1) A lot of people use giving to charity as a means to silence their nagging conscience about the huge differences in wealth that there is in the world.
2) A lot of non-profit organizations use that bothered conscience as a leverage to (successfully) generate income (almost like the Roman Catholic indulgence system)
3) What the Non-profit sector wants to make their donors believe is: “give your money=compassion”. This is a very very serious lie, that a lot of Christians believe these days. The meaning of Compassion is “suffering together” and I wonder if that can be achieved by giving from our abundance and by out sourcing that to the Nonprofit sector.
4) The non-profit sector wants to make Compassion easy and convenient for us people who have too much money like MacDonalds makes eating out fast and convenient. But like eating the McDonalds food is unhealthy, the current convenient Mission and Aid industry is dangerous for our souls. Compassion is all about raw inconvenience and suffering.
5) Splitting (1) making money and (2) using it for social change into two different entities is seldom a good idea. It is like me telling my wife, you are the person in our family that helps people and I will concentrate on the making of the money. Utterly bad idea and I can give you thousands of failure examples that started with motives as stated above by Sascha Dichter but this is not how God has made us and wants us to operate.

Sorry if I come across very black and white, I know the topic is more complicated but I get very upset with sayings like: “If all our society had was effective businesses, we would not be a great nation.” (Jim Collins) I like to say “If all our society had was effective businesses, we would NOT need social sector organizations at ALL!”

So my point is that the way we run and look at business is utterly wrong.

In trying to fix the real problem (ineffective business) we have created an even bigger problem and that is the separation of making money and making positive change in this world.

I would love to discuss this further with you!

Wilfred
Nampula, Mozambique

- Nonprofits, and especially ministries like DG, exist to do things that they couldn’t do if they were for-profit. Things like a 5 dollar book sale. Nonprofits, and especially ministries, should be radical in their service to others and making their resources and services available as inexpensively and effectively as possible.

- The opportunity to give to a nonprofit is an opportunity to invest. Not in financial returns, but something even better: good works. So nonprofits provide the opportunity for people to invest in good works on a large scale. Thus, what nonprofits do _serves_ those who donate. We are not simply being served by our donors, although that is certainly true, but also serving them.

I think this is exciting and will be blogging on these ideas in the future.