Do the Word

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.

Biblically, generosity grows when we give as God directs (namely, comprehensively, strategically, and accountably) rather than as our passion or opportunities direct (spontaneously, unpredictably, and emotionally).

This will sound surprising to some, as the virtue of generosity is more typically associated in the popular imagination with the latter set of characteristics than with the former. A person who is truly generous, so the popular imagination conceives, will be delighting himself and others by popping off with surprising acts of generosity as the Spirit moves, like paying for the Egg McMuffin ordered by the guy in the car behind him as he tools through the McDonald’s drive-through. Here the great good is not falling into a pattern like tithing or providing ongoing funding for a project or cause, both of which smack of an unthinking formalism.

In Part I of our series, we sought to confound both the tithers and the anti-tithers by commending the practice of giving away an increasing percentage of one’s income every year.

In this second post, we seek to confound both the spontaneous givers and those who carefully and strategically invest their giving in a single area of great passion.

Fortunately there’s actually a text for that sort of confounding, namely, Alan Gotthardt’s Eternity Portfolio. I’ve previously written about the book, calling it my “if-you-are-heading-to-a-desert-island-soon-and-can-only-take-one-book” book. If you haven’t yet read that previous post, please click on the preceding link and have a go. It’s absolutely no problem–I’ll wait for you.

Dum de dum de dum…

So you’re back? Great. And better equipped to hit your next desert island, I hope.

Gotthardt’s book is not perfect, but it makes a great point:

In the Bible, God doesn’t commend random acts of senseless giving.

Instead, God really does commend specific areas for investment, which Gotthardt organizes along two axes:

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

Gotthardt also contends that God doesn’t simply commend us for giving generously; rather, He holds us accountable for selecting investments that yield a sizable return. This means, of course, that God is holding us–not only the nonprofit through which we’re giving–accountable for what happened to the money we gave. So when we say, “Well, I give to the homeless guy on the street corner; what he does with the money is between him and God”, we’re missing the biblical giving boat.

But note:

It’s not only the spontaneous givers who miss that boat. It’s those whose invest the majority of their giving deeply and carefully in the cause that most fully aligns with their area of passion.

Such givers say to themselves and others, “I feel like I’m called to direct my giving to evangelism (or discipleship, or mercy ministry). Others are passionate about different areas, and God will move everyone’s hearts so that all of these important causes can be funded.”

This is an expressly unscriptural principle. There’s simply nothing even approximating a warrant for this approach anywhere in the Bible.

It’s the byproduct of our age of professionalization that we idolize efficiency and specialization, even in the area of being fully formed in Christ. When there are areas of Christian growth that we know to be important but that we’re not passionate about or natively good at or interested in, we turn to Paul’s Body of Christ excursus in 1 Corinthians 12 and say, “See? I’m not a part of the body that does evangelism. Instead, I’m in the part of the body that does ushering and preparing the scrambled eggs for the monthly men’s breakfast.”

When we give our time and money only to the area of our passion, we ensure that we remain Peter Pan Christians. We never grow up.

Conversely, God’s call is that not only His Body as a whole but we as individuals grow up into the likeness of Christ. That doesn’t mean that each of us does everything, but it sure does mean that each of us is active locally, regionally, and globally in ministries of evangelism, discipleship, and mercy.

What you do in each of those areas of focus is up to you–there’s certainly a lot of latitude there scripturally.

But that you do something in each of those areas of focus is the second key to giving that is guided by more than a feeling.

As this year draws to a close, why not snag a copy of Gotthardt’s book and endeavor to build your own Eternity Portfolio, paying special attention to filling in the gaps where your passions/experiences/interests have not yet led you?

In doing so, you’ll find something interesting will happen over time:

God’s passions will become your passions, and the things that before didn’t register with you at all will suddenly become inestimably precious.

And that is real growth in generosity.