Do the Word

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.

We’re in the middle of a series of posts about how to create migration (or maturation) plans for your champions and potential champions by drawing upon your own growth journey by which you became a champion for your cause.

In our immediately preceding post, I began to show you how I would draw upon my own growth in Transformational Giving as I develop a maturation plan for a potential Mission Increase Foundation champion. (MIF is the charitable foundation for which I teach and the organization promoting the cause of Transformational Giving. Hope to see you at an upcoming training event, most of which are free.)

I concluded the post by asking: What kind of a maturation step could I develop for a potential MIF champion based on what I experienced as a seven-year old?

Answer:

What happened to me when I was seven was that a cause to which I had been  indirectly related (church) suddenly became available to me as a cause I could experience directly (leading worship in our living room).

If I were to talk with a potential MIF champion and I wanted them to begin to participate in the cause of Transformational Giving, I would ask them:

“Let’s think through the charities you presently support one by one. You don’t even have to tell me what they are. But as you think of each one, I want you to ask yourself, ‘Does my giving here connect me directly to the cause, or is my giving here in lieu of a direction connection?’ For the causes where your giving is currently indirect (likely because you are giving to a nonprofit so that they can connect directly with the cause), why do you suppose you are choosing to be indirectly related to the cause? How does this impact your growth in relation to the cause? And what ideas can you think of to give directly and relate directly to the cause? How would that direct giving change the relationship you have with the nonprofit in question?”

If, for example, someone was giving to a rescue mission to help the homeless, they might ask themselves, “Is this giving connecting me directly to cause of caring for the poor? Or am I doing this giving in lieu of caring directly for the poor?” They might then ask, “Why am I giving indirectly to this cause? What would it look like for me to give directly to the poor?” And that would be a fascinating conversation indeed–worthy of a few blog posts in and of itself.

In any case, that’s how I would use my own experience to create a P-level (Participation level–it’ll make more sense when you read the book) champion maturation step for my cause of TG.

In our next post we’ll push on past my seven year old self to an experience I had in my late teens as I continue to model for you how to draw upon your own maturation journey as a model for your champions and potential champions.

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.