Coach Your Champions Corporately, Part I: Growth to Fullness in Christ Ain’t Nearly as Mystical as Some Folks Make it Out to be

Posted on March 2, 2011 by Pastor Foley

CT’s Mark Galli launched 2011 with a post entitled Blessed Are the Poor in Virtue: Why Some People May Want to Abandon New Year’s Resolutions As Soon As Possible. In it he contends that the process of growth to fullness in Christ is “more mysterious than we are apt to think”:

During an evening prayer service on New Year’s Day, a friend described his spiritual journey the previous year. He lamented that his plans to become more regular and disciplined in prayer and Bible study had come to naught. And yet, he said, he found he grew spiritually more than ever.

This is precisely how the spiritual life has worked for me. The more I strive to be a “good Christian”—more prayerful, patient, giving, sacrificial, whatever—the more I find myself anxious, irritated, guilty, resentful, and self-righteous. When I simply accept that I’m a sinner, really, I find that I pray more, am more patient, more giving, more humble, and more loving.

(Before we get to the heavy-duty freight, take just a sec here and read John Acuff’s tongue-in-cheek post on Stuff Christians Like entitled #954 Using a fear of legalism as an excuse to be lazy. Acuff: “Reading the Bible regularly on a schedule is only one degree removed from thinking you have to earn Christ’s love everyday.” Too funny.)

Returning to Galli:

Add to that the experience of many: that only by abandoning moral striving can one really make any progress in this life… It also has to do with what enables people to do the very thing they fail to do when they strive to do it: freedom. You cannot enjoy freedom when you feel you have to do such-and-such to be good. That’s not freedom but oppression. Only when you realize that you do not have to do or be anything can you know freedom, and only when you know freedom can you really choose the good.

I once heard David Carradine share that same sentiment on an episode of Kung Fu. But I digress. Back to Galli one final time:

To be fair, some really do grow by making resolutions, setting goals, striving with all their might! But accepting one’s spiritual poverty and relaxing in grace has been the most fruitful course for many others.

Complicated stuff, this more-mysterious-than-we-think striving-for-nonstriving. Contemporary John Wesley scholar Gregory S. Clapper notes that it can lead to what he calls “the problem of self-deception” (see Acuff essay, above). Wesley himself proposed a decidedly non-mysterious alternative to such individual introspectiveness, namely, searching, searing, regular, raw accountability encounters with fellow self-deceivers on the discipleship trail. Writes Clapper in his eminently worthwhile The Renewal of the Heart Is the Mission of the Church:

Wesley was not one to recommend lonely mountaintop contemplation, for he knew too well the human heart’s propensity for deceit. Wesley was constantly forming new believers into classes, societies and bands where the Christians could examine each other and openly and honestly share with each other the course of their spiritual struggles. Seeking “feedback” and direction from others was more the norm for the Methodist movement than the exception.

Thus, in counterpoint to Galli’s claim that “There really is no point in trying to do or be anything but a sinner,” we can say, well, yes there is. One can be a fellow sinner. For one of God’s lavish–but often flatulently non-mystical–gifts to us which Galli does not mention in his article is the brother-and-sister discipleship daisy-chain in which God has graciously appended us like paper clips.

Sadly, that daisy-chain has been largely dissembled in recent days, in both nonprofits and churches, and thus does not and cannot function in much if any equipping or accountability framework. One of the Holy Spirit’s primary tools has been misplaced by the pastors and nonprofit leaders who were called to be stewards and custodians of the toolbox: As Ephesians 4:11-13 makes clear that Christian growth is a primarily a corporate process, not an individual one. Or as Luke Stamps puts it:

Unlike the Roman Catholic view, the Reformed view did not teach that grace was a substance that was channeled, irrespective of personal faith, through the sacraments. Instead, grace was defined in terms of the “benefits of redemption” (justification, adoption, sanctification, etc.) and was granted only to those who believe. And yet, this grace does not come to the elect in an immediate fashion, that is, not mediated through outward means. No, the Reformed confessions maintained that redemption is communicated to believers through the outward means of the Word, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and prayer. The Word, when combined with the Spirit’s regenerative work, creates faith, and the sacraments and prayer sustain this faith throughout the believer’s life. In this sense, redemption is mediated to the believer through the ministry of the church. John Calvin could cite Cyprian approvingly in this regard: “He has not God as his father who has not the church as his mother.”

Generally, mothers are not a terribly mystical lot. They nag you to read your Bible daily. If you try to explain to them that it is important for you to only read your Bible when you’re absolutely certain you’re not striving for anything, they will roll their eyes, tell you that you are making ridiculous excuses, and order you to stop playing World of Warcraft.

Which is sager advice than that offered in most editorials.

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Introducing a New Mini-series: Coach Your Champions Corporately

Posted on February 28, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Today we launch into a multi-part series on a donor development (and, for churches, member discipleship) topic which may be the most important development/discipleship topic that almost no one is talking about.

I have in mind the corporate coaching of champions: a fundamental commitment to turn away from (yes–I mean, repent of) doing donor development as a one-to-one or one-to-many process and a decisive turn toward coaching and equipping all of your champions simultaneously, in one another’s presence, where their substantive, cause-focused interaction with you and with each other forms the length and breadth of your development undertaking, and where the growth of one leads to the growth of all (yourself included).

At root is the recognition that things happen in groups that don’t happen individually. Groups have resources on which we may draw, resources about which modern donor development and, sadly, member discipleship are woefully ignorant and negligent.

It’s not that we don’t bring our donors and members together. We do. There are banquets, auctions, wine and cheese benefits, volunteer appreciation luncheons, and even volunteer training events. In churches there is the, you know, Sunday service among other gatherings.

But for the most part, to draw on language Luke Stamps shares from Michael Horton, these gatherings aggregate individual experience and donor/organization (or member/church) relationships rather than serving as platforms where shared knowledge and skills and resources and giftings are expected and enabled to cascade from the corporate or collective that is gathered onto the individual (including the pastor or nonprofit exec):

It is well worth exploring Christian piety as a cascading phenomenon. Reformation piety . . . rather than expressing Christian life as flowing outward from the individual to broader relationships (i.e., the church as the aggregate of the individually regenerate), sees it as cascading down from the church and the family to the individual.

The basic unit of donor/member development, in other words, is the collective–the champion network of the nonprofit or the congregation of the church. The collective experiences the cause together. The collective processes the challenges and opportunities together, learning from each other and from a variety of resources under the guidance of mature facilitators. The collective makes decisions together, allocating resources like the collective’s time, money, and attention, in its work of attending to the cause or causes to which it is called.

As we’ll see in this series, this is something altogether different from a pastor preaching at a congregation or a nonprofit exec leading a training event. And on the other hand, it is also something altogether different from crowdsourcing. This is not a “donor cloud” of shared bias and ignorance that we are seeding.

Instead, what we have in mind is something old and new brought back out of the treasure chest: A practical way for all donor/member development to be daisy-chained together so that no one’s development is an end in itself but rather each one’s development is drawn upon fully and directly and intentionally as the primary machinery on which we rely to further the development of all the rest.

Donors developing donors, as it were–members developing members.

Or, if that doesn’t sound radical enough:

Only donors developing donors. And only members developing members.

Should be a fun series. It will definitely be best read…corporately.

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Two Videos: How Donors Connect…and How They Don’t

Posted on February 25, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Most of us in the nonprofit world exhibit a skewed, inaccurately idealized image of:

  • how donors are connected
  • what they are connected to
  • what passes along those connections

Our idealized fundraising models are based on a Matrix-like image of donor connectivity. In our models, information generated by a nonprofit–in the form of a newsletter or email or tweet–tumbles outward from us on a straight-line path to a donor, who receives it and passes it on to others in his or her sphere of influence in the way and for the purpose the nonprofit intended.

That idealized model is flawed in several ways:

  • In reality, donors pass on very little of the information they receive from and about organizations
  • Of the information they do pass on, they rarely pass it on in a straight-line fashion, i.e., even a retweet reshapes the information through the change in context (from nonprofit to donor)
  • Donors pass on information for their own purposes, not those of the nonprofits originating the information (think of this as a kind of information mashup, which is the typical way information is transferred by human beings). Since nonprofits rarely think in terms of the things that might motivate donors to pass on information, they can’t imagine either the content or the form that is most conducive to information transfer

A far more accurate illustration of donor connectivity comes from the following video, which, while designed to depict (of all things) traffic patterns in Lisbon, perfectly conveys a number of profound truths about how donors connect. First watch the video, then consider these truths:

  • People are not discrete nodes on an idealized information transfer network but are instead more like blood vessels, smooshed up into each other through densely packed relationships (both casual and formal) as they (not simply strands of information) tumble along through life.
  • In other words, people don’t simply pass on information but instead pass on themselves in a million small ways everyday. Sure there are transactions, but these are far and away the least common (though must studied) way humans share. The main way humans share is that their characters/natures/personalities simply smoosh into each other as they “do life” together and side by side.
  • The most effective way to impact your cause, then, is not to supply donors with information, as if they dutifully pass it along to others, but to support donors in their own character/nature/personality transformation as relates to the cause itself.
  • Remember that these kinds of transformations are never individual in nature: when something truly impacts our character/nature/personality, we will pass it along to others as a matter of course, simply by rubbing up against them as we live.

Sum it up in two observations:

  • The modern fundraising model is fundamentally flawed because it thinks in terms of information transfer leading to financial transactions. Life is far more organic than that. Fundraising must think in terms of personal transformations that–of necessity–impact all those who come in contact with the one who has been/is being transformed.
  • Because modern fundraising traffics in idealized (read: “badly flawed”) ways of thinking of human beings as discrete containers of meaning and interest, it overlooks that fundraising is inherently communal/corporate and must be comprehended and practiced as such.

Next week we launch a mini-series on this blog that I think will rank as one of the top four or five that we’ve yet done on this site. In essence, it will be a call to shift fundraising from a Matrix-like informational flow conception to a blood vessel-like process of corporate transformation.

I realize that may sound rather abstract or theoretical at the moment, but just extend a little trust my way, give the above videos one more view as you muse over these things, and then join me as we reconvene next week to talk about Coaching Champions Corporately.

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