Adapted from Helping Without Hurting in Generosity

As we wrap up our series on Generosity in God’s kingdom story, we’ve shared about the importance of giving in ways that lead to flourishing for both givers and receivers, and the challenges of measuring the impact of our work according to God’s story, and not just outputs of our ministry efforts. 

But as followers of Jesus, we’ve been given a great gift of knowing the impacts God is working toward. We know from the whole sweep of Scripture that God is on a mission, reconciling all things to Himself in Christ (Col. 1:20). And He accomplishes this mission in a particular way. In God’s story of change, transformation comes through Father, Son, and Holy Spirit dwelling among God’s people in the local church. And that church, by God’s grace, forms and fosters a community whose worship, story, systems, and practices are consistent with living in right relationship with God, self, others, and creation.

This is God’s goal for everybody—for givers, for ministry staff, and for people in material poverty. We are all in this together! 

But as we looked at last time, this process takes time and can be hard to capture in a snapshot. Beyond that, holistic transformation requires the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit, who freely operates outside our control (cf. John 3:8). So how do we identify and support effective ministry? 

The Church as Case Study

Imagine you were considering a grant to Jesus at the start of His earthly ministry. Jesus had big goals! He said His ministry would launch a kingdom that would bring peace, healing, and shalom over the entire cosmos. And He seemed so sincere and trustworthy. So you gave him a three-year, start-up grant.

How successful do you think your grant would have looked at the end of the three-year term?

Within that timeframe, His ministry would have looked like a disaster: Ushering in a kingdom? What kingdom? He had only 12 disciples, one of whom was a traitor. Furthermore, He was executed on a cross between two criminals, and all His staff ditched Him. Almost any mainstream study or evaluation would suggest His ministry was a colossal failure! Would you have given Jesus a second grant? 

Yet, today, His ministry is the most successful in all of history—billions of people seek to follow in Jesus’ way, and the church is growing God’s goal for us of being a kingdom of priests (cf. 1 Pet. 2:9) and a people from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation (cf. Rev. 5:10). God works where He wants on His own schedule. He cannot be controlled, and He is not held captive to the length of our granting cycles! 

Getting to Metrics: Leading v. Lagging Indicators of the Kingdom

Given the long-term, divine nature of transformation in God’s story of change, it can be helpful to think in terms of “leading” indicators vs. “lagging” indicators in discerning where to give.

“Lagging indicators” would be metrics for the ultimate goal we are seeking: people being transformed over time toward right relationships with God, self, others, and creation. 

“Leading indicators” are the inputs and activities that God generally uses to accomplish His transforming work. These are far easier to observe. And faithfully pursuing these inputs and activities is what God is calling us to do as His disciples. We can and must leave the supernatural work of transformation in His hands.

Briefly, these leading indicators are ordinary activities of loving God, loving our neighbors, fellowshipping with other believers, and attending to the gifts, needs, and concerns of those around us. We’ve tried to articulate these as the 20 Ministry Design Principles in our book A Field Guide to Becoming Whole (and we’ve summarized these on our blog).

Some of these principles are explicitly articulated in the Bible. Others, while not explicitly found in Scripture, are consistent with what the Bible is saying about God’s story of change, stewarding the good things that humanity has already discovered in God’s world.Group-based rather than individual-based interventions whenever possible.

So as givers, we should be glad to receive reports on ministries tracking these leading indicators in their ministry activities and outputs because we know they point toward the transformation we seek. And we should not pressure organizations to conclusively report on all the great impacts they’ve accomplished. Those impacts are very difficult to prove, and they are up to God anyway. 

Bringing Us Home

Ultimately, God’s story of change is pointing us toward the new heavens and new earth where Jesus is making all things new (cf. Rev. 21:1-5). This is a place mirroring the “habitat” God for which designed us to flourish in the garden of Eden. And this restored and fulfilled Eden is the model into which our ministries should be living.

Life in Eden was characterized by: God + Dignity + Community + Work as Worship/Service. And being restored to the renewed Eden requires: God + Dignity + Community + Work as Worship/Service + TIME

What the world needs are givers who patiently walk with ministries and people in poverty over long periods of TIME, as all of us get transformed—slowly but surely-—by the supernatural working of the Triune God.

Giving shouldn’t be a transactional process in which we hire ministries to produce transformed people, rewarding the ministries if they are “successful” and punishing them if they aren’t. It’s about all of us—givers, ministries, and people in poverty—walking together through time as God restores us to the fullness of who we were designed to be and invites us to be on mission with Him. 

So don’t be paralyzed or discouraged by the slow, sometimes confusing, and often frustrating middle of the story in which we currently live.

Remember, the goal isn’t to make the Majority World into the affluent West or to make people in poverty more like people with wealth, for we are all broken. Rather, the goal is for all of us–those with wealth and those in poverty–to be transformed into the image of Jesus Christ. He is both the source and the goal of transformation. In Him and Him alone is the life that is truly life.