Do the Word

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.

Several years ago, the concept of random acts of kindness became popular. Commit random acts of kindness, the idea was, and the world will become a better place.

Perhaps the world will become a better place through your random acts of kindness. But odds on, you yourself will not become a consistently kinder person through random acts of kindness any more than you will become a more physically fit person through random acts of exercise.

Developing virtues like kindness and generosity requires consistent, regular discipline under the leading of the Holy Spirit. That’s why we Christians call it discipleship, y’know.

And there are fewer disciplines more effective in developing generosity than making a commitment to give away an increasing percentage of your income each year.

Notice that I said an increasing percentage, not an increasing amount. Christian ministries are struggling today precisely because we failed to understand that distinction.

Check this out:

Over the past fifty years the amount of money Christians have given to churches and missionaries and charities has steadily increased–well, up to this year anyway.

What hasn’t changed, however, is the percentage of income Christians give to charity. Whether we’re in the midst of boom or bust, recession, depression, or progression, bear or bull, over the past fifty years the percentage of income American Christians have given to charity has remained between 2.9 and 3.1%.

That means giving has gone up over the past fifty years only because Christians have steadily been making more money. In other words:

Christian giving in the US is tied to GDP (gross domestic product), not generosity of the heart.

How do we begin to change that?

Well, we can’t teach what we haven’t learned. So we Christian leaders–both pastors and nonprofit ministry leaders–need to grow in the discipline of generosity in order to be able to teach others to do so. A simple–but deeply challenging–way to do that is to make a commitment to increase the percentage of income you give away each year.

My wife and I learned that discipline from a much beloved champion in Billings, Montana named Doc Haggstrom.

Doc married Evie as he was completing his medical education as a urologist. Serving in the military during the Korean War. Financially strapped young couple with promise–you get the picture.

Doc had been raised in a Christian home where tithing (giving away 10% of one’s income) was standard practice. Evie, not so much. So when Doc talked to Evie about tithing from their meager income, she found the whole concept irresponsible.

“We can’t even pay our own bills,” she protested. “What business do we have trying to pay everyone else’s?”

Now Doc could have simply insisted that they were going to tithe, but I suspect that not only did Doc not want to sleep on the couch; he also wanted to help Evie (and himself) grow in the grace of generosity, and he knew that forcing her to tithe was likely to make her more resentful, not more generous.

So Doc proposed that they begin their married life by giving away 5% of their income, and then, every year at the end of the year, they would evaluate whether God had been faithful in providing for them, and, if He had, they would then increase the amount that they gave away the next year by another half a percent.

Evie agreed, and the two did just that. They both passed away a few years ago, at a point when they were giving away the vast majority of their income. They have forever impacted the town of Billings, not to mention everyone in their sphere of influence, with their generosity. I still think about Doc often for so very many different reasons, and his practice lives on in my own family, among others.

There’s nothing magical about the percentage you increase every year. If you don’t like half a percent, try .25%. Some folks, like John Wesley and Tony Campolo, went cold turkey, determining comparatively early in their lives the absolute base amount on which they could subsist and then giving away the rest. Myself, I think it would be hard for me to rightly judge what that base amount ought to be, and as the father of four children who are college and upper high school age, I tend to think that that number rightly and responsibly changes as we grow older.

But all of that personal reflection is secondary to simply making the overall commitment to give away an increasing percentage of your income each year. That’s a decision you can make regardless of your age or position in life or present income. You can make the commitment to do that as you head into 2010, taking the next month and a half to pray about it, run the numbers, bite your fingernails, gird your loins, and git ‘ir done.

With respect to the donors-as-dunderheads pundits about whom I wrote in my previous post, I find that there’s nothing like giving away an increasing percentage of your income every year to make you less inclined to base your giving on your feelings and more inclined to think strategically, prayerfully, and intentionally about what you’re supposed to be accomplishing through your generosity.

But before Holden Karnofsky and others pat me on the back and shake my hand and compliment me for coming to my senses and realizing that this is what they’ve been saying all along, and that such intentionality should lead givers to GiveWell, Charity Navigator, and other charity ranking websites in order to discover which charity they can give through in order to make the biggest difference…

…I’d recommend they wait to shake my hand until after Monday’s post.

I describe this discussion as genuinely uninspiring because it treats donors like dunderheads and nonprofit organizations like diligent and dedicated public servants.

Holden Karnofsky’s blog at GiveWell is a particularly notable stronghold of the donors-as-dunderheads camp.

In his post entitled Perspectives on Donor Irrationality, Holden approvingly highlights the quotes of Jeanne Panossian, who, in commenting on a couple of Holden’s donors-as-dunderheads posts, wrote:

• On donor illusions: ” … It takes extraordinary ethical fortitude to openly tell people how complicated your organization is, normally a donor has made their basic decision in the first 15 to 30 seconds of a conversation …”
• On the administrative expense ratio: “…While I love to talk all day about [my charity’s impact], I have learned it is not worth my while. Waving a flag and telling people how we pay for our paper clips yields me more funds faster …”

Donors yielding up their funds in a 15 to 30 second conversation arising from their frenzied passion for paperclips?

I can honestly say that I have met not one person in my more than twenty years of work in coaching champions for whom that would be even a remotely accurate caricature.

One of Holden’s other commenters heroically takes on the burden of educating the great unwashed donors of the world to better understand the needs and intricate workings of how we nonprofit types must run our organizations as we change the world:

If the donors don’t understand, it’s the responsiblity of the entire non-profit sector to educate them.

Yikes.

Perhaps when donations drop, donor-dunderhead talk rises. After all, if you’re not giving to my organization, what’s wrong with you?

My own experience has been that individuals want to champion causes and be able to effect real change in the world. Ironically, that puts them in competition with many nonprofits, who prefer to champion causes and effect real change in the world but who need individuals’ money to be able to do that. So they have to convince individuals:

• Don’t try this change-the-world stuff at home.
• It’s dangerous work, better left to professionals.
• We’re the best professionals for the job.
• Your giving card is enclosed. Because, after all,
• It’s safer for the world and more effective in general for you to impact causes indirectly, by giving to intelligent, effective types like us.
• By the way, did we mention that we don’t use a lot of paperclips?

Holden wrote a post that shocked me in which he contended that nonprofits focus too much attention on givers. (My experience has been that givers are shocked when nonprofits send them a timely receipt and give them a thank you call, but I digress.)

I suggested to Holden that it was eminently possible–yea verily, even advisable–that nonprofits need to focus more on giver-related measurements, and that such measurements need not–yea verily, even should not–be focused on a giver’s feelings about giving.

(TG Principle 5 says, for example, “A Transformational Giving relationship between a champion and an organization is primarily a peer-level accountability relationship, not merely a friendship or a mutual admiration society.”)

In response to my comment, Holden replied:

Eric: if a charity serves donors by doing a better job on its programs, I’m all for that.

Er…?

Our whole nonprofit sector seems to suffer from a crisis of imagination when it comes to thinking about how we can do a better job coaching our champions about giving. When the best we can do is to suggest that we need to better educate donors about why they should feel good about giving towards overhead and not just program, that’s not good, friend.

Philanthrobloggers are bogged down with the idea that donors give primarily based on friendship, feelings, and flash.

I beg to disagree vehemently with that perspective, while admitting and asserting at the same time that (TG Principle #9) giving is learned, not latent in donors (whom I prefer to call champions). So if givers give to friendship, feelings, and flash…where do ya suppose they learnt that from?

That’s why I’m launching into a new six-part series on this blog entitled, More than a feeling: Six ways to grow (and measure your own growth) in giving that aren’t about feelings. Because ultimately there are not donors and nonprofit organizations but truly only champions seeking to impact causes, and if we have not first learned individually how to grow and measure our own growth in giving and impacting causes, we will not fare so well when it comes our turn to serve at the helm of nonprofits seeking to do that same thing.

Series begins next post. Until then, I’m off to play with my paperclips.