Do the Word

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.

Especially when I teach on how to develop a Signature Participation Project–one of the core elements of introductory discipleship in Transformational Giving (check out this post to learn more about SPPs and to see an example)–there are some people who respond by sighing, ‘I’m just not creative. I can’t come up with any cool ideas like that.’

The assumption is that the creation of SPPs and P/E/O champion maps is the province of the creative–those whose pens whirr on restaurant napkins as great ideas fly by the minute.

I couldn’t disagree more.

Transformational Giving is a discipleship process, not a creative process.

The creation of SPPs and P/E/O champion maps are products of:

• diligent scripture study
• reverse engineering the experience God has painstakingly walked us through to grow us as champions in the cause
• interviewing other champions to learn how they were discipled in the cause
• holding up all of this in prayer and fasting

The basic coaching/discipleship premise of Transformational Giving is that God is growing us in the image of His Son. He does so by leading us through certain experiences. These are not ‘works’ that save us. They are discipling experiences that shape us. Ephesians 2:10 says it this way:

For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do [emphasis mine].

Ephesians 4:11-12 shows us that God raises up leaders to discover, equip, and walk with His people through those works:

It was He who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be apostles, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, to prepare God’s people for works of service [emphasis mine]…

You’ll notice that what is called for on the part of leaders is not creativity but rather discernment: What are these works of service that God has prepared? How can I help people walk in them?

That’s not pen-and-napkin brainstorming stuff. That’s poring-through-the-Bible-on-our-knees stuff. That’s 1 Corinthians 4:16/Hebrews 6:12/Hebrews 13:7 stuff.

Or, as one of the regional directors of World Gospel Mission put it when I was doing training there last week, ‘The Bible calls us to go unto all nations and make disciples. All Eric is saying is that part of the process is making missions disciples in our own nation.’

Bingo. Bingo bango bongo. Supremely well put!