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…

If all I knew about my grandfather was what I read in his 1952 diary I might think he was a man whose life was a monotonous string of colorless days. My grandfather, Bunyan Smith, was a pastor in one of the poorest sections of Nashville, and I knew enough about his life as a preacher to expect that his diary would not likely be thrilling. However, I was completely unprepared for how unremarkable it would be. His first entry on January 1 begins with, “Up about 7:00 a.m. Family worship at breakfast. Dressed for the day. Went to church to pray. Studied. Visited the sick. Wrote letters. Ate supper. Retired.” His…

It was a delight to see two amateurs, which literally means “those who do it for the love of it.” What drew them together was their love of the game.

I have an affinity for entrepreneurs. They are often identified (mistakenly) as risk-takers who don’t calculate before acting. Nothing could be further from the truth. They work hard to eliminate as much risk as possible, but having done that they are willing to make the move. This is why I love watching the process of true entrepreneurs eliminating risk to give themselves the best chance of succeeding. I like being a part of their identifying an opportunity brought on by change. I’ve been in conversations lately with two friends who have built a company and are turning their attention to a complex, important issue in our community: early childhood education.…