The Spirituality of Fundraising
By Ian Livett, Director of Fundraising at Embrace the Middle East
It’s a privilege to support the work of our Christian partners as they serve in a range of contexts in the Middle East. This year, we celebrate 170 years of a partnership which is sustained entirely by voluntary donations from Embrace supporters. We thank God for this steadfast generosity and for our supporters themselves, who, along with our sisters and brothers in the region, are vital companions on the Embrace journey.
Finance is a sensitive subject and talking about supporting a charity financially, or fundraising for a cause we care about, can be a tricky conversation (especially for us Brits) but I think that’s because ‘fundraising’ is really a misnomer.
Fundraising isn’t – as one might reasonably assume – primarily about raising funds. Indeed, in my experience, if that’s your starting point, you won’t be very successful and you won’t deserve to be! No, fundraising is in fact, about relationships between people with a shared sense of purpose.
Ken Burnett, who first coined the term ‘Relationship Fundraising’ in the ’90s puts it like this, “Fundraising…is about one person talking to another person about something that they both care deeply about and saying to them, if we work together that we can do something about it.”
Ken’s work transformed how charities in the UK approached their fundraising and every serious professional fundraiser since aspires to develop and maintain that sense of connection and collaboration between their supporters and their cause. However, while Ken’s framing of the role of fundraising for a Charity explains WHAT fundraising can be at its best, he doesn’t and can’t offer an explanation WHY it works... I think that’s because at its heart, fundraising is not a charity discipline, or marketing exercise; it is, in fact, a ministry.
Dutch priest and professor, Henri Nouwen (1932-1996) reflected deeply on this idea and his sermons and lectures on the subject have been drawn together into a publication called, The Spirituality of Fundraising. In it, Nouwen explains how fundraising (and to my mind, supporting a charity) is “to invest yourself through the resources that God as given you – your energy, your prayers, and your money – in this work to which God has called us.”
When relationship or – as we’d say, at Embrace – partnership drives our fundraising, it’s better because we’re touching upon something divine, or as Nouwen puts it, “we are drawn together by God, who is about to do a new thing through our collaboration.”
Now that is exciting!
I hope it excites you too, because when you so generously support Embrace with a donation, you are actually accepting our open invitation to participate in the Embrace story – which itself is a story about the continued and uninterrupted presence of Christians in the Middle East and their, and our, participation in the building of the Kingdom of God.