Do the Word

Yes, the worker deserves his wages. And yes, those who preach the gospel should earn their living from the gospel.

But we Christian workers employed by churches and nonprofit ministries face a subtle but very real temptation when it comes to our time, namely:

We’re willing to work endless extra hours without compensation for our own ministry or cause…

…but what about donating our time to organizations and causes other than our own?

“Well, yeah, but…” we want to splutter and mutter with every fiber of our overworked beings. “The last thing I need is to spend more time doing ministry. I need to spend more time with my family, and relaxing, and…”

Oh, agreed. Absolutely. No worries–I’m not talking about us adding more hours to our days.

I’m talking about us transferring part of our precious limited daily allotment of minutes away from the ministry jobs we get paid for…

…and toward ones we don’t.

Just as the Sabbath reminds us that God gets along just fine without our labor when we rest one day in seven, giving away an increasing percentage of time without compensation outside of our ministry orgs means that God’s gotta step up and fill that irreplaceable gap that is us when we’re not there.

That was sarcastic, by the way.

Freely offering God our time in the causes that move His heart other than the cause to which our own ministry is called does two other very important things:

1. It reminds us that we are called to be comprehensively formed in the likeness of Christ…not simply well-trained (and well-paid!) specialists committed to one organization.
2. It reminds us that God’s passions are broader than our own organization. It’s a healthy thing when we realize that our own church or organization isn’t the center of the universe and doesn’t deserve the idolatrous devotion of our time and money.

So just as with the other disciplines we’ve discussed in this series, start small. Calculate the amount of your time you give away…

• completely outside of your own organization;
• completely without compensation (and remember, one form of compensation is networking for better career opportunities);
• completely outside of your primary skill set;

…and make a plan to increase that percentage annually, reallocating it where necessary away from our paid ministry gigs.

Where should you spend that reallocated time?

Just as you develop an Eternity Portfolio for your money, do the same thing with your minutes. Take a look at the two axes…

• Location: Local, regional, and global
• Allocation: Reaching (evangelism), teaching (discipleship), and ministering to needs (mercy)

…and see where you’ve got holes. Then make a plan to donate time in those “holey” areas, because they are, you know, holy.

Now, no fair starting a new ministry in your church and donating time there, or spending time at a friend’s nonprofit. Remember what we talked about yesterday: give anonymously, where only God can see it. Especially with your time.

It will do you good to rest your preaching voice and instead wash dishes at the local rescue mission without any of your coworkers or church members around.

Did wonders for Brother Lawrence, y’know.

As I’ve written about before (here and here), I am not a big fan of the Christian stewardship movement.

Not that I am against Christian stewardship by any means–after all, some of my best friends are Christian stewards. Rather, as I wrote in the two prior posts on the subject noted above, I am against the idea that the primary giving image/category/role discussed in the Bible is that of the steward, and I am against the idea that our primary goal is to be “rich toward God”.

That being said, one of the truly great “rich toward God” verses in the Bible that never gets much play in the Christian stewardship movement is Matthew 6:1-4, where Jesus says:

Be careful not to do your ‘acts of righteousness’ before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.

So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

Would you like to be rich toward God, asks Jesus? Then give unrewarded in any way so that only your Father may reward you.

Most of us are able to discern the grosser form of such rewards–I mean, it’s been at least a good three or four years since my wife and I have had a building or a communicable disease named after us due to our largesse.

But think about the subtler forms of being “seen by men”.

How about, say, donation receipts for income tax purposes?

“Wait wait wait wait wait,” some of our Christian stewardship friends may say. “Being able to deduct your donations on your income taxes is good stewardship. It enables you to be able to give more money away.”

Again. Enough with the stewardship talk. There’s more going on in biblical giving and generosity than maximizing the total dollar amount you give away or the impact your donated dollars can have.

There’s Matthew 6:1-4.

And understand that Matthew 6:1-4 isn’t an ode to random acts of generosity. In other words, just because you’re giving in cash doesn’t mean you need to (or get to) be any less strategic in your giving than we’ve talked about in the previous posts in this series.

It just means that before you go to church you run by the ATM, withdraw your weekly offering in $20 bills, and put it in the plate in an unmarked offering envelope.

Or your next gift to a nonprofit organization involves you stuffing their enclosed reply envelope with a fat $100 bill…instead of a check or EFT auto-deduct.

I suspect that for most of us, giving in this way will actually be harder than increasing the percentage of money we’re giving away to charity.

So let’s work our way up to it.

Once you set your giving percentage for the year, set an initial percentage of that percentage (1%? 5%? 10%?) to give away anonymously and unreceipted…and then increase that percentage each year. Absorb the tax hit as part of the cost of giving in secret, consoling yourself by noting that charitable giving may not be tax deductible forever the way things are going, and you’re just getting a jump start on the training to be generous when the only reward you’ll get for your donations comes from your Father in Heaven, who sees what is done in the secret places of our hearts.

Few things are likely to induce greater growth in our own personal generosity than teaching our children to be generous. That this is a process rather than an event is well understood conceptually but executed less well in practice.

That is, parents who do focus intentionally on teaching their children to be more generous typically do so through a series of discrete moments and events, with the implicit assumption being that children who experience enough discrete encounters with generosity will grow up to be generous people.

This, however, violates a fundamental premise of Transformational Giving, about which we’ve previously written here and here, namely:

P + P + P + P ≠ E

In other words:

Doing a lot of different charitable projects with your children does not in and of itself usher them into a mature lifestyle of generosity. Instead, it ushers them into a lifestyle of doing a lot of different charitable projects.

In Transformational Giving we distinguish between three different kinds (not degrees) of relationship to charitable causes. In brief:

• Participation (P) is project focused, short-term, high-touch, and understandable without external reference to an organization. Child sponsorship, filling Christmas shoeboxes, and giving gifts of Christmas goats to global south countries are all examples of Participation activities.
• Engagement (E) is lifestyle focused. At this level, commitment to a cause extends beyond a series of discrete participation projects and into a significant and mature level of daily awareness and involvement in a cause. Here the person is fundamentally changed through equipping, education, and experience.
• Ownership (O) is replication oriented. Here we understand that it is our responsibility, not a nonprofit’s responsibility to spread a cause [editor’s note: that’s different than spreading a nonprofit!] in our sphere of influence.

Typically, parents who seek to help their children to be generous do so through P-level activities, for example: “Kids, let’s buy a turkey to donate at church this Sunday. There are other families who don’t have food to eat like we do, so let’s help out.”

In and of itself, it’s a great move: We absolutely need to begin with P-level activities like this to get our children on the generosity curve in the first place.

The challenge comes when we stay at this level with our children and simply repeat the same activities or bounce from activity to activity. Then we run the risk of inadvertently convincing our children that donating a Thanksgiving turkey is “doing our part”.

Instead, just as we ourselves need to grow from Participation to Engagement to Ownership in causes, we need to help our children be aware of and experience the same growth.

A few ideas in this regard:

• When doing a Participation-level activity with your children, ask yourself ahead of time, “How can I build on this activity in growing them into Engagement in the cause?” For example, the first year you might bring a turkey to church.  The second year you might take your children to a rescue mission to serve a meal. The third year you might invite a poor family to share Thanksgiving dinner with you in your home, and so on. Rather than a series of Participation activities, in other words, seek a progression that helps grow your children from thinking of a cause in terms of seasonal projects into thinking of a cause in terms of a lifestyle.
• Be careful not to simply give your children the “fun” part of the giving project. In other words, having them write the monthly letter to the child you sponsor while you write the sponsorship check does indeed teach them something about charity…but likely not the lesson you really want to teach them.
• Consider matching your children’s giving, perhaps even on a 10 to 1 basis. This is a great way to motivate generosity in adults, and it works no less well with children. All of us are fascinated by our own efforts being multiplied.
• Help your children create their own Eternity Portfolio. Teach them from a young age to give strategically and comprehensively. Teach giving the same way you teach saving and investing. (Oops–I guess we’d better start teaching our children those things, too…)
• Involve your children in deciding where and what percentage of the family resources as a whole are given. You can even set aside part of your family’s giving as “Kid’s choice”. Have them help you determine how much in such a way that they are making trade-offs that genuinely impact them. For example, help them see how eating a meal at home instead of going out for pizza translates into more money to give away. The way children will make generous choices when they grow up is to give them the opportunity to make generous choices as children.
• Be an O to your children’s P…which is a fancy way of saying: walk your children through your own growth in the causes that are important to you. Why did you get involved in a cause in the first place? What have you learned the longer you’ve been involved? When did you experience disappointment in relation to the cause, and why, and what did you do to address that?
• Debrief your P-level family jaunts with E in mind. In other words, after you take the kids down to the homeless shelter to serve a meal, ask them challenging questions. Give them books and articles to read.

Becoming generous takes at least as much intentionality as learning to drive, and yet we devote far less time, resources, attention, and wisdom to the task. By becoming more intentional about growing our children in the grace of generosity, we accrue a great unanticipated benefit:

We become more mature in our own generosity as well.