Do the Word

In most missions agencies (and in most nonprofits in general), your brain surgeon becomes your primary doctor and treats you for everything from gout to halitosis.

Problem is, brain surgeons don’t tend to know a lot about body parts below the neck. They’re, you know, brain surgeons.

Which is why World Gospel Mission is instituting a massive overhaul of their partner/champion structure to let the brain surgeons focus on brain surgery while instuting a whole new front line of general practitioners.

Permit me to explain:

If you are a nonprofit, it seems like the most natural thing in the world to manage donors’/volunteers’/champions’ activities, not the gaps between the activities.

So if you call up a missions agency and say, “My church group would like to go on a short-term mission trip,” they connect you to the short-term mission department. Or if you say, “I’d like to put Missionary Jones in my will,” they connect you to the planned giving office. Or if you say, “I’m considering full-time missonary service,” they put you through to the full-time missionary service office.

But what happens if you talk to the short-term mission department and decide you don’t want to go on a short-term mission trip? Or what happens if you get the brochure on career missionary service and it’s not for you? Or how about if you actually do put Missionary Jones in your will? What happens next?

Answer:

Typically you end up in The Gap–AKA The Mailing List.

In most nonprofits, you get added to the mailing list as a way to make sure the nonprofit can still stay in touch with you. When you’re in The Gap, you get The Newsletter and The Occasional Appeal Letter–neither of which you probably asked for–because the nonprofit hopes that you will see something in The Newsletter or The Occasional Appeal Letter that will cause you to contact the organization again and reconnect with a different brain surgeon, which is to say a department that specializes in a particular function.

Nonprofits manage organizational functions when they should in fact be coaching donors through the gaps.

The logic is compelling when you really stop to think about it:

If I call your agency and inquire about long-term mission service, and then I decide I’m not interested, you will likely call me once or twice or maybe even three times before consigning me to The Newsletter List. But if I decide I’m not interested in long-term missionary service, there’s at least a pretty good chance that I’m not sure exactly what I want.

Which is why nonprofits should focus on coaching champions in the gaps, which can best be done by making sure that every champion is assigned to a “general practitioner”–a champion development officer who serves as a generalist, able to talk with and coach a champion through everything from short-term mission service to making a planned gift to becoming a full-time missionary.

This is The Great Leap Forward in which WGM is now engaged.

Instead of having a volunteer department and a donor department (which is typically divided into mass fundraising and major gifts and planned gifts) and a gift-in-kind department and a short-term missions department etcetera etcetera, WGM is now organizing its partner and champion functions into three departments:

1. A partner department, where, as we talked about in the previous post, each organization will be coached by a partner development officer/generalist who can help the church plan how to grow in missions on every front.

2. A champion department, where the same thing happens with individuals. Doesn’t matter if you want to volunteer, donate a car, go on a mission trip, or become a full-time missionary, you won’t be shuttled from department to department. You’ll have one person to coach you along all phases of your journey.

3. A partner and champion services department. What were formerly front-end functions passing champions and partners around like hot potatoes now become second-line specialists to which champions and partners are referred but never relinquished to as those champions and partners walk through specific parts of the journey. You may fill out a long-term service application with a career missionary specialist, but you won’t get transferred to him or her permanently–any more than you would leave your family doctor and have a brain surgeon take over your general care after the family doctor sends you to the brain surgeon for a consult.

It’s called coaching through the gaps. And it makes eminent sense, because the gaps are where champions and partners have the greatest likelihood to grow.

Why would you leave that to your newsletter?

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?