Alternative Giving

This year, almost all of our Christmas gifts for family members were made through the alternative giving program at our church. We're a liberal church, and many of us have families that are mostly conservative, theologically and politically. We're also a mostly middle class church, and most of our families don't have material needs.

As a result, our missions and outreach ministry saw an opportunity to provide an alternative to the traffic jams around the malls, the dilemma of trying to buy gifts that avoid offending the values of either the giver or the recipient, and the perceived obligation to buy someone another trinket that doesn't have lasting value. It also signaled the end of most of my own efforts to convince my family that my faith and my politics are better than theirs, mostly by giving liberal books as Christmas gifts.

Our alternative giving program enabled people to give donations in honor of friends of family members to any of a couple dozen charities that were pre-screened by the committee. Those who wanted could write a single, tax-deductible check to the church, from which the money is dispersed to the charities. I paid the charities directly to enable employer matching of the gift.

Our committee selected 20 or so charities, all of which reflect our church's values, and some of which reflect values of more conservative people. My family members did not receive donations to the charities on our list that advocate a response to global warming, equal rights for sexual minorities, universal health care, civil rights for oppressed people, and so forth, because those would have made them feel uncomfortable politically. Instead, we gave to Habitat for Humanity, Care, Medical Teams International, and Save the Children--charities that are consistent with the values of just about everyone. Yet across our church, almost all of the charities on our list received a donation.

The program was a tremendous success in our church, and the committee found in its research that a number of families in the church have practiced alternative giving for many years. One family described the family Thanksgiving celebration, which includes a time when everyone goes through the Heifer Project catalog and requests alternative gifts--a cow or a dozen chicks for a poor farming family, a well for a village without clean drinking water, etc.

Alternative giving has become something of a fad within progressive circles, with many web sites offering resources and ideas, and even radio commercials on our progressive talk station. It's even becoming more common in evangelical churches, something that offers me additional hope that Rick Warren's generation of evangelical leaders will have more balanced priorities than the generation of Jerry Falwall, Pat Robertson, and James Dobson.