Mike Fichter's blog

Some helpful new material produced by Lifeway Research on the issue of Protestant pastors and abortion deserves a thorough going-through to glean encouragement, opportunities and challenges.  The report, based on phone interviews with 1002 senior pastors, was released on 11.23.09 by Lifeway.

Among the highlights: 89% of conservative pastors speak on the unborn at least once per year vs. only 25% of liberal pastors.

98% of very conservative pastors consider themselves “pro-life”, a number that drops to 14% among liberal pastors.  Without seeing the survey protocol, it is not known what a liberal pastors’ definition of “pro-life” might be.  According to Lifeway, when all of the Protestant pastors were forced to declare a position one way or the other, over 75% declared themselves to be “pro-life” vs. a small 13% who chose the “pro-choice” label. 

85% of pastors who speak of the unborn more than once per year also speak on poverty at the same frequency.

You can read the full report here

So, what do we glean initially? Here are a few of my observations:

1. We need to celebrate the faithfulness of the conservative Protestant pastors who hold fast to the value of life and seize the opportunity to build stronger ties with them and their churches based on relationships, not programs.

2. The great divide between a “conservative” pastor who speaks for the unborn and the “liberal” pastor who supports the right to an abortion is the authority of scripture, not politics, as so prophetically penned in Frances Schaeffer’s last work The Great Evangelical Disaster.  (You’ll need to dig into the report detail for this).

3. Liberal pastors must harbor a gnawing conscience that they are misrepresenting the unborn or they would speak of their support for abortion far more frequently.  Pastors who speak on the authority of scripture have a foundation on which to stand; pastors advocating abortion have only shifting sand.  Could this be the fertile soil for a revolution in the pastoral ranks?

It’s not terribly uncommon to hear a life movement leader say something like this after a disappointing fundraising dinner, direct mail campaign, etc., – “I don’t know why people don’t give more.”  That’s a valid question, but maybe a better question is one that we should ask before the big event or campaign: why do people give at all?

That’s the question that the highly respected Indiana University Center on Philanthropy set out to answer in an October 2009 report titled Understanding Donors’ Motivations.  The clues we can glean from this document are extremely valuable and should be of great assistance in helping savvy Right to Life organizations, pregnancy resource centers, and others secure an abundance of resources when applied to annual and capital campaigns. 

The number one reason donors give?  To meet basic needs.  The second highest reason: helping the poor to help themselves.  And number three: to make the community better.  In each of these instances, donors are looking for opportunities to fund solutions instead of fighting against stuff.   Did you catch that?  It’s a paradigm shift to view fundraising from the perspective of “help us to change the world to make it a better place” as opposed to “help us to tell the world about how badly everything is broken.” 

The life movement has the best story in the world to tell.  We’re all about moms.  We’re all about babies.   It’s a Hallmark moment waiting for the world to stand up and cheer.  Our fundraising challenge is to take our story and package it in such a way that donors are knocking down our doors to be a part of the solution.

Have you ever held on to a coupon for a product or favorite restaurant just a few days too long?  Then you know what it’s like when you realize you’ve blown a great opportunity. 

If you’re in a ministry leadership position, don’t let that happen with Thanksgiving.  There is no more natural time of year to express your heartfelt thanks to donors for how they support your mission throughout the year.  It doesn’t have to be fancy.  In fact, I have found one of the most efficient and cost-effective means of saying thanks is via a 4×6 full color postcard that you can create in minutes.   Not very creative?  Use a service like overnightprints.com that will provide you with a whole range of templates you can customize. 

Mail it under your bulk mail permit and you’ve just built a ton of good will at a very small cost.   

Thanksgiving is a lot of things to a lot of folks.  To wise ministry leaders, it means exactly what it says.

Sometimes the most significant developments occur while our attention is someplace far away.  With the national debate raging over health care in D.C., a miracle happened at a Planned Parenthood abortion center in Texas when one staff member saw one baby’s image on one ultrasound – and her world was rocked to the core. 

No one in Washington ordered her to view the ultrasound image.  No one required her to take the steps that she did.  And no one in Washington could stop her heart from being gripped when it all came down to a tiny child drawing away from the probe that invaded her world of safety. 

It’s easy to get caught up in staring into the floodlights of Capitol Hill.   But we’ll do good to remember that miracles are not subject to an act of Congress – and often they are thousands of miles away.

In one of the defining moments of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the American men’s and women’s relay teams shocked tens of millions of track fans around the world when both teams disqualified themselves, literally minutes apart, by failing to complete the pass of the relay baton.    

In the blame game and second-guessing that followed, USA Track and Field CEO Doug Logan was able to rise above the disaster and to look forward by observing that the relay teams’ failures underscored the pressing need for a complete evaluation of “the way we select, train, and coach our relays.”

Track meets, even Olympic meets, will always come back around.  But organizations without a leadership succession plan may not get another chance. 

Recently Focus on the Family revealed that Dr. James Dobson would be officially transitioning out of the ministry’s flagship radio broadcast.  I’m sure that more than a few folks who heard the news were quick to lament a possible decline on this powerful ministry’s impact around the world.  And in reality, no ministry can lose someone of the stature of Dr. Dobson and avoid some type of bump in the road.  But the good news is that Focus is ahead of the curve by making this the next step in a planned transtion of leadership. 

Every organization must eventually deal with changes in leadership.  It’s just a matter of whether the speed bump you hit will rattle the change in your ashtray or cause you to bottom out.