Do the Word

Great quote here from Ken Gergen, author of the one of the best fundraising books of the year that has precisely nothing to do with fundraising, Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community:

*If a policeman says “Stop where you are.”… you become a suspect.

*If a salesperson says, “Can I help you?” …you become a customer.

*If your wife says, “Can you give me a hand, honey?” … you become a husband.

*If your child says, “Mommy come quick.” …you become a mother.

Others call us into being as a suspect, a customer, a husband, a mother, and so on. Would we be any of these without such callings?

So where do donors come from?

From nonprofits who call out to people, “We need money to do our work. Do you have any money to give us?”

We nonprofits could issue out any number of types of calls to members of the public. In the process we could call into being volunteers, champions, apprentices, learners, amateurs (in the best sense of the word), budding experts, students, cause-centered communities, and disciples.

But the fact that we value people primarily for their ability to give us their money means that we seldom call into being anything other than donors.

In our previous post we wrote about the historical appeal that never quite happened–the one that didn’t quite incorporate what we now know about the extensive involvement of ordinary champions in international affairs and how to channel that on behalf of our causes.

Today we rewrite history by rewriting the speech that Coach coulda/shoulda/sure wish he woulda given to the million men who had come to Washington DC for Promise Keepers’ Stand in the Gap event.

Here’s the speech that could have been (make sure to imagine this being thundered out in Coach’s good ol’ scratchy voice):

What we see here today is truly an awesome work of God. It happened because YOU spread the word to your friends, to your co-workers, to people you met on the road. And I can’t tell you how proud I am of every one of you, because I’d probably bust out crying. But we haven’t yet gone far enough! You’re all connected to the guys on your block, to the guys where you work… But you’re also connected to guys all over the world. So today it’s time for each one of us to take up the next challenge – the challenge of spreading what we’ve done here today, to every country of the world!

Instead, Coach kind of just dropped the “i-bomb” (“Promise Keepers is goin’ international–and we’re gonna need your support!”) on everyone, and it was total crickets.

Oh, people applauded and cheered. They just didn’t applaud and cheer like people who were really excited about something they were going to do. They applauded and cheered like people who had been told what someone they liked was going to do. “That’s great, Coach! Good on ya. So, what else are we doing today?”

You see, in that field full of men, there were men with connections in every country on earth. Places where their churches did mission work, or where their brother-in-law had once lived, or where their companies did business – places where the PK network could have expanded because the men in it took the lead. Instead, we tried to do it top-down – our plan, our ministry, with a million donors standing around in a field waiting for us to tell them where to send the check.

And, of course, it didn’t quite work.

What I remember most is that I was standing behind two big ol’ boys wearing PK baseball caps and PK polo shirts stretched tightly over their big ol’ bellies.  The one guy furrowed his brow, turned to the other guy, and said:

“International?  I ain’t goin’ international.  Are you goin’ international?”

We had missed the point.

Promise Keepers wasn’t “going” international. It already was international. It just didn’t know it.

Your ministry’s champions have already gone international, too. Maybe you just didn’t know that yet either? Or, if you did, how are you channeling that existing international involvement toward your cause?

I once stood in the middle of a million men who had come to Washington for a Promise Keepers event and there learned the greatest lesson I could ever learn about how to involve champions in international ministry causes…

…and how not to.

It happened on the afternoon of October 4, 1997.

Do you remember that date, by any chance?

It was the date of Promise Keepers’ “million man gathering”—Stand In The Gap.  I was a VP at the Russ Reid Company at the time, and we been asked to work with Promise Keepers to develop a recruiting and marketing plan for the event.

At last, October 4th came.

None of us knew what to expect, of course, but when–at 9 o’clock in the morning–somebody blew a shofar and we all started singing, “Holy, Holy, Holy”, everything just felt great.  From then on, it was a total high.  And I hardly remember what any of those speakers said, or any of the problems we undoubtedly had, or what I ate for lunch, or any of those things.

Until that afternoon.

Coach—Bill McCartney—was giving his big address. All day he had been raising the Spirit in these men with the incredible energy and love that Coach brings to the table. He had built up that he had a major surprise to unveil – something that would really rock our world! Coach said, in his great, hoarse, scratchy, tough voice:

Promise Keepers is gonna go international!

Interestingly, I remember the moment more for what it lacked than for what it contained. What it lacked was passionate, thunderous applause. And this was odd, because just about every other sentence had elicited passionate, thunderous applause from about a million men that day.

“License plate BR549.  Your lights are on.”  YEEEEAAAAAAAHHHHH!

“Does anybody have change for a 50?”  YEEAAAAAAAAHHHHH!

“How do I get back to Cleveland from here?”  YEAAAAAAHHHHH!

I’m sure Coach and Promise Keepers had worked for months on the international plan. They knew the organization needed to be a global force, not just an American one. They knew that the PK message was needed by men in every nation. And so they viewed the million man gathering as the perfect place to announce the PK plan—their plan.

And that’s what seem to cause the relative hush as Coach said, “WE’RE going international!”

It was as if a million guys simultaneously thought, “Who’s WE?” This was a plan they didn’t recognize; a vision that had been sprung on them, not transferred to them.

What would the alternative been?

We’ll take a shot at rewriting Coach’s coulda-been historic appeal in the next post.