Do the Word

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.

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.