Ten Questions to Ask at Your Christmas Event

Posted on December 20, 2010 by Pastor Foley

Last week we took up the challenge of creating an alternative to Shane Claiborne’s holiday mischief. The goal was to develop an event that could bring genuine growth and the beginning of ongoing relationship to individuals from disparate groups (e.g., rich and poor, suburbanite and city dweller, homeless and homeful).

I offered a project idea I called Gifts of the Magi, about which you can read more here. (Make sure to check out the Comments section of the post, where Shane responds to my proposal.)

One of the aspects of my proposal involved engaging the two disparate groups in discussion questions. I offered a list of possible questions as part of that post.

Over the weekend, howevever, courtesy of Justin Taylor’s fine blog, I came across a vastly superior list of questions to my own. Not only do I think this new list of questions is the better list to use in conjunction with the Gifts of the Magi project, I believe you and I should use this list at our own Christmas gatherings this week.

The list–entitled Ten Questions to ask at a Christmas Gathering, comes from Donald S. Whitney. The list appears to have disappeared from his own site, so until it reappears, let me list the questions here (and do make sure to click through to Don’s site and check out the rest of the great content that’s still there):

  • What’s the best thing that’s happened to you since last Christmas?
  • What was your best Christmas ever? Why?
  • What’s the most meaningful Christmas gift you’ve ever received?
  • What was the most appreciated Christmas gift you’ve ever given?
  • What was your favorite Christmas tradition as a child?
  • What is your favorite Christmas tradition now?
  • What do you do to try to keep Christ in Christmas?
  • Why do you think people started celebrating the birth of Jesus?
  • Do you think the birth of Jesus deserves such a nearly worldwide celebration?
  • Why do you think Jesus came to earth?

Great discussion questions to ask two disparate groups of people your ministry will bring together.

Great discussion questions to ask the guests at your own personal Christmas parties.

Great questions to stop and ask yourself right now.

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And now, a Merry Christmas wish to the hopefully very nice attorneys in Donald Whitney’s ministry:

Copyright Disclaimer: All the information contained on the Center for Biblical Spirituality website is copyrighted by Donald S. Whitney. Permission granted to copy this material in its complete text only for not-for-profit use (sharing with a friend, church, school, Bible study, etc.) and including all copyright information. No portion of this website may be sold, distributed, published, edited, altered, changed, broadcast, or commercially exploited without the prior written permission from Donald S. Whitney.

For more short, reproducible pieces like this, see www.BiblicalSpirituality.

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The Best Gift Your Nonprofit Can Give the World: A Viable Plan to Go Out of Business

Posted on December 17, 2010 by Pastor Foley

Thomas Friedman’s New York Times op-ed piece entitled Adults Only, Please contains a powerful thought-starter for nonprofit organizations:

Dov Seidman, the C.E.O. of LRN, which helps companies build ethical cultures, likes to talk about two kinds of values: “situational values” and “sustainable values.” Leaders, companies or individuals guided by situational values do whatever the situation will allow, no matter the wider interests of their communities. A banker who writes a mortgage for someone he knows can’t make the payments over time is acting on situational values, saying: “I’ll be gone when the bill comes due.”

People inspired by sustainable values act just the opposite, saying: “I will never be gone. I will always be here. Therefore, I must behave in ways that sustain — my employees, my customers, my suppliers, my environment, my country and my future generations.”

For nonprofits, cleaving to sustainable values means focusing on the cause rather than the organization that promotes it. Paradoxically, nonprofits embrace sustainable values by creating a viable plan to go out of business.

I wrote about this last year in a post entitled Wanted: Extinction, Not Attention that highlighted the work of Willie Cheng, author of Doing Good Well: What Does (and Does Not) Make Sense in the Nonprofit World. In Cheng’s words,

Individual charities are set up to solve specific societal issues, and hence should be working themselves out of a job by finding the solutions.

Translated into Seidman’s values language, a nonprofit with laserlike focus on finding solutions to the specific societal issue it was created to address will display sustainable values as it works itself out of existence.

Witness sustainable values in action in the decision of the Children’s Aid Society to close one of its schools, in Greenwich Village, New York. Why?

Because their sustainable values caused them to recognize that they had accomplished their work in that area.

From the Nonprofit Quarterly:

The school operates as part of the Phillip Coltoff Center, which according to the New York Times, opened 119 years ago “when the Village was populated by legions of poor children.” Times have changed, and the Children’s Aid Society feels the school’s 1,000 young children – plus older students who take part in extra-curricular programs—come from families who can afford to send them elsewhere, even at a higher cost. “We can’t really justify,” said Richard R. Buery Jr., president and chief executive of the Children’s Aid Society, “the big disconnect between having so many resources focused on serving a population—while clearly a population that needs and deserves the service – that simply has access to more resources and opportunity than a place in the South Bronx, who are in our mission to serve.”

This wouldn’t be the first time that the Children’s Aid Society has closed operations, declaring its work done in a particular community. The Times cites two other schools shut down in past years. “We support communities’ being strong, and then when they’re strong you want to focus on ones that are not,” Buery added.

If Children’s Aid Society was focused on situational values, they would have focused on institutional health and parental demand and continued to operate the school. But by focusing on the sustainable value of cause, they recognized it was time to declare victory and move on.

The Whole Life Offering Ten (from my new book due out in February) puts it this way:

Nonprofits and parachurch ministries are church renewal movements, called to equip the church comprehensively in a particular work of mercy so that work may once again be normative for Christians.

Same is true for secular nonprofits: they are societal renewal movements. Either they solve the problem they were created to address, or they make attending to the problem the normative behavior of ordinary folks rather than the professionalized province of a specialized nonprofit.

As I noted in another post from last year, Nonprofit as Church Renewal Movement, such a focus–on the sustainable value of cause rather than the situational value of nonprofit survival, would give us an entirely different set of success measures:

  • Getting big wouldn’t be viewed inherently as a good thing or even as a goal; in  fact, we’d view it with a certain amount of suspicion. After all,
  • The real metric of success would be the degree to which the Christian nonprofit successfully re-embedded care of the particular cause back into the church.
  • We’d definitely be measuring not only ROI but RII, and
  • We’d know exactly when to go out of business, namely, when the church gets back in business and on firm footing in relation to the biblical cause God has given us to harangue the church about.
  • Could that be what God has in mind when He calls us to found a nonprofit?

So this year as you contemplate what to give your donors for Christmas and year end, eschew the calendars, key chains, and staff photos and send them your viable plan to achieve your purpose and go out of business.

It’ll set you up for a much better year-end or new year ask, by the way.

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Most Lapsed and Inactive Donors and Members Don’t Wander out the Back Door; They Wander Back Out the Front Door

Posted on December 15, 2010 by Pastor Foley

Bob Allen’s Why Do People Leave Churches? post on the Associated Baptist Press blog (thanks to Call & Response for the tip) is as applicable to secular charities as it is churches and religious nonprofits, as it deals with the ubiquitously toothache-y subject of lapsed and inactive constituents.

From Allen’s article:

“Churches have gone to great extreme effort to get people in the front door of the church,” Brad Waggoner of LifeWay Christian Resources said in a 2006 podcast. “There’s been some success numerically in that strategy, but very few people are talking about the back door of the church. That is: ‘Where do the people go that slip out of the life of the church?’

“The back door is just as important as the front door in determining the health of a local church.”

Allen quotes church consultant George Bullard, who contends that four things are necessary in the first year of a new attendee’s experience in order to minimize the likelihood of lapsing: Push guests toward regular attendance; make sure they develop deep friendships within the congregation; get them in a small group; and find a volunteer opportunity where they can plug in.

Not a bad idea in the bunch. And yet…

Conspicuously absent from our discussions (both Christian and secular) of lapsed and inactive donors and members is the reality that most “lost sheep” don’t wander out the back door.

They wander back out the front door. The door they came in.

That is, donors and members “lapse” because they weren’t intending to be donors or members in the first place.

In the case of a nonprofit, for example, a “prospect” receives a direct mail acquisition package. She has no intention of being “acquired” into the nonprofit’s donor file. She was making a single gift, not an ongoing commitment. Only the nonprofit sees the person as a lapsed donor. The person sees herself as someone who did a nice thing and who keeps getting harassed by the charity for more money.

Same with the person who wanders in the door of a church at Christmas because they want to see face melting lasers and indoor snow while eating Christmas treats. They don’t think of their departure in terms of a lack of deep congregational friendships, small group participation, or volunteer opportunities. They just came to see the face melting lasers, man.

Regrettably, minimizing lapsing is usually construed as an assimilation/cultivation task, yet it should primarily be viewed as a recruitment task. That is, if our recruitment efforts align with our assimilation/cultivation efforts, our lapsed/inactive rates will plummet as a matter of course.

Translation: Time to stop building our donor files with wine tastings and auctions and our churches with face melting lasers. Time to start recruiting champions into causes.

Lest we fear that actually asking people to understand and do difficult things might tank our recruitment efforts, check out Katya Andresen’s post entitled Do People Give More If It’s Painful? (Short answer: Yes.)

Tripp York, author of The Purple Crown: The Politics of Martyrdom, reminds us that the use of face melting lasers to recruit new converts is a relatively recent development; in the early church, people actually joined the church knowing that it would likely lead to their death:

To become a Christian under the Roman Empire, at least in the first three hundred years of Christianity, entailed possible loss of goods, exile, and very often death. Christianity, therefore, was not entered into lightly. To become a Christian meant that one had to prepare for the possibility of a premature death.

Jesus’ own lapse prevention strategy went like this:

“Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.’” (Luke 14:28-30)

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