Do the Word

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.

Great email from a workshop participant yesterday. The writer oversees a ministry to incarcerated youth. Question was: in TG, are we really, for example, calling all people to do face-to-face ministry with prisoners? What about those who truly feel no calling in that area and who exhibit no gifting for it? My reply follows:

You have masterfully put your finger right on the key question that Christians must answer today—and one of the key distinctions between Transformational Giving and traditional fundraising.

About eighty years ago, missions intensified their fundraising efforts by advising donors and potential donors that they could ‘give or go’. That is, you could share the Gospel in Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth. Or if that wasn’t practicable for you, you could give so that others could go and do that in your place.

Loren Cunningham from YWAM was one of the first mission figures who noted that missions agencies were extending an offer that neither Jesus nor the scriptures in general were making. As Cunningham noted, Christians are called to give and go. Not all Christians will go to the ends of the earth, but all Christians are called to go somewhere, even if that’s the end of the block.

Since then, missiologists have noted that the extrabiblical disjunction that missions agencies offered (to give or go) has been responsible for a number of missions ailments, e.g., anemic missionaries, shortages of career missionaries, churches who don’t ‘feel called’ to missions, and declining donor support for missionaries to the point where the Christian Leadership Alliance noted at the end of last year that the current model for missions funding will become extinct by the end of this generation, should Jesus tarry.

One thing that no one disputes is that for a time, giving Christians the choice between doing and giving resulted in plentiful funding for organizations that volunteered to professionalize the doing!

So, for example, Christians who were uncomfortable sharing their faith were told that they could fulfill the scripture’s call to share their faith by giving money to a professional evangelist instead.

Christians who were nervous around homeless people were told that they could fulfill the scripture’s call to care for the poor by giving money to professional homeless service providers.

And, yes, Christians who did not want to visit those in prison were—and are—told that if they are uncomfortable visiting prisoners, they can instead fulfill the Savior’s call to visit those in prison by giving money to professional prison ministries.

As time has passed, that has created a staggering number of nonprofit ministry professionals to whom the church has largely delegated scripture’s calls for direct action.

The result? Spiritual anemia afflicts the church. Christians buy into a professionalized model of ministry where those who ‘have a gift for that sort of thing’ carry out what scripture actually calls all Christians to be involved in.

Christians becoming consumers, in other words, as professionalized providers of ministry assure them that they are doing the right thing by ‘leaving the driving to us’.

Today, the professionalized providers of service are becoming more and more dismayed, because Christians are not holding up their end of the bargain. They’re simply not giving near as much as they should, according to churches and nonprofits. And indeed, the percentage of income given by the average Christian has remained unchanged for the last fifty years.

But there’s an interesting trend that’s beginning to arise. Driven (sadly, often by secular trends, rather than a return to scripture that always called for this in the first place) Christians are ‘grabbing the wheel’ for themselves. Instead of sponsoring missionaries, they’re going on mission trips themselves. And they’re raising their own money to do it! They’re giving and going, in other words, while the church and nonprofit ministries watch with a mix of concern and intrigue.

Transformational Giving is an effort to return the relationship between Christians and nonprofit ministries to a scriptural foundation—one in which Christians are equipped to directly impact the causes to which Christ calls them.

In TG, the ‘give or go’ disjunction is acknowledged as patently unscriptural, and the idea of basic Christian responsibilities being delegated to paid professionals is repudiated. The priesthood of all believers is affirmed, where, as in Ephesians 4:11-13, the role of ministry leaders is recognized as preparing all God’s people for works of service and bringing them to full maturity in the cause of Christ–not doing the works of service for them and relegating them to the role of supporters.

It’s going to take all of us some time, should Jesus tarry, for Christian leaders to help Christians reclaim the works of mercy commended to all Christians. That’s what TG is all about: coaching nonprofits to evolve from professionalized service providers financed by supporters to coaches of champions, equipping Christians to walk in the works of service God has prepared for them.

In the case of your ministry, you’re in a key spot. You’re absolutely right: most Christians are completely freaked out about the idea of visiting those in prison. And that’s where the P-E-O (participation-engagement-ownership) process comes in. It’s how we prepare God’s people for works of service. We ‘head them off at the pass’ when they tell us that they are going to give money to us so that we can do the ministry for them. We know that God calls them to give and to visit prisoners—and we know that visiting prisoners will change them in a way that donating to a prison ministry alone never can.

But this requires that we coach them. Many (most, perhaps) will need to begin with steps that precede actually doing a visit. Those steps might involve lunch with you and them and a former prisoner. One ministry we work with begins the discipleship process by inviting champions to send Christmas cards. Next step? Have them receive the replies and begin to correspond. Perhaps a fictional or autobiographical book will help prepare the champion. In any case, what all these steps have in common is that they are preparing the champion for works of service, not serving as a substitute for the same.

It would be unreasonable to expect that every champion would go on to be a full-time worker with incarcerated youth (or whatever one’s particular cause is), or that everyone would be able to handle the hardest cases. But that’s not what Jesus calls for. His call is simply that we visit those in prison. Responding to that call need not (and typically will not) be a full-time vocation for most of us. But it does appear that the Savior had in mind that neither would it be absent for our lifestyle, either.

God came to us directly in the form of Jesus—and He calls all of His people to go directly to the world in need, not through professional intermediaries. Nonprofits can and should join churches in equipping them to give and go. Because there’s something about doing both of those things at a progressively deeper level that grows us in His image in a way that doing one or the other simply can’t accomplish alone.