Last week we looked at Matthew 6:21, and how the use of money reflects priorities. We were reminded that Jesus taught that where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
As a result, when we give a gift to God, we are expressing our desire to make Him a priority in our life. In Christian fund raising, the road well-traveled is mainly concerned about securing needed funds for the ministry.
The paradigm operates by encouraging Christian leaders to find people that have money and then convince those people to give their money to the ministry.
On the road less traveled, Christian leaders are focused on helping followers of Christ express their love of God by making Him a priority through the giving of their treasure. On the road less traveled, the relationship between the giver and the recipient—the ministry or the church—is secondary.
More important is the giver’s and the recipient’s relationship with God, who stands at the center of this biblical model:
Yet still reigning is that old model with its emphasis on the relationship between the giver and the recipient:
When the primary, if not exclusive emphasis is on the giver-recipient relationship, the giver may feel enormous pressure to ensure that the donated funds are used effectively.
Similarly, the recipient may feel enormous pressure to find donors that have the resources to help and then to convince them to give. This pressure has led to several problems.
Problem #1: Donor Spin
Over the years I’ve watched churches and ministries make outlandish claims designed to convince God’s people that their cause is worthwhile.
About twenty years ago, a ministry was reporting the number of daily internet conversions happening in a certain Middle Eastern country that, if accurate, would mean the entire population of the country would confess Christ in seven years.
It is not anyone’s intention to lie or to conduct the wholesale fabrication of information. The claims that get out of hand result from the pressure these ministry leaders feel to justify their work. The justification is not to God, but to the donors.
(Some of you are wondering, “But what about my need to steward God’s resources, to know that my gift was well spent?” We will address that in due course.)
Nearly thirty years ago, I visited Romania for the first time and met with a Romanian youth worker in Cluj.
During our get-to-know-you meeting, I asked him about the big youth workers conference that had been held earlier in the year. He asked me if I wanted the truth, a question that made me wary.
He told me that six months before the conference, the city of Cluj had only two vocational youth workers and ten or fifteen others serving as volunteer leaders in their churches.
A large foreign organization came to Cluj and hosted a weekend conference for youth workers. The organization offered two nights in a charming hotel, delicious meals, and interesting speakers.
The president of the ministry was one of them. Over five hundred people signed up and attended. The organization videotaped the conference and then communicated to the donors that they trained five hundred youth workers.
The Romanian man then asked me, “Six months after the conference, how many youth workers do you think there were there in Cluj?” I gave the goofy-face look I use when I don’t want to answer a question.
He said, “The same two vocational workers and the same group of volunteers.”
I don’t believe the organization was just whipping up a big lie. Instead, I think they were so concerned about communicating to donors that they forgot to be more concerned about what God thought. You can’t spin God.
Problem #2: Follow the Money
When we moved to Poland, I discovered that people had certain expectations of me because I was American.
To be more specific, many national Christian leaders look to find an American who can connect them to financial resources in the United States.
These godly and gifted Christian leaders are operating according to a fundraising model they have embraced without careful biblical critique.
Undergirding this practice is the belief that Americans have money and once you contact them, you’ll have the opportunity to convince them to give you the financial resources you need.
I encounter this so often that when I travel internationally, I keep my US heritage quiet, and I speak Polish in public as much as possible. After years of ministry work in a variety of countries and cultures, I realized the larger issue behind this attraction to Americans.
When the emphasis is on the transaction between the giver and the receiver, the receivers—in churches around the world—follow the money to the wealthy.
These givers and receivers are godly people, but the model they follow drives them unintentionally in a specific direction.
It works something like this: the ministry work needs funding, so you must find people who have financial resources and convince them to give.
Of course, a Christian leader will invest time in individuals with a high net worth. That’s only common sense, right?
One fundraiser told me point-blank, “I can spend two hours with one donor who can give a gift of $25,000 or spend fifty hours with twenty-five people who might give $1,000.”
In my early travels to India, I wanted to meet with a large number of Christian leaders to understand what God was doing in India. This was like the proverbial blind person describing the elephant—while drinking from a fire hose.
During one of my trips, an American pastor took me to meet his India contact. When we arrived at the airport, we were greeted with flowers and taken to hear a children’s choir sing for us.
I was given a two-part invitation: to speak at their Bible school graduation the next day and to lead a training session for over 2,000 children’s workers they were gathering. Having planned a shorter visit and having barely met them, I declined both invitations.
I remember thinking, “Who asks someone they just met to speak at a graduation—and then ask that same person to lead a training event in their country even though he just arrived and knows little or nothing about the language, culture, and ministry context?”
I mean, the last time a Christian leader from China speaking Mandarin arrived in Southern California for the first time and was immediately asked, with no advance warning, to speak at a Bible school graduation the next day and then lead some training for 2,000 California children’s ministry leaders was… never.
I was in India simply to learn about the culture, to see what ministry work was underway, and to try to gauge what the Holy Spirit was doing in that vast land.
I wanted to ask about other Indian leaders I had met and some I planned to meet. I wanted to run by them, for confirmation or correction, the insights I was gathering.
My hosts, however, were uninterested in my findings, and it seemed that they didn’t even know about the most well-known Christian pastors and leaders in India.
These Indian leaders wanted a connection to the US. I had observed this phenomenon before in the Middle East and East Africa: national Christian leaders worked hard to develop exclusive access to an American.
My Indian hosts wanted me to focus entirely on partnering with them and no one else on that vast subcontinent of India. As I said earlier, these gifted and wonderful Indian Christian leaders were following a pattern they had not critiqued biblically.
The result of this “Follow-the-Money” mentality is that Christian leaders and pastors are often left feeling like “a mix between a beggar and a snake oil salesman.”
(That great line is from my mentor Rob Martin, director of the First Fruit Institute and author of When Money Goes on Mission.)
And for the stereotypical salesman, closing the deal is crucial. The person-to-person interaction is all about the hoped-for sales transaction.
Closing Thoughts
On the road less traveled, the focus is giving as an act of worshiping God.
Pastors and Christian leaders therefore focus on helping Christians give as God guides and directs them. These pastors and leaders are always to be mindful that their goal is not getting money.
Instead, their goal is getting people to grow in their relationship with God and to obey more completely His instructions about how much of their material resources to give and to whom.
We still present the needs of the ministry, but we encourage people to give their hearts to God as they give of their material possessions. This focus on giving to God reduces the emphasis—the overemphasis—on the giver-receiver transaction.
Our great and godly goal is to help God’s people give their hearts to God. These ten words spoken by Jesus are profound and life changing:
“Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Matthew 6:21)
Because of these words, we can approach fundraising as a ministry—even a crusade—that helps Christians grow as committed disciples of Jesus Christ.
When we approach Christ’s followers with an opportunity to give, we are helping them give their hearts to God by giving their treasures to Him—and we are in the fast lane of the road less traveled.
The Road Well Traveled: Learn about prospective donors, find a project that aligns with their heart and giving history, make the ask for the appropriate amount (you know that from your research), and do not leave without the check.
The Road Less Traveled: Minister to people by presenting your needs and asking them to talk with God about financially supporting the ministry and to then do as He leads. Help people grow in their relationship with God through giving.