True Treasures

I had two experiences of drumming up support for Kingdom Causes this week: on Monday, a traditional golf marathon fundraiser, and last night, an opportunity to speak to one of the adult fellowships at my old church. The first had the usual pieces: e-mail blasts, personal phone calls (even Facebook chats) all to raise funds for this upcoming year. Normal fundraising stuff for a typical fundraiser.

I approached last night's talk like your typical missionary asked to come to a church: trying to figure out how to be the most inspiring so they would want to get involved or give. But at some point I revisited an exercise called the "treasure hunt" I learned from ABCD (Asset Based Community Development) training, which became the main "recruitment" piece of my sharing.

Basically, every person writes down on post-its 3 things that are related to things they know (head), things they are passionate about (heart), and things they know how to do (hand). We share with the whole group our "treasures," post them on a board, then organize them into like categories as stuff shared inevitably overlaps.

After we organized the many treasures, I basically told the group that when we think of reaching our community, we often forget that within ourselves God has already given us many interests, passions, and talents that can be used for his mission. We have such and such ministries you can get involved in with Kingdom Causes, but I'd rather they start with their God-given assets instead of having them fit "my" agenda. I did share about what we do now, but that was much shorter than I originally planned.

Henri Nouwen called fundraising as ministry a new way of relating people to their resources (as defined by time, talents, and money). It is actually a conversion process. I hope the treasure hunt exercise was a new way for the group to see themselves not merely as people needing more outlets for engaging their community, but that they already possess vast resources to shape whatever direction the Lord leads them.