Chapter 8: Volunteering
Updated: 1/2/20
Then the King will say to those on his right hand, ‘Come, you who have been blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me a drink; I was a stranger and you took me in; I was naked and you clothed me; I was sick and you cared for me; I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the righteous will answer and say, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you? Or thirsty and give you a drink? When did we see you a stranger and take you in? Or naked and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and come to you?’ Then the King will answer and say to them, ‘Truly I say to you, what you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it for me’ (Matthew 25:34–40).
Matthew 25 is the primary passage in the Bible that deals with the final judgment. It begins with the parable of the ten virgins with lamps. Five of them put oil in the lamps. Five did not. The five who did not ran out of oil before the bridegroom returned. They asked the other five if they could have some of their oil, but the other five refused. The five who did not prepare themselves by purchasing oil for their lamps perished.
This is followed by the parable of the talents. A businessman goes on a long journey. He leaves talents, meaning coins of a certain weight, with three of his servants. At his return, he demands an accounting. Two of them had doubled their money. One of them had buried the coin, and he simply returned what had been given to him. The two who had used profit-seeking entrepreneurship to multiply the money entrusted to them were granted great rewards. The one who had buried his coin had his coin taken from him, and he was cast into outer darkness.
These two parables were preparations for Jesus’ account of the final judgment. God divides humanity into two groups: the sheep and the goats. Eternal life goes to the sheep; eternal damnation goes to the goats. The primary characteristic of the sheep is charity toward the poor and needy. The primary characteristic of the goats is the opposite: a refusal to show mercy to the poor and needy. The issue is this: what you do to the least among humanity represents your view of God, his kingdom, and eternity. If you do not share your wealth voluntarily with those who have none, this marks you as a person without mercy, a person who shows no grace. I follow the biblical definition of grace: unearned favor. God shows grace to us in redeeming us from our sins. We did not earn our redemption. We could not have earned our redemption. With respect to what it takes to receive eternal life, no one can earn it. God’s grace is mandatory. As a mark of this redemption, we are to show grace to those around us who are greatly in need of grace, meaning unearned favor.
Jesus specifically referred to the visitation of prisoners. Prison ministries have been familiar to Christians ever since the beginning of the church. People in prison occupy the lowest rung in society. They are outcasts. They are models of what it means to be cast out of society. Some Christians are to show mercy to these people by visiting them in prison.
Not every Christian is called to do this. There are not that many prisoners in comparison to the total number of Christians. Supporting such a ministry financially is a way for Christians who would never step foot inside a prison to minister to these people. Their money can assist that tiny minority of Christians who are willing to do this.
I speak from experience. I was part of an international prison ministry in the final years of the twentieth century. This ministry was a visitation ministry to men incarcerated in maximum-security prisons. A team of about 40 men met each week for six weeks prior to the visitation. Why? For prayer and training. Then we would go into the prison on a Thursday evening, and we would return each day until Sunday afternoon. We spent three and a half days talking with them at tables. The team brought in prepared food, which was the initial hook for most of them to attend the sessions. Attendance was by invitation only. The prison chaplain invited especially hard cases. The food we served was the best food they had in their entire term in prison, which in most cases lasted 20 years to life. It was simple food. Example: freshly prepared lasagna, freshly made salads, and all the ice cream and cookies they could eat. Or maybe they got hamburgers with fresh vegetable trimmings and condiments. Again, they got all the ice cream and cookies they could eat.
In order to be part of this visitation team, you had to volunteer to return to this prison for 12 consecutive weeks. Some of the volunteers had to drive two hours each way to get there. I had to drive 70 minutes each way. I showed up for the full 12 weeks each time I was part of a team. Showing up made a great difference. So did remembering their names. I was never good at this, but I learned how to do it in order to minister to these men. Just showing up and remembering their names were powerful tools of evangelism. It does not sound like much, but for these men, it was a great deal. I saw dozens of men whose lives were transformed by this simple program of visitation.
The key was personal contact. It began at the weekend session. Here is an example. Each volunteer had to write a one-page letter of encouragement to each prisoner. It had to be hand-written, not a signed computer print-out. It took time. On Sunday, each prisoner received a stack of these letters. It shook most of them to the core. We placed a box of tissues at each table. Many of the men broke down and cried. No one had ever written even one letter to them like these, let alone 40 writers. In a talk by one ex-prisoner, he referred to these letters as “plunka.” (This is one of the most effective talks I have ever heard: http://bit.ly/KairosTalk.) The men I knew in the prison ministry all had the same experience. They felt that their lives were made much better by volunteering. They all believed that they got a great deal out of the experience. This is why they would come back, twice a year, year after year. The men inside the prison probably did not initially understand why we did this. What was in it for us? In terms of the mindset of the thief, the charlatan, and the con man, it made no sense. But then, for those who received Christ’s message of our deliverance from sin’s curse, their lives were changed. They understood. One of the marks of this changed attitude was the fact that it was considered a great honor among recent attendees to be selected by the chaplain to serve the next group that came through. They served by waiting on tables. They would bring food to these men, and then return to ask if they wanted second or even third helpings. If there was any food left over, they would get to eat it. But they still did whatever they could to persuade the first-time participants in the evangelism weekend sessions to have another helping. This is why there usually was no food left over after a meal, except maybe some lettuce and tomatoes.
Wives of the volunteers would stay in a nearby town at a participating local church. They would cook the food. They would get involved in constant prayer sessions for the evangelism going on inside the prison. They were also volunteers. Then, when wives went into the women’s prisons, their husbands did the same thing that the wives did. They stayed outside and did the cooking. This greatly impressed the female prisoners. No man had ever done anything like this for them in the “free world,” as prisoners refer to our world. The husbands participated in the constant prayer sessions. Then, at the end of the day, there would be a meeting from those who had been inside the prison regarding what had happened during the day. These were family efforts.
In addition to all this, every participant had to bake 1,200 cookies, or else his wife did. There was a rule against buying the cookies. The team handed out bags of cookies to every prisoner at the end of every daily session. At the end of the second day, we handed them extra bags of cookies, and asked them to give their cell mates a bag of cookies. We also asked them to give their worst enemy in the prison a bag of cookies. This broke down resentment among cell mates. We also gave the prison guards—we called them officers—bags of cookies. In the prison we went to, there was a rifle tower on every corner, and at least two marksmen were in each tower. So, we would ask them to send down a little basket on a rope. We would drop in a slip of paper listing the types of cookies we had. They would haul up the slip of paper, write down which kinds they wanted, and lower the slip back down. We then loaded the basket with their orders. Then they would haul the basket back up. We did that twice a day: two shifts of sharpshooters. They loved to see the ministry twice a year.
Cookies circulate as money inside prisons. The exchange price of prison cookies fell like a stone during our weekend sessions.
Because of extreme constraints on my time, I have generally not participated in ministries that require lots of volunteer time. I did the prison ministry for almost two years. I had always wanted to do something like this, and finally I did. But this was not my calling. I was easily replaceable. It was a form of service that had positive visible effects in the lives of men without hope. I was happy to be involved.
In 2005–8, I donated about three hours every seven weeks by giving a 90-minute lecture to a group of poor people in the city of Memphis, Tennessee. These were adults who had never held a full-time job. It was my task to persuade them to keep returning to their jobs when the organization that trained them was finished with the training. The organization trained these people to get jobs. It could also get entry-level jobs for them if they went through the program. But it could not impart to all of them the mindset associated with a lifetime of labor. Too many of them quit their jobs. In my lecture, I concentrated on the difference between the job and the calling. I taught that a job is a means of pursuing a person’s calling. I taught that their individual callings were more important than the jobs the training organization could get for them. For the sake of their callings, I argued, they should not walk away from their jobs. I never found anyone in the audience who did not understand the difference between the job and the calling after my presentation, despite the fact that most of these people had not been in high school for years, and most of them were probably dropouts.
It is possible to persuade people intellectually with a good speech, but persuading them emotionally to internalize the information and then change their behavior in terms of it is far more difficult. But you already knew that, didn’t you? If you ever become a Christian activist, you are going to have to get used to the difference.
Anyone who donates time to projects such as these will receive earthly blessings. I have in mind the sense of meaningfulness that such donations of time and effort always produce. There are also rewards beyond the grave. Jesus made this clear in his teaching about transferring wealth from this world to the next. “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on the earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. Instead, store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6:19–21). But sacrificial service for others who have no way to repay also produces earthly benefits for donors. This is why people who get into the habit of giving away time and money generally do not break this habit unless they run out of spare time and spare money.
There are many ways to volunteer our time for righteous causes. Even when we are short on time, we can donate money. This money should be in addition to the tithes that we pay to our local congregations. These ministries are specialized ministries. They deal on a regular basis with people who have specific needs. They learn to discriminate between people who are serious about getting out of poverty and those people who just want a handout for the rest of their lives, especially so that they can consume alcohol. This ability to discriminate between categories of poor people is vital for any long-term ministry to the poor. This enables these ministries to continue to raise funds and help specific people.
People who volunteer both money and time are far more committed to a ministry than people who donate only money. It is relatively easy to send money to a ministry. People who have a lot of money sometimes do this. If they have a great deal of money, their time is extremely valuable. If they earn this money in a competitive market, every minute counts for a lot of money. If they live off of the income generated by their capital, they usually have lots of applications for donations from nonprofit organizations. They have to allocate their time as well as their money in making these decisions to donate or not donate. Even if they have so much money that they run their own charitable foundations, and they have specialists making these decisions, they rarely have spare time to devote to a particular ministry at the expense of all of the others. If they devote time to one of these charities, there will probably be requests from others for them to devote a similar amount of time.
In contrast are those people who are committed to the work of a particular ministry. The larger the ministry, the more ways there are to volunteer time. If a ministry is small, donations of time are highly valuable. If ministries become dependent on such volunteer activities, they establish personal contacts with the volunteers. Ministries do not have much personal contact with people who donate only money unless they donate a great deal of money, and someone in the organization contacts them. But this is not the same kind of personal contact that comes from personal interaction on a regular basis in some form of service. The level of commitment from somebody who is donating time regularly is likely to be considerable. He cannot do this with many organizations. He may be able to do it with only one or two.
Then there is the question of the effectiveness of the respective donations: time and money. Rich people do not usually give money to Christian ministries. They give money to secular nonprofit organizations that do not have openly religious goals and positioning: universities, educational organizations, and the arts. These organizations always have implicit religious goals, but they are left unsaid. The people at the top of the economic hierarchy are extremely rich, but they are only rarely Christians. They do not give much money to economic relief organizations other than the Red Cross. They are not involved in evangelism. They do not see themselves as stewards of God’s resources. They do not seek to build the kingdom of God in history. In the United States, a highly charitable nation, household giving is about 2% of disposable income, year after year. The super-rich give a much lower percentage than the poor do.
This may look as though God has underfunded His kingdom. This is not the case. The growth of the church in sub-Saharan Africa, China, and Latin America since about 1980 has been more rapid than we have ever seen before. We are living in the great age of evangelism for the Christian church. This has required a great deal of volunteers’ time. It has not required a great deal of volunteers’ money. They have not had much money to donate. These geographical centers of successful evangelism have been concentrated in economically underdeveloped societies. In terms of the effectiveness of programs that generate positive changes in lifestyle, the time donated by Christians who live in these underdeveloped societies has been much more effective than the enormous quantities of money donated by exceedingly wealthy humanists in the developed world. This unprecedented social transformation has not been funded primarily by money. It has been funded by dedicated individuals who reside in low-income nations. They have devoted time and emotional commitment to helping other people change their ideas regarding God, man, law, sanctions, and the future. This change of mind in hundreds of millions of people has led to widespread personal and social transformation. This has gone unnoticed by the secular world in the early decades of the twenty-first century. It has not been going on in the economically developed world, where most humanists reside. They do not see it. Neither do most Christians who live in developed nations.
When we are talking about the transformation of individual lives, donating time generally has greater effect than donating money. The economic value of the time donated by individuals in economically undeveloped or less developed countries is minimal in comparison to the value of the money donated by humanists to humanist causes in the developed world. The sheer number of people donating time to evangelism and helping poor people dwarfs the time donated by humanists to their causes. While money is certainly important in funding causes of all kinds, the payoff in terms of lives changed is greater when funded by donated time than donated money.
Humanists tend to donate money to projects that promise social transformation. They have greater confidence in institutions than in individuals. The opposite tends to be true with respect to the motivation of Christians. Christians tend to focus on individual transformation rather than social transformation. Neither outlook is correct. The Bible points out that the redemption of individuals and the redemption of social institutions are supposed to take place simultaneously in response to the gospel. The gospel heals all those areas of life in which sin has been dominant, which means every area of life. This is what Kenneth Gentry calls the greatness of the Great Commission, the title of his 1990 book. Sin has been dominant in most human institutions. This was true of the message of the prophets in the Old Testament, and it was also true with respect to the message of Jesus and the apostles in the New Testament. To ignore either individual ethical transformation or social transformation as the proper response to individual regeneration is to make a mistake theologically, intellectually, and institutionally. Among Protestants, no one saw this more clearly than John Wesley. His message of individual transformation led to the elevation of millions of poverty-stricken Englishmen and Americans into the middle class. This took a little more than a century.
This is why a Christian activist who is serious about helping others to transform their lives should make a decision early to do volunteer work with some Christian institution. If he has sufficient money to make donations, he should do this, too. But the kingdom payoff from his donated time will be greater than the payoff from his money.
There is something else to consider. In becoming a Christian activist, you may become discouraged about how difficult it is to raise money. You never seem to be able to raise enough money to make a difference in the thinking and behavior of other people. You should therefore understand early in your career as an activist this important fact: it is always easier to raise money than it is to recruit, motivate, train, and monitor disciples. Christian organizations can raise money if they have programs that are effective in helping other people to change their lives. Christians with a lot of money will donate money if they can see that their money is having a measurable effect for the better in the lives of individuals. They are ready to donate because they rarely see such personal change in their communities and relationships. When I was an untrained evangelist in a prison ministry, I saw more people brought to saving faith in Christ among those inmates—we called them residents—than I have ever seen outside of prison walls. This was equally true of other participants in the program. This is what kept most of us coming back. We could see positive results from our investment of time. We did have to invest a lot of time. But we made minimal donations of money. Our main investment of money was to buy the ingredients for our wives to bake 100 bags of a dozen cookies per bag.
On one occasion, a leader of the Pharisees invited Jesus to a feast. Jesus accepted the invitation. This gave Him an opportunity to observe what was going on, which in turn allowed Him to make comments. Here is an important comment.
Jesus also said to the man who had invited him, “When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or your rich neighbors, as they may also invite you in return, and you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. For you will be repaid in the resurrection of the just” (Luke 14:12–14).
This kind of feast does not involve any hope of being invited to a similar feast later on. The general principle is this: when you give charity, expect nothing in return of economic value from the recipient of the charity. It is legitimate to hope for changed behavior on the part of recipients. It is legitimate to expect a verbal “thank you.” There should be some positive acknowledgment by the recipient of the charity that someone has gone out of his way to provide a benefit that was in no way deserved by the recipient. The disciples learned this when Jesus healed the lepers. Only the Samaritan thanked Him (Luke 17:11–19). They all should have thanked Him, but He did not ask them for thanks. Any form of charity that is given on the basis of some form of predictable return of valuable resources is not charity. It is simply a profit-seeking investment that is disguised as charity. It may get applause of some kind by the general public, because people do not understand the economic motivation behind the donation. But God understands. He is not fooled.
It is legitimate to expect a general return in history from sacrifices on behalf of God. Jesus spoke about this.
Peter began to speak to him, “Look, we have left everything and have followed you.” Jesus said, “Truly I say to you, there is no one who has left house, or brothers, or sisters, or mother, or father, or children, or lands, for my sake, and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundred times as much now in this world: houses, and brothers, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions, and in the world to come, eternal life” (Mark 10:28–30).
There are also heavenly rewards. “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on the earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. Instead, store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6:20–21).
Most people lack faith in the God of the Bible and also in the cause-and-effect economic relationships that the Bible teaches really exist. Therefore, they see acts of charity as entirely self-sacrificing. They have difficulty understanding why people indulge in such behavior. Maybe they do understand that the donor gets psychological benefits from his donation. But, on the whole, they see this behavior in terms of sheer sacrifice. This is a mistake. There is a balance between giving up things of value and receiving things of value in return. To believe that there is this causal regularity, you must also believe in a sovereign God who lays down the law. God’s law is inherently ethical. He also brings positive historical and eternal sanctions to those who are generous in His name. Because they do not fully understand the relationship between earthly sacrifice and benefits beyond the grave, covenant-breakers are sometimes impressed with the charitable spirit that dominates the lives of a comparative minority of Christians. These charitable acts speak well of God because God has asked His people to demonstrate charity. The only direct quotation of Jesus’ words that appears outside of the four Gospels is this: “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 10:35b). Ultimately, it is not possible for a covenant-keeper to give and not receive. But the positive sanctions with which God rewards charitable giving are not always visible in history. In this sense, the holiness of Christians is partially self-interested. There is nothing wrong with this. This is what God has built into the emotions of many covenant-keepers.
In the United States, something like Jesus’ recommendation to host feasts for the poor is honored twice a year: in late November, at what is known as the Thanksgiving holiday, and in late December, which is close to the Christmas season. Charitable organizations offer free turkey dinners “with all the trimmings” to poor people in the slums. Only rarely do rich people and middle-class people attended these feasts. They do not sit down next to the poor who benefit from them. There is no interaction. They donate money to pay for these free dinners, but they do not come into contact with the beneficiaries. This is charity, but it is an impersonal form of charity. It does not mean as much to the recipients as it would if the donors would show up and eat a meal with them. I learned this in the prison ministry’s meals. It was the personal contact that amazed the inmates, not simply the free food.
It is common for donors to support ministries that work with homeless people in large cities. These are called rescue missions. These missions may offer overnight shelter. There usually is free food. These missions are in the worst part of town. The attendees are invited in for a free evening meal, but before they can eat it, they are required to listen to a brief sermon with perhaps some singing of hymns. This is the price of the free meal. Most of the attendees have heard the basic message before. The message has had no impact in their lives. But they want the free meal. A ministry like this is surely better than no ministry at all. A few people do have their lives changed by these ministries to people who are barely surviving on city streets. Often, these derelicts have mental disorders. They have addictions. A few of them are transformed, and they recover. This is what the mission is intended to achieve. But most donors do not get involved in missionary activities in the worst part of town. They give money, but they do not volunteer their time.
Before I begin discussing this factor, I need to return to the theme of the Pareto curve. This is the famous 20/80 distribution. It was discovered by economist Vilfredo Pareto in the late nineteenth century when he was studying property ownership in European nations. He discovered that approximately 20% of the population owned 80% of the capital. This same 20/80 distribution has been found to govern many different kinds of organizations and operations. I therefore make extensive use of it when analyzing such things as time management.
I begin with an assumption. I cannot prove this assumption, but I recommend that you do not assume that it is incorrect. A charitable organization that relies heavily on volunteers becomes dependent on the most effective 20% of those volunteers. A charitable organization that relies heavily on donated money becomes dependent on the top 20% of the donors. Similarly, a charitable organization that depends heavily on volunteers will become extremely dependent on the top 4% of those volunteers (20% of 20%). The same thing applies to organizations that depend heavily on donations. With respect to your efforts, you will find that it is far easier to work your way into the top 4% of the volunteers than it is for you to work your way into the top 4% of donors.
When you are looking for an organization to become a major recipient of your time, you should consider at least seven factors. First and most important are your personal interests. Are you really interested in the work of a particular organization? If you are, then it is obvious that you should begin examining this organization as a possible arena for a decade or longer of charitable service. The next issue is your set of skills. Do you have specific skills that will be especially useful to a particular organization? If so, then you should give careful consideration to choosing this organization as your arena of service. The third issue is geography. Is the organization doing work that is close to where you live or where you work for a living? If it is, then you will spend less time commuting. This increases the amount of time that you can spend as a volunteer. The fourth issue is your weekly work schedule. Before you begin to volunteer for any organization, you must have a good understanding of where your time goes each week. You should already have a developed budget for your time. How much time do you spend earning a living? How much time do you spend with your family? How much time do you spend with your church? What are your priorities? Your priorities for the allocation of your time in the long run will be more important than your priorities for the allocation of your money. There is always a possibility that you will find ways to earn more money. It is far more difficult to find ways for you to extend your years of productivity. Your time is more precious than your money. This fact is more difficult to deal with emotionally when you are young than when you are old. When you are old, your perception of passing time is more focused.
The fifth issue is less important in the beginning than it will become after a decade of service. Is there an extensive hierarchy of authority in the organization? If you spend years doing diligent service at the local level, and you begin to draw attention to yourself as an effective and dedicated performer, will there be opportunities for you to advance up a recognizable chain of command? Will your influence increase as a result of your move up this chain of command? If you are serious about having long-term influence in your community or even beyond, you will at some point have to gain leverage for your contribution of time and effort. In a small organization, there is limited leverage. Most of the work is done on a face-to-face basis. You will have considerable influence in the lives of your fellow volunteers, especially those who serve with you side-by-side over many years. You will also have influence in the lives of some of the recipients of your charitable work. But this circle of influence will be geographically limited. In contrast, a large organization with a formal hierarchical structure will offer opportunities to extend your influence across a larger geographical area. But your influence will be increasingly impersonal except around those in your immediate circle of volunteers. Your influence will be dispersed. Furthermore, as you will learn over time, the more successful you are in sharing credit for whatever you do, the more cooperation you will gain from those around you. When you are working closely with a small group of people, you will get credit for what you do well, and you will be blamed for what you do poorly. It is much more difficult in such a setting to conceal your weaknesses. The higher you rise in an organization, meaning a bureaucracy, the easier it is to hide your weaknesses, and the more difficult it is to gain credit for your unique contributions.
A sixth consideration is the age of the organization. If the organization is relatively new, it is more open to change. There are few traditions that limit it. An older organization is different. It has many traditions, most of them unwritten and informal, which limit the scope of its operations, and which also limit the scope of systematic changes within these operations. This phrase is hampering: “We have always done it this way.” So is this one: “We just don’t do things that way around here.” The older the organization is and the more entrenched its traditions, the more difficult it will be for you to implement fundamental changes that become permanent. As an activist, you want your efforts to produce positive change. This is easier in a relatively new organization than an old, established one. An ideal situation is to get involved with a relatively new organization that becomes successful, and therefore it grows. It extends its influence geographically. It develops a wider circle of influence. It attracts more volunteers and more money. It positively affects the lives of more people. In such an organization, a diligent volunteer who shows up week after week, year after year, is in a position to shape that organization’s future. He is in a position to establish traditions that will shape it for years to come. To identify such an organization early in his life is an act of entrepreneurship. There is great uncertainty associated with making such a judgment. The Pareto principle applies here, too. Only about 20% of organizations survive the transition to the next generation after the founder dies or retires. Only about 20% of the survivors grow sufficiently to begin to make an impact in their communities. The percentage of organizations that make a measurable impact over decades and over large geographical areas is much lower than 20%. I think 4% is a reasonable estimate.
Seventh, there is the issue of your calling: the most important thing that you can do for God’s kingdom in which it would be most difficult for you to be replaced. Your commitment to a local service organization could easily become your calling in life. If you do not yet have a calling, it is likely that service to such an organization over many years will become your calling. Your calling is supposed to shape your life. It is supposed to influence the job that you take. If you identify your calling early enough, it should shape your decision about what person to marry. The more time you donate to an organization, the more emotionally committed you will be to that organization. Similarly, the more dependent the organization will become on your services. There will be mutual dependence. This is inherent in every calling. You will become difficult for the organization to replace. This is especially true if your services are not salaried. It is far more difficult for an organization to recruit an effective long-term volunteer than it is to hire an effective long-term employee. Any organization that wants to keep a long-term employee can usually do so by giving raises on a systematic basis. There is no comparable method of compensation that will keep a volunteer on the job.
It may seem as though I am being calculating in laying out this list of questions that you should ask and then get answered before you make a major commitment of your time. I am indeed being calculating. More to the point, I am asking you to become equally calculating. This is a major investment of an irreplaceable resource: your time. You can recover from making monetary donations to an organization that proves to be an ineffective user of donated money. It is much more difficult to recover from making donations of time to an organization that is an ineffective user of donated time. It is far easier to replenish lost money than it is to make up for lost time. Your time is precious. Do not waste it.
When you donate time and energy on a systematic basis over a long period of time, the organization will become dependent on your services. There are cases in which an organization will make an offer to a volunteer to join its staff. At that point, if service to the organization has become your calling, then you are being given a unique opportunity: to convert your calling into your job. You will be paid a predictable salary, and you will be assigned a predictable series of tasks. You will probably lose some degree of flexibility, but the organization will now be in a position to lower the possibility that you will stop volunteering. If the organization has become dependent on your services, it will not want to find itself in that situation. The most effective way to guarantee someone’s long-term service is to pay him a market wage or even an above-market wage.
I recommend that you take advantage of such an offer. I also recommend that you begin to evaluate the possibility of getting such an offer from the organization in the future. This should become part of your overall strategy of service. Your service will be no less dedicated because you are considering the possibility of making this a full-time career. If anything, this possibility should increase the intensity of your service. You want to make yourself visible to people higher in the chain of authority. Specifically, you want to become visible to someone who has a stake in keeping you on the job. The person should want to do this, but the person should also be in a position of authority to make an offer or to get someone else in the organization to make the offer. The crucial thing to remember is this: if you get the offer, and you accept the offer, your level of commitment should increase, not decrease. Now that the organization has demonstrated its dependence on your services, you know that your services have been truly effective from the point of view of the management of the organization. This is an important confirmation of the value of your services. Before the organization is willing to pay you to perform these services, you cannot be sure how valuable these services are to management. They may be important to the people you serve locally. These people generally come and go. If you help them put their lives together, they probably go away. Maybe they will come back to become volunteers. If you are an effective recruiter, they will come back.
There is a price to pay if you become a permanent employee. Your relationship with the people at the bottom of the organization will be severed. But this is true even if you are an effective volunteer who gets invited by someone in management to move up the chain of command. There may be a chain of command of volunteers as well as a chain of command of salaried employees. Every time you get a promotion in life, you sever the connection with those people you worked with who enabled you to get the promotion. This is not unique to volunteer service. Usually, however, volunteer service, being intermittent and somewhat sporadic, leaves more autonomy. You are less constrained by organizational requirements. You have greater flexibility. As you move up the chain of command, you will lose some of this flexibility. They are paying you to become predictable. People who are predictable are less flexible than people who are not predictable. This is the primary meaning of predictability.
If you accept an offer to go on to the payroll, you will become part of the system. This may be part of your long-term plan. To maximize your influence in the organization, you almost always have to be part of the system. Organizations do not make themselves dependent on volunteers precisely because they are volunteers. They are less predictable. It is more difficult to control them. It is more difficult to assign tasks to them and then provide positive sanctions for the correct performance of the tasks. There are no monetary positive sanctions. The positive sanctions become less predictable than the positive sanctions of a monthly salary. This is why volunteer organizations pay monthly salaries. They want greater predictability as they get larger and more influential.
As an activist, you should give some consideration early in your career as a volunteer to which kind of activism is more appropriate for the vision you have of your future and the future of the organization to which you donate your services. Do you want influence locally and personally? Does your position as a volunteer give you this? If so, then you probably should not go on to the payroll. But if you want long-term influence in the organization beyond the local level, you will almost certainly have to go on to the payroll. In doing so, you will become part of the hierarchical system. You will have to conform to the rules and regulations of the organization in ways that you do not have to conform if you are an unpaid local volunteer. Organizations that want to retain the services of volunteers have to grant a greater degree of autonomy to volunteers than they would grant to somebody on the payroll. This autonomy and flexibility become hooks that bring volunteers back to the organization year after year. There is less supervision of long-term volunteers who are involved in local branches of the organization than there is of permanent employees who have moved up the chain of command, and who exercise authority in the name of the organization. There is greater responsibility; there is therefore tighter authority both upward and downward.
Very few people ever succeed in persuading somebody to pay them to perform their callings in life. A person’s calling is usually a form of volunteer service. There is obviously a great benefit in having someone to pay you to perform your calling. The time you formerly donated free of charge to the organization now becomes a source of predictable income. You convert time into money. More than this, you convert what is your highest-value time into money. This is your calling. It is the most important thing you can do in which you would be most difficult to replace. Not many people ever achieve this. You will move from your present employer to a new employer. This frees up a great deal of your time for even greater service. You may even want to volunteer time to another organization. Or you may want to do more teaching with the time that you new employment situation has made available in your life.
To the extent that your volunteer service has enabled you to make personal contacts with fellow volunteers and with the people served, there is risk to be put on the payroll. Your personal testimony with respect to the kingdom of God may be restricted by the organization once you are on the payroll. If the organization is not self-consciously a part of the kingdom of God, then going on the payroll may be a liability to your calling. If the most important thing you can do is to serve in an unpaid capacity in order to gain greater flexibility with respect to your personal testimony, then going on the payroll might be a bad decision. On the other hand, if your goal is to persuade senior managers to adopt a better way to do things, then going on the payroll is probably a good idea. If you have specific ideas about how the organization’s operations can be made more efficient, then the larger your sphere of influence in the organization, the better it is for your program of Christian activism. But if you are being asked to trade your Christian testimony for a salary, do not accept the offer. If you perceive that this is an unofficial policy of the organization, then politely turn down the offer, and continue to serve as you have served in the past.
Is your volunteer service more heavily dependent on your personal testimony on a face-to-face basis than on your vision of what the organization could do if it had better leadership? If so, do not accept an offer to go on the payroll. You may not know the answer to this until you have worked in the trenches for several years as a volunteer. You may never be given the opportunity to go on the payroll. But if your primary goal is institutional transformation rather than personal transformation, then going on the payroll is a tremendous opportunity to extend your calling to a much wider audience.
Smaller organizations are usually underfunded. An underfunded organization almost never has an effective master of the tools of communication on the payroll. That is for larger organizations. Therefore, if you develop skills of digital communications, you can become an important asset in a charitable organization. You can provide services free of charge that the organization would have to pay a considerable salary to a technician to perform. One of the easiest ways to make an organization dependent on your services is to become the communications expert for the organization.
There are two main areas of communications in my day. There will undoubtedly be many more as time goes on, technology develops, and audiences fragment. The main ones today are websites and videos, probably videos posted free of charge on YouTube. Whatever the most common means of communications are in your community, you must become proficient in the use of these technologies. You do not have to become a master. You have to become better than 80% of the competition, whether volunteers or salaried. If you can make it into the top 20% personally, then you have an opportunity to make the organizations public presence better than 80% of the competition. If you are an unpaid volunteer who can do this, you are very valuable to the organization. The organization will not want to lose your services.
There is something else to consider. If you are producing videos that promote the work of the organization, then almost of necessity you are going to be in contact with high-level decision-makers in the organization. If the organization is small, you will gain a face-to-face relationship with the head of the organization. He or she understands that the public’s perception of the value of the organization is dependent upon the website and the videos. The organization has to perform good service, but if donors and prospective volunteers are unaware of the value of these services, then the organization’s work will be hampered. The head of the organization does not want the organization’s work to be hampered. If you can overcome this problem, your services will become vital to the organization.
It is a good idea to serve for at least a year in an unpaid local capacity to get a sense of the primary value of the services rendered to the poor and needy who walk in the door for aid. You want to see what they need. You also want to see how the organization is meeting these needs. This kind of knowledge is highly personal. It is local. In a charity, this information is best gained as a volunteer. So, your donated time for a year or two can become vital for designing the website, if there is no website, or producing videos if there is no systematic program to produce videos. Furthermore, somebody who produces videos will be in close contact with volunteers and low-paid employees at the local level. Everybody wants to get his story told in public. Everybody likes other people to appreciate his efforts. This is why everybody wants to be the friend of whoever is in charge of making the videos. From top to bottom, hardly anybody will turn away a request from the video guy who wants to produce a video that promotes whatever it is that the person is doing either for the poor and needy or for the organization. Nobody turns away favorable publicity. Nobody turns away an opportunity to get his name in front of the public, especially his spouse, his family, and members of whatever organizations he belongs to.
Modern technology keeps getting cheaper and more effective. It becomes more versatile. If your ability to tell a story is good, then it really does not matter what the technology is to tell that story in front of an audience. The crucial skill is the ability to tell the story. This is a limited skill. You do not obtain it by reading a manual or by taking an online course. You can read manuals on tools, and you can take courses on how to use tools, but the ability to tell a story effectively is highly personal, highly limited, and highly valuable. You need to develop your skills with a particular technology, but this is insufficient to make you valuable to the organization. These skills are necessary, but they are not sufficient. The better that you can tell a story, the more effective your presentation will be. The better that you can help someone else tell his story, the more valuable your presentation will be to the person whose story you tell and also to the organization, for the organization needs effective stories about its efforts in order to raise funds to continue its work.
Initially, if you are put in a position to present the organization’s story to the general public, you will be under constraints. Nobody in authority is going to hand over everything to you. But, over time, people in authority will begin to trust your judgment in telling the organization’s stories to the public, and also getting these stories in front of a growing audience. Both of these tasks are difficult. Most masters of communications technologies lack both of these skills. Again, if you have basic competence in the technologies, but you have above-average skills in telling stories and in persuading people to listen to these stories, the organization will become dependent on you.
I can think of no better volunteer service than this one for the purpose of getting an offer to go on the organization’s payroll. Once it becomes clear to the head of the organization how valuable the visible results of your services are, the more likely that he will not want to lose your services because you lose interest or for any other reason. The best way to keep your services flowing is to pay you a salary. Once you develop these skills, they are highly portable. You may be able to use these skills in your present occupation.
Here are basic rules that govern the production of a promotional video. Do not break these rules. Adhere to them in the order I recommend.
1. Decide on a single action step that you want the viewer to take at the end of the video.2. Design this action step to maximize the percentage of viewers who take it.
3. Structure the entire video in terms of persuading the viewer to watch the entire video and then take the action step.
4. From the beginning of the video, tell the story of a single benefit that the organization delivers to specific recipients.
5. Provide proof in the video that this benefit really is crucial to recipients, and the organization really does deliver it.
6. Keep the initial video short. Viewers have short attention spans. Their time is valuable to them. You are asking them to donate it to watch the video. Do not expect them to watch a long video the first time.
7. If necessary, provide a longer video as a follow-up to the initial short video.
If you have to tell these stories by doing a voice-over narration, or you must interview someone, then you must develop your skills in public speaking. Most people do not want to become public speakers. They are uncomfortable speaking in public. This discomfort is a major barrier to entry. Those few people who overcome it almost automatically enter the top 20% of performers in their field. A person who is a mediocre performer, but who can speak effectively in public, becomes valuable to the organization he serves. Most employees do not understand this. Most volunteers do not understand it. You would be wise to understand it.
A Christian activist should first become clear in his mind regarding his calling in life. This should influence the kind of occupation he chooses. His occupation should always be subordinate to his calling.
Once a Christian is clear about this, then it is time to start thinking about ways to volunteer. It is through volunteering that a Christian gains understanding of the way that nonprofit institutions work. He finds out about fund-raising. He finds out about the perpetual demand for subsidized services from people who are poor and needy, but also from people who are lazy and looking for a handout. Every charitable organization had better discover which motivation undergirds any request for aid.
When someone volunteers to serve another person, he has begun to implement Jesus’ call for sacrificial service to others in his name and on his behalf. This is basic to the Christian way of life. There are many Christian organizations that are worthy of support financially. There are also many that are deserving of donated time. To work as a volunteer is to learn about the division of labor. It is also to learn about how people become committed to a life of service. It is excellent training for any Christian activist. He can begin to have significant positive effects on people in great need.
Serving as a volunteer is excellent training for Christian service in general. Someone else is putting up the money. Someone else has organized a program or multiple programs for the support of the poor and needy. Long-term social change should always begin with sacrificial service to others. This is basic to the Christian gospel. We are to do to others what Jesus Christ did on our behalf. The Incarnation set the pattern. We are to do our best as creatures to imitate this pattern.
Anytime people seek power before they have gained experience in sacrificial service, they have adopted a rival religion. Christianity is not the pursuit of power. It is the pursuit of righteousness. When people without experience in serving others gain the leverage associated with political power, they are unreliable holders of power. They have not been properly screened.
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To read the entire book, go here: https://www.garynorth.com/public/department197.cfm.