Do the Word

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.

A recurring Transformational Giving question goes something like this:

“I understand how a local ministry could get its champions to participate in ministry projects and then coach them into engagement in the cause. But my ministry is international. How do I get champions and potential champions to participation and then on into engagement in my international ministry cause if I can’t get them to the field?”

Answer:

An overwhelming number of champions are already active internationally–we just didn’t know it and didn’t think to ask!

Consider the following beefy, information-rich quote from Robert Wuthnow’s brilliant new book, Boundless Faith. Granted, it’s the longest paragraph in history, but what a paragraph!

[I]nternational telephone traffic quadrupled between 1991 and 2004. Another indication is that the number of air passengers traveling from the United States to other countries grew from about ten million in 1975 to nearly sixty million in 2000. Nearly two-thirds (62 percent) of active church members in the United States have traveled or lived in another country. One in seven (14 percent) has lived in another country for at least a year. More than four in ten (43 percent) have friends or relatives who live outside the United States. Vacations, foreign study, military service, and business all contribute to these international connections. Eleven percent of active church members have served in the armed forces. Among church members currently working, 37 percent say they routinely interact with people from other countries at work. Immigration is another source of transnational ties. Although the United States is historically a nation of immigrants, the pace of immigration in the past three decades has been considerably greater than it was during the preceding half century. Approximately twenty-two million more came as undocumented workers. The impact was especially evident among young males in their twenties, the percentage of whom were foreign born jumping from 4 percent in 1970 to 18 percent in 2000. Currently, 8 percent of active church members are immigrants, 14 percent are children of immigrants, and 74 percent attend congregations in which recent immigrants are present. Besides having personal ties and experiences abroad, most Americans regularly consume information about the wider world through the mass media. Among active church members, 38 percent claim to be “very interested” in news about other countries. Three-quarters watch news about other parts of the world on CNN, MSNBC, Fox news, or other channels at least once a week; a quarter read about international news at least once a week in a national newspaper; and four in ten obtain information about foreign events at least once a week from the Internet.

Crucial insight:

If we can get champions to think missionally about the international contacts they already have–daily!–we have a powerful and readily available platform for growing them in international ministry causes.

I once saw an organization overlook that insight a million times on the same day–and they’re still paying for it.

I’ll tell you that story in the next post.

Some months back I wrote a post that begin like so:

Unless we can come to grips with the idea that a monthly giver might be a lapsed champion, we’ll never understand Transformational Giving.

It’s a crazy idea. But as many crazy ideas are, it’s a biblical one. Check out these words of Jesus from Revelation 2:1-5:

To the angel of the church in Ephesus write:
These are the words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand and walks among the seven golden lampstands: I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked men, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them false. You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary. Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love. Remember the height from which you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place.

The sixth and final key to growing in generosity is the recognition of this great truth:

Growing in generosity is not about giving more. It is about giving more deeply.

The peril in giving strategically and systematically, then, is that we will in a perfunctory manner, with less than our whole hearts and intentions.

The cure for this peril, however, is not to revert to giving that is sporadic and random; after all, “heart” in the Bible means more than “feeling”.

Instead, the cure is to ensure that each gift we make is first and foremost and offering to God.

Simple suggestions, but ones that work for me in this regard:

• If you give via EFT (i.e., an auto-transfer from your bank account), don’t have your donations all come out on the same day. Spread them throughout the month, and, as the gifts auto-deduct one at a time from your account,
• Offer each one prayerfully to the Lord. To get you started, here’s a list of offertory prayers that you can adapt to your family’s own giving circumstances. (You are going to do this with your family…right?) Pray them with your family each day you make a gift, and as you prepare your offering before you go to church each Sunday.
• If EFT makes you less mindful of your giving, stop giving by EFT. Better to enter heaven with your checks cut than to take the broad information highway which leads to destruction.
• If you give by writing out checks, write out the checks as per usual, but pray over each one using prayers like the ones noted above.
• Call your contact at the ministry to which you’re giving and together pray an offertory prayer with them each month as you give your gift.
• Sing! The doxology (“Praise God from whom all blessings flow/Praise Him all creatures here below”) never ceases to draw me into gratitude and worship. Why not sing as you carry your donations to the mailbox, or as you enter your EFT gifts into your checkbook?

It is not hard to come up with rituals to help you give more deeply.

It is, however, easy to auto-forsake your first love as you seek ways to be more efficient with your time and money.