Fundraising Advice for Struggling Churches

Posted on September 24, 2010 by Pastor Foley

From Daniel Threlfall’s upcoming Sharefaith interview. Question’s his, answer’s mine.

We’re a financially struggling church. We hardly have enough money to replace our threadbare carpet, let alone give our money away. Do you have any advice?

I would say you don’t have a carpet challenge or a financial challenge. You have a discipleship challenge. I’ve not yet seen a church where comprehensive Christian discipleship was taught where giving was a problem.

Unfortunately, much contemporary discipleship training can’t figure out how to integrate giving into the training process, so they break it out and teach it separately as “stewardship”. So they run into the same problems I mentioned earlier, and they end up struggling financially like other churches.

So the key is to establish, embrace, and implement a comprehensive program of discipleship that grows Christians to fullness in Christ, where their giving is one part of a much wider pattern of personal involvement they have in the things that God cares about.

Financial gifts are nothing more or less than token and pledge that the Christian will be “all in” with their time and their passion and their participation in a given cause.

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What is Transformational Giving?

Posted on September 22, 2010 by Pastor Foley

Sharefaith‘s Daniel Threlfall recently did an interview with me that will appear soon on the site. He asked me a series of really insightful questions about the basics of Transformational Giving and the Whole Life Offering. As I answered Daniel’s questions, I realized I have never written succinct answers in this blog to some of these most foundational questions about TG. So it seemed to me they bore repeating here. I’ll be posting the questions and answers over the next week and change. Thanks to Daniel for the provocative prompt.

“Transformational Giving” is a term that you use. Can you explain it? Who’s being transformed? How? Why?

Transformational Giving is a general term for the growing movement to teach Christians financial giving in the wider context of comprehensive Christian discipleship.

Churches and Christian NGOs either talk way too much or way too little about financial giving. Some have the idea that increased financial giving comes as a result of better and more creative tools, techniques, and strategies designed to motivate people to give. But that actually doesn’t work. During the history of modern fundraising—roughly the last fifty years—the percentage that the average Christian donates to charity has remained unchanged. It sits right around 3%, whether the economy is good or bad. And even though churches and Christian NGOs have implemented tons of new tools, techniques, and strategies, the average Christian actually gave away a higher percentage of their income during the Great Depression than they do today. They forget that the one power God never delegates to human beings is the power to change the human heart. So God stands guard at the entrance to the human heart and refuses to grant deep and lasting access to the practitioners of these tools, techniques, and strategies. Because it’s not how he grows Christians to full maturity in Christ.

On the other hand, some churches and Christian NGOs assume that people will give more if we don’t talk about money. They consider it a kind of virtue to not talk about money. But this overlooks the reality that giving, like every other element of discipleship, is learned through explicit teaching and guided practice. God commands us to teach Christians how to do it well. Since many churches don’t talk about giving, it’s no surprise that in the United States, 5% of church attendees account for 60% of the giving, 50% of the attendees account for 1% of the giving, and 20% of attendees give nothing.

“Stewardship” is often presented as the answer, but it is pretty weak broth. It looks in the wrong end of the telescope and shrinks biblical discipleship down to the task of making good and generous investments of one’s time, talent, and financial gifts. But in Romans 12:1-2, the focus is not on the transformation of the steward’s resources. The focus is on the presentation of the Christian’s whole life as an offering. God is less concerned about our donations and more about who we are becoming as we make them. Stewardship is too small a category when what we’re talking about here is being transformed into the likeness of Christ!

So Transformational Giving contends that comprehensive discipleship is the biblical framework for talking about giving. It recognizes that the giving of Christians parallels their overall maturity in Christ. So if you want to grow giving in a particular area of a Christian’s life, you have to grow their overall maturity in Christ in that area. A Christian’s financial donation will be roughly the same size as their head, their heart, and their hands in relation to a particular cause.

Embarrassingly, secular fundraisers have known this for years. Beginning in 2001, a series of studies have shown that a person who is asked to become comprehensively involved in a cause will be 50% more likely to give financially to the cause than a person who is just asked to support the cause financially. And that’s common sense, really. We give to what we care about. Transformational Giving says, “Let’s work with the Holy Spirit to grow Christians to full maturity in Christ in the causes Christ cares about. Let’s grow them not only financially but holistically.”

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Should Christians give money to beggars?

Posted on September 20, 2010 by Pastor Foley

Just returned from a deeply impactful trip to Cambodia where I taught the Whole Life Offering material for the first time, to the Child Evangelism Fellowship Asia-Pacific Conference. Teaching WLO was beyond great, but the personal highlight of the trip for me was having the opportunity to preach to the poorest of Cambodia’s poor at a squatter’s camp of 10,000 outside of Phnom Penh. It’s in such moments that one discovers whether one has any good news worth sharing.

So that was the experience floating around in my mind when I read Holden Karnofsky’s post, Should I Give Out Cash In Mumbai?

Worthwhile reading, that.

Holden considers three options (give cash to those who beg for it, give cash randomly to people whether they beg or not, or give cash to a local nonprofit) before deciding that giving to a local nonprofit may be the approach that has the most to commend it.

My own list of options would look quite different than Holden’s for reasons I shared recently with Sharefaith‘s Daniel Threlfall in an interview that will be published on the site. Threlfall asked me, “Should I give to a beggar who comes up to me on the street and just asks for money?”

To which I replied:

In Christian discipleship, we can only ever give ourselves. Money given in Jesus’ name is just the token and pledge that the Christian will withhold no good thing from the one to whom the money is given. So if you are giving money to the beggar to make him go away, you have actually robbed him. God expects us to give the beggar far more. Because that’s what he himself does with beggars like us. He gives himself. Having received him, then, our calling is to give ourselves back to him on the altar of the world. That’s our reasonable worship.  So offer the beggar Christ’s friendship-love, of which your financial giving is gloriously but the smallest part.

Sum it up and ask:

What should we be giving when we are on the streets of Mumbai?

My answer:

At least a day.

You know you’re going to encounter beggars on the trip, so plan it into your itinerary. Take an interpreter. Tell the beggar that you do not have a lot of money but as a Christian you want to give what you can to help, since you yourself received help when you begged for it from God. Ask him or her to teach you about life in the slums. Go visit him or her where s/he generally stays (even homeless people generally squat somewhere). Be a good guest. By all means share the Gospel as your greatest gift. When it comes time to give, give what God has revealed to you is the most helpful gift you can give.

At worst, your gift will likely be more effective than many provided by the United Nations.

When I went to the squatter’s settlement, my hosts pointed out to me the rows of unused toilets built by the U.N. “The U.N. thought the squatters needed toilets,” said Joy, a Korean missionary kid raised and educated through the undergraduate level at Cambodian schools. “So the U.N. built toilets. The locals found them odd and did not use them much. Didn’t know how to maintain them. They just avoid them now.”

Joy is heading to England for year two of her master’s degree in Urban Development. In year one they asked her and the other students what was their goal and vision. Joy gave this a lot of thought and said, “Home. I want everyone to have a place that they joyfully regard as home.”

“That is rather immature,” said her professors, who do not live in Cambodia.

“What would be mature?” Joy inquired.

“Reducing the rate of poverty. Increasing the number of liveable housing units. That kind of thing.”

Ah.

I am glad for Joy’s “immaturity.” I hope she does not lose it in year two.

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