Emergence of the Altruism Economy

Wealthy patrons bankrolled the initial Renaissance. The altruism economy is sponsoring this one.

The March 9, 2008, edition of the New York Times Magazine was titled “Giving It Away.” Various articles chronicled the evolution of altruism, celebrity chefs’ cooking for charity, four stories of individual twenty-somethings’ efforts to change their piece of the world, and an interview with Dr. Larry Brilliant, head of corporate giving at Google. The thread that ran throughout the magazine is that we are witnessing something truly phenomenal in both the magnitude and the creativity of people’s determination not just to share their wealth but to make a difference with it. The Times edition came a few months after the release of Bill Clinton’s Giving¹ and hit the stands during the Oprah’s Big Give television series. Celebrities like Bill and Melinda Gates, Warren Buffett, Bono, and Angelina Jolie target disease, Third World debt, illiteracy, and other social ills on a global scale.

But we also discover in every community nameless heroes who volunteer in soup kitchens, tutor struggling kids in English and math, build houses for people who can’t afford them, and perform innumerable acts of kindness and generosity. And they give money—a lot of money. Charitable giving now comes to around $300 billion a year and is rising.

Altruism shows up in every sector of the economy. Every major corporation, and most minor ones, assign their managers community service obligations. A growing number of businesses dedicate a certain percentage of sales to performing altruistic work, from digging wells to provide safe drinking water overseas to supporting local school projects. Special Web sites are donated to organizations, allowing people not just to direct their own money but also to release others’ resources for projects of their choice. FreeRice.com is an example of this development, with up to half a million people participating daily, freeing 400 metric tons of rice for hunger relief. Family foundations support favorite causes and local giving circles fund the arts in their communities. Hospitals provide millions of dollars in free services each year. Schools and student organizations unleash tens of thousands of volunteer hours into their communities through their campus service projects. The entertainment industry throws money at charity benefits. American Idol raised millions in one night, and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition has inspired hundreds of copycat local renditions.

The emergence of the altruism economy signals the positive inclination of people to believe that they can and should make a difference, starting with their neighborhood and extending to the entire globe. They also expect the people they deal with in commerce, the schools they attend, the businesses they support—and the churches they belong to—to be investing in making the world a better place.

This increased spirit of altruism is calling the church out to play. It beckons the church to move from being the recipient of a generous culture (religious causes garner the largest percentage of charitable dollars—about a third) to actually being generous to the culture. It challenges the church to move beyond its own programs and self-preoccupation. And it promises that once the church ventures into the street to engage human need, it will have many partners from all domains of culture to join with it in creating a better world.

This explosion of good actually creates a chance for the church to gain relevance and influence. But only if the church is willing to get out of the church business and get over the delusion that the “success” of the church impresses the world. It does not. It only impresses church people, while making others even more skeptical of the church’s true motives. After chronicling the negative image of Christianity among younger generations in their groundbreaking book Unchristian, David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons conclude, “No strategy, tactics, or clever marketing campaign could ever clear away the smokescreen that surrounds Christianity in today’s culture. The perception of outsiders will change only when Christians strive to represent the heart of God in every relationship and situation.”²

The way forward for churches that want to redefine their position in the community will be through service and sacrifice. In classic Renaissance dynamics, this approach is rediscovering and reapplying an ancient idea. The early church movement was characterized by this posture of service. Recapturing that character will require the church to make a major shift into a kingdom way of thinking and seeing. This shift will show up in a new scorecard highlighting different factors and behaviors than the ones that are typically tracked (attendance, monies received, activities at church). These new metrics will push beyond the church’s own internal measures to monitoring the church’s positive community impact beyond its walls.

Missional Shift 1: From an Internal to an External Ministry Focus

The church must shift from an internal to an external focus in its ministry. This reflects what missional churches and missional church leaders are doing and why they are doing it. They don’t focus beyond the church to be culturally hip. They make this shift because the new direction defines who they are. The missional church engages the community beyond its walls because it believes that is why the church exists.

This shift redefines the target of ministry. Internally focused churches and ministries (and people, for that matter) consume most of their energy, time, and money on a wide range of concerns, from survival to entertainment. Success in the internally focused culture is defined in terms of organizational goals. Leaders in these situations focus their efforts on helping the ministry achieve these goals (attendance, budget, new program widgets, improved widget performance). In other words, the scorecard is tied to activity focused on the organization itself.

Externally focused ministry leaders take their cues from the environment around them in terms of needs and opportunities. They look for ways to bless and to serve the communities where they are located. Much of their calendar space, financial resources, and organizational energy is spent on people who are not a part of their organization. These ministry ventures may or may not improve the organization’s bottom line in terms of traditional measures (attendance may actually go down if people are released to mission). These leaders increasingly look to network with other leaders and organizations with similar passions in order to synergize their efforts and increase the impact of their ministry efforts.

Shifting from an internal to an external focus usually requires a radical change of mind-set on the part of the leader, away from being ruled by the constraints and scorecards of the internally focused system. Many leaders have spent their entire leadership lives in pursuit of building great organizations that rise to the top of church industry standards. Changing values and motivations is not easy, but nothing less will accomplish this shift. Not to mention the fact that leaders generally know how to “do church” (even if it is a guaranteed losing season), but they don’t know if they have the requisite competencies to do anything else. After all, their training, roles, and status are tied to their church culture performances, not to their community awareness and contributions.

The Search for Personal Growth

It is no accident that people pulled millions of copies of Rick Warren’s Purpose-Driven Life off the shelf. They want to grow, and they want their lives to matter. Just check out the self-improvement section of your local bookstore. It dwarfs many other areas. Or take a look at what colleges and universities are offering, and filling up, in terms of adult education opportunities—everything from second-career (or third!) preparation to the advanced pursuit of leisure hobbies and interests. Check out the cable TV listings of shows offering advice to help people decorate, cook, dress, garden, manage money, train a dog, or flip a house. Life coaching has become a major industry. Many therapists are moving from traditional pathology-based approaches to more holistic, interventionist, proactive coaching, recognizing that people are searching for life change and development.

This unprecedented pursuit of personal development can be traced to several key changes. In the second half of the twentieth century, wave after wave of technology pushed people to adopt the mentality that they would need to engage in lifelong learning. Thanks to the Web and wireless access, information is now ubiquitous and asynchronous. Need to know something? Google it! You can suck the entire Library of Congress out of thin air! Right now!

Paradoxically, the more knowledge is available to us, the more we feel we need to learn. Far from satisfying our curiosity to know stuff, the onslaught of information fuels it. So a pervasive sense of needing to grow, to learn, to adapt, and to change has taken residence in the psyche of people in our culture.

The availability of information also does something else. It empowers people. Consider just one example—education. In a previous world, now made ancient by the digital revolution, people used to have to go to certain places and to certain people to acquire the knowledge necessary for an education. The educational system was built around an information acquisition and transfer modality, involving a largely didactic process from teacher to student. In this system, the learned instructor, the one with the information, passed knowledge down to the supplicant learner during certain hours of the day on certain days of the week in certain months of the year. We even built buildings where this knowledge transfer could occur, sending out buses to gather the learners. It was mass standardized education.

Forget that! Today, people learn at their own speed, on their own time, at their own convenience. In this new arrangement, power is ultimately transferred to the information consumer. Learners get to craft their own learning path.

The availability of information has increased empowerment. People are empowered to do for themselves things they once had to rely on others to do—others with the information and connections—like ticket agents who alone had seating charts for airplanes or stock brokers who alone had access to the stock market or any of hundreds of other examples. Some of you have never known a world where you had to wait for the bank to open and then ask someone there to manage your accounts. People like the idea of being able to manage the transactions of their lives. More than that, they expect it! They also want to and expect to be able to maximize their own personal development—whether at work or in their hobbies or recreational pursuits.

Not only do people want to grow themselves, but they also want to make sure other people have the same option. They want to invest in people, to lift the life experience of people less fortunate. To make these investments, people are now capable of and inclined toward researching problems and funding their ideas of solutions. And they are also increasingly determined to make sure their social capital is used efficiently and effectively to produce the results in people’s lives they seek to achieve. Nearly gone are the days when charities could ask donors for money based just on how much activity the charitable organizations generate. Donors want impact—in people terms.

When you combine this commitment to personal development with the rise of the altruism economy, you arrive at the missional renaissance.

Missional Shift 2: From Program Development to People Development