Do the Word

Just getting ready to head to a meeting with the Executive Team of World Gospel Mission to walk through the launch of the radical reorganization of their structure to provide maximum support for and encouragement of partner and champion maturation.

In Transformational Giving nomenclature, “champion” refers to individuals, whereas “partner” refers to organizations, like churches.

In the past (though there have been flashes of other things) many of us have inadvertently treated churches and other organizations either like rock quarries or charitable foundations.

In rock quarry mode, we saw churches as huge repositories of raw materials (“donors”) that we would go in and mine (through presentations in which we would gather names and addresses to our mailing lists). The job of “refining” these donors for the cause we saw as belonging to us.

This notion is consistent with the way we’ve worked overall with donors—plucking them out of their sphere of influence for a one-to-one (solicitation) relationship with us, overlooking the vastly preferable method of leaving an individual in their tribe and working with them to equip their whole tribe (which is the approach you see over and over again in the New Testament).

When we did work with churches as a whole, this often took the form of seeing them as a foundation—a funding source to which we made a presentation and, when funds were granted, a follow-up report. (We did do follow-up reports…didn’t we?)

With the launch of a whole division devoted to champions and a whole division devoted to partners, World Gospel Mission is signaling a vastly different approach to their work with churches and other organizations (like camps and universities). They’ll be taking everything we’ve talked about related to champion maturation strategies and applying it to partners.

Imagine sitting down with a church and saying, “Let’s collaborate on a plan that grows your congregation in the cause of missions. Some of the pieces will involve WGM. Some won’t involve us at all. Some areas you’ll be familiar with and love to do. Other areas will be brand new and a real challenge. But all will be essential to maturing your church in the overall cause of missions. And we’ll do this collaboratively.”

Instead of the church being a quarry or a foundation out of which we draw things, this transforms it into a bank or a garden or a story (pick your analogy here, hopefully less clichéd than mine) where we deposit things. Our role is transformed from solicitor (which causes churches to be wary) to a coach (which will initially cause them to be even more wary, because at first they’ll just think we’re really skilled solicitors).

In the next post, I’ll share with you about WGM’s champion-side reorganization, in which all of the functions that relate to individuals—from financial donations through short-term mission trip participation to recruitment for long-term missionary service—are handled by generalist “champion development officers” who, along with missionaries, interface directly with champions and coach them through all the phases of their involvement in missions, rather than divvying up those phases among different specialized divisions within the organization.

Reading Bob Moffit’s uber-fabulous If Jesus Were Mayor and came across a paragraph so juicy and so relevant to what we’re talking about in this blog that I would have stood up and cheered had my wife not been asleep when I read it:

Paul wrote of five ministry classifications for church leaders–apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. He wrote, though, of only one overarching job description for them all: ‘to prepare God’s people for works of service.‘ Whatever a church leader’s ministry gift or calling is, it must result in God’s people being equipped for good works. The implication of this passage is both clear and challenging: If the work of church leaders does not result in equipping the members to serve, they have not fulfilled the task they were assigned.

Through the magic of search and replace coupled with shameless plagiarism and a gratuitious and self-serving edit or two, we can produce something darn near like a one paragraph manifesto of what we’ve been blabbering on in this blog about for several days now:

Paul wrote of five ministry classifications for Christian leaders, and one can safely assume that nonprofit ministry leadership falls somewhere in this bunch–apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. He wrote, though, of only one overarching job description for them all: ‘to prepare God’s people for works of service.‘ Whatever a nonprofit ministry leader’s ministry gift or calling is, it must result in donors (what we call champions) being equipped for good works. The implication of this passage is both clear and challenging: If the work of nonprofit leaders does not result in equipping donors/champions to serve, they have not fulfilled the task they were assigned.

Preparing God’s people for works of service has to mean something more than building a donor file and prayer partners who support you, just like it has to mean more for a pastor than encouraging worship attendance, prayer, and getting folks to give generously to the offering.

This doesn’t mean that every donor/champion grows so much in the cause that s/he replaces the executive director any more than that every church member grows so much that they replace the pastor. It does mean, however, that there should be a continuum from donor/champion through executive director just the same way as there should be a continuum from church congregant through pastor.

Traditional development structures are just not set to deliver that, no matter how well-intentioned the practitioner. Ephesians 4:12 is a sledgehammer that busts up traditional development, friendraising, personal support development–you name it. Because Ephesians 4:12 says that the way we evaluate our development efforts is to ask:

How well are you preparing God’s people for the works of service He prepared for them beforehand?

Interesting William Easterly review of Peter Singer’s new book, The Life You Can Save, in The Wall Street Journal last week.

Singer’s signature argument in the book goes like this:

Suppose you are taking a walk and you come upon a child drowning in a shallow pond. Would you stop and rescue him or would you worry about ruining your shoes? Of course you would rescue the child. Then why don’t you spend less on shoes and instead give the money to Unicef or the World Health Organization, since they can surely save a child with your donation-in-lieu-of-shoes?

Singer’s conclusion? You should be more generous.

Easterly’s conclusion? Singer puts too much faith in Unicef and the World Health Organization. He goes on to cite some examples of the bureacratic inadequacies of NGOs and recommends that they improve.

My conclusion?

Singer’s book is the latest in a growing trend (including Christian Smith’s Passing The Plate and Christianity Today’s cover article, Scrooge Lives! Why We’re Not Putting More Money in the Offering Plate And What We Can Do About It) that sees the fault in the (greedy and materialistic) individual and the solution in individuals overcoming that, likely through being chided and preached at and reminded to buy fewer nice shoes and make more donations to international NGOs so children overseas don’t starve.

What these articles accept without question is the great good of organizations caring for children overseas in such a way that what is required of ordinary people is simply to give their money, and more of it, thank you. The efficiency of professionalizing care in this way seems so obviously beneficial that no one stops to closely analyze the results and ask, “Um… So how is this approach actually impacting the cause?” (And, for Christians, how is this approach impacting the church growing in maturity and Christlikeness in relation to the cause?)

What if the problem is not caused by the fact that ordinary people are selfish and greedy but rather by the fact that nonprofit organizations keep ordinary people at progressively greater distance (paradoxically, as organizations become more successful) from directly interacting with the cause, in effect mystifying it such that the only conclusion that can be drawn is that solutions are best left to the paid professionals?

What if the reason we save the child drowning in the puddle but don’t sell our shoes to make a donation to Unicef is not that we are selfish but rather that we respond when we are directly engaged in the cause but that nonprofits, sometimes inadvertently, are isolating us increasingly from interacting directly with causes that Jesus intended Christians to deal with ourselves?

The solution, then, comes not from us being motivated to be more responsive to appeals for indirect involvement but rather for organizations like Unicef and WHO to pioneer ways for ordinary individuals to be directly involved with the cause.

That’s the beauty of child sponsorship which most fundraisers fail to grasp. Most fundraisers love the idea of monthly sponsorship and try to adapt it to their cause. In doing so, they are rarely successful because what makes child sponsorship work is not the idea of putting a dollar amount on something abstract but the fact that it places individuals in direct relationship to the cause. The cause has a name and a face and writes to them three times a year. They can even go visit the cause if they like.

This doesn’t mean Christians shouldn’t be more generous. Far from it. But it does mean that the gateway to greater generosity is organizations working to more directly engage Christians in the cause, not characterizing Christians as ungenerous because they fail to respond to organizations’ appeals to support their professional efforts.