Family: “We are involved with a start-up ministry and have made a public pledge based on the sale of a property. Is there any way we can get credit for the full sale price but not put the entire amount in the gift? We want to make the list of major donors but hold back part of the proceeds.” Advisor: “I think we can do that. We’ll just set up some instruments that are a bit complicated but create the impression you’ve given the full amount. We can hide the rest in a trust or claim some expenses that will be invisible to everyone but you. No problem.” This conversation…

Maybe it's both as Winston Churchill said. “This is no time for ease and comfort. It is a time to dare and endure.”

Hillary Clinton stirred up some dust in her interview in The Atlantic by saying, “Great nations need organizing principles and ‘don't do stupid stuff’

  If you sometimes feel the joy of giving is elusive, you are not alone. Over the past 20 years we’ve had the opportunity to connect with hundreds of individuals, couples and families working with the issues that affect their philanthropy. While each individual and family’s situation is unique, we have found the following five challenges to be most universal. Time. The source of the most frustration for giving families is the lack of time to commit to the giving process. Good giving is work and takes a commitment of time and energy. Most donors have not given their philanthropy much thought and do not know what their focus needs to…

Mark Labberton, President of Fuller Theological Seminary, recently used the word “exile” in his address to the General Assembly of the PCUSA  to describe living faithfully as “a minority in a setting where we worship a peculiar God and do peculiar things.” In the current issue of First Things, Carl Trueman makes a case for reformed Christianity being the best place to ride out the imminent exile of cultural irrelevance. He is not writing of a geographical resettlement, and I agree with Trueman that we are not to be in isolated Amish-like communities – or “enclaves of the past” as described by Alvin Toffler in Future Shock. I am more frequently…

I’m in Los Angeles this week serving as one of several mentors for a group of 12 organizations that are a part of Praxis, an accelerator program for both nonprofit and for-profit organizations. Similar to Echoing Green or the incubator Y Combinator, Praxis provides mentors, networks, seed funding and a year-long program to help faith-motivated social entrepreneurs who have, as Dave Blanchard and Josh Kwan put it, “committed their lives to cultural and social impact, renewing the spirit of our age one organization at a time.” At the end of the program, three top organizations will be selected to share the prize money of $100,000, and I am delighted that…