Do the Word

I was just working with the Mission Increase Foundation team to adjust our training schedule to add a workshop/lab sequence at the end of 2010, should the Lord tarry, on Giving Circles.

Giving Circles are the exponentially growing phenomenon in which groups of folks get together to pull their money and their experience in order to make more impactful gifts to charity.

This has the scent of a Transformational Giving movement in that it’s champion-led. But I think I think Giving Circles are traditional/transactional fundraising’s (ttf’s) John the Baptist moment.

In Matthew 11:11, Jesus says:

I tell you the truth: Among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist; yet he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.

I think I think Giving Circles is ttf grasping at TG. They certainly point the way, what with donors (and I’m using that word on purpose here) being proactive rather than reactive, but they’re built on the ttf foundation of nonprofits serving as actors and individuals serving as supporters.

The fact that Giving Circles group people together and give them information and enable them to establish goals and evaluative mechanisms does make them more effective donors.

But at the end of the day, they’re still donors, albeit more effective ones.

Allison Fine posits a future direction for Giving Circles that I would say has a nice TG cast to it in a post she (fittingly) entitles ‘A New Relationship With Donors’:

Giving circles are generally oganized by friends to give to a variety of causes, leaving the cause in the passive position of hoping to be supported.  What if causes organized giving circles to support their cause — and other causes. I know, really scary to think about organizing your own donors to possible give to other organizations, but, hey, that’s what people do. What if you took all of your donors in one zip code, regardless of how much they gave and helped them to organize a get together at someone’s house to talk about the cause. Maybe they don’t even talk about giving the first time they meet. Maybe they just to talk about the cause, what it means, what it does, how it could do better, etc. They could come back onto your Facebook page or on Twitter and share what they learned, what they thought and dreamed for the cause. And then the second meeting they begin to talk about giving to the cause.

In TG, of course, we would contend that the champion should not only be equipped to dream about the cause, learn about the cause, and give to the cause but also to do the cause. In TG, I think I think Giving Circles will be reconceived as Discipleship Circles, where champions coach each other, under the guidance and power of the Holy Spirit, toward comprehensive maturity in Christ in relation to the cause.

Interestingly, there’s another name for that kind of modified Giving Circle:

Church.

What church is today is rather far off from that mark, of course. But as we talked about earlier this week, what is TG itself if not a church renewal movement?

I’m writing from Seoul, Korea, where we’re hosting most of the Seoul USA board of directors as well as a team from Southwest Hills Baptist Church in Beaverton, Oregon, plus my dear bro and sis Bob and Pyong Faulkner (Bob of the Seoul USA Weekly Baekjeong blog fame). They’re here doing a surprising amount of heavy lifting:

• teaching at Seoul USA’s Underground University of NK defectors preparing to return to China and NK to minister to the NK church;
• launching gospel flyer balloons today in the very sea that you’re hearing on the news is crawling with military ships in the area of greatest political tension in the world (and we’re doing the launch on the 59th anniversary of the start of the Korean War);
• prayer walking INSIDE the DMZ (it’s all in who you know, I guess).

I didn’t really realize it during the planning process for the trip–I didn’t realize it until halfway through the trip, in a discussion time we had at the end of yesterday’s activities–but this trip has been a P to E move (Participation to Engagement).

And I think I think that move happens:

• a whole lot later and deeper than we normally think it does
• only at the behest of the Holy Spirit
• on the other side (I’m being totally serious in saying this here) of an existential crisis where we either have to choose between giving up or continuing to show up

Here’s what I mean:

I think I think all of our tendency–mine included–when we see the PEO chart is to think that we ourselves must of course be at the O level and our long-time supporters and donors (who, as we learn PEO, we now think of as champions) must be at the E and O level.

And I think I think that we’re likely mistaken about that. I think E is a level it’s possible for most of us Christian nonprofits to never even sniff.

I think I think that when we’re at the P level, we believe that the cause we love can be advanced, fixed, solved, helped, or assisted by the right programs and the right philosophy and the right amount of money to fund it all.

But then a moment comes when God opens our eyes to the fullness of the cause and all of our confidence in programs evaporates in a split second like water off your hands stuck under one of those newfangled hand dryers. And at that moment we have to make a choice as to what we’ll do.

I think I think compassion fatigue happens as one of the possible responses at that moment.

And I think I think denial is another possible response, where we just push out of our mind the thought that we just can’t fix the darn problem and we decide to pledge allegiance to the organization and its budget and its ongoing existence as an alternative to what we had originally hoped for (can you say idolatry?).

And I think I think the other option is something that Koreans call ‘Jung’.

We don’t have a word like ‘Jung’ in English, and I think it’s partly because we don’t much have the experience of ‘Jung’ in the West.

‘Jung’ loosely translates into “stickiness”, like the way that Asian rice sticks together. (It’s interesting, when you think about it, that Western rice doesn’t stick together…)

‘Jung’ is that part about being Korean that simply makes you stick together like sticky rice with other Koreans even when you disagree–even when you disagree so strongly that you hate each other (think about the puzzling relationship between North and South Korea, for example). Because of ‘Jung’, you stick together like sticky rice even when you don’t have an answer and when you can’t fix a problem and when you can’t see a way through.

I’ve always described the E level as a ‘lifestyle’ level. But I don’t think that’s strong enough. I think I think that most of us have P-level lifestyles in relation to the causes we love because it’s almost too painful to think that we can’t solve the problem or fix the person no matter what program we use or how much money we invest.

Now, to P level people what I just wrote sounds like discouragement or defeat. But to E level people, it sounds different somehow. A lot like love, come to think of it.

Jung.

All this came up yesterday after we heard Yu Sang Joon speak. Mr. Yu’s story is the subject of the movie, The Crossing, a heart wrenching story that tells about Mr. Yu’s  accidental defection from NK and his young son’s death all alone in the Mongolian desert.

Mr. Yu has never seen the movie. Doesn’t want to. Can’t really talk about it, even years later.

He struggles with a lot of things, really. His health is decimated. He is crippled by anxieties, fears, and sadnesses that he can’t put into words. He doesn’t like to leave home most days. Despite that, he’s still extremely active in ministering to NKs in ways that I can’t write about here.

What he shared with us is that most missionaries don’t have the patience for NK ministry. There’s no way to time when an NK will come out to visit a relative in China, no way to make it so when they come there’s a missionary on the spot to share the gospel with them and then disciple them properly. And even when the meetup does somehow occur, if you keep them in China in that spot long enough to disciple them properly, they’ll be detected and repatriated to NK by the Chinese public security bureau, almost certainly to die. And if you move them on along the NK defector underground railroad, they’ll never be discipled properly.

It was an MC Escher-esque conundrum he was laying out. Our minds were twisting and turning trying to figure out what program could be created or modified or funded to fix what he was talking about.

But when someone asked him why he continues to help, then, if there’s no way to accomplish the grand goal, he said simply this:

Isn’t it simply because it is a human life?

There was one person in the room who still stridently believed that good people giving generously could still create an effective program possible of fixing people and problems. He felt it was discouraging to think that even if we wanted to make a difference, we couldn’t be successful at it.

But almost simultaneously the rest of the room followed Mr. Yu across a bridge (he told us he wanted to be a bridge, interestingly, by the way) from P to E. From Projects to Jung.

(And I think I think you can’t get to Jung without going through projects. Something about the way God designed us. I think I think that may be what Paul is trying to get us to understand about the law, at some level.)

It’s interesting. The cause of Seoul USA relates to persecuted Christians. In Hebrews 13:3, it doesn’t talk about helping the persecuted church or supporting the persecuted church or fixing the persecuted church or healing the persecuted church. I think I think these things are necessary but not sufficient.

Hebrews 13:3 talks about remembering the persecuted church. Not recalling them. Re-membering them. Like, ‘putting ourselves back together with them.’

Like Jung.

Remember those who are in prison as if you were their fellow prisoners, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.

Participation/Engagement/Ownership is the Big Mac of the Transformational Giving Extra Value Meal. It is the Tom Brady of the Transformational Giving Super Bowl Team. It is the Joey of Transformational Giving’s 1980s Blossom TV show.

It is, in other word, the pedagogical centerpiece.

Each time we develop a new topic for presentation in our monthly workshops, we’re really explicating a new dimension of–a new application of–PEO as a way of growing people to full maturity in Christ. People who are relatively new to TG then say, ‘But we talked about PEO laaaaaaaast month!’ People who sit with TG for some time say, ‘Please make sure we talk about it neeeeeeext month, tooooooooo.’

So as I was reading Henderson’s book on John Wesley’s class meetings, I was astounded to read a note that could just as easily have been written about PEO as it could about Wesley’s pedagogical method. Pardon the long excerpt, but DANG! It’s a good read:

The progression of Methodist converts through successive groups toward a stated goal as their readiness allowed and as mastery was attained at each level reveals a profound knowledge of both human nature and educational philosophy. Since Wesley had no training in group design or any contemporary models to copy, it must be assumed that his understanding was either intuitive or accidental, or the result of experimentation. The place of the behavioral mode before the affective mode goes against the grain of widely-accepted thinking about how to effect character improvement. It was widely-held belief opinion in Wesley’s day (and vestiges of this belief still persist) that human progress begins with the motives or will or ‘tempers’ and extends outward to overt behavior. It came as a revolutionary discovery in 1900 when William James, the father of modern psychology, proclaimed that actions precede, rather than follow changes in attitude. This was 150 years after Wesley designed a system for correcting behavior first (through the class meeting) and feelings or attitudes later through the bands.

I’ve long been content to make the case that PEO is the scriptural progression for discipleship, but this is the first time I’ve been struck by the power of the pedagogy behind it.

Reading the passage has led me to think I think I have an idea regarding the dimension of learning that is the focus of each level of PEO, namely:

• At the Participation level, we’re focused on behavioral change
• At the Engagement level, we’re focused on cognitive change
• At the Ownership level, we’re focused on affective change

Psychology students will recognize behavioral, cognitive, and affective as the three divisions of the human personality described in modern psychology. ‘Behavioral’ and ‘cognitive’ are easy words to intuitively grasp, but how about ‘affective’?

Affective refers to feelings and emotions. In Wesley’s view, it referred to the quality of one’s love.

On the face of it, ‘affective’ is a puzzling focus to pair with O. Traditional/transactional fundraising, for example, might pair the affective with P, on the idea that tugging on the heart strings is the way to get a quick donation.

But in the Scriptures, whether 1 Corinthians 13 (in which Paul talks about love) or the writings of John, love is always portrayed as the pathway to full maturity–that which doesn’t pass away or become transmuted into something else.

It’s also interesting to note that when Jesus encounters the rich young ruler, we’re told:

Jesus looked at him and loved him.

So there is something in the maturation of our love that must precede the sharing of the cause with others if it is to be effective and genuinely Christian. In other words, replication happens at all levels in TG. Participants replicate. Engaged folks replicate. But when a Participant replicates, they reproduce people whose passion is for a project, not for the cause. When Engaged folks replicate, they reproduce people who are far more likely to become representatives of the nonprofit than they are to become reflections of it.

So Ownership is the level at which we focus on the character and quality of the champion’s love so that their replication/reproduction process is solely guided by that love, rather than passion for a project or an organization.

PEO = BCA. Does that help or hinder your understanding of PEO?