Do the Word

I’m really going to have to encourage World Gospel Mission‘s Todd Eckhardt to write a blog, or at least guest-write on mine. Brother’s got a knack for Transformational Giving, and I love reading everything he writes.

One of the principles Todd utilizes in coaching WGM’s missionaries is that your calling is not something that you turn on and off like a light switch. If you work with kids on the mission field, work with kids when you’re on home missionary assignment. If you oppose gambling while on the mission field, help your champions oppose it when you’re back home. It’s a great approach because it keeps the cause center stage. In addition, you’ll be equipping your champions to imitate you as you imitate Christ in relation to the cause.

Eavesdrop with me as Todd coaches a WGM missionary who serves at a hospital in Africa on how she can coach her champions from the field.

The missionary writes:

I just finished reading Coach Your Champions during my recent vacation and enjoyed the book.

However, I am a bit confused because my support team isn’t “next door” to me, so I am not sure how I could get them involved actually seeing the work when they can’t just jump in the car and come to the hospital in Africa to a birthday party of one of my “grandkids” because I have lots of “kids” as our students and graduates.

It seemed much easier in the book to get the Champions involved and involve others when they were “next door”.  Maybe you can explain how to help get them personally involved except for prayer and financially for many of my champions.  Or are they supposed to personally help nurses in the USA and pray for me in Africa?

It is true that your champions cannot pop over for a ‘party’, however this does not prevent them from acting in other ways, both for you and for their home community.

For example:  Every nurse taking one of your exams would love for people to pray for them.  Sometimes my kids will call their grandma the night before a test and ask grandma to pray for them.  You can do the same with your students.  Ask some of your champions if they would be willing to be assigned a student and then they can pray for the student. Perhaps even have the champion and student exchange emails so that when a student faces an exam or a difficult time they can email their “grandma/grandpa” and ask them to pray.  Then a day or two after the exam the champion can email back and see how the exam went.  If a student does not have email perhaps you would be able to facilitate this with your email. The champion could also reach out to a local nurse as you suggested.

Just think if a woman’s group at a local church organized with a hospital or doctor’s office to come once a month during lunch or break time and had 10 minutes of prayer with the nurses?  They could ask the nurses to share needs and pray for them.  Then if they ask why they can tell them about Jesus and about you and how you are nursing in Africa and through you touching their lives as your champions they wanted to touch other nurses lives to ‘pay back’ in the name of Jesus. They could even have your prayer cards with them in case they would want to connect with you and your nursing role in Africa.

As far as nursing (me being a nurse and a Parish Nurse), I am intrigued with the total care and chaplaincy (spiritual) care that is taught and practiced at the hospital in Africa. I did not know if you had something like that in your area in the States and sharing that with nurses and engaging them this way. It would be a way to teach principles to the nurses here as well as make them aware of your ministry in Africa. I could talk to you more about it.

I just finished reading Coach Your Champions during my recent vacation and enjoyed the book.

However, I am a bit confused because my support team isn’t “next door” to me, so I am not sure how I could get them involved actually seeing the work when they can’t just jump in the car and come to Tenwek to a birthday party of one of my “grandkids” because I have lots of “kids” as our students and graduates.  However I do think my emails help people with email access to “come and see” and hear what they are doing as I send out my picture emails.

It seemed much easier in the book to get the Champions involved and involve others when they were “next door”.  Maybe you can explain how to help get them personally involved except for prayer and financially for many of my champions.  Or are they supposed to personally help nurses in the USA and pray for me in Africa?

Every so often I run across an organization that I feel like really embraces the principles of Transformational Giving…without having ever heard of Transformational Giving.

Voice of the Martyrs is my paradigmatic example.

I connected with Voice of the Martyrs in 2003, teaming up to do Bibles Unbound (which this month, I’m delighted to report, tallied its millionth Bible sent out by Bible mailing champions! Woo hoo!).

When I connected with them, I discovered they were already operating a champion development program utilizing many of the principles that we teach in Transformational Giving (TG). They had never embraced traditional/transactional fundraising (ttf) to begin with. And they were (and are) active around the world in creating owners of the cause of the persecuted church…so much so that Seoul USA, the organization my wife and I founded, now operate Voice of the Martyrs/Korea. And in 2010, Lord permitting, we’ll be launching Bibles Unbound/Korea.

I have a similarly warm spot deep in my heart for Teen Missions International.

My only interaction with TMI came a decade ago, when my wife enrolled our two eldest children in the program one summer.

I hadn’t thought about TMI since then, until I stumbled across a year-old article about the organization the other day on Christianity Today’s website.

When I read the article, I was struck how TMI had accomplished in our two kids the very kind of transformation we talk about in Transformational Giving.

In fact, it’s hard to read the article’s description of TMI without thinking about Transformational Giving:

At Teen Missions, campers give up virtually their entire summer for evangelism. They spend two weeks in Merritt Island, Florida, learning the work of a missionary before heading into the world in teams of about 25. They are schooled in evangelism, construction, and Bible studies. They don purple construction hats as they work the ground with hoes and wheelbarrows. They practice public speaking and learn to share their faith in ways that transcend linguistic and cultural barriers, such as through puppet shows. After their mission trip, they return to Merritt Island for a few more days to reflect on their experiences before heading home at summer’s end.

Whereas churches often mistake participation in an annual short-term mission trip for maturity in the cause of missions, TMI utilizes short-term mission trips as an opportunity to build into youth not only participation but also engagement and ownership with the cause of missions as a whole, not only with a particular field.

For TMI, what happens before and after the short-term mission trip is as important as the mission trip itself. I know that personally, since Daniel and Christine would write home to us about the obstacle course (designed to build teamwork), the mosquitos and lack of air conditioning (designed not only to equip campers to survive on the field but to give them a taste of how life just is in quite a bit of the world), and how they were required to clean their plate just like at home (an intentional practice in both places designed to help kids comprehend not only hunger and the value of food but also the importance of graciously receiving hospitality wherever you go).

Besides, Daniel and Christine got their first training in sharing their faith and doing public speaking at TMI boot camp.

Daniel’s trip to France and Christine’s trip to Canada were like icing on the cake. But unlike in many short-term missions programs at churches, the trip itself wasn’t mistaken for the cake.

In fact, even the fundraising the child must do to go to TMI is transformational:

Campers also raise their own camp and travel fees, plus enough for another child (from $2,500 to $4,000) that funds 34 international boot camps where, for instance, an African child can train to be a missionary in his or her own country.

The article on TMI is living proof that there’s really nothing new in Transformational Giving. It is truly nothing more or less than an effort to apply biblical principles to discipleship, including giving.

That being said, what’s sad is the degree to which we Christian organizations have clung (and continue to cling) so tenaciously to traditional/transactional fundraising (ttf) strategies such that Transformational Giving seems risky, or novel, or impractical. I praise God for organizations like Teen Missions International and Voice of the Martyrs which were TG before TG was TG, and which remind us of the power of grounding our development efforts deep into the pages of scripture.

Just went through the rabbit hole (courtesy of a tip from Katya Andresen’s blog) to see what P/E/O looks and sounds like in a radically secularized context.

Story Innovation Labs is offering a free downloadable e-book entitled Storylistening through Social Media.

See if any of this sounds familiar:

THE CROWD THAT LISTENS—politely, patiently, credulously—HAS DISPERSED FOREVER.

Talking to just anybody isn’t what marketing is about anymore.

Brands need to know the influences of their audiences and the relevance of what others are publishing/saying about them.

ARE YOU STILL IN THE BUSINESS OF DETAINING THE UNINTERESTED? Why?

What if you could NURTURE A COMMUNITY around what you do, instead?

Engagement can be beneficial. Wise conversation curation can transform an ebbing sea of increasingly inattentive “consumers” into a thriving, engaged, interacting “community.”

…and lays out strategies for dealing with each group and equipping individuals to grow from one group into another.

It’s definitely not P/E/O (unlike A/F/F/F/F, P, E, and O are different in kind, not degree, plus the A/F/F/F/F architecture is decidedly focused on connecting customers with the organization, whereas P/E/O connects the champion to the cause, with the organization as the stage/platform), but it’s certainly interesting enough to make the e-book worth downloading and scanning through. (The foe/fiend conversion material certainly has resonance in TG, not to mention the New Testament.)

I have to admit to having mixed feelings any time I see analogs of P/E/O pop up in secular marketing. On the one hand, there’s a degree of vindication in being able to say to ministries, “Look, even secular nonprofits and forprofits are turning away from the strategies we Christian organizations are clinging to dogmatically!”

On the other hand, there’s always a sadness in seeing secular nonprofits and forprofits coarsely approximate what only we can fully embody, by the grace and power of the Holy Spirit and the plan and purposes of God.