show me the money!

What is called generosity is usually only the vanity of giving; we enjoy the vanity more than the thing given. Francois de La Rochefoucauld

This morning I read an interesting post on a friend's Facebook page about an enterprising Church's annual financial campaign. http://www.facebook.com/jeff.thormodson

In case the link fails to work or if your attention span precludes the capacity to listen to and read it all, let me share the thoughts the post provoked in me....

Lakepointe church promises it's members that if they haven't been "blessed" by the Christian God within 90 days the church will return any money the individual has contributed during the "90 day" campaign.

I'm completely baffled by all of this..... My own local church had a large capital campaign this year but they didn't feel it required them to make a "satisfaction guaranteed or your money back" promise to provoke their members to give.
I would have been deeply offended if they had!
I don't give because of what I'll get in return, nor do I think we should encourage anyone to give with that mindset.

God certainly doesn't haggle with us, He isn't Jerry McGuire trying to gain a new lucrative client. The way I hear God's people ask for money sometimes sounds like they think  God is "cold calling" strangers promising them their dreams if they only invest in this newly improved Pyramid scheme, profits guaranteed!

Christians in America give less than 2% on average of their annual income. They are no different from any other demographic. The reason for the falling generosity among wealthy Americans is because they have lost a sense of charity to those who depend upon their comparative wealth to sustain the poor in their poverty. Churches or Christian non-profits have felt that drop in generosity just as their non-christian contemporaries have across the North Atlantic cultures. People are more selfish than their parents. Encouraging them to give by promising to "show them the money" won't help to change that trend in the next generation. We are the richest generation of humans ever to have lived yet we seem to be growing into some of the most selfish humans to have ever lived on this planet.

The second problem I have with this "show me the money" campaign is that the authors seem to have set aside the idea that perhaps sharing a compelling reason/vision for why someone would possibly want to sacrificially give to them might be a good idea.
Was there nothing really worth mentioning that was happening this year at Lakepointe church? Was there not even one compelling reason available, other than to appeal to the "supposed greed" of the church's members?

I confess I have a great deal of sympathy with those in any church who have trouble with the idea that they should just keep shoveling money at their pastors with no expectation on any one's part that those pastors will be held to account for what they do with that hard earned money.

As part of my job I am entrusted with raising the annual budget for our non-profit. The team who does the fundraising campaigns each year doesn't promise supernatural Jerry McGuire like profits for those greedy enough to invest in our Ponce scheme. Instead we set forth a clear vision for what we will achieve in the upcoming year, how the money we are asking for will be utilized and what return the donor should expect for their investment.

Oh yes! I hope you noticed we do offer a "return" on investment. But it isn't personal blessing, or cash back promises, instead we offer tangible blessing for "other" people.
In our case those others are college students in St. Louis. Our team makes a compelling case for why those students are worth investing in and we have made personal investments towards that mission.

Our supporters believe in what we do, they believe in the fact that students' spirituality is worth caring for and in the realization that it requires large sums of money to care for them where they are.

Each year we bring the facts and figures on what we achieved with what they gave last year and make another compelling argument for what we'll do next year with the money they give in January at our annual fundraising banquet.

We call it the 98% rule. People give 2% of their income to things that they don't expect or demand a return from, the other 98% is giving carefully to things they make a profit on or feel they really need to thrive where they are. Being wise with your money is different from being selfish/greedy with it. I think one of the other reasons people are less willing to give more to churches and non-profits is because of the prolific waste of time, talent and treasure they have seen in past years from those churches and non-profits.

I have a dream that if we can produce tangible goals every year then those who give generously will to want to give to us rather than the institutions that seem incapable of behaving as wise stewards of others' hard earned income.

If you are one of the many people who give money to the ministry I work for then please be certain that we weren't offering you a blessing from God. We pray every day that any blessing God was planning on sending our way will be directed to the students we care for and you help pay to be cared for. There won't be any left over for you.

The rest of us will continue to depend on God's unfailing mercy and compassion to ensure whatever blessings we need will be supplied!

We all do stuff that sounds weird or just plain wrong at times, so I'm more than willing to assume the best from the leaders at Lakepointe church.

But I still think we need to stop telling people the reason to be generous is because they can get yet another influx of cash and blessing from the Christian Santa Clause's naughty or nice list!