The Fuzziness of Being Faith-Based

Breakout sessions typically make me want to break out my smartphone or break out of the room. Rarely does the side stage stack up with the main act. But at a recent conference for human resources professionals, one breakout session was full of fireworks about a controversial subject—what it means to be a faith-based organization. What the speaker shared, however, left me disheartened.

There is no more imprecise label than faith-based. It holds a hundred meanings, each of them different than the next. For nonprofit organizations that wear this label, our interpretation of its implications varies even more. And these differences became clear in the session.

The presenter—let’s call her Sharon—hailed from a widely-known faith-based organization, one of the largest in the world. Her organization is consistently platformed at major evangelical churches and conferences across the country as an organization fulfilling Christ’s call to bring hope to the least and the lost. Sharon directed their global hiring efforts across 50 countries. As a member of the executive team and as “final say” on all senior leadership positions, her stamp carried significant credence. Sharon led a breakout session on recruitment and hiring, her domains of expertise.

She flipped through PowerPoint slides with ease, articulating how she screened job candidates and recruited for positions in remote countries. Sharon concluded her talk, and the audience thanked her with a round of gentle applause. And that’s when things got interesting.

The conference included folks of a swath of religious beliefs—apathetics, atheists, evangelicals, Muslims and everyone in between. One questioner, based on his tone, was likely a practicing antagonist, if you can call that a religion. I remember their exchange vividly.

Antagonist: You say you’re a Christian faith-based organization. Does that mean you only hire Christians?

Sharon: Well, we hire Christians for our senior leadership positions in the countries where we work, but let me state with absolute clarity: We have a strict non-evangelism policy and hire people of all faiths for entry and mid-level positions. We’re about helping people, not about telling them what they should believe.

Antagonist: So you do discriminate in your leadership roles. Well, how do you know if someone is a Christian?

Sharon: We don’t discriminate. When I say “Christian,” I mean we aim to hire leaders that exhibit the Golden Rule—that love their neighbors like themselves. Good people that exhibit kindness and humility. We look for those traits in interviewees.

Antagonist: OK, so say you do hire a Muslim or Hindu for a mid-level position: Could that person be promoted to a senior leadership role?

Sharon: Absolutely. We have numerous Muslims and Hindus, in fact, that serve as country directors for us across the globe.

The conversation continued for some time, the Antagonist and Sharon each feeling each other out, like boxers at the weigh-in ceremony. After their brief exchange, I replayed Sharon’s responses over and over again, attempting to reconcile what she said with the assumptions I had about her organization. Some might read that exchange and be encouraged by it. I felt betrayed.

I was certain she wouldn’t have repeated this to the Christian churches that support her organization. In fact, I’ve consistently heard a message from her colleagues that sharply contrasted it. But there she was, one of the organization’s senior leaders, castigating evangelism and repudiating efforts of other faith-based organizations that place importance on the beliefs of those they hire.

What I expected would be a blah breakout session became a personal watershed moment. The “faith-based” label was not one size fits all. Our world is better because of Sharon’s organization, but they are not who I thought they were. And they are not who they set out to be. In our pluralist culture, the gravitational pull of secularism can feel irresistible. But there is fresh momentum building among many faith-based organizations that believe it’s not.

This fresh momentum surfaces in surprising places. Even an adamant atheist pleaded for faith-based organizations to remain anchored to our faith. To hold fast to our foundation. Though many disagree with the message of Jesus, we all agree that a light under a basket is no light at all.

Michael Scott and Andy Bernard on Charity

Sitcoms rarely address the effectiveness of charity and international aid. However, Michael Scott and Andy Bernard exposited these deep issues on a recent episode of The Office. Aiming to impress their friends and colleagues, the winsome duo joined a busload of aspiring youngsters bound for Mexico on a three month mission trip.

Michael Scott and Andy Bernard discuss charity

The scene unfolds:

Andy: Save me an aisle seat, Michael, I’m coming. I will not stand idly by while these Mexican villagers are sick.

Trip Leader: We are actually building a school.

Andy: Whatever. I won’t stand for it.

Michael: How long till we get to Mexico?

Andy: Well, two days minus how long we’ve been on the road. 45 minutes? So, like two days basically. Maybe more.

Michael: What are we building down there again? Like a hospital? A school for Mexicans? What?

Andy: I don’t know. I thought it was like a gymnasium.

Michael: Why aren’t they building it for themselves?

Andy: They don’t know how.

Michael: Do we know how? I don’t know how.

The episode closes with the comedic tandem abandoning their charitable foray, convicted that their talents would be better served selling paper to small business owners in Scranton. Channeling their inner Robert Lupton (and my other favorites, Brian Fikkert, Dambisa Moyo and Bill Easterly), Scott and Bernard touch on some deep issues in their short monologue:

Is our charity needed? Are we displacing someone locally who could do the job? Do we actually have the skills and capacity to serve well? Is our helping really helping?  …an unlikely source prompts big questions.

Can You Measure Spiritual Impact?

My wife and I often visit our friends in Breckenridge, Colorado. We love the beauty of the mountains and enjoy our friends immensely. Their 8-year old son, Nathan, is a terrific source of entertainment. During a recent dinner conversation, Nathan informed us about his Little League baseball season. He rattled off the scores of his team’s last few games. His parents quickly stopped him, interjecting that the league and coaches don’t actually keep track of scores.

Nathan retorted, “We all keep score anyway. We always keep score.”

I smiled, thinking back to my own youth baseball experience when I did the exact same thing. Sure there were no scoreboards, but every single kid on the diamond knew the score.  Why? Because we want to know how we’re doing. It’s more than just winning and losing. We want a tangible measure of our performance. Are we succeeding? Are we catching up? How bad is it? Keeping score answers those questions.

In working with the poor, many times it’s easy to justify not keeping score. After all, we’re trying to help people. Isn’t that enough? I’m not sure it is. I think we need to keep score. It’s not about knowing if we’re winning. Even if the score illuminates we are losing, at least we have a gauge of how we’re doing.

It is particularly challenging to measure spiritual impact. At HOPE, it is straightforward to track financial metrics. We measure repayment rates, savings balances, client retention and a slew of other data points. It is much more challenging to gauge whether our work impacts the spiritual climate of the communities and families we serve. It’s hard and it’s also controversial to suggest we can measure spiritual impact when we know that only God sees the heart.

This month, a conference with a bold title—Spiritual Metrics—is gathering to discuss these issues. I believe it is possible and critical that we measure our spiritual impact. While we can only “see in a mirror dimly,” dimly is better than not at all.

We aren’t perfect in our measurement, but at least we know how many clients have been given a copy of God’s word, how consistently our staff gathers for devotions, and how many churches we actively partner with. It takes creativity, but per the old management axiom, what gets measured gets done. We need to keep score to remain accountable to what we are uniquely positioned to do as Christian organizations. Just like Nathan’s baseball team, we need to keep score.

The Case of the Vanishing Orphanage

“You are the first American group to ever visit our community.” Simon’s words sent chills through the missions team that had ventured to his remote Kenyan village. It was a risk to come to such an isolated place, but its undiscovered magnetism was also its allure. Their arrival was a momentous step in a long journey.

Several years earlier, Simon* met these Colorado church leaders at a John Piper conference. They had an immediate kinship. It was hard not to love Simon: He was eminently likeable, oozing charisma with each handshake and smile. Now in Kenya, after months of careful planning, they had finally arrived. As their bus labored up the dusty driveway, the orphanage they knew only by pictures came to life.

The orphanage looked like many like it in Africa: A fenced-in compound with simply-constructed dormitories and classrooms. The zenith of the complex wasn’t its buildings, however. It was the 200 smiling children which greeted the visitors with hoots of delight when their bus arrived. The trip unfolded in typical fashion. The Coloradans spent their days playing with orphans, seizing photo opps, and dreaming with Simon about ways their church could help the orphanage flourish.

"The Vanishing Orphanage"

 The trip rattled stereotypes and collided cultures. Simon orchestrated the trip with clockwork precision, his robust leadership skills firing on all cylinders throughout the week.  As the trip came to a close, the bus drove the team away.  The children chased their bus, wrenching the emotions of even the group’s most stoic members. Hearts full, the team flew home, now well-equipped to share their stories of helping orphaned children and exploring uncharted places.

Despite the many positive moments throughout the week, there were unnerving whisperings among the group. It was strange the teachers didn’t know many of the orphans’ names. It seemed overly-controlling when Simon prohibited them from visiting the neighboring village unaccompanied. Also odd, the orphanage lacked a garden, which is like an Alaskan lacking a snow shovel: The fertile soil can give anyone a green thumb. These quiet whisperings slowly unfolded into loud gasps, and then into protests, and then into many tears, when the group returned to visit Simon’s orphanage just one year later.

On their return trip—one which almost mirrored their previous trip—a team member, Dan, stayed around after the team departed for the States. On his own, Dan journeyed from the Nairobi airport back to the orphanage on a scout mission to investigate the team’s concerns. As he arrived in the village and walked toward the orphanage, a woman approached him, grabbed his arm, and amplified the whisperings.

“Just so you know,” she shared solemnly, “the orphanage is not real.”

Dan, panged with a haunting feeling of betrayal, trekked from the village to the orphanage, hoping to disprove her. He arrived at the place where he played with smiling children just one day earlier. His eyes confirmed the woman’s words: The place was deserted. The yard where the children used to run and play? Nothing remained apart from the lonely debris which bounced with the wind across the red clay earth. The sleeping quarters? Empty. The cafeteria? Vacant. No workers, no orphans, no supplies, no anything. The orphanage had vanished. It was all a mirage.

In truth, the Colorado church was not the first American group to visit Simon’s community. In fact, many churches from across the US and Canada were privy to Simon’s deceitful wooing over the years. His highly-sophisticated web of lies featured faux staff, rented children (he pitched it to their parents as a day camp), and staged arrests (always resulting in generous bail outs by the visitors). All told, this Madoffesque charity scheme collectively defrauded these churches of tens of thousands of dollars. More disappointing, it tainted many wonderful memories and fertilized the unhealthy seeds of cynicism and close-heartedness.

My first response to Simon’s elaborate scam was eye-rolling distrust. This type of story can cultivate skepticism, prompting us to pull back. But it doesn’t have to. It does not mandate that we retreat. In the face of even unbearable trials, Jesus prods us to advance, but to do so with eyes wide open:

Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves. – Matthew 10: 16

Jesus’ instructions to his disciples preceded their harrowing journey to bring the good news to the world. He knew their path would be lined with hardship. Still, he sent them out, charging them to be as shrewd as they were innocent. Abounding in compassion, but not the undiscerning kind. Go to Kenya, but send back a scout if you sense something is amiss. Pour out generosity, but do so discriminately, taking Jesus’ instructions as your marching orders. Love abundantly, but always ask hard questions. Jesus sends us out. No retreat. No close fists. No bitterness. Go boldly, shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves.

*Names changed to protect confidentiality.

Atheist Supports Evangelism

Matthew Parris, an award-winning columnist with a prominent British newspaper, wrote this in a recent column:

 Travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: One I’ve been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I’ve been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

Now a confirmed atheist, I’ve become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people’s hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good. (emphasis mine)

What a powerful proposition Parris suggests. I agree with him strongly, as does my organization, HOPE International. We believe his comments are the reason Christ-centered organizations are so important in Africa. Still, it is confounding to read this from an atheist. Essentially, what Parris says compares to Mitt Romney making a comment like this in a primary debate: “You know, I believe I’m a great candidate, but I just think Rick Perry is better prepared and will be more effective than me at bringing about the type of change we need in America.”

It’s laughable to think about. Yet, this is what Parris says. Despite that he whole-heartedly believes there is no God, he supports and believes in the work of Christian organizations in Africa because of the transformation which only God can bring. We have seen this clearly demonstrated around the globe. The transformative message of Christ coupled with an effective and empowering method of helping is a dynamic combination.

As a decidedly Christian organization, we are actually able to add tremendous value to the lives of our clients because of our Christian-ness. And Parris, an atheist, seems to agree. In other words, HOPE is not just a Christianized knock-off version of bigger secular organizations. HOPE’s faith-based approach is much more than that – it’s ultimately the singularly most-important characteristic of our work.