Thanking and Receipting: A Test |
Jun 10, 2010 |
At Mission Increase Foundation we recently concluded a month of teaching Thanking and Receipting workshops. While that title may sound perfunctory, it proved to be one of our most controversial and game-changing teaching topics.
My colleagues Suzanne Dubois in Colorado and Matt Bates in Los Angeles have provided further guidance on this in their recent posts about receiving well and writing letters that commend instead of thank.
Here’s a little test recently faced by The Mentoring Project (TMP), a Portland, Ore.-based nonprofit ministry to fatherless boys (thanks to friend and fellow TG thinker, Amy Karjala, for the link to the post).
TMP’s marketing director, Justin, received a call saying that a group of young men from Restore International Academy in Uganda wanted to make a donation to help young boys in Portland, Ore. Many of these boys were former child soldiers whose lives were torn apart by poverty, conflict, and civil unrest.
Turns out, thanks to Restore International, they’d begun planting and tending their own crops and making a profit. And, they wanted to use a portion of that profit to help fatherless boys in Portland, Ore., most of whom likely still had it far better than these young men.
How would you react? I imagine most people would initially react like Justin:
"When we heard this news we were shocked, and a little unnerved. What were these young men thinking? Are we seriously going to accept donations from kids in Uganda?"
But, what Justin and The Mentoring Project did next was spot-on-perfect.
“…we realized that accepting the contributions and allowing Ugandan youth the opportunity to give generously is the most empowering thing we can do.”
Simple. Brilliant. Justin instinctively knew one of the principles we discussed in the workshop – your acknowledgement of any gift should be focused on God’s work in the giver. He quickly moved from feeling uncomfortable with the gift to rejoicing in and commending the growth the givers were experiencing.
Would you have passed this test?
Hats off to The Mentoring Project for openly sharing this process with the rest of us. We know that giving is something Christians are called to do because it helps them become more like Christ. So, we shouldn’t deny kids in Uganda or HIV-infected mothers the opportunity to experience that growth. Does that still make you uneasy? Consider the example in Philippians 4. Paul’s letter to the Philippians is our best guide for properly orienting our thinking about receiving the financial gifts God blesses us with. The core question we must ask is, “How do I see God at work in this giver’s life and how should that cause me to respond first to God and then to my champion?”
