Do the Word

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.

Interesting that two of my favorite blogs did posts this week on the subject of donor experience as the future of fundraising. (See The Agitator’s Offering “Touch” and “Experience” and Donor Power Blog’s Give donors more experience for their giving.)

Mike, however, has a different take.

Mike is a champion I met with yesterday. He shared with me how he is currently comprehensively active (what I call “all in”) with five nonprofits, which he selected after interviewing a number of them four years ago using a guide he received from the Center for Nonprofit Excellence.

He told me that he had an idea in his head of the causes in which he felt he should become involved, and then he interviewed nonprofits according to his criteria, which included his commitment to being directly involved in the cause rather than simply giving to a nonprofit so that they could impact the cause funded by his resources.

So the twin questions are these:

1. Are donors really looking for nonprofits to provide them with experiences? Or, to steal a CS Lewis analogy, when we think that way are we looking at the flashlight beam rather than what the flashlight is illuminating (which in this case is the idea that champions are cause-driven and are looking for nonprofits that can equip them to better impact the causes that draw them)?

2. Is Mike the exception to the rule or the firstfruits of what will soon become the “new normal” for donors-who-are-better-called-champions?

I would answer “yes” to this question, but even if I’m wrong, I would say that those of us in the Christian nonprofit sector ought to be working hard to Make More Mikes.

After all, Ephesians 4:11-13 doesn’t say that God gave you leadership of a ministry so that you can give donors experiences in exchange for their donations. It says that God gave you as a gift to His champions so they could be knit together and built up to full maturity in the cause you both share.

We’re continuing our discussion of how to use your past experience to create champion maturation strategies, using my own experience as a model.

In today’s episode, I’m 21 years old, serving as associate pastor of Covenant United Methodist Church in Fort Wayne, IN. At the time it was a church of about 400, growing quickly, largely due to the fact that the north side of Fort Wayne was growing quickly.

Each week I’d look out on the congregation and see more and more cheerful new people who appeared competent and capable of doing something more than just sitting there. Are they content just to sit there?, I’d wonder. By and large they certainly didn’t jump at the invitations we extended to attend this special event or volunteer for that activity.

One day I received a flyer to attend a training session on the Every Member In Ministry strategy utilized by Frazier Memorial United Methodist Church in Montgomery, AL. What they taught blew me away:

Every member makes two commitments when joining our church family: a commitment to Jesus Christ and a commitment to support the Frazer family through prayers, presence, gifts, and service. Our In His Steps Commitment cards reflect annual commitments of prayers, presence, gifts, and service by each member— children…students…and adults. Our commitments in these areas determine how and where Frazer will minister in the coming year.

The idea of people making a commitment in the areas of prayer, presence, gifts, and service wasn’t what blew me away. What blew me away was the final sentence above: What people committed in each of those areas would determine how and where the church ministered in the coming year. If members had gifts to run a nursery and the inclination to put those gifts to use, the church would have a nursery; otherwise, they would not.

That experience has profoundly shaped my thinking about nonprofits. In general, nonprofits determine what they’re going to do in a given year and how much that will cost. Then they turn to donors to give the money to cover the cost of that program.

But what would happen if the length, breadth, heighth, and depth of a nonprofit’s ministry–and its how and where–were determined solely by the corporate and personal assets of its champions (and you know from previous posts that I’m talking about far more than just the financial here), and the work of the nonprofit’s staff was to build those assets (rather than to solicit them)?

So how might I apply this insight from my personal journey to a champion maturation strategy for the cause of Transformational Giving through Mission Increase Foundation? (I’m doing this to model how you might apply your own experiences in relation to your cause.)

In yesterday’s post I laid out a P-level step based on my experience as a seven-year old. So today it seems fitting to lay out an E-level step based on this gift-experience the Lord gave me when I was 21:

I’d ask a champion to make appointments with me to visit each of the charities they presently support, touring and meeting with the ED at each charity. In those appointments, I’d ask the champion, “As we walk through this place, what are the corporate and personal assets you have that you think you could potentially deploy to make a difference in this cause? Why have you so far not chosen to do so?” And then in the meeting between the champion and the ED, I’d get both parties to consider the question, “How could and should Mr. Champion grow in relation to the cause this year? How can your nonprofit assist in the building of his personal and corporate assets in this regard?”

We’re moving here towards the idea that once it reaches the E level, the relationship between champion and nonprofit is covenantal–something we’ll be developing in MIF’s June workshop on Reactivating Lapsed Donors.