Different Ways to Give People Away

On this episode of The Lead On Podcast, Jeff Iorg, president of the SBC Executive Committee, discusses the concept of "gospel generosity" beyond financial giving, focusing on the practice of "giving people away" to support missions and ministry. He explores various ways churches can engage in this form of generosity, from short-term mission trips to disaster relief and evangelism efforts, highlighting the impact of sending people to serve and support other communities.

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Host

Jeff Iorg

President, SBC Executive Committee

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Jeff Iorg: 00:54

Welcome to the Lead On podcast. This is Jeff Iorg, the president of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, continuing our ongoing conversation about practical issues related to ministry leadership. Yet recently, I preached in a church and was a part of a series of messages they were working through and a seri an emphasis in their church on gospel generosity. And I was able to preach not only on giving financially to support missions and the mission work that we're doing around the world, but I also was able to preach a second aspect of gospel generosity, which is what I wanna focus on today on this podcast. I wanna talk about giving people away.

Jeff Iorg: 01:38

Now you may be thinking, oh, we can't do that. Our church needs every person we've got to do everything we can. We have a leadership crisis. We have a leadership shortage. We have a worker shortage.

Jeff Iorg: 01:49

We can't even think about giving people away. Well, let's take a step back and reconsider that perspective today on the podcast because I think that there really are two prongs of gospel generosity. The first prong, of course, is giving financially to support missions and missionary work around the world. The second part is giving away people to get this done. Now, this is a convictional practice that I've used from really the very beginning of my ministry.

Jeff Iorg: 02:19

When I went to my first church, I very quickly started talking with them about the possibility of taking a mission trip somewhere. And they had never done that before, didn't really have a lot of experience with it, but they were, of course, willing to hear the possibility of something new from their new pastor. And within a year, year and a half, we were finally, able to put together a trip and we went, a small group of us, from, Missouri just to the neighboring state of Kansas to help a church with a facility construction project. My son was, three or four years old by this time. And, on one of the afternoons, the moms and some of the kids had an outing, and my son, caught his very first fish.

Jeff Iorg: 03:07

It must have been about four inches long, but he thought he had landed an orca. And so he brought that out of the water, was so proud, and took a picture. And I carried that picture in my wallet for years, not only as a reminder of that early mission trip by that church, but also just the memories that it brought back to me of our church doing something with a group of families on mission in another place, in ministry. Now that trip was years ago, back in the mid nineteen eighties. Interestingly enough, however, the pastor of that church has remained for several decades.

Jeff Iorg: 03:43

And over the years, I've seen him at various Southern Baptist Convention meetings and other places, and he'll always come up and smile. Of course, I recognize him even after all these years, and tell me about his church and the ministry that's going on, and will reflect back on that mission trip those many years ago.

Jeff Iorg: 04:00

Well, when I moved to the seminary, I

Jeff Iorg: 04:02

carried with me this idea that we needed to have gospel generosity, but quite frankly, the seminary had restrictions, both legal and regulatory, on giving money away. This is a surprise to some, but when organizations receive funds for certain purposes, they have to spend those things for those purposes. And so when I proposed that we think about what it meant to have gospel generosity even as a seminary, I got some pushback from my CFO who said, well, I'm all for generosity, but we we gotta find a way to do it that's within the rules, so to speak. Well, I did some work on that, and what we finally concluded was that while we were really not able to give away money, we could do something else, and that is we could give away our people. And so we reached out to a number of, seminaries that we had partnerships with in Africa, Mexico, Asia, and talked with them about how we could be more directly involved in strengthening their programs, expanding their scope of influence, and really helping them with their mission by not giving them money, but instead, by sending people from our school to help them.

Jeff Iorg: 05:15

Now this was mostly professors, but occasionally administrators to help them to think through, how to do their work more effectively, and in terms of the faculty, how to teach more effectively or to broaden their teaching and their instruction by bringing in these outside professors. This turned out to be a wonderful way for our school to give itself away. We funded the faculty to go and do these experiences. That was certainly within our purview and our financial responsibility, but we didn't charge the school we were going to any money or expect anything from them, and yet we were able to give to them and strengthen their program by what we were able to do. I remember once when one of the presidents of one of those schools came to our campus and with a heartfelt emotion came to a faculty meeting and poured out his heart about what we had meant to them by sending people, and not only how much it had taught their students,

Jeff Iorg: 06:07

but how much it

Jeff Iorg: 06:08

had encouraged their faculty, and then how much just by watching our faculty in action, it had trained their faculty and made them even more effective in the work they were doing. So these are two examples, from my early ministry of giving myself away and leading my church or my organization to give itself away by giving away its people. Now, when I was preaching recently at this church that was emphasizing gospel generosity, over lunch, the pastor and I were talking about his plans for giving his people away. And he said something that was a bit he said it a bit sheepishly as if he were almost, embarrassed, but he said, you know, this year we're we're only, involving ourselves in in one international, missions trip and three local mission trips. And I thought, my goodness, that's fantastic.

Jeff Iorg: 07:01

But he was thinking, well, that's not very much. Well, that's actually quite a lot even for a church of some size. And then he said, in fact, we have a goal of having 10% of our average attendance at our church involved in some kind of missions endeavor where we give people away in service to others every year. So if you had a church of 200, that would be 20 people a year that get involved in this. Now I don't have any formulas or any kind of, really data to put before you here, but I'll tell you that 10% number really resonated with me.

Jeff Iorg: 07:35

I thought, man, if a church could have a goal of having, like, at least 10% of its average attendance invested, by in in helping others, by sending people to to assist them in their ministries, man, I think that would be a a really pretty remarkable goal, honestly, for the typical church.

Jeff Iorg: 07:52

And so I wanna talk to

Jeff Iorg: 07:53

you today about some different ways to give people away because you're probably thinking of just the one way, and that is a formal organized mission trip where where you send people out as a team to do something somewhere. And I'm gonna talk about that as one option, but there are so many other ways to get at this. So let's just start with this first one, which is the most obvious one, and that is sending your church members on short term mission assignments. Now, this usually involves forming a team to go somewhere for say one to two weeks to do a specific project or work on a specific task. And there are lots of ways to do this as Southern Baptist through the International Mission Board and the North American Mission Board, And frankly, I think these are done best when they're done with an organization like this, because when you do do it with an organization, you have a lot of infrastructure in place that you don't have to think about or worry about or create as a church.

Jeff Iorg: 08:52

For example, insurance issues are resolved. Possibilities of medical care needed on the field are resolved. But perhaps even more importantly, when you send a team with an organization that already has missionaries in place, you're joining a strategy, not just making up a project. So you're actually going somewhere where there's an ongoing work being accomplished, and the work that you're being asked to come there and do really facilitates or adds to that work. And so this makes the work even more effective because it's a part of an ongoing process or project that you're doing.

Jeff Iorg: 09:25

Now these short term assignments can take on many forms. Some of them are what I would call practical or need meeting ministries, and perhaps the most well known of these in Southern Baptist life is disaster response or disaster relief. Now in Southern Baptist life's, disaster relief is organized through state conventions and coordinated by the two mission boards under the auspices of their organization called Send Relief. And so disaster response involves hands on work to actually get the relief to people in their homes and in their businesses. It involves hard work.

Jeff Iorg: 10:06

Disaster relief is things like, you know, scraping out mud from flooded buildings, picking up debris after tornadoes, chainsawing through all kinds of, trees and other things that are felled by hurricanes and other disasters. So disaster relief, on the one hand, can be very, hands on and very physically draining and, frankly, pretty demanding. But it also involves other things like food service and childcare and things that support the workers who are actually doing these other things I've just described. So one way to get involved and to get your church members involved outside of your church is to plug them into disaster relief organizations through your state convention and through the National Send Relief efforts. Now another way to do these hands on type projects is to get involved with teams that do construction for churches.

Jeff Iorg: 11:00

They're organizations that, again, are usually organized state by state, but there are organizations of craftsmen who come together to get the work done and to go out each summer for and build a church building, for example, in a place where a new church is being started. And they'll send team after team after team over a period of six, eight, ten, twelve weeks and make a significant, if not a significant progress on building a church building, are completed entirely in that time frame. And so these are two ways that you can get people involved in what I would say are the hands on direct ministry efforts that people like to do. But there are also some other things you can do which are really more focused on the spiritual needs of people. Now disaster relief and construction projects focus on those things too because they often have chaplains and others who go into communities and make a difference.

Jeff Iorg: 11:49

But now I'm talking about doing things that are directly related to sharing the gospel with people in other contexts, and that's evangelism strategies and prayer strategies to where you actually go and share the gospel with people. Few years ago, I went with a group of students from Gateway Seminary to India, and our trip was specifically designed to do two things, share the gospel with people who had not yet heard it, and many of them not heard even the name of Jesus, and then, do some leadership development with pastors and others that were already in the area. So when we went there, I was basically a chaperone, believe it or not, because of cultural restrictions and etcetera. The the women who went with me on the trip and with the whole team, not just with me, but a whole team of us went. And the women that were on the trip would go into the community and they would go into homes of women and share the gospel with them.

Jeff Iorg: 12:47

But in order to do that, they had to have a man who would accompany them in public and be their sort of escort, if you will. And it's an it was all of a cultural requirement. We were all willing to cooperate with it. No problem. So I had these two female seminary students that were going there as evangelists to share the gospel with women in India.

Jeff Iorg: 13:07

And, there were a small cadre of Christian women that were in the church there in the community we were going to. And so what they did was they opened up their homes, and these are small apartments, just really concrete boxes, maybe usually one room, at the most two rooms. And they would go into their building where they lived, and they would say, I have friends coming from America, and I'd like for you to meet them. They're going to be talking about their relationship with God and what it means to them, and I'd like to invite you to come. And so these women, and oftentimes children would come, and we would have twenty, forty, 50 women packed in these small apartments.

Jeff Iorg: 13:43

And we would arrive and the the two students, the American women would share the gospel, share their testimonies, and I would either sit in the corner or even sit in the hallway because I was there as the chaperone or as the escort for these Americans, and it was expected that they would have a male a man who was doing that. That's what I'm talking about. You can actually go in other places in the world and share the gospel. They were sharing the gospel directly. They were asking people to receive Jesus.

Jeff Iorg: 14:10

They were asking people to, to commit themselves. And because they were doing it in conjunction with this very small little church that was in that community, they had some local connection. They were a part of a larger strategy. There was follow-up that could be done, and these Christian women were getting greatly encouraged by seeing the response of their neighbors to come and hear the gospel in their own homes. Another aspect of this for us was street preaching.

Jeff Iorg: 14:35

Now we had to be really careful about this because of the the cultural restrictions, but we had a couple of guys on our trip that were really good at at speaking the gospel in, really pretty short messages, you know, three to five minute messages in the streets, and then saying, if you'd like to talk with me, I'm gonna stand over here under this this tree, and I'd be glad to visit with you about what I've just been saying. And men would then come over and gather around, and these guys would

Jeff Iorg: 15:00

be able in small groups then to share the gospel. In different parts of

Jeff Iorg: 15:04

the world in different ways, you can go and share the gospel, and you can send people how to do this. Now, it's best, I think, if you go in cooperation with some organized effort that's being done, which has local support and even local missionaries involved, so that you really do step into the stream of what will actually work in that culture and you step into the stream of what needs to be done there. One of my horror stories I heard from a missionary once was a church that was very effective at sharing the gospel here in The United States and they had a particular gospel tract that they had written that they felt was just super effective in communicating the gospel. And so they had it translated into Russian, and they flew a team of people to Russia to stand outside the subways and hand out this American gospel tract translated into Russian. And they were just handing them out indiscriminately to everyone they could that was coming out of the subway, and they did this for a week and handed out thousands of these, which were then filling up the gutters and thrown into the trash all over the city.

Jeff Iorg: 16:01

The missionaries were heartbroken. They said if these people had just contacted us beforehand, ask us what would be effective, we could have eliminated all the cost and expense of printing something that was Americanized and was not gonna be well received here, and we could have brought them into our strategies, and they could have helped us actually to evangelize Russians and do something specific that would actually get

Jeff Iorg: 16:19

the gospel to more people. So the first thing

Jeff Iorg: 16:23

you can do is send people on short term assignments, whether it's something like disaster relief or construction or something like evangelism or prayer. You can do this by working directly with people in the field and make a difference on these kind of assignments. Well, that's the one everyone always thinks of. Now the rest of the podcast, I wanna give you some more ideas about what it means to invest your people outside your church in helping others. Another way you can do this is to send church members to help other churches in your area.

Jeff Iorg: 16:51

Now there are lots of models of how you can do this,

Jeff Iorg: 16:54

but let me give you

Jeff Iorg: 16:55

a couple of things that have been meaningful to me over the years. The first one happened when we were planting a church in Oregon many years ago. We had very limited musical talent and ability in our church. We were a brand new church. We're just a handful of people, less than 20, and, it was challenging.

Jeff Iorg: 17:12

So I went to one of the churches in our area that really wasn't a huge church, maybe 200 in attendance, and I said, look, you have people that sing in your church, and you have, several that are on your worship team and in your choir. I wonder if you would have people come to our church, maybe one or two, and sing for us or sing with us, and we'll do the same music you did the Sunday before. So you don't have to practice or learn anything new. What you did on the first Sunday of the month, come and do it our church on the second Sunday of the month. What you did on the second Sunday of the month, send somebody to do it our church on the third Sunday of the month.

Jeff Iorg: 17:45

And we coordinated like that for the first few months we were open, and they sent us people to help us with our music and our worship that we really needed. And by being a little bit flexible to cooperate with what they were already doing, we were able to really significantly enhance the ministry of music that we had and a worship that we had. Now that's just one example of a church sending a few people on a continuing basis over a period of months to help another church in an area of real need. Another one is Vacation Bible School. Now Vacation Bible School is a very common ministry in many healthy and growing churches across the Southern Baptist Convention.

Jeff Iorg: 18:24

So I wanna challenge you

Jeff Iorg: 18:25

to think about doing something that may be new for you, and that is if your church does a vacation bible school. Let's say you have a church of, you know, a couple hundred people and and you do a vacation bible school and you have 75 to a hundred children come and you've got a dozen workers and they put on a great week long bible school. Why don't you ask a few of those workers three or four weeks later to do a second Bible school for a church in your community that doesn't have the resources to have one? And why don't you see if you can't use that Bible school to do several things in the life of that other church? Train their workers, motivate their, their their leaders, help them to catch a vision for what they can accomplish, and maybe even win some lost children and some lost families to faith in Jesus by putting on this bible school.

Jeff Iorg: 19:10

And here's what you're thinking. Well, there is no possible way that the people of our church

Jeff Iorg: 19:13

can do two vacation Bible schools in one summer. Now think about what you just said. You're not doing two vacation Bible schools. You're doing one vacation Bible school twice. And so having taught at a seminary, I

Jeff Iorg: 19:27

can tell you this. The first time you have to prepare a class takes hundreds of hours. The second time you teach that same class takes tens of hours. Because you've already done all the heavy lifting of preparation, The execution of it doesn't really take that much time compared to the preparation time, and when you've already done the preparation, doing it two or three or 10 times doesn't take nearly as much time as the first time. So what I'm saying is you've already studied all the material, you've already gathered all the resources, You've already bought all the displays.

Jeff Iorg: 19:57

You've already made all the posters. You already know how to do the crafts and have leftovers, frankly, from them. Why not just take all of that and do it over again? With very little preparation, you can bless another church with a significant ministry opportunity. Now I know this is a little bit extreme, but my wife, a few summers ago, did four vacation bible schools in the same summer.

Jeff Iorg: 20:20

She did the first one at our home church, the largest one of them of the summer, But then she and three or four other women, decided we're gonna go out and do these vacation bible schools. And so they contacted other churches and and, explained what they wanted to do, and and all they asked was this. You have to have one helper for every one person that we send that can be our our assistant in the classroom and help us with all the aspects of bible school that week. And then we're gonna need to provide a couple of other people to sort of staff up the external aspects of bible school that need to be taken care of, record keeping, and all that kind of thing. But we'll bring four high quality teachers with all the curriculum, all the material, all the supplies, everything, because we've already done it once, doing it the second time won't be that hard.

Jeff Iorg: 21:06

And my wife did four vacation bible schools that summer in four different churches. One of them, the larger one at the beginning, which required all the preparation and all the materials, and the other ones, much smaller, but yet an opportunity to make a difference in churches that really needed a boost and weren't going to have a Vacation Bible School if these ladies didn't do them. What I'm saying is think about music and VBS and other programs that you're doing and ask yourself, how can we be a blessing to

Jeff Iorg: 21:34

some other church that needs some help? Now I saw this in our

Jeff Iorg: 21:38

church in California in a different way, and that is our pastor was highly regarded and respected by many other pastors. And when churches would start struggling and lose their pastors and really get down to the point where, you know, they couldn't even afford a pastor any longer, they often would come to our church and say, can you help

Jeff Iorg: 21:53

us? Now, our pastor had

Jeff Iorg: 21:56

a vision for training lay pastors and some who became pastors in our church. And so he had a a weekly class called the pastoral development class, and and he would spend an hour with these guys every week helping them to learn how to preach, learn how to make a visit, learn how to provide the crisis counseling, learn how to do the basics of pastoral ministry. And then when these churches that were struggling would come to us, he would say, yes, we can send somebody to help you. And he would send out one of these men to become their pastor, and they remained an independent church. They remained separate from what we were doing as a church, but yet they had someone that was from our church that had the strength that we could bring to the table that was now helping them to rebuild their church and find new strength because they had pastoral leadership.

Jeff Iorg: 22:40

We had about half a dozen of these going on by the time I left California. All very quietly, no fanfare, just pastor training men in our church who could be by vocational or co vocational pastors, and he could send them out and help struggling churches to really find themselves again and see if they could not find a find a way to go forward. And as a result of that, another thing our church was able to do was help some of these churches to reevaluate their their facility use and to really rethink what they were doing in in how they were, using their resources and using their facilities in ministry. We had some people in our church that had expertise in that area. We were able to help them do that as well.

Jeff Iorg: 23:20

So one way you can give away your people is, of course, mission trips like I'm describing. Another way is by sending people out in vacation bible school, music ministry, or even in pastoral ministry, where you send people out on the short term assignments to make a difference in churches that are struggling or need a boost or in some way need to be helped to rekindle their ministry passion. Now another way you can do this is to send your members to help start new churches. Now this, of course, can be done the more more traditional way that you're probably thinking of, and that is, well, we put together a group of maybe 10 to 50 people, and we send them out with a pastor to plant a new church. Well, that certainly can happen.

Jeff Iorg: 24:01

I'm certainly not opposed to that, and that's a good thing to do. But that's really not what I wanna emphasize right now. Instead, what I wanna emphasize is you challenging members of your church, particularly teenagers and young adults, to see themselves as being part of a church planting movement or a church planting team, and to think about going somewhere in the world, planting themselves, and joining a pastor who's planting a church and being a vital part of that ministry. When I'm preaching on college campuses, for example, I will say, if you're training to be a nurse, why don't you go be a

Jeff Iorg: 24:33

nurse in Seattle or Salt Lake City? If you wanna be an architect, why don't you try to find a job in Boston, someplace like that? In other words, take your profession

Jeff Iorg: 24:47

and go somewhere else and plant your life. And when you get to Salt Lake City or Seattle or Boston, you join a church plant, and you bring several things to the table. Number one, you bring your life as a committed Christian. Number two, you bring your gifts and talents as a Christian servant. Number three, you give bring the training you've had growing up perhaps in the bible belt or growing up in a church environment where you understand what it means to be a church leader.

Jeff Iorg: 25:13

And number four, and don't diminish this, you bring your money. You have gone to school. You've learned you've learned the skills necessary for a profession, and that profession pays well. And now you have the capacity to give a tithe and even to give beyond that to missions and other causes, and you're able to do that in support of this ministry or this church that you've moved there to be a

Jeff Iorg: 25:33

part of. Listen, I think this is a a a

Jeff Iorg: 25:37

remarkably untapped resource for church planting, particularly in North America, and that is challenging young, young adults to think about going to college or going to some kind of trade trade school training or something like that to get the school the the the skills they need so that they can move somewhere else in the world, plant themselves, and make a significant difference in church planting and church strengthening, particularly in what I call emerging regions, which is the the West, the Northwest, the Upper Midwest, and the Northeast. These places outside the Bible Belt that are in such desperate need of church planting, but not just church planters, but people to go there and give them themselves in church planting to help build a church by all these means that I've just been describing. And, of course, you can also do this internationally, but that requires a another level of commitment and another level of responsibility that might involve cross cultural training and even language acquisition. But just doing it here in The US would be something that I would like to see thousands of young people do, and I wanna challenge you as a church leader to to challenge people to think this way.

Jeff Iorg: 26:48

To challenge people to think about doing their profession, doing their life somewhere else, and in doing that, giving people away in ministry. And then finally, of course, you can send people out in response to God's call to ministry leadership. Don't be afraid to issue a public call for people to answer God's call to ministry leadership so that they will answer God's call to be pastors, answer God's call to be missionaries, and that they will answer God's call to commit themselves to doing the work of ministry leadership and wherever he may assign. Well, today on the podcast, I've been emphasizing gospel generosity, but not giving money away. That's important too, and that's another podcast.

Jeff Iorg: 27:33

But today, I've been focusing on giving people away. Look. You think, I don't have enough people to give anyone away. I I I'm desperate for the leaders I have. People I have are already stressed in their schedules and already doing all they can do.

Jeff Iorg: 27:50

Well, I wanna remind you of an overarching biblical principle

Jeff Iorg: 27:54

that applies in this area. Jesus said give, and it will be given to you. He used an agricultural analogy of filling a grain basket. He said give,

Jeff Iorg: 28:06

and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over. Jesus said, if you give, I will replenish your supply. And then Jesus said on another occasion, if you wanna find your life, lose it. In other words, if you wanna find something, give it away and see what God will do in replenishing your supply.

Jeff Iorg: 28:35

I've seen this, of course, happen in finances, but I've also seen it happen with people. As God works to motivate you to give your people away, Whether you're sending them out on short term mission assignments domestically or internationally, whether you're sending members to help other churches in your area that have particular areas of need or struggling with certain issues, whether you send members from your church out to plant a new church by sending out a church planting team or a church planting core group, or whether you challenge your members to go into church planting support and to become part of church planting movements by moving themselves around The United States or around the world, planting themselves and doing their profession in such a way that they can become a part of a church plant, Or, you give people away by extending God's call regularly to ministry leadership and seeing people raised up and sent out from your church to get this work done. I believe, based on the principles of scripture that teach when you give, God replenishes. I believe that when you give away your people, God will replenish your supply. He will raise up people to do whatever is needed to fulfill what may have been undone by people that you've given away or people that you've sent away.

Jeff Iorg: 29:54

God wants us to be generous. And gospel generosity is about more than giving away our money. It's also about giving away our people. So I want to challenge you today to think about ways that you, in a church of maybe a hundred or 200, maybe a church of a thousand, doesn't make any difference how large you are. Think about it proportionally.

Jeff Iorg: 30:14

How can we give a reasonable number of people away every year that make a difference in the lives of others, believing that as we do that, God will replenish our supply, and he will bless and honor our work and expand even the number of people we have that we can send out on mission for him. Gospel generosity, it includes giving away your people. Do it as you lead on.