Why Shane Claiborne’s Idea of Being “Long Gone” is the Wrong Kind of Holiday Mischief

Posted on December 6, 2010 by Pastor Foley

One of my new year’s resolutions for 2011 is to try hard to agree with Shane Claiborne and Christianity Today’s Mark Galli at least one time apiece.

But it is still 2010.

Shane’s A Season for Mischief and Conspiracy: A New Take on Christmas Charity on Huffington Post is not a new take on Christmas Charity at all but rather the same old take–disappointing for a radical of Shane’s caliber.

The question Claiborne is addressing is that a rich suburban church wants to help poor folks in Claiborne’s neck of the woods, yet they want to do so in a way that preserves the dignity of the recipients. Writes Claiborne:

Here’s what we came up with. A group of us who live in the inner city pray, and then come up with a list of a dozen of our neighbors who have had a particularly difficult year — like my friend who worked for the shelter which lost its funding and had to lay everyone off, or our neighbor whose house caught on fire, or the family around the corner whose 14 year old got pregnant this year. Then, we give that list to our suburban co-conspirators, and we let each family know to expect a little visit at a set time (though we keep the details of the visit on the down-low).

On the special night, the carolers roll through the neighborhood. They visit each home with some lovely singing, deliver a plate of baked goodies, and then they head out. They are long gone by the time the family has opened the envelope underneath the cookies — which contains several hundred dollars and a note that says, “Know that you are loved. Merry Christmas.”

Last year our little mischief-makers gave away over $10,000 to families around the city. And the cool thing is the families do not even know who they are. They don’t even know the name of the congregation and may never see them again … all they are left with is a little reminder that they are loved.

It’s the last part that seems so sad and typical to me–no one, giver or recipient, comes away transformed by the miracle of ongoing relationship that transcends, rather than reinforces, the usual stereotypes.

Sadly, Shane is technically correct that this particular mischief is potentially less humiliating to recipients than other similar Christmas projects I’ve seen. But ought we not to have our sights set far higher than lauding projects that simply avoid humiliating others?

Instead, we ought to have something truly more radical in mind. To that end, a quote from my upcoming book, The Whole Life Offering: Christianity as Philanthropy, due out in February:

In Christianity-as-philanthropy, financial and material giving is the visible token and pledge of a whole life offering of comprehensive, beneficent, direct, unwarranted, unfailing friendship-love of others in the name and after the character of [God].

The predecessor of giving is repentance, shaped by comprehensive personal preparation according to the aforementioned Works of Piety. As Jesus instructs in Luke 11:41 (NASB), “But give that which is within as charity, and then all things are clean for you.”

In contrast to philanthropies, which view money as a tool for social change and the giving of money as an expression of personal values and vision, in Christianity-as-philanthropy giving is self-emptying. It is worship of [God] through the care of those he loves. This kind of giving is an end in itself, not a means to change the world. It is sacramental, not transactional. The recipient is friend of God standing in the stead of God and is regarded as such.

It is only on such a foundation that money or goods can be rendered to others in a way that does not demean or define relationships.

After the manner of Christ, all financial giving ought to be token and pledge that the giver will withhold no good thing from the recipient… rather than giving as drive-by that leaves giver and recipient no better acquainted and no more likely to bear one another’s burdens than before cookies and carols and cash are clandestinely conveyed.

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Want to Inspire Children to Live Generous Lives? Teach Them to Connect Directly, Not Just “Help”

Posted on December 1, 2010 by Pastor Foley

I think the best thing Mrs. Foley and I have done to inspire our children to live generous lives has been to fill their lives with lots of interesting aunts and uncles–homeless and formerly homeless individuals and recovering drug addicts who have either lived with us, come over to our house for dinner, or participated with our church fully as members in our church events, from Bible studies to movie nights to neighborhood outreach events. From these experiences our children learned that the phrase “those in need” is a revolving one, applying to each of us from time to time, rather than a designation of a different species who nice Christians (yet a different species) help.

“Every twelve hours the world turns,” I always tell our children, “and the people who were on the top end up on the bottom, and the people who were on the bottom end up on the top.” I think I got this from the great baseball manager Sparky Anderson, but I can’t find the original source anywhere. I’d be so happy if it turns out I made it up. But I digress.

Anyway, I was disappointed to note a lack of advocacy for the value of direct connection between children and homeless men and women in Carol Howard Merritt’s otherwise welcome post, Inspiring Children to Live Generous Lives.

Writes Merrit:

As we were trying to nurture a bit of generosity in our congregation, we talked to Chef Steve Badt of Miriam’s Kitchen. Miriam’s is located in the basement of our church. They provide a hot, nutritious breakfast and dinner as well as a full range of social services to our homeless guests in Washington, D.C. During this time of year, the children in our congregation actively support Miriam’s through Fannie Mae’s Help the Homeless Mini-Walk and by having a Thanksgiving fruit collection. In the spring they’ll continue their support as they plant an herb garden for Miriam’s.

Merritt adds several more ideas for involving kids, namely, Sponsor a food drive featuring foods kids like to eat; Host a trip for children to glean food at a farm; Highlight one item that the homeless need at this time of year.

Since I am the former president of one of the largest homeless shelters in the world, I get concerned anytime we talk about helping “the homeless,” as if we were speaking of a monolithic population, or, worse, a generally dangerous one from whom children need to be protected from direct contact. As such, given that the homeless charity Merritt writes about is located in the basement of her church, I was surprised that the ideas did not focus on enabling children to connect directly with specific homeless men and women. Dispelling stereotypes and fears related to homeless men and women may be one of the most important ways we inspire our children to live more generous lives.

Keeping with the basic ideas suggested by Merritt, why not:

  • Have kids interview homeless men and women (and children) in order to discover what they like to eat, and then have the kids bring those foods and learn to prepare them together with the residents of the shelter?
  • Arrange for a trip where children and shelter residents visit a local farm to glean produce together?
  • Have kids and shelter residents exchange Christmas gift lists so that residents can be givers as well as recipients? (“How can homeless people give gifts?” is a helpful stereotype to upend, by the way.)

I write this out of a deep conviction that teaching our children to live generous lives is more about helping them build mutualistic relationships with the oft-excluded than it is about teaching them how to “help those in need.” Here’s a bit of personal background about what it looked like for me when that light bulb came on (check out the end of the post).

Oh–and here’s a link to a post I did exactly a year ago with a list of ideas on how to inspire children to live generous lives. Few subjects are more important in philanthropy, and I am grateful to Carol Howard Merritt for stimulating the discussion once again.

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What Turkey Baskets Can Teach Us About Fundraising

Posted on November 29, 2010 by Pastor Foley

As you wade through your refrigerator of Thanksgiving turkey leftovers, make sure to check out Jan Edmiston’s phenomenal post, What Turkey Baskets Can Teach Us About Evangelism, at A Church for Starving Artists blog. Her lessons apply as equally to fundraising as to evangelism; hence, my cribbing her blog title in plagiarized tribute.

Edmiston discusses how that old charitable staple–the Thanksgiving turkey basket given to “those in need” by the churches and nonprofit organizations with which we’re associated–sends one of two messages to the recipients:

  1. We took the time to get to know you, and we wanted to give you something that showed that we learned about you and want to get to know you even better; or
  2. We eat turkey for Thanksgiving, and, since we are the haves and you are the have nots, we are giving you a turkey to eat for Thanksgiving. And you should be grateful for it.

She writes about Casa Chirilagua, a DC-area nonprofit that provided Thanksgiving baskets containing beans and rice and maseca to their Latino neighbors.

(Do check out the link to Casa Chirilagua. Worth noting that the organization’s motto is “Learning Together to Love Our Neighbors As Ourselves”–a tremendous Transformational Giving-type motto. Not only do my toes tingle at the thought of a Christian nonprofit taking as its purpose “learning together”; I also value the recognition that loving our neighbors as ourselves is something altogether different than loving our neighbors as if they were the same as us–a common ailment among us churches and nonprofits.)

Writes Edmiston:

We in the church are slowly learning that we need to minister to the people who happen to be around us, without assuming that we know what they like/want/need. We might assume that pumpkin pie is the only way to go. But they might actually be mango pudding people.

How do we know?

We recognize our relationship as neighbors. Love each other. Talk with each other. See each other as equals and friends. For too long, the church has come in, taken charge, and then gone home…

It’s so much easier to make a convenient plan (convenient for us) and deliver the goods to “the needy” rather than nurture relationships with people who need support to the point that their issues become ours. We congratulate ourselves for sending checks to faraway lands without any followup. How much harder it is to have authentic relationships with the pregnant teens in Huntsville or the blind students in Kerala.

Application to fundraising:

Use even the simplest and most common “drives”–clothing drive, turkey drive, sock drive–to upend stereotypes about the population you serve. Enable your donors to “learn together” to love these individuals as real people, not as stereotypical objects of pity but as fascinating subjects of God’s purpose, worth our time to get to know well so that we can love them in the same way Christ does–i.e., as personally as possible.

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