13 May 2011

UNDER THE WATERFALL: Patrick ButlerMany times there is a missing-in-action-member when it comes to missions, said economist Brian Fikkert to lay and professional ministerial lay leaders recently. Donors.

The issue is control, said Fikkert  co-author of the book “When Helping Hurts” and professor of economics at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Ga.

“Jesus’ style of ministry would not have gone over well with today’s donors,” that make many ministries jump through a series of hoops to prove they are “sustainable” and “effective,” Fikkert said.

Fikkert humorously laid out a scenario where a gatekeeper of a donor institution grills Jesus himself on his unorthodox methods.

Let’s see, you only had 12 followers,” the gatekeeper muses, “they left you and you ended up on a cross. Hmm, that doesn’t sound like we could fund your program for another three years.”

The audience was laughing — on the outside at least. But as I looked around the room at leaders of charitable institutions that I know have regular financial challenges to overcome, on the inside there's a desire to convince donors to change the way they assess ministry “effectiveness. “

This is exactly what Fikkert said was one major goal of his Chalmers Center — an organization dedicated to helping “churches to help the poor to help themselves,” according to its website.

But the work to convince givers to answer to a new paradigm of what true poverty consists of is tough and it's slow, he said after I asked “how’s it going, getting this concept across to donors?”

Wrapped up in the whole misguided concept of “effectiveness” Fikkert said, is a misperception of what “poverty” really is. “If we misdiagnose poverty,” he said, “we apply the wrong ‘solution’ to the problem.” And that’s a problem.

Our mindset of what we — as “first-world” givers and workers — are trying to accomplish is skewed, he said.

If the approach is skewed, than the checklist many donors use to approve “effective” ministries perpetuates failure. It is an awesome nightmare of biblical proportions to imagine that most of our resources to “help” the world is actually hurting, because of forced mediocrity through misguided donor-demanded “quantifiable” results.

Economist Fikkert’s point: Relationships between God and man, and man-to-man, take an indefinable amount of time that cannot be crunched by numbers on a computer program. To reduce ministry to such a scenario is to gut the Gospel of its effectiveness, he said.

It’s very said, really. I’ve known ministry and nonprofit leaders for decades. I can tell you there are thousands upon thousands of under-funded willing workers answering the call to “fields white with harvest.”  The holdup for so many of them to be effective is the simplest tool needed to get the job done: money.

 

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