and found that they checked their cell phones or doodled and did not make eye contact. On the other hand, people who identified themselves as having less did make eye contact, laughed more, and nodded. They were more socially engaged than the subjects who identified as wealthier.

Piff went deeper and found that in a game where subjects were given $10 worth of points and asked how much of it they wanted to share, the richer individuals were less generous than poor people. In a trust game, they were less egalitarian and cooperative.

Lest you think that we poorer folks are immune from this effect, Piff found that people who felt just “temporarily higher” in social status were less charitable as well.

In my new Whole Life Offering book, I quote John Wesley, who noted the same phenomenon in his own day and concluded that unfamiliarity (of the rich with the poor) breeds contempt:

One great reason why the rich, in general, have so little sympathy for the poor, is, because they so seldom visit them.

Interestingly, it’s the same conclusion that researchers came to in the study Joanne cites in her post: rich people who report fewer day to day encounters with the poor tend to be a stingy lot.

Joanne notes that one foundation is implementing an interesting cure:

The key, then, may be to create such encounters for wealthy donors. The Boston Foundation is one that has started doing so. That organization takes people on walks through dangerous inner-city neighborhoods at night. The first hand experience is far more effective than just sharing crime statistics.

Be sure to check out this previous post on Pomona Hope and this report from Springwise for two other ways nonprofits are seeking to de-stingify the rich by giving them firsthand encounters with the poor–encounters where the poor are rightly portrayed not as objects of pity but as subjects of great potential.

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To Tithe or Not To Tithe: That is Not the Question

Posted on May 4, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Props to Call & Response blog for calling our attention to the new National Association of Evangelicals survey on tithing.

As reported by CNN, the survey shows a 42/58 split of evangelical leaders against regarding tithing as a biblical requirement.

The most insightful comment in the CNN piece comes from Purdue University sociology professor Dan Olson, who notes that the survey results may be more a referendum on the survey question’s phrasing (i.e., what does it mean for tithing to be “required”? Required for what?) than an indication that attitudes are changing about tithing.

“Most of those leaders would probably say, ‘you really ought to tithe, but the term ‘requires’ gets at a theological point,” he said.

I like that point a whole lot better than Olson’s next point.

“Most Christians would say the laws of the Old Testament are not what save you – you’re supposed to be giving out of a spirit of freedom, not because you’re bound to laws,” he said.

That’s a dichotomy (giving because one is “bound to laws”–ostensibly, laws like tithing–versus giving out of a “spirit of freedom”) that may prove unhelpful in promoting greater maturity in Christian giving.

That’s because it’s a dichotomy that continues to permit us American Christians to duck–as a matter of theological principle, no less–serious questions related to how we’re spending our money, like:

Does the “spirit of freedom” really prompt us to spend on average 98% of our money on ourselves?

We repudiate–with moral indignation, even–discussion of questions like this on the grounds that giving is not a salvation question, so putting parameters around our giving (e.g., through promotion of practices like tithing) must be a repudiation of salvation by grace.

But what if the question were not “Is tithing required?” but rather “What are the practices related to giving that have generally accompanied Christians’ growth to fullness in Christ?”

That shift in inquiry would likely reveal two things:

  1. Most of us American Christians aren’t much interested in growing to fullness in Christ as a practical matter–great when it happens, but hardly normative and certainly not required. Our focus is more on getting in–to heaven, of course–and any question or practice that causes us to stray away from that issue is regarded as suspect–works righteousness leavening the flaky golden loaf of salvation-as-free-gift.
  2. Most of us American Christians see growth in generosity as a spontaneous act of Transformation From Above, born in golden moments of great serendipity (the Christian equivalent of Random Acts of Jaw-Dropping Kindness, where the opportunity to give is so God-ordained that even we spoiled, selfish American Christians don’t usually fail to see it), as opposed to something we are responsible to plan ahead of time and that we can get better at by following practices that more mature saints than us have undertaken across the ages .

This revised question also presupposes that there are indeed discernible, generalizable practices (i.e., “rules” or “laws” in the sense of “ways of life,” not in the sense of “things you need to do to get saved”) related to giving that do actually consistently accompany growth to Christlikeness.

Put differently, spontaneity in giving–a commitment to avoiding patterns or disciplined rules for the regular charitable disposition of one’s finances–is, um, less likely to lead to fullness in Christ than is following disciplined patterns and rules.

This is not to say that all disciplined patterns and rules lead to fullness in Christ. Some don’t. Some really do lead to insularity, legalism, and self-righteousness.

But that does not make spontaneity (giving out of a “spirit of freedom”) an unassailable good or even a recommended practice for giving. We’d contend (in fact, we did in this seven-post series) that spontaneity and a lack of rules and disciplines of giving enslave us again to the very things from which Christ came to set us free.

So the question ought not to be whether tithing is required but whether it is a practice that typically accompanies growth to fullness in Christ–and, if so, whether there are elements related to that practice that are more or less helpful (i.e., more likely to produce Christlikeness than crotchety legalism).

Wouldn’t it be interesting, for example, to see a study on whether giving away a greater percentage of one’s income was correlated with other evidences of fullness in Christ?

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