March Madness reflection (one of three parts)

I've been spending a lot of my driving time recently thinking about Journey's March Madness campaign from two weeks ago.

In case that name doesn't mean anything to you, here's the deal. In the spring we kick off a campaign where we raise money from within our church community for the express intent to give away. The programming team brainstorms different ways to give this money back to our community - some ways are trivial and frivolous, some are actually fairly significant.

This year our goal was to raise $6,600. And then every day of the week we had a giving event. We gave away keychain lanyards at the high school. We gave away Chipotle burritos. We gave away gift certificates at the local movie theater. We paid forty cents off every gallon of gas for a few hours at a local gas station.

The whole event was fun - it's fun to raise money for a special cause (like most churches we take offerings every week - but it always feels different when it's for something special). Likewise it's fun to see people volunteer to come out and give stuff away - it's rewarding to provide opportunities for people to get involved.

A lot of crazy stuff happened this year. We easily exceeded our goal for financial contributions. We ended up getting some media exposure. We had some of our events far exceed our expectations (the gas buy-down and the Chipotle giveaway). And then, after it started to wind down we've heard some criticism.

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Part I: Impact

Here are some numbers. We estimate that we directly impacted 2,600 people (or households). We gave away 250 envelopes with $5 bills in them. We gave away 500 air fresheners. We gave away 300 lanyards to high-school students. We had approximately 360 customers at the gas buy-down. We gave away 820 burritos at Chipotle. We gave away 400 gift certificates at the Rave.

And what was the point of all that? Quite simply we set the bar low. Our only goal was to turn the tables a bit by giving away some cool stuff. Do we think that will change people's lives? Probably not. Do we think that makes any kind of significant impact on curing the social ills in our area? Not really. What we do think is that part of Gospel truth is that God is a loving God and that we are called to live that out in our daily lives. And giving generously is an easy application of that.

The thing is, if instead of handing something to those 2,600 people we would have polled them about what they though defined or represented Christians I doubt "generous" would have scored very high. What would we have heard? Irrelevant. Probably a common refrain. Judgmental. yep. Loving. Probably not.

Jesus instructed his disciples to go out and heal in his name. Now - don't get me wrong - nothing we did remotely approaches healing. But, in a small way, we went out and loved (peculiarly) and gave (generously) in the name of Jesus.

I am convinced that there is immeasurable power in cracking the window that maybe, just maybe, there are people out there who need to see evidence of that.

Will it work? We likely will never know. But we sowed seeds. We'll leave the concerns of the soil to the holy spirit and to the teller of parables.