One Christian’s Perspective on The Giving Pledge, Part I: Two Very Different Giving Pledges

Posted on August 23, 2010 by Pastor Foley

Even in the midst of several really excellent pieces from secular writers on the Giving Pledge (my own favorites are here, here, here, and one particularly insightful piece I’m saving for the end of this post), I’ve been surprised not to see more vigorous discussion among Christians of this billionaire-driven challenge to America’s billionaires to give away more than half their wealth to charity. Since nature abhors a vacuum even in virtual reality, I’ve decided to devote this week’s posts to my own (Christian) perspective on the Giving Pledge.

We begin our consideration of the topic by contrasting the focus of two different “billionaire pledges”—the first from the Giving Pledge and the second from Zacchaeus the tax collector.

First, from America’s billionaires:

The Giving Pledge is an effort to help address society’s most pressing problems by inviting the wealthiest American families and individuals to commit to giving more than half of their wealth to philanthropy or charitable causes either during their lifetime or after their death.

Second, from Zaccheus the tax collector:

Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was wealthy. He wanted to see who Jesus was, but being a short man he could not, because of the crowd. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way. When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.” So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly.All the people saw this and began to mutter, “He has gone to be the guest of a ‘sinner.’ “

But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.”

Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.”

Zacchaeus is not helping address society’s most pressing problems. Instead, he is repenting as a result of his warm, personal, unwarranted encounter with Jesus Christ.

In the same vein, Peter Wilby, in an especially insightful piece entitled The Rich Want a Better World? Try Paying Fair Wages and Tax suggests that the greatest social impact of all may come from the repentance of the philanthrocapitalists themselves:

If the rich really wish to create a better world, they can sign another pledge: to pay their taxes on time and in full; to stop lobbying against taxation and regulation; to avoid creating monopolies; to give their employees better wages, pensions, job protection and working conditions; to make goods and use production methods that don’t kill or maim or damage the environment or make people ill. When they put their names to that, there will be occasion not just for applause but for street parties.

There is an irony in the claim of the Giving Pledge that “the Giving Pledge is specifically focused on billionaires”.  In truth, the Giving Pledge is not focused on billionaires but rather on social problems as understood and reshaped by billionaires according to their values and experience. Absent a Zacchaeus-like transformation, it is difficult to imagine such philanthropy not being warped by what Samuel Torvend expositing Martin Luther (p. 32) called our “strong inward curvature” which “pull[s] everything, consciously and unconsciously, into the orbit of self.”

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Church Marketing: Market the Message AND the Community Formed by It

Posted on August 20, 2010 by Pastor Foley

Here’s a church-angled follow-up to our post last week, Marketing is what happens when relationship fails.

The blog site Q considers whether Christianity is amenable to being marketed as a “product”, ultimately deciding in the negative:

Let’s think for a minute about what Christianity is and why it doesn’t make a good “product.” For one thing, products must be subject to markets, yet God is not subject to the consumer needs or wants of any market. God only and ever deals on his own terms. His grace comes from within him and is bestowed on us as he pleases. It doesn’t come when we are ready for it or when we long for it. We struggle to fathom something that can’t be purchased “on demand” in this day and age, but Christianity is one such thing. God saves at his discretion and on his watch.

Good stuff. And yet the title of the post, Church: Marketing a Non-Commercial Message, implies an interesting assumption, namely, that what one would be marketing–were one to be marketing it (which Q suggests one should not)–would be “the message”:

Another reason why Christianity doesn’t make a good product is that it doesn’t lend itself to an easy commercial sale. Sure, there are appealing things about it, but there are also not-so-appealing things about it (um… taking up one’s cross, avoiding sin and worldliness, etc.). And although the Gospel is wonderfully simple in the sense that even a child can recognize its truth, it is also mind-blowingly complex in a way that doesn’t lend itself to thirty-second jingles.

The potential danger here is a slide into a conception of Christianity that can be adequately expounded entirely through propositions–a perspective on which Jesus makes an interesting comment in John 5:39-40 which is brought out nicely in The Message translation:

“You have your heads in your Bibles constantly because you think you’ll find eternal life there. But you miss the forest for the trees. These Scriptures are all about me! And here I am, standing right before you, and you aren’t willing to receive from me the life you say you want.”

So marketing “the message”–the propositional aspect of the Gospel–in disembodied form typically leads to “missing the forest for the trees”.

Marketing the embodiment of “the message”–the church community itself–is a concept that receives attention from Carol Howard Merritt in a Huffington Post piece from last week provocatively titled, Church Charity In The 21st Century. She relates a conversation she had at a party recently when a fellow partygoer asked her, “So what do you do?” When Carol answered, “I’m a pastor”, she received a notable reply from her interlocutor:

“Oh my God,” she responded. “I never knew why anyone would go to church. But last year, my mom got sick. She’s divorced, and I’m living hundreds of miles away from her, so I didn’t know what we were going to do. And her church totally took care of her. They brought her meals. They drove her to the doctor. They called me when anything out of the ordinary happened.”

“Yeah. That’s what the good churches do.”

“Really?” She looked completely confused as she continued, “I had no idea. You should really advertise that.” I laughed, and we talked for a bit more about her career. But, her initial comments stuck with me as I walked away and snagged a rare empty space on the couch. I looked at the crowd of mingling people, and the loud music triggered my thoughts. It never occurred to me that people wouldn’t know that churches care for the sick. What had church become in the minds of most people?

The last question is a fair one to ask and a painful one to answer. Carol posits a reply worth discussing:

While many civic organizations have become relics of the past, spiritual communities still thrive in our society, as a place of solidarity in all stages in life. In our sanctuary, there is a space where CEOs and homeless people sit together in the same pew. We’re a gathering where people from diverse ethnicities work with one another. It is a setting where the young and the old support each other when we’re in spiritual, emotional, or physical need. It is a place I can go to in times of faith or in doubt. When I’m too weak to hold any belief in God or myself, I know that a community holds it for me. And I can be strong for others when they falter. It is a sanctuary, in a broad sense of the term, where people can question and work to make the world a better place.

Two posts, two approaches to marketing the church.

The Book of Acts suggests a third and different approach, however: Since “the message” is incomplete unless it is embodied, the marketing of the church requires the presentation of both “the message” and the community formed by it if the transmission is to be complete.

Simon Sinek’s Start With Why is especially relevant in this regard. If we keep the “why” in mind, we’ll market neither the propositions nor the community separately, as the “why”–why do we feed the sick and visit the shut-ins, why do we gather together across age and economic boundaries, why do we stay together when we’re weak–links the two:

Any organization can explain what it does; some can explain how they do it; but very few can clearly articulate why. WHY is not money or profit– those are always results. WHY does your organization exist? WHY does it do the things it does? WHY do customers really buy from one company or another? WHY are people loyal to some leaders, but not others?

Q is right that we can’t just market the “what”. Howard Merritt’s “how” is compelling but incomplete. Church marketing–and Christian nonprofit marketing, too, for that matter–depends on the “why” for its power and persuasiveness.

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What’s The Best Donation You Ever Made Through a Nonprofit?

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Pastor Foley

The folks at WiseBread are running a contest where readers write in to identify the best purchase they ever made in their life.

While I was initially simultaneously transfixed and unnerved by readers responses to date–“6 years of school” and “a small house during grad school” sit side by side with Sara3903’s note that her best purchase ever was “laser hair removal”–I eventually came to and found myself asking:

What’s the best donation I’ve ever made through a nonprofit?

Two realizations initially emerged:

  1. I could think of a lot of meaningful donations I’ve made. None of the really meaningful ones that came to mind at first were ones I made through a nonprofit, however. That’s telling, and not in a good way for us nonprofit fundraiser types.
  2. For the number, variety, and amount of donations Mrs. Foley and I have given over the years, it was pretty sad that this was a hard question.

I know the folks at GiveWell might cluck their tongues that I didn’t rank order my donations by their effectiveness and efficiency, but as I reflected on the giving Mrs. Foley and I had done, I came to the conclusion that I would consider effectiveness to be necessary but not sufficient, and I think efficiency is typically defined in cold and dehumanizing ways.

In the end, I concluded that there were three types of donations Mrs. Foley and I had given that were my most favorite:

1.  Donations of personally meaningful gifts-in-kind

I’m talking here about really good stuff we hated to part with, not  junky stuff on its last leg. I thought of two cars that my family and I had donated to different homeless shelters over the years–cars that ran well and that we could have used for several more years, but cars that we felt we were under-using at the time and thus were better used by people who couldn’t afford them. I also thought of one Christmas when I was a student pastor, and how I and the family had purchased and anonymously donated through our church a brand new Nintendo video gaming unit to a woman whose husband had left her high and dry with four kids. We were dirt poor at the time, would have enjoyed the videogame unit ourselves, and spent our Christmas bonus to buy it. I’m not sure if that was effective or efficient, but the memory of it has stayed with me for more than 20 years. Maybe that’s why I like With This Ring so much. They teach people to give away their coolest stuff in order to help dig clean water wells in Africa and to teach others to give radically, too.

2. Donations that made a strong statement about a particular way we felt like a cause should be addressed

Here I thought of the gift Mrs. Foley and I made in the wake of the Haitian earthquake. I wrote about that here. What made it one of the best donations I’d given wasn’t just that I feel like the gift was efficient and effective. It was that I prayed about and deeply considered all the possible options and then chose the way that I myself felt the cause should be addressed. It was a gift of affiliation, a concept about which we wrote recently.

3. Donations we made as part of an overarching plan.

What also came to mind for me were our efforts to think through and carry out an overarching plan for giving, one that moved beyond causes about which we were already passionate and into causes about which we knew we needed to become more passionate and involved. It wasn’t the particular donation in and of itself that was the best; rather, it was the sense that we were maturing in our giving, carrying out a thoughtful plan of involvement that was comprehensive, proportional, and maturing in terms of the causes it encompassed and how it encompassed them.

The most interesting thing to me about the list I created was its repeatability. I had thought that “best gifts” could only occur once in a while, and that expecting each gift to be a best gift would be an unreasonable standard.

But as I looked at the list, I realized:

  • I can regularly give away items of value to me.
  • I can regularly make thoughtful gifts that express affiliation and particular ways of addressing a cause.
  • I can regularly give as part of an overarching strategy that moves my giving in the direction of my involvement in causes becoming more comprehensive, proportional, and mature.

The other thing I realized about the list was that no fundraiser could have made any of those things happen for me. They were intrinsic to my life and to the meanings therein. The nonprofit served as the platform, but not as the solicitor or meaning maker.

And how about your best gift?

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