Do the Word

The best resource you have for coaching your champions to maturity in the cause you share is not a generic “Coach Your Champions” chart or template from another ministry.  It’s your own journey from zero to hero in relation to your cause. As you contemplate the steps through which God took you, you’ll get priceless insight into how to help others take the same journey.

Last time I promised to offer you slices from my own experience as a model.

For me, my cause is Transformational Giving. Here’s a definition (you’ll need one for your cause, and it will likely be harder than you think to write it out in a single sentence. Give it a try. I’ll wait for you):

Transformational giving is a collaboration between you and God in which He infuses your corporate and personal assets with His grace as you offer them in the way He asks to the people and purposes that He directs.

(Side note: When you coach your champions you’re offering a priceless personal asset [your experience] to the people God directs [your champions]. When you do that under the guidance of God, He’ll infuse your coaching with His grace and bring the saints in your care to perfection–full maturity in the cause! Isn’t that more fun that soliciting people for money so you can do ministry?)

So where did the journey to maturity in that cause begin for me, and how might I use my journey to build a champion migration strategy for TG?

Though I didn’t know it at the time, the first TG experience the Lord ever gave me happened when I was around seven years old.

I grew up in a nominally Christian home, which meant that although my parents weren’t on fire for the Lord, they were able to tell the difference between a Methodist and a Jehovah’s Witness. So when Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked on the door, my parents dismissed them cordially but agreed to accept the books and magazines as part of, well, not wanting to seem rude.

I had no idea who the people were; visitors to our house were quite rare, as we lived way out in the countryside; and I was an avid reader, so I regarded the literature with genuine curiosity.

One book in particular electrified me. It was entitled something like, “Church services for Your Home”. You can have church services in your home???? My seven-year old mine boggled at the thought. Even though we didn’t go to church regularly, I knew enough to know that church was something that happened in the ornate building near the library, not in our living room. And it sure didn’t happen with me leading!

I asked my parents if I could lead our family in the church services outlined in the book. They consented with some bemusement. As it turned out, the vocabulary was beyond what I could make sense of, so God likely used my limited reading skills to spare me from a life of Kingdom Halls.

I never became a Jehovah’s Witness. And I never presided over church services in our home as a seven-year old. But the experience was transformational to me, nonetheless: At the age of seven, God planted in me the idea that Christianity was not the work of paid professionals in special buildings. Even a seven-year old could lead worship in his living room.

So what in the world does that have to do with TG? And how can I use that when I coach champions to grow to maturity in the TG cause?

As a seven-year old, the transformational step through which the Lord guided me was the idea that I was not to be merely a witness (and definitely not a Jehovah’s Witness) to His work. I was to be directly engaged in it. And this work could not be confined to a special building but could and should take place in my very own living room.

That truth is embedded in Transformational Giving. A fundamental TG principle is that the more directly givers are connected to the cause, the more transformational their giving becomes. Just as the work of the church isn’t primarily conducted by the paid clergy and confined to the building, the work of the nonprofit shouldn’t primarily be conducted by the paid staff and centered at nonprofit headquarters.

That is, part of what makes giving transformational is its directness: When we pour directly into the people and purposes God puts in our path, we experience something transformational that doesn’t always happen when we give indirectly through a nonprofit organization so that the nonprofit can do ministry.

Now, this doesn’t mean that nonprofits should cease to exist. But it does mean that nonprofits should serve as platforms through which champions can connect with and grow in their ability to directly impact the cause. Nonprofits are gymnasiums for champions, not traveling circuses that entertain and amaze Christians with their death-defying feats of ministry in exchange for donations.

So as I plan a TG champion migration strategy, one of the first experiences  I’m looking to give to champions is the experience of giving in such a way that through their gift they interact ever more directly and skillfully with a cause that they’ve previously interacted with only indirectly.

How might I do that?

More to come in our next post.

I hope to have a link to enable you to order the Coach Your Champions book shortly. One of the core concepts therein is the idea of creating a “champion map” or champion migration strategy–a chart that lays out in a Participation/Engagement/Ownership trajectory how a champion has grown and is growing towards full maturity in Christ in the cause that you both share.

In order to get the book’s editor off my back, I had to promise that I would post bounteous numbers of sample champion maps on this blog. And indeed, I’d be shocked if we didn’t do just that over the coming months, though maybe in a form or fashion very different than what you might expect.

But here’s why I’m slow to make those my initial posts:

As the number of organizations with which I’ve created those “maps” grows, the three things I’m finding are:

(1) Each map is harrowingly unique. So different are they that you’d almost have a hard time telling that each organization was actually even engaged in the same process.

(2) The process requires that the map be constantly reviewed and revised in light of what you learn from and with your champions as you do maps with each champion. If it’s worth anything, it’s got to be a living, breathing chart. And the revisions we make to those charts are typically changes in kind, not merely degree.

(3) Organizations have a harder time trying to adapt a map from another organization than they do beginning from scratch and building their own. It’s like trying to tell your own life story and starting by editing someone else’s. There’s no generic template that starts with categories like “pray”, “give”, and “teach” that is productive, since, while each map ultimately involves some iteration of those things, it doesn’t seem to be helpful to do so in a formulaic way that enables you to start with another organization’s journey. (I surely do value examples; however, in our field examples quickly become Xeroxes.)

So if you can’t start from another organization’s journey, where can you start?

The answer is obvious, if not painful:

You have to start from your own journey, and that of your existing champions. This gets at the idea of collaborating with your champions that we wrote about in yesterday’s post.

You have to start by asking, “How did God move me from knowing and doing next to nothing in relation to my cause to the point where I’m at today, entrusted with this cause in a major way?”

What I find is that almost none of us intuitively have a really good sense of the steps that God used to bring us to the level of maturity and activity in the cause where we’re at now. And it’s very telling that the last place most of us look as a starting point for coaching our champions is our own story.

The New Testament of the Bible (NIV translation) records three places where we’re urged to imitate those who are farther along in the cause than we are. If my claim in the book is correct–that we’re the most major donors our organization will ever get–then why are we not urging our champions to imitate us?

I don’t think it’s modesty. In fact, I think it’s the opposite. I think we have a hard time believing that our champions can realistically surpass us in what they do for the cause. (Interesting that Jesus himself had no such vision problem–see John 14:12.)

So the first step in preparing our organization’s champion migration strategy is not to a generic map that we download and tweak with quick customizations. It’s to the long road of our own experience, retracing it prayerfully as we ask, “God, how in the world did you bring me here? What were the transformational steps and moments you took me through? And what can I learn from my own journey about how to create a path or at least leave some markers on the way for the champions you’ve sent me to coach?”

Rather than putting up a link that says “Download customizable maps here“, I want to instead model the process for you by doing some posts in which I analyze how God brought me to where I am in this cause of Transformational Giving, and how that can inform how I coach others to full maturity in this cause.

The baring-all begins in the next post.