Do the Word

Last night when I and my fellow passengers aboard United Airlines flight 5830 were stuck on the Indianapolis tarmac for two and a half hours in a plane whose air conditioning was broken, WGM’s Tim Rickel texted me:

Start chanting ‘Passenger Bill of Rights. Flight attendants love that!

Passenger bills of rights. The brand new Credit card bill of rights. Even an Arena Football League Fan’s bill of rights. The concept of bills of rights that provide individuals protection from thoughtless and predatory practices by the organizations with which they do business is certainly gaining steam.

There’s even a Donor bill of rights, which, among the dramatic blows for donor liberty that it strikes, asserts that the donor has the right:

V. To receive appropriate acknowledgement [sic] and recognition.

Hm. That’ll change things.

The interesting thing about bills of right is that they are generally drawn up in situations where people recognize the need to protect a group considered less powerful from a group considered more powerful, usually in the context of a transaction. That’s certainly the feel of the donor bill of rights, which boldly and provocatively asserts that the donor has the right:

X. To feel free to ask questions when making a donation and to receive prompt, truthful and forthright answers.

(Sadly, implementing that one would indeed be an improvement for many ministries.)

Very few husbands and wives draft bills of rights. Other than a few wacky websites, there are not many Christians’ bills of rights. And the one and only ‘friend bill of rights’ was posted on the web earlier this week.

(Pretty good piece, really, though the assertion that as her friend she has a right to ask you ‘to give/receive help moving, driving to/from the airport, and always a place to crash when coming from out-of-town’ does give me the briefest of pause for thoughts. But I digress.)

Generally, if a relationship is transformational (marriage, friendship, membership at a church) and it’s entered into voluntarily by parties, bills of rights just don’t cut it. Sure, they protect against grosser transactional abuses. But one tends to (or ought to) have higher hopes when one marries than avoiding grosser transactional abuses.

That’s why not many bills of rights are found in the scriptures. What is found therein, however, are covenants. What’s cool about the word ‘covenant’ (or berit in the Hebrew) is that it bespeaks two entities on the same side. Synonyms for the word include ‘league’ or ‘confederacy’–a far cry from anything gross or transactional.

Transformational Giving principle five says:

A Transformational Giving relationship between a champion and an organization is primarily a peer-level accountability relationship, not merely a friendship or a mutual admiration society.

A peer-level accountability relationship bespeaks a covenantal relationship, a league, a confederacy focused on accomplishing a cause. And that is indeed the nature of the relationship between the champion and the organization/development officer in a Transformational Giving context.

The simplest form of covenant between the champion and the organization is the champion map–the P/E/O (Participation/Engagement/Ownership) annual plan drawn up collaboratively that identifies the areas where, using the Scripture as a guide, the champion and organization discern that God is calling the champion to grow in the coming year. The implied covenant behind the champion map is this: The champion commits to the growth plan. The organization commits to holding the champion accountable to the plan as well as coaching the champion, with the grace of God, to achieve the growth envisioned in the plan.

(For more on creating champion maps, check out the Coach Your Champions website. Heck, you can even buy the book.)

But the concept of the champion/organization covenant goes even deeper.

A champion/organization covenant is not:

• a statement of faith
• a credo
• a mission statement
• an annual plan
• any one of the fifteen other things nonprofits are taught that they’re supposed to have and probably do but no one can find them because they’re never used

Instead, a covenant defines what and how champion and organization are holding each other accountable to in service of achieving the cause they both share.

Check out these two sample covenant-type docs from nonprofit ministries (neither of which, interestingly, refer to these as covenants, despite them being reasonably good examples of the same). Kudos to Mission Increase Foundation/Arizona‘s Jonathan Roe for the tip.

Note the nature of the language. It’s not a ‘Here’s what you’re responsible for; here’s what we’re responsible for’ approach. There’s no we/you split.

Further, unlike the Donor’s bill of rights, there’s more than money being comprehended here. In fact, the primary category is cause, not money. That doesn’t mean money doesn’t fall under the covenant. Far from it. It means that giving through the organization is the result, not the purpose, of the relationship.

Take a look first at this covenant from Son Life Ministries in Wheaton, IL:

1. Christ commanded me to make disciples–it isn’t an option.
2. Christ–through His life–modeled for me the process of fulfilling the Great Commission. Making disciples involves seeking the lost, establishing believers, and equipping workers: An ongoing balance of winning, building, and equipping priorities, programs, and relationships.
3. Dependence upon God–through his Word, prayer, and His Holy Spirit–is essential to fulfill my part in His Great Commission.
4. The Great Commission is my individual responsibility. In its most critical and basic form, the Great Commission is peer-to-peer, friend to friend and expands from me to the ends of the earth.
5. My love for God and for others motivates me to Great Commission living.
6. The church is God’s chosen vehicle to assist and equip me in the fulfillment of this God-given responsibility.

And how about this piece from our friends up the road at Denver Seminary?

1. We are committed to training people for diverse ministries in and alongside local churches.
2. We are committed to upholding teaching as the professors’ primary task.
3. We are committed to promoting the maximum utilization of faculty gifts of leadership and scholarship to serve God’s redemptive purposes.
4. We are committed to providing graduate level education in which scholarship is placed in the service of ministry.
5. We are committed to applying in the classroom adult education principles which wed relevant theory to the practice of ministry.
6. We are committed to employing biblical truth in critiquing and addressing cultures.
7. We are committed to fostering the moral and spiritual formation of students.

So why all the fuss about a covenant? Why add another document to write on top of the mission statement, vision statement, statement of faith, monthly bank statement, and statement to the press?

Because a covenant is your key to determining mutually with champions when they lapse…and how you will respond.

Tomorrow: the grand finale of our series on lapsed donors.

It’s half time at the Lapsed Champion Bowl!

Today marks the middle of this week’s posts on the subject, so before you run out to use the restroom and grab a bowl of Tostitos (be careful on the order there) and do other half time-esque activities, let’s review the highlights from the first half:

• We discovered that many individuals who are categorized as ‘lapsed’ really aren’t lapsed at all. They’re participants. Participants participate in projects. They might even participate repeatedly, or annually (like a rescue mission donor giving money to provide meals for the homeless every Thanksgiving). As such, they may look quite ‘active’.
• As the apostle John reminds us, however, activity is not the criterion by which we measure whether a champion is ‘of us’. Knowledge of the truth is. We’re not talking here about knowing in the informational sense, but in the King James way of knowing one’s wife that always made us giggle in Sunday school. In Transformational Giving we call this Engagement. Engagement means ‘knowing’ the cause the way Adam ‘knew’ Eve.
• As such, when a ministry defines and declares who’s lapsed on the basis of the lack of recency of individual giving (saying, for example, that all individuals are lapsed who have given two or more gifts in their giving lifetime but none in the last two years), it’s missing the boat. Activity isn’t the issue. And ministries aren’t the arbiters of what counts as lapsed. Engagement with the cause is the issue, and what counts as lapsed is determined by Scripture.
• Even using this language stands to land us quite far downstream from where we want to be biblically if we’re not careful. Jesus doesn’t talk in terms of sheep who wander. He talks in terms of shepherds who lose. So we need something more than a lapsed champion strategy. We need an organizational accountability strategy, in which we repent of and seek to recover the champions whom we have permitted to lapse (or, if you prefer, the sheep we have permitted to wander) on our watch.

So heading into the second half of play (the two posts remaining this week), what should we be looking for?

• A two-sided lapsed recovery strategy, one that addresses not only sheep who wander but also shepherds who lose. We should expect to see the appearance of TG Principle 5, which talks about the relationship between organization and champion being a peer-level mutual accountability relationship. There’s no way this game can be won unless each side recognizes and recovers its authority and responsibility.
• That kind of talk brings the champion map to mind–the P/E/O plan created by the champion and the organization to chart a trajectory for champion growth in the image of Christ in relation to the cause.
• I’d also look for TG 5 to be used to talk about how Scripture needs to be the basis of determining what counts as lapsed, not the need of the organization nor the desire of the champion. That’s likely to involve talk of intensive Scripture study, prayer, and fasting.
• It’s also appearing likely that more is at issue here than a person’s giving. Don’t be surprised if in the second half we see the appearance of the idea that a person could be happily giving regularly and yet still count as lapsed. You could almost see that coming in the first half with the idea in yesterday’s post that an organization could well be humming along and in fact itself be lapsed.
• We’ve seen since the opening kickoff this week that Participation has been sidelined from the lapsed discussion. Engagement clearly is going to be the focus of the second half offense. If the opposite of lapsed isn’t active, you have to think it’s Engaged.
• The whole idea that Engagement is tied to knowledge sets us up well for a revelation that a champion can’t lapse without first ‘knowing’ the cause. That’s definitely going to mean changing the way we deal with all champions, not just the lapsed ones. Likely we’ll see that the best lapsed champion strategy…is an effective P/E/O (Participation/Engagement/Ownership) strategy that plants the seed of ‘knowing’ the cause in every project from P through O. In other words, the key to not losing sheep is clearly connected to keeping them focused on the cause, not just bombarding them with a monthly barrage of heart-tugging appeals.

The fascinating thing to note as we close this halftime show is that we know something new has to be introduced in the TG offense in the second half. Even when you consider the champion maps and a well-formed P/E/O strategy, it’s not enough to keep shepherds from losing and sheep from wandering. We’re clearly looking at a major new piece being added to the TG playbook right here.

The teams are headed back on to the field now, sheep on the left and shepherds on the right. Things are shaping up for a powerful finish to this one.

Whoa Nelly! Call the family and gather ’round the blog for the second half of the Lapsed Champion Bowl!

Role reversal.

That’s the phrase that keeps coming to mind for me as I reflect on the vastly different way that Transformational Giving views and treats the subject of champions lapsing, as compared to how traditional/transactional development deals with ‘lapsed donors’.

As we talked about in yesterday’s post (and when you review it, make sure to check out the comment posted by Mission Increase Foundation Expansion Officer Tracy Nordyke), John’s words about those who were not ‘of us’ and Jesus’ words about shepherds reverse the roles normally played in the lapsed drama by organization and champion.

In traditional/transactional lapsed donor strategy:

• the organization determines what constitutes a lapsed donor. Typically they determine that a donor is ‘lapsed’ when the donor, after having in the past given X gifts in Y period of time, has now ceased altogether from giving over Z period of time.
• the donor is responsible for the lapse due to their inaction. In fact, if their unresponsive behavior keeps up, we usually term them ‘inactive’.

Notice how these two key points are inverted in Transformational Giving:

• In 1 John 2:20, notice what John says is the opposite of not being ‘of us’. It’s not ‘staying with us’. It’s knowing the truth. In other words, activity isn’t the measurement; knowledge is. And knowledge here, of course, means something entirely different than amassing information. It might better be translated by a word far more familiar to us in Transformational Giving, namely: Engagement. More on this as the week unfolds. The key to note for today is that the standard of lapsing is not  set by the organization. It’s set in relation to the truth (to which, I would add, both the organization and the champion are subject. This raises the fascinating spectre of lapsed organizations, which, provocatively,  John raises in Revelation 2:3-5 with regard to the Church at Ephesus.)
• As we noted yesterday, Jesus doesn’t say, ‘Suppose a sheep wanders.’ He says, ‘Suppose a shepherd loses a sheep.’ So the subject and verb here are switched. The emphasis is flipped 180 degrees. The focus is not ‘donor lapsed’. It’s ‘shepherd lost’.

So let’s take stock of where we are as of Day 2 of our lapsed champion odyssey:

• In TG, organizations don’t define what counts as lapsed. Scripture does.
• According to Scripture, organizations can lapse just the same as champions can, even when they are by all appearances quite active.
• The shepherd, not the sheep, has an accountability role not comprehended in traditional/transactional development.

Having fun yet? More tomorrow.