Do the Word

Many nonprofit ministry presentations descend into local churches like UFOs and leave the same way, with nary a crop circle left behind.

What I mean by that is that when the typical nonprofit is invited to speak at a local church, the focus is typically on the speaking opportunity itself, rather than on how the speaking opportunity can best fit into an overall strategy for that church. I’m referring here to a strategy related to the cause the nonprofit is tasked with espousing–a strategy that needs to be in place before the presentation and that must cover the period extending long after the presentation is over.

During the visit, the nonprofit too often focuses on trying to tactfully harvest interested members of the congregation (especially so-called ‘good major donor prospects’) to speak with more in depth at a later date. (‘And can we set up a table with our brochures and talk to people after service? We promise not to be a cult.’)

When the speaking engagement is conceived of in this way, the nonprofit walks away with its new referrals; the church walks away until it needs a speaker for Missions Sunday next year or for the pastor’s vacation; and the two groups have, at best, a warm feeling about each other and a vague commitment to ‘keep in touch’ and ‘work together’.

But the church should never be looked at as a breeding ground for potential donors.

Instead, as we discussed in the previous post, the church is a tribe. (It’s actually much more than that. This is the Bride of Christ we’re talking about here! But my point is that it’s at least a tribe.)

As such, Transformational Giving invites us to look very differently at our relationship with churches and other organizations–a category that we call ‘partners’ (in distinction from ‘champions’, who are individuals.)

At minimum, that means that before we ask a church to let us speak, before we accept an invitation when a church invites us, before we open our mouths to speak in front of a church, we and the church ought to know and agree clearly and explicitly how this presentation fits into a wider ‘involvement map’ for the church and the cause that the nonprofit is tasked with espousing.

My dear brother Tim Rickel at World Gospel Mission told me about a recent ‘Missions Sunday’ to which he was invited to speak. Putting the ideas we’ve been talking about into practice, he called the pastor and said, ‘Pastor, what’s your thinking about how my speaking and this Missions Sunday can help you accomplish your church’s overall goal related to missions?’

‘Oh, we’ve been doing Missions Sunday for 20 years,’ said the pastor dismissively. ‘You only need to show up and speak.’

‘Well,’ said Tim, gently pushing back, ‘It would be helpful for me to know how my speaking can best help you achieve your goals related to growing your congregational impact on the cause of missions. How does Missions Sunday fit into that overall plan?’

‘You know,’ said the pastor reflectively, ‘I’ve honestly never thought about that question.’

So the challenge is on both sides of the altar, so to speak. Nonprofits too readily seek and accept opportunities to speak in churches because they see churches as donor petri dishes. Churches too often readily seek and accept outside speakers without an overall plan into which the speaker fits.

End result?

• Many, many miscommunications that result in a general and well-deserved climate of suspicion on the part of churches toward nonprofits.
• Less ‘profitable’ visits by nonprofits to churches. The extractive mentality, no matter how well it’s executed, is simply resulting in less extracted these days.
• Worst of all, there are tons of missed opportunities for churches to grow in relationship to the cause, which is the scriptural mandate. Tragically, churches defer to the specialized, professional ministry of nonprofits and abrogate their biblical responsibility: namely, to be the primary means by which God’s purpose toward the cause championed by the nonprofit is accomplished in the world! Far too often, in other words, churches see themselves as supporting nonprofits, rather than the other way around.

So how can nonprofits coach the tribes know as churches?

Bob Moffitt offers twelve profound suggestions on page 354 of his book, If Jesus Were Mayor. (It’s easy to pass over one or more of the following suggestions. Don’t. Each one is a gold mine. Drill deeply. Dwell and prayerfully meditate on each one. Then create a partner development strategy that accomplishes as many of them as possible.)

Here’s Bob’s list (note how it’s divided into three overarching categories, just like we recommend you create in your maps for champions–see the Coach Your Champions book for all the details):

The parachurch can equip the local church.

• Train it in the tasks for which the parachurch has a mandate
• Build skills–such as problem-solving, nonformal education techniques, planning, or evaluation
• Assist it to develop its own vision–instead of urging it to adopt the parachurch’s vision
• Offer consultation as the church implements new vision and skills

The parachurch can encourage the local church.

• Share a vision from God’s Word regarding its specialized ministry
• Walk alongside to help if the local church runs into difficulties or stumbles in the implementation of its vision
• Offer a covenant relationship of prayer–sharing tasks and burdens
• Foster reciprocity, so the local church also ministers to the parachurch

The parachurch can network the local church.

• Like it with other local churches that have similar visions
• Network inexperienced local churches with experienced churches, for the purpose of training
• Introduce it to local government and business relationships
• Introduce it to other local or international organizations with skills and resources that could help local churches carry out their visions

And here ends the quote from Bob. Now, back to me:

If the relationship between nonprofits and individuals needs to change (and, boy, does it ever), then the relationship between nonprofits and churches and other tribes needs to be completely blown up and rebuilt from scratch. Honestly, there may be no greater issue facing nonprofits and churches in our generation than this one.

‘It’s a fact of life: birds flock, fish school, and people tribe.’

That’s the opening line from the book jacket of Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization by Logan, King, and Fischer-Wright. The book arrived in the mail today, and I resent the fact that I have to work instead of being able to stand in my driveway in the 43 degree Colorado sunshine and read it.

If it is a fact of life that people tribe (and I believe that it is), it’s a fact sorely overlooked (or at least underutilized) by nonprofits. For decades, ‘tribes’ has translated into ‘endless referrals’, as in: ‘Hey, Joe Donor just invited me over to his house for a dessert with his friends!’

Our thought in such a circumstance: ‘Joe is finally using his connections to get me in front of people who could potentially become good donors to my organization.’

Much better thought in such a circumstance: ‘Joe Donor’s tribe is gathering, and I have the opportunity to coach the whole tribe in how they as a tribe can impact the cause Joe and I both love.’

Is that really so far-fetched?

Matt ‘I’d rather contribute to your blog than to do the hard work of writing my own’ Bates sent the Mission Increase Foundation GTO team a great excerpt from Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone in which Putnam blasts charities for thinking they can build tribes (I’m retrojecting that term back into Putnam’s writing) through direct mail apeal letters. Putnam cites the case of direct mail juggernaut Greenpeace, which tripled its membership to 2,350,000 in the years between 1985 and 1990…and then promptly lost 85 percent of those members in the next eight years.

(‘Well, yeah. But we’ve really cut down on our attrition rates since then. In fact, we’re unveiling an amazing new reactivation strategy…’)

Rather than mining Joe Donor’s tribe for interested individuals that I can add to my organization’s donor file, let’s instead focus on deploying a whole tribe  on behalf of the cause in one fell swoop–a tribe that already exists and naturally hangs together even without the benefit of a reactivation strategy.

This is so alien to our thinking as nonprofits because we tend to think that until an individual is corralled into our organization’s donor file (as ‘our donor’), we haven’t truly ‘acquired’ them.

(What odd and objectionable language, don’t you think? Why do we do this stuff?)

Such a donor seems ever in danger of slipping away. Why, we don’t even have their name in our database!

Given that people naturally ‘tribe’, is the individual really more safely and securely tucked into our cause when we manage to kidnap them out of their natural tribe or tribes and insert them into our donor file?

(Interestingly, most nonprofit donor files can’t truly be considered a tribe by Logan/King/Fischer-Wright’s definition, since members of a tribe are those who would stop and greet each other if they passed on the street. You could fill a mall with the donors of a larger nonprofit organization, and they could probably blissfully shop side by side for eons without realizing they were part of the XYZ Ministry donor file-cum-tribe).

(I got that definition by standing in the driveway an extra three minutes reading Tribal Leadership, by the way. Dang. This looks like a good book. Tracy, please cancel all of my meetings this week.)

Among the most natural tribes frequently encountered by Christian ministries?

Local churches.

What would it look like to coach an entire church-tribe at once, rather than seeking only to kidnap the immediately interested members and corral them into our donor file for further cultivation/solicitation? (Please cue the Invasion of the Body Snatchers music.)

We’ll turn to that in our next post, with nothing less than twelve excruciatingly specific recommendations.

Should ‘steward’ be the principle biblical category we use when describing the Christian, especially with regard to his or her giving?

My answer is no, though by answering in the negative I certainly don’t intend to imply that Christians should think of themselves as ‘not-stewards’.

Rather, my point is simply that I am not a proponent of the kind of thinking one encounters in the movement we might call ‘Christian stewardship’–well represented in books like Wes Wilmer’s A Revolution in Generosity: Transforming Stewards to be Rich Towards God or in the comments from Dave, a Mission Increase Foundation workshop attendee, in our previous post. 

(Not that the two would consider themselves identical or even similar. That estimation is totally my own.)

More today from Dave, for whom I have tremendous respect but am taking this opportunity to respectfully disagree in the hope of stimulating all of us, myself included, to new insights.

In Dave’s conversation with Mission Increase Foundation Colorado Giving and Training Officer Suzanne Dubois, Dave wrote: 

If there is any cause in the Bible that is obvious, it is those who are disadvantaged (the poor, widows, and orphans).  But for some reason, there are very few stories about people who are poor.  Most of them are about how we are supposed to care for those people and each other, which in essence is being rich toward God.  Why else would there be over 2,300 verses dealing with money and possessions?  It’s because that is part of God’s nature, and He wants us to be like His example, Jesus, the best example of being generous toward God. 

Please understand here that I do not go out and teach people that they are stingy, as mentioned in Mr. Foley’s blog. [Editor’s note: the post that Dave is referencing can be found here.]  The job of conviction belongs to the Holy Spirit, but it is also certain that today’s average Christian doesn’t understand his or her obligation as God’s steward, basically because the church has avoided teaching that, and as is readily admitted at some seminaries, pastors haven’t been taught that either.  If you don’t understand that you are obligated to steward everything you have and are, then you really don’t have the whole counsel of God.  Our stewardship has to involve our relationship with God, with our self, with our neighbors, and with that part of our creation over which we have influence.  If we avoid that, then stewardship is just a church word for ‘the church wants more of my money.’

I find so much to like in what Dave is written, but I love the quote from the rabbi in Spangler and Tverberg’s Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus, who, exasperated when no one would say anything to rebut his teaching, groaned, ‘Come on, people! Somebody disagree with me! How can we learn anything if no one will disagree?’

So I owe Dave the courtesy of disagreeing with him.

That steward is a helpful and important concept I wholeheartedly agree (as do Luke 16, 1 Corinthians 4:1-3, Titus 1:6-8, and 1 Peter 4:9-11, several of which are especially interesting in that they refer explicitly to stewarding the ‘mysteries of God’  and the ‘manifold grace’ of God).

That steward is the fundamental concept around which you want to build your approach to giving I have the severest reservations. Four, to wit:

1. Jesus is primarily identified in the scriptures as God’s son, rather than God’s steward. That he stewards both the mysteries and things of God is without question. That son is a better descriptor than steward ought to be equally so. Same with us. We are best understood as the sons and daughters of God, gradually being conformed to the image of His son. The overwhelming corpus of scripture treats discipleship in this way rather than in a stewardship context.
2. Steward is typically understood as an individual image. That is, I am stewarding what has been given to me. But a major, major (and, in our day, wildly underrepresented) part of the biblical framework about giving is corporate, that is, body oriented. And by this we mean something more than ‘I am giving to the church’. This is why TG talks about personal and corporate assets. Our network, our body, our sphere of influence–biblically, we give embedded in a framework greater than the individual. (The emergence of giving circles in secular fundraising attests to the naturalness of thinking in these terms.) The image of the steward obscures that reality.
3. Of the 2,300 verses dealing with money and possessions, it’s interesting in how few of those Jesus holds up the image of the steward when he refers to our purpose and role. When he admonishes care for the poor, he uses the images of neighbor, brother, friend, and even shepherd. This creates a far more compelling, direct, and personal relationship than is necessitated by the stewardship language that Jesus does not use. You’d almost think he was doing this on purpose.
4. The importation of steward language (I say ‘importation’ because stewardship is only explicitly referenced in the New Testament in the scripture passages I noted above, though certainly the concept is not alien to other scriptural allusions) as the primary identifier of the Christian runs the risk of overlooking the reality of the Lord’s indwelling presence within us. We are not stewarding the Lord’s time, talent, and treasure in his absence; rather, we are embodying him corporately because he is present. That’s why images and phrases like ‘body’ and ‘temple’ and ‘living stones’ appear much more frequently than the image of the steward. 

Jesus clearly makes much of our relationship with money, and so should we as we are mutually accountable to each other before him. But when I buy shoes for my son, I would hope my actions are not best characterized as me stewarding my time, talent, and treasure. Rather, I would suggest that I am best understood as doing what a father does when he loves his son (which reminds me of a certain verse that contains the word ‘gave’ but somehow omits the word ‘steward’…).