Do the Word

We’ve spent more than half a month now on posts detailing the Engagement level of Transformational Giving (TG). And E deserves every bit of the attention–it truly is the heart of TG.

I’m going to give the subject a rest for now until we teach it in even greater detail in our free January Mission Increase Foundation workshop, after this concluding post courtesy of World Gospel Mission‘s Tim Rickel which details one of the most vital and yet least well known P to E moves in US history:

Stephen Mather got 15 wealthy industrialists together—prominent publishers, politicians, industry leaders, and railroad  builders—and took them on a long camping trip in the wilderness out west and called it The Mather Mountain Party. They stood before stunning beauty and reflected on the amazing treasure God has given us in our wilderness places. They saw where people had trashed an area camping out, and Stephen had them work together to clean it up. They dined on 5 star cuisine prepared by top chefs and served on linen tablecloths under a canopy of trees or next to a beautiful wilderness view throughout the whole trip. At the end he gathered them together. He told them that now they owned this cause. That this wasn’t the end, it was the beginning, of using their influence to move congress to preserve these spaces for generations to come. In the commentary on the series, one man says, “He didn’t preach to the choir, he took people who didn’t even go to the church and showed them the wilderness beauty and urged them to take up the cause.”

Talk about CMS [Champion Migration Strategy–WGM’s term for Transformational Giving] in action. There’s some reference material for you, no charge. Does CMS work? Go to a national park!

The perfect P to E move, Tim–thanks for a fitting conclusion to our Notes in the key of E series. May the Lord bless you with a vacant RV space during your next camping trip!

Good advertising makes you feel something then do something.
–A Senior Marketer from General Motors

Didn’t General Motors just declare bankruptcy?
—Me

Perhaps GM’s ad problem was simply that its ads didn’t make us feel something and then do something.

Or perhaps GM’s ad problem is that the old formula of feeling leading to doing (AKA tugging on heartstrings in order to tug on purse strings) just doesn’t quite pack the punch it once did.

Or perhaps for Christian ministries the problem goes much deeper than that.

With regard to fundraising, Christian ministries and missionaries continue to subscribe almost universally to that old GM formula as if it were Gospel. The truth is, it’s anything but. It’s actually quite problematic from a Christian discipleship standpoint to nudge people towards giving through appeal to emotion.

As Mission Increase Foundation‘s Suzanne Dubois and Tracy Tucker noted as we were preparing for this past summer’s Marketing Your Ministry workshop, there are no scriptures that guide us, lead us, or teach us how to drive people’s action through their feelings.

This is definitely not to say that emotion plays no part in the process of biblical giving. Far from it. The importance is the sequence.

Let’s read 1 Peter 1:22 together re-e-e-a-a-l-l-y carefully:

Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for each other, love one another deeply, from the heart.

(Interestingly, some early manuscripts have the verse ending with “from a pure heart“.)

So what’s the biblical counsel? Get everyone all lathered up with emotion so that on impulse they’ll respond rightly?

Far from it!

The Bible never places much trust in our emotions to guide right action!  My own life verifies that suspicion is well placed, thank you very much, You?

Instead, take a look at where emotion enters the process, according to Peter:

1. We learn the truth and then obey it. This produces:
2. Sincere love in love–an outflow of action–and because of this
3. We love one another deeply.

Two key truths here.

First, the biblical model turns the GM marketing model on its head. (Praise God–perhaps we can avoid bankruptcy after all!) Biblically, action–obeying the truth–precedes feelings. As Christians, we may or may not initially feel like doing the right thing at all. As Christian leaders, our goal is not to manipulate feelings until our listeners feel like doing the right thing. Our goal is to work with the Holy Spirit to teach the truth, i.e. What does God call you to do in relation to this cause?

Second, the Bible associates the heart with depth, will, strength, and response to truth, not with emotions stirred courtesy of a heart-rending DVD. You can see that 1 John 3:17-18:

But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth.

For the Christian, the feelings equation is truth + deed; then God’s love can pour out through us.

That’s why the third component of E (Engagement) is experience, which is shorthand for truth + deed. Appealing to emotion may produce “success”, if success is defined as “getting someone to give me money”. But it sure isn’t the biblical path to growth in the likeness of Christ for our hearers.

And it sure didn’t sell a lot of cars for GM.