Do the Word

Thanks to Joanne Fritz for the link to the story of the Salwen family, authors of the new book, The Power of Half, in which they chronicle their Transformational Giving style journey of selling their home, giving half of the proceeds to the poor, and–well, they didn’t quite complete the biblical trifecta, but life is a long time.

If you haven’t yet heard the story, you’ll want to at least read the article if not the book. For purposes of this blog, what I want to do is to parse that story for you into P, E, and O elements, since their story illustrates the progression so well.

The P stage (short-term, high-touch, high-yield, understandable with reference to itself, containing a foretaste of the whole enchilada):

Still, Kevin [the father] believes that generosity is not all nurture. A person’s nature plays into their willingness to give, and his daughter Hannah has that giving nature. Her nature kicked into high gear when they were stopped at a red light three years ago with a Mercedes on one side and a homeless man on the other. Hannah remarked that if the person didn’t own the expensive Mercedes, the homeless man could have a meal. That led to her fervent request that her family do more to help others.

So they sold their home, bought one for half the cost, and embarked on a year-long family study of where and how to give away half of the proceeds from the sale. They ultimately chose to give through The Hunger Project to aid Ghana. And they went to Ghana to see it all through.

(This is a good time to note that the aforementioned all falls within the P category. People sometimes mistakenly think of P, E, and O differing by degree of commitment, but nothing could be further from the truth. Most people stay at the P level in their giving. Some become super highly committed Ps, staying red hot and rollin’ all throughout their life for the projects they care about. What makes a person a P is simply that their relationship to the cause is mediated by a formal, structured project–in this case, even a radical project like selling your home and giving away half the proceeds.)

Our best estimate so far at Muppet Labs is that 70% of champions stay at the P stage. 30%, however, transition on to E, which is exactly what the Salwens did:

What the Salwens did is impressive; however, what has happened to them as a family is equally as impressive. Their project transformed the family in what Kevin says is “a magical way.” Without intending to, the family “traded stuff for a deeper level of connectedness, and trust, and togetherness.” What would seem like a difficult step to most people, downsizing from a luxurious home and giving away $800,000, is “just certainly an amazingly easy deal” when you realize what the family gained.

The move from P to E happens when the cause breaks through the project and into the person’s everyday life. It’s not necessarily that they stop doing the project but rather that their relationship to the cause extends beyond it. In this case, the process of selling the home, researching charities, giving the money away, and visiting Ghana transformed the Salwens. Giving broke out of its structured project bounds and remade the very relationships between family members. To wit:

Kevin believes that the process of digging into each of their deeper values as they went though the process of choosing where to invest the money opened lines of communication among the family that had never been there before. The teens saw their parents as more than just parents, and Kevin and Joan saw their children for who they really were at their core.

Of those who move on to Engagement, around 10% progress to the O stage. At O, the individual recognizes that it is their responsibility–not a nonprofit’s or a supposed expert’s–to spread the cause within their sphere of influence, recruiting those they know to P-level participation. Here’s what that looks like in the case of the Salwens:

The family realized that there was a book to be written about the transformative effect of their project. The Power of Half was written by Kevin and Hannah to “help inspire other people to just take a good look at their lives and recognize what they have more than enough of” so that they can get out in the world to help others and themselves the way the Salwen family did.

They don’t believe others need to sell their house. They want others to look at what is possible for them. “The book,” Kevin says, “provides a roadmap for how people can make that decision of what they have more than enough of” and figure out what their half is. They can get together with their family or their community and decide how they can be out there “doing a little bit of good in the world.”

And that’s what it looks like to go from P to E to O. Perfect. Enjoy the book.

Here’s a quote from Paul Thompson of Twin Falls, Idaho, one of the 10 missionaries that are now back from Haiti after being imprisoned on charges related to trafficking Haitian children:

We’re four guys — well, we’re a group of 10 people — that are convinced that it’s better to get up off the couch and go and help people than just sit on a couch and do nothing.

As a guy who doesn’t like couch duty myself, I fully understand the sentiment–and yet as a trainer of nonprofits, I’d want to commend Option C to all of us in the future.

• If Option A is sitting on a couch and doing nothing, and
• Option B is getting up off the couch and going and helping people in a way that lands you and your posse in the slammer, then
• Option C is recognizing that it is incumbent upon us to deny ourselves the couch in the first place and instead devote our time to being coached and trained in growing to the fullness of Christ in all of the areas in which He calls us to serve…before disaster hits.

Many volunteer champions have served–and continue to serve–knowledgeably and with distinction in Haiti.

I have my ministry with you today because of the efforts of one of them.

Pastor Bill Rogers, who has gone on to be with the Lord, loved Haiti so much that he would always cry–always–when he talked about it. He took work teams and mission teams there every year. He spread the word about Haiti and the need for our love and care there to anyone who would listen. He raised funds and sent them on for projects he could not complete himself.

This was all in the 1980s, when Bill was serving as pastor of Mt. Olive United Methodist Church, where I arrived as a pukey-faced fall-down-in-the-mud Gentile who didn’t know nothin’ from nothin’ about the Christian faith. I met Bill because Tim Rush, the newsman with whom I was working at the time on WBAT Radio, where I was doing the morning show while going to college, asked me to go to church with him. I did.

I met Bill there, and Bill was the first Christian worker who ever coached and mentored me. He taught me how to get up off the couch and serve the Lord. Because of Bill, I became a pastor with a passion for teaching other Christians to get up off the couch and serve the Lord in ways that pair zeal with knowledge.

That passion remains vigorous to that day.

If Bill were alive to have heard about the missionaries from Haiti noted above, I believe he would have simply said, “Oh my.” And that would have been enough, since anyone who knew Bill knew what that meant.

So as I reflect on Paul Thompson’s words, above, what I am ultimately left praying for is that God might raise up among all of us a new generation of Bill Rogerses who call people to rise up off the couch to be coached and trained to serve on the front lines of ministry year after year after year, knowledgeably and with distinction.

Just like Bill.

We’ve begun considering Tim Muldoon’s book on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius and what insight the exercises might be able to shed on the P/E/O process that is at the heart of Transformational Giving.

In our last post, we noted that imitation is the engine of champion coaching.

Ignatius, recovering from a devastating leg injury, found himself enthralled by the biographies of great Christians–so much so, in fact, that he visualized himself doing even greater deeds than they had done.

Continues Muldoon:

In his autobiography , [Ignatius] writes of this period with a certain self-criticism, for he understood later in his life that this early period was a romanticized kind of spirituality. Many people fall into a similar pattern, thinking of spirituality in grand terms but missing it in the most basic, everyday ways. I’ve seen it among college students, who very often are willing to go and work in soup kitchens, travel to Appalachia or South America and do service work, or devote hours to participating in retreats, but don’t apply this same kindness and generosity in their sexual lives, for example. One writer has described the spiritual life as involving first a movement of self-knowledge, then a movement away from self-centeredness. Many of us get stuck, though, in a very self-centered spirituality.

Call this “the danger of getting stuck at P”, or Participation level, of champion development.

Now, make no mistake about it: P is vital to champion development. Without structured, formal, short-term, high-touch, high-impact activities that are understandable in and of themselves, it’s hard to get champions involved in causes with which they are generally unfamiliar or uncomfortable.

The problem comes when we let them stay there, or even work to keep them there–which is exactly what most of us nonprofits do.

Instead of coaching champions to extend beyond programmatic involvement in a cause into a level of maturity where they are practicing the cause intentionally and informally in their everyday lives, we nonprofits have a tendency to feel very uncomfortable helping our champions to experience and impact the cause directly outside of our programs.

The result? Champions drown in a sea of self-centered spirituality.

In other words, champions refuse to engage with the cause except for on their own terms. Their own timing. Their own programmatic preferences. Their own starting and ending point.

I can recall this with a volunteer at our learning center when I was at the Los Angeles Mission.

You’d be hard pressed to find a more dedicated champion. Came every Tuesday. Taught for several hours. Even gave sizeable gifts on top of that. Most nonprofits would assume she was an “O” (Owner) because she was so involved.

But P, E, and O don’t differ by degree, like lukewarm, medium, and hot. They differ by kind. And the move from P to E happens when an individual’s commitment to the cause “breaks through” the programmatic (and necessarily romanticized) training wheels and into the vagaries of the champion’s everyday life.

That never happened for this particular volunteer. The training wheels never came off. Years in, the volunteer was no more comfortable or competent running into homeless people at the gas station or highway offramp or parking lot than anyone in the general public would be.

P had become, in other words, a prison. Or, alternatively, a set of blinders that made it possible for the person to not have to see or engage with the cause in real life. The volunteer only had to deal with homeless people in the learning center of the Los Angeles Mission on Tuesdays. Other than that, homeless people didn’t really exist as subjects with which to engage.

We’re all familiar with the dangers of not moving from P to E in the form of our difficulty in transitioning from dieting (which is a P-level activity) to a lifetime of healthy eating practices (which is an E-level activity). Many folks bounce from diet to diet to diet hoping to find one that will lead to permanent weight loss. But diets don’t lead to permanent weight loss. To be effective, diets must “break out”  into a lifetime of healthy eating practices. This is why some diets are better than others. The grapefruit diet is deficient in this regard, since it does not break out into a lifetime of healthy eating practices. Sure, you can lose weight on it. But you’ll gain it right back once you complete the “P” activity of grapefruit dieting.

That’s the danger of getting stuck at P.

Most nonprofits have a difficult time coaching champions from P to E because the P to E move means giving up our illusion that the cause we’re engaged in is simple, neat, clean, and soluble. As Muldoon wrote:

In short, [Ignatius] formulated his spiritual exercises as a way that people could get rid of their illusions and focus on what is important in life.

So P activities can either help us get rid of our illusions–by leading us to informal, intentional Engagement with the cause in our everyday lives–or they can become new illusions for us, making us feel confident and comfortable in a program-based life of self-centered spirituality egged on by nonprofits and missionaries who can unfortunately become much more interested in our money than in our growth.