In all of the news stories being written about the death of Steve Jobs  I have yet to see one that begins with “Billionaire Steve Jobs.” When Warren Buffett and Bill Gates or some Saudi sheikh die I suspect that “billionaire” will be the leading word in the obituary. That word defines them in our minds; it was a by-product for Steve Jobs – not what defined his life in his eyes or ours.  While he was #39 on the Forbes list of billionaires this year (a move up from #162 in 2010) that was not at all how we thought of him. The greatest part of his financial wealth…

For much of my life I had 20/20 vision.  That changed in my 40’s and now I have trifocals for reading seeing close and seeing distance.  I like them…but I have to get them adjusted every couple of years as I grow older.  Some people have glasses for most of their lives.  Come to think of it all of us have glasses all of our lives because we “see” things through lenses whether we know it or not. One of the earliest lessons I learned by teaching in a Christian school was the importance of teaching students to see the world through the lens of Scripture and not the surrounding…

Before 1925 each missionary and agency of the Southern Baptist Convention was responsible to raise their own operating support.  While some thrived on this others suffered.  Overall the method (known as “societal giving”) resulted in “severe financial deficits competition overlapping pledge campaigns and frequent emergency appeals.” As well the churches already suffering from their members (Southern farmers) being devastated by the worst crop price crash in the history of the country were besieged with constant appeals for money from agencies and individual missionaries.  The response to near bankruptcy and chaos was the invention of the Future Program Commission (now the Cooperative Program) to create a unified and centralized way to…

After every conference we get questions that did not get answered at the conference and this year is no exception.  I’m going to take a few and give my thoughts and invite yours.  Each of us has different styles of giving and my perspective is going to be different from yours so I want you to feel free to throw in your own thoughts. We have mostly given based on prayer.  We just pray and listen to God and he has told us whom to give to and how much.  And I think that is still a great way to give.  But we learned that we can also ask questions…

Most of the people reading this blog will never come to the annual conference of The Gathering – for a number of reasons.  It’s like any other conference for a particular affinity group – doctors lawyers educators – in that the content is designed for individuals families and foundations giving financial support to ministries.  However that does not mean some of the content is not interesting or useful for others.  Because of our arrangement with the media vendor (Dove Conference Services) I cannot give you a link just yet to a download direct from our site.  However you can go to their site and download everything that looks interesting to…

I finished an article on rational funding earlier today had a great conversation with a new non-profit about the importance of funders not responding to needs or filling gaps but looking for opportunities and met with a group of donors to talk about how valuable it is to think about philanthropy in terms of investments that have clear goals reporting and measurements along the way. I read a number of articles on venture philanthropy and how to design metrics for results-oriented philanthropy.  It was a great start for the day.  The phone rang and on the other end was a friend on the board of a day care that has…

Several years ago I was sitting in a marketing meeting listening to a discussion about how to engage boomers.  The unanimous conclusion was boomer donors want to be “hands-on” and “engaged” with the work.  There was then a strategy session about how to give them that experience without the expense of the infrastructure it takes to actually make people “hands-on”. While that was not the birth moment of the short term missions movement (which began in the 1950’s with Operation Mobilization and YWAM) it was about the same time progressive churches began to create week-long mission projects vacations with a purpose and other temporary assignments for amateurs.  Skip forward a…

In a couple of weeks I am going to join a group of academics and researchers being convened by the Lake Institute at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.  The purpose is to have a roundtable discussion on a review of recent literature on faith and giving.  They sent out the forty-three page report ahead of time and I thought some of the observations might be interesting to a wider audience.  As far as I know nothing is proprietary.  Again these are just quotes and observations that I found interesting as I read.  Most of them are predictable and common sense.  Some are thought provoking.  Some are well I’ll…