Bjcorbin's Blog

Bill was an independent contractor in a large metropolitan area.   On nice days, he’d pull into the city park, and eat lunch in his truck.  One summer, after seeing the same homeless man for several days in a row, Bill decided to make an extra lunch and bring it with him.  Sure enough, the homeless man was there, and Bill was able to share the food with him.  For several weeks after that they’d meet at the same time and place.  Soon, other homeless people began to appear, and Bill started bringing whole loaves of bread, and lunch meat, and big bags of chips.  When the local media caught wind of the story, local merchants began donating food.  But Bill quickly found that his charity work was interfering with his business, and he wondered how long he could keep it up.  It felt good to help people, but he knew he couldn’t do it alone. 

At first, he arranged for a business to donate some space to store the food; and then he enlisted some other people to help distribute lunches in the park.  For a while it was all volunteers, but when monetary donations began to come it, he was eventually able to hire a few people to coordinate the effort.  As things continued to grow, he created a non-profit corporation, and they eventually moved into a building of their own.  By now, their story spread, and homeless / low-income people from all over the city were benefitting from their work.  Articles were written, awards were given, and praise was heaped upon Bill.  Despite this, his primary motivation remained centered on helping people.  The logistics of running what had become a huge operation eventually caused him to give up his contracting business, and to work for the corporation full-time.  Soon the organization branched out into other parts of the state, and representatives from other cities came to Bill, asking to start chapters in their area.  Within a few years, the organization was on a national scale, and Bill spent most of his time representing the corporation all around the country.  For a long time he felt good about what he’d accomplished, and for all the people who were being helped.  But one day, that came to a screeching halt.

On that day, he was reading the paper over his hotel breakfast, when he saw an article about charitable organizations, and how they spend their money.  The author rated the organizations by how many cents out of every dollar actually reached the people it was meant to help.  And to his great dismay, Bill saw that his organization was listed as one of the least efficient in all of America.  According to the article, only about 28 cents out of every dollar donated actually reached the hungry.  It also cited Bill’s extensive travels (e.g. flights, hotels, rental cars…) as a contributing cause for this inefficiency.  Bill couldn’t believe it, and he immediately dialed the Chief Financial Officer for the organization.  He wanted to know if what this reporter was saying was true.  The office told him that it would take a while to work up the numbers, and that they’d send them via computer.  Bill went back to his room depressed, and cancelled his meetings for the day.  All he’d ever wanted to do was to help the poor, and now people were implying that he was actually taking advantage of them.  That thought made him sick to his stomach.

In a little over an hour, Bill heard his phone chime, indicating that a new e-mail had come in; and he quickly flipped open his laptop.  Though it took a few minutes to weed through the information, he finally got to the bottom line.  And to his utter dismay, he found that the 28 cent figure was actually from the previous year, and that in the current year, that number was down to around 22 cents out of every dollar.  His mind reeled as he searched for an explanation for how they’d reached this point.  After all, he had to hire people, and it was only right to provide them with benefits.  They also needed facilities and equipment.  For a while they’d leased trucks to haul the food, but the accountants suggested that they could save money by purchasing vehicles.  They even cut the cost of that by buying used trucks.  Unfortunately, those trucks broke down a lot, and maintenance costs skyrocketed.  So, they eventually bought new trucks.  And on and on it went.  The bigger they had gotten, the more it had cost.  Though he continued to pour over the figures, all of his justifications began to sound hollow, as they soon gave way to an overwhelming sense of failure.  All he’d ever wanted to do was feed hungry people, and now he was faced with the reality that he’d unwittingly built an organization that consumed most of the resources to sustain itself.  As Bill’s head hung in dejection, he wondered how things had gotten so off track.

This little story is a parable of sorts, and I believe that it could be similar to the testimony of many ministers of the Lord.  So many set out in the simplicity of the gospel, only to build institutions that consume all of their time, energy and resources.  Along the way, the main objective becomes obscured, or even eclipsed, by the need to sustain the ministry itself.  Unwittingly, it stops being about the people, and it starts being about the entity.  Though we can rationalize that the entity is doing “good” things, it’s hard not to wonder if this is really what God had in mind.