The first portion of the conference was entitled "Rethinking Our Culture" and featured Michael Emerson, Gary Moore and Jill Schumann as the speakers. A sociologist, an economist and a CEO, not the actor, musician and CEO.
Michael, as the first speaker, introduced the idea of rethinking our culture, by giving a variety of facts and figures about why people give and don't give money and if every "strong" Christian tithed, how much more money would be available to churches to spend on doing God's work. His talk was intriguing and insightful about why people give and how to use that information to encourage people to give. One fact I found shocking was that when "strong Christians" (i.e. regular worshipers) were polled, and asked how they would respond if their congregation required all families to tithe (give 10% of their post-tax income to the church) in order to be a member of good standing, only 8% would start tithing, but 20% would drop out of church life entirely, not bothering to go to a different congregation. Money, income especially, is considered a deeply personal issue.
Gary continued this idea about how culture affects our giving by discussing finances, especially the impact of the financial decline in the last 3 years. He focused on Ayn Rand (who I had never heard of) and her followers and how they have effected the world economy. Ayn Rand was the founder of Objectivism and lived a philosophy that more is better and how that effects others is not your concern. Gary's talk was packed full of information, in fact too much for a brief 40 minute presentation, and I felt lost through most of the talk since I did not know who Rand was and her philosophy was never fully explained (therefore I apologize if I got it wrong). The talk was also negative in tone which turns me off, and our discussion afterwards was kinda lost and confused until we turned to the idea of "now what" which got me on my soap box.
But in contrast to Gary's presentation, Jill's was extremely positive and hopeful about how current and future trends can help us rethink how people want and need to give. She focused on four main trends: focus and loci (people can be very specific about what they want), boundaries are blurring (corporations are getting into non-profits and vice versa), positivity (people want to hear more about the good things and less about the bad), and technology (social networking especially has allowed people to have a global community and to find those things they are interested in). Three out of these four trends I mentioned when I was on my soapbox during the previous discussion. We need to use these four trends, and others, and adapt to how people want to give and make those opportunities available. At the end of the day, I was able to talk to Jill and thank her for being so positive. So often, especially in church work, either these trends are ignored or if they are mentioned they are looked down upon because that is "not the way we have always done it." It was encouraging to hear someone else bring up these trends and see them in a positive light. Unfortunately the majority of the people in my discussion group did not catch on to the fact that these trends can be and are good things.
I was going to end with the three questions that we were asked at the end of each presentation, but they don't make a lot of sense out of context so instead I'll ask three questions that arose for me:
- Why do you give? How do you respond when people ask you to give more?
- How have you been effected by the financial changes over the last 3 years? Have you seen yourself giving more or less of your time and money as a result?
- What is one trend that you see developing? How can that be used as a tool to help others learn about and give to churches, charities and causes?
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