Do the Word

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!

This misconception is predicated on the idea that Transformational Giving is like a switch that you throw. One minute your development efforts are transaction transaction transaction, the next they’re transformation transformation transformation.

That’s not how it works.

I began stumbling into the rudiments of what’s now Transformational Giving in 1996, while serving as a Vice President at the Russ Reid Company and working on the Million Man Gathering for Promise Keepers. Just seeing how certain individuals (who called themselves Promise Keepers, not Promise Keepers supporters) owned the Ten Promises of a Promise Keeper in their sphere of influence gave me pause for thought. ‘The organization is like the stage, the convening mechanism,’ I mused.

And then I came down from Transformation Mountain and promptly helped to create a January fund raising appeal package for the Los Angeles Mission called ‘Don’t Throw Christmas Out with the Tree’.

It was as traditional and transactional appeal as they come.

(It was also as bad an appeal as I’ve ever done. But I digress.)

The point is that at the very time that I was drawing up the first draft of the TG 10–the backbone of Transformational Giving–in 2005, I was still freely using the word ‘donor’ (which today I rue) and writing pieces like a ‘lapsed donor reactivation letter’ that began, ‘I haven’t heard from you this year, and frankly I’m concerned.’

The transition from trasactional fundraising to TG is almost always two steps forward and one step back.

Along the way, however, we see transformation busting out all over…sometimes even in transactional fund raising programs.

That became quite apparent to me in 1997, when, in a one-step-back reversion to transactional fundraising during my time as President of the Los Angeles Mission, I wrote a really moving appeal letter about Michael, a former crack addict who was now clean and serving on the staff of the mission as one of our work start chaplains helping our rehab program grads land jobs.

A ‘donor’ who normally sent in small gifts sent in a big gift–big enough to prompt me to call her.

‘What in the world did you send such a big check in for?’ I asked her.

‘Well,’ she replied. ‘It’s kind of personal. My son has been homeless for years. He may be dead, for all I know. When I saw the story about Michael, I thought that if I made a gift, maybe somehow it would be like helping my son.’

I invited her down to the mission to meet Michael personally. When they met right outside my office door, the woman collapsed into his arms and started sobbing.

Transformation’s been happening for years, you know, even in the most transactional places. All we’re doing through TG is to create a solid biblical foundation where transformation is the standard, rather than the exception. That takes time to learn. And you can’t force it to happen (true transformation is the work of the Holy Spirit, not marketing creativity). You can only foster it.

So in our monthly free workshops and labs, my question each month after teaching each different topic is:

What one step can you take towards implementing Transformational Giving in this area of your development efforts?

When you ask people that way, they rarely say, ‘Well, it’s just one great big theory.’ Instead, they say, ‘Well, I could probably do that one thing you talked about where…’

I’ve noticed in my years of teaching Transformational Giving that transformation is contagious. It’s like it breaks out in your development program, appearing first here and then there. Jesus said that’s the way it is with Kingdom things.  Like yeast in bread. Don’t despise the day of small beginnings and all that.

When you think about TG as the mustard seed, then what begins to happen is that you see it every day. It rarely appears in a super-systematized form (though it sometimes does). Instead it happens in a champion conversation here or a magazine article there.

Like tonight. I started writing this post, took a break to go to the Y, and then came back. I was thumbing through the latest issue of Christianity Today when I ran across an article about Bel Air Presbyterian Church pastor Mark Brewer’s effort to equip Los Angeles churches to fulfill their biblical responsibility to the homeless–a TG premise if ever there was one.

The project, Imagine LA, offers the following blessedly transformational math equation on their website home page:

8000 homeless families [that’s the total number in LA]
+
8000 faith-based organizations [that’s the total number of churches, synagogues, and mosques in LA]
_______________________________________
0 homeless children

The website goes on to say:

Just imagine if each one of these faith-based organizations helped a homeless family achieve long-term stability and sufficiency.

Bingo. Transformation. It’s breaking out all over. Note the great P to E (Participation to Engagement) quote from Kurt Frederickson, the chair of the Faith Community Subcommittee of the Simi Valley Task Force on Homelessness:

It’s real easy to live in the suburbs and go to skid row and pass out sandwiches [editor’s note: that’s the P project]. It’s a whole lot harder to circle around another person and say, ‘I’m going to be with you for the long haul’ [editor’s note: hello E!].

Transformation, like the Kingdom of God from whence it comes, is among us.