Do the Word

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?

My dear friend Greg Stier, President of Dare2Share, the youth evangelism training ministry on whose board I serve, tells Dare2Share champions and potential champions:

Look, my cause is not Dare2Share. My cause is youth getting trained to share the Gospel with other youth. If you can accomplish that better through Campus Crusade or Youth for Christ because of your connections and relationships, by all means go for it. All I know is the Bible is calling you to do that somewhere. Where are you doing it?

That is one of the best representations of Transformational Giving I’ve ever heard. (Part of the reason I asked Greg to write the forward to my book, Coach Your Champions.)

Greg understands implicitly one of the core TG truths that is exceedingly hard for us ministry leaders to put into practice, namely:

The cause is not synonymous with our organization.

We all assent to that mentally. But putting it into practice? Muuuuch harder.

You know by now if you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time that I believe that we nonprofit leaders are perpetually at risk of setting up our nonprofit organizations as idols. Anytime nonprofits treat ourselves with a sense of permanence and as the locus of God’s activity in relation to the cause, we assume for themselves the position of false ultimate.

(I was telling Jon Hirst from HCJB Radio today that I’m enamored with Wille Cheng’s proposal that all nonprofits ought to be chartered for a set number of years and then automatically go out of business. It’s always good for us to be reminded what is permanent in God’s eyes…and what is not.)

When we start talking about Owners (‘Os’) in TG as those champions who are comprehensively owning the cause in their own sphere of influence, the natural tendency of ministries is to think of these Os as representatives of the organization, spreading the organization’s work and needs in their sphere of influence.

Oops.

There’s a difference between cause and organization.

Cause is the work that God has prepared for the church to do. Organization is a platform designed to coach the church in walking in those works and accomplishing God’s purpose. Check out yesterday’s post for more on this thought; what we want to emphasize here is that when you’re training champions, you’re equipping them to impact the cause in their sphere of influence, not toot our horns and sign up supporters.

Remember: we support champions to grow to full maturity in Christ in relation to the cause. They don’t give to us so that we can do ministry. They give through us because we provide the best platform for them to accomplish what they are called to do biblically.

You can see a perfect illustration of what I’m talking about here, with the story of Carolyn Cooper.

We will inevitably raise up champions who are a reflection of us. If we do our job well, however, what they’ll be spreading in their sphere of influence (as per their biblical responsibility) is the cause, not our business cards and brochures.