Do the Word

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?

Transformational Giving principle 7 says:

The relationship between champion and champion is as important as the relationship between champion and organization.

I’ve long felt that this is a TG principle with very few scratches even on its surface. It’s certainly the least intuitive aspect of the networking theory of TG. Most folks, upon seeing the networking diagrams, grasp that it makes sense to coach existing champions to spread the cause in their sphere of influence.

Grasping that we should be equally intentional about bringing these champions together? So far it’s been just that: grasping.

But I’ve been reading this killer book this week by D. Michael Henderson from Northland, A Church Distributed. The book is titled, A Model for Making Disciples: John Wesley’s Class Meeting.

Wesleyan or no, buy the book. It’ll give you Hungry Man meals for thought in the area of TG. Especially in relation to this question of the role of community in coaching champions. Check out what Henderson writes:

Wesley was convinced that learning is expedited by group interaction, whether the content of that learning is behavioral transformational, redirection of attitudes and motives, cognitive data-gathering, strategic training, or social rehabilitation. It seems that he responded to every instructional need he met by establishing a group, some kind of group. He felt his own personal growth was largely due to participation in group experiences, and he advocated them for others. [emphasis mine]

He notes a bit later:

The leading members of one group were almost always participants in the next group up the ladder. For example, the leader of a class was almost always a member of one of the bands, whose leader was in turn, automatically a member of the select society.

The idea of dealing with ‘donors’ by building a relationship between them and the organization is so deeply ingrained in us that it seems superfluous to think about connecting them to each other. For John Wesley, however, it was fundamental.

What would it look like in TG for the leading P to be a member of an E group? For the leading E to be a member of an O group?

What if the definition of a good Signature Participation Project included this characteristic:

• Collective. Joining a cause is communal, by definition. A good SPP squarely grounds the champion process in a collective of Participants, led by a champion at the E or O level.

CommuniTG. Flip the question and ask not if there’s a reason for champions to be brought together with other champions but rather if, by the time we’re done, there should be space for anything but that in TG?

Each Monday, Sports Illustrated’s Peter King publishes a fantastic five-page website column on football. My favorite page is always the fifth one, in which he lists the ten things he thinks he thinks that week about football, life, and coffee. (Go figure about the coffee.)

It’s a great journalistic technique, this idea of listing things one thinks one thinks. After all, King can say all kinds of things without hopelessly committing himself in the particular direction of his comments; at the same time, if his instincts turn out to be correct, he can claim to have been the first one to have brought up the idea.

So, in that vein, this week I want to share with  you some of the areas of research on which I’m working in Transformational Giving.

Don’t worry–it’s not esoteric stuff. Far from it. It’s all quite foundational. A lot of it is percolating in my brain as I begin to formally apply TG to a local church context. Inevitably TG will take any good Christian nonprofit there, to thinking through how we as Christian nonprofits interface with The Mother Ship.

So as you read these posts, I want to especially encourage you to post your comments in reply. Agree. Disagree. List three examples. Offer alternatives. Construct. Destruct. But whatever you do, don’t use the words ‘donor’, ‘friendraising’, or ‘wealth identifier overlay’.

My first ‘Things I think I think about TG’ post this week deals with the purpose of the nonprofit organization. I think everything about TG–and much related to church and nonprofit health in the future–hinges on us getting this right.

It’s certainly possible (and we have five decades of proof in this regard) for a nonprofit to be financially and even programmatically successful in ways that either don’t aid the church’s maturity or, worse yet, actually inhibit it.

I’ve written about the risk of idolatry inherent in nonprofit work, and I’ve written about how enamored I am of Willie Cheng’s idea that nonprofits should always surge towards extinction.

Now I’m pondering a thought about the purpose of the Christian nonprofit, namely:

The Christian nonprofit is called into existence by God as a church renewal movement in the cause which it is called to champion.

I think I think that if we adopt this idea, we get a wholly different set of success metrics:

• Getting big wouldn’t be viewed inherently as a good thing or even as a goal; in  fact, we’d view it with a certain amount of suspicion. After all,
• The real metric of success would be the degree to which the Christian nonprofit successfully re-embedded care of the particular cause back into the church.
• We’d definitely be measuring not only ROI but RII, and
• We’d know exactly when to go out of business, namely, when the church gets back in business and on firm footing in relation to the biblical cause God has given us to harangue the church about.
• Could that be what God has in mind when He calls us to found a nonprofit?

Nonprofit as church renewal movement. What do you think you think?