Smarter Generosity: Why We’re Having This Conversation

Katie Brubaker: Welcome to the Smarter Generosity podcast. I’m Katie Brubaker.

Eric Fleshood: And I’m Eric Fleshood.

Katie: Today we’re going to talk about why we’re doing a podcast. It seems like a good place to start. Eric, let’s start with the name. What do you mean by smarter generosity?

Eric: The Smarter Generosity name comes from the mission statement of Cru Foundation, where we say we’re here to help accelerate the Great Commission through smarter generosity. We thought that would be a great name for our podcast.

We’re trying to bring together two things that can sometimes be difficult to bring together. Let’s start with generosity. I think most people understand what that means. It’s a heart-oriented posture of wanting to give yourself away, live with abandon, live for others, and share with others. When it comes to charitable giving, that’s certainly the heartbeat of Scripture when it comes to participating in God’s kingdom.

So generosity is pretty straightforward. We say smarter generosity because, as Christian stewards in the United States, there are opportunities available to us to make our giving more effective. There are more and less efficient ways to be generous, ways to make the most of your giving dollars and help them go as far as they can, often by leveraging provisions in the tax code.

If we can bring together the head and the heart, that’s what we’re trying to do here.

Katie: So we’ve got the smarter, which is the head, and the heart with generosity. Like you said, there are good ways to be generous, but there are also better ways to be generous. I think that’s at the heart of this podcast.

You touched on something else. You said that smarter generosity is part of the mission statement of Cru Foundation. Could you give us a flyover? What is Cru Foundation?

Eric: Cru Foundation is a ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ, also known as Cru in the United States. It was started by Bill Bright in 1972 with the express purpose of helping to fulfill the Great Commission. There was a recognition that people might have an asset or a complicated giving situation that a foundation could facilitate more easily than traditional methods at the time.

Cru Foundation has operated continuously since then. Today, we are a full-service public foundation connected to Cru, in service to the Lord and the fulfillment of the Great Commission. We help people unleash the full potential of their giving for the benefit of the body of Christ.

Katie: Going back to what you said about generosity, I know that when people call or interact with the foundation, we often hear something like, “I know generosity matters. It’s important in my life, but I don’t always know how to connect it all.”

They may not know how it fits into their lives, what it looks like for their families or their kids. How would you respond to somebody who says, “I know generosity matters, but I don’t always know how it fits into my life”?

Eric: God’s wired me a certain way, and I try to think about things as an integrated whole. What I find in my life is that it’s easy to take different parts of the Christian life and treat them like compartments.

Sometimes that’s how we think about generosity. It’s one aspect of my Christian life that I need to figure out, just like I need to figure out how to pray more or how to disciple others.

But as I’ve grown, I’ve realized generosity really could be a definition of the authentic Christian life, a mark of the true Christian.

Think for a moment about the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians chapter 5: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, and self-control. My understanding is that, in the Greek, Paul isn’t unpacking separate things so much as different aspects of one thing. The fruit of the Spirit has many facets.

While generosity isn’t mentioned specifically in that list, I dare you to find someone who exhibits the fruit of the Spirit who isn’t one of the most generous people you’ve ever met.

I think generosity, at its heart, is an overflow of someone who’s really connecting with the gospel, with Jesus, and who’s filled with the Spirit. It’s a natural outflow of that. So when people say, “I don’t know how to incorporate this into my life,” perhaps the starting point is going back to Christ.

Katie: What do you mean when you say the starting point is going back to Christ?

Let me give you some context for why I asked that. I was laughing when you started talking about how generosity can be siloed in our lives. It’s like, “Pray more. Check. Did I read my Bible today? Check. Am I giving a tithe? Check.”

I felt convicted because, just this morning, I was thinking about my two teenagers, who are going to have summer jobs. I was thinking through budgets and how we’re teaching fiscal responsibility. I thought, “We really need to incorporate giving so they can start exercising that muscle.”

But that’s a great example of how we normally think about it. Giving is one item in the budget, one more thing to do, rather than part of a whole life of stewardship as a Christian.

With that background, what do you mean when you connect generosity with going back to Christ and living as an integrated whole?

Eric: Certainly there’s an aspect of giving that’s a discipline. But what I’m trying to get at is that generosity isn’t so much something you do as it is something you are. It’s a character trait. It’s a mark of the soul and the spirit.

It’s the overflow of your relationship with the most generous, wonderful person in the universe. As you get to know Him and see His generosity toward you, you can’t help but become more generous yourself.

Katie: I will push back a little because I know plenty of non-Christians who are very generous. How does that work together?

Even if I weren’t a believer, I think I would probably still have a generous bent. Maybe part of your answer is that, as you know Christ, generosity gets woven more deeply into the fabric of your life. But I do know a lot of generous people who aren’t believers. How does that fit?

Eric: You’re absolutely right. We Christians certainly don’t have the market cornered on goodness in this world. Our friends and neighbors who aren’t Christ followers are capable of being some of the most generous people you can know.

Perhaps it goes back to the source of that generosity. Why are you generous? Where does the energy for that come from? Does it come from something manufactured, or from a belief system that isn’t true?

Generosity is still good. But in the end, we want our generosity to be connected to the truth. For those of us who are Christ followers, that means the overflow of the truth of Jesus.

Katie: I like what you said earlier, that generosity can be a discipline. As people practice it over time, that’s also where formation happens.

I want to pivot a little and look ahead to what we’re going to discuss on this podcast. I think we’ll talk a lot about stewardship and how generosity and stewardship work together.

What do you see happen in someone when they begin to think of themselves more as a steward instead of an owner?

Eric: There’s a lot of freedom that comes from making the transition from an ownership mentality to a stewardship mentality.

A steward has responsibility, but not the ultimate responsibility that an owner has. God is the owner of everything. When we realize we’re put on this earth to be managers, to be stewards of what He’s entrusted to us, there’s a sense in which the pressure is off. There’s only so much we can control as managers and stewards.

Adam and Eve realized that in the garden, sadly, when they went from being managers with all kinds of freedom, naked and without shame, to embracing an ownership narrative. They reached out and grabbed what wasn’t theirs. They decided that was a better path to glory and power and love and intimacy.

Katie: And it was expressly forbidden.

Eric: Yes, and they found out quickly that operating from an ownership mentality brought curses and woes that we’re all still working through today.

Katie: So that stewardship mentality around generosity is part of what we do at Cru Foundation. It’s more than practical knowledge. Interwoven with it is this movement from an ownership mentality to a stewardship mentality.

I’d say that’s one of the foundational aspects of what we do at the foundation. Would you agree or expand on that?

Eric: Certainly. That’s what we want to be about, and the things we do at the foundation support and underscore that perspective in people’s lives.

A lot of times people come in, and we start talking about charitable giving tools. It’s amazing how many of the solutions depend on your ability to distinguish between ownership and control, or ownership and use.

If you think ownership is the goal, it can actually get in the way of maximizing God’s resources for His purposes. But if you realize that your goal as a steward is to make sure God’s things are used for God’s purposes to the greatest extent possible, that changes things.

A simple example is someone realizing that, instead of giving cash to a favorite ministry, they could give appreciated stock. That might be better for their cash flow, and it could offer two tax advantages.

Depending on their circumstances, they may be eligible for a charitable deduction based on the value of the donated stock. And by transferring appreciated stock directly to an eligible charity rather than selling it first, they may avoid realizing the capital gain themselves. The charity generally doesn’t pay capital gains tax when it sells donated stock.

So ownership transfers from the donor to the charity, but the donor can still have influence over where those charitable resources are directed.

On the other hand, if a donor insists on holding on to ownership and sells the stock first to give away the proceeds, they may realize capital gains tax. That means a portion of the value may go toward taxes instead of charitable purposes. They’ve potentially lost an opportunity to steward those funds toward the cause they wanted to support.

Katie: When you say ownership, I think of control. I don’t know if I’m equating those exactly the way you mean, but I think of being open-handed. When you truly realize and believe that the Lord owns it all, what does that look like in your life when it comes to generosity and stewardship?

I’ll admit I’m guilty of looking toward the practical side of generosity: What are the tools? How do we make this happen?

I have to be careful to return to a more holistic way of thinking about stewardship because I tend to focus on getting things done. If somebody listening has a similar bent and realizes, “I mostly think about generosity in practical terms,” where do they begin rethinking their relationship to generosity?

Eric: I can certainly appreciate that. A lot of what we talk about at Cru Foundation is tools and techniques, but that can miss the heart of it.

What we’ve learned at Cru Foundation is that about 80 percent of the conversation should center on the why. What’s it for? What is God’s purpose for me in this?

Because that’s where life is. That’s where the fun is. That’s where vision, heart, and becoming more Christlike come into the equation.

Once that’s in place, the how-to conversation becomes a lot easier. I find people have a lot more energy to get the how-to done.

Katie: That really is where the fun is. I’ve said to people when I’m working through different gifts, “If we’re not having fun doing this, I feel like I’m doing it wrong,” because it is joyful.

I’m glad you said that. It really is a lot of fun.

If someone takes only one thing from this conversation, Eric, what would you want it to be?

Eric: I’d like to invite people to join us in this conversation of learning and growing, pursuing Christ, and trusting Him to form our hearts in a way that prepares us for the kingdom we’re inheriting, and to begin living into it right now.

One of the ways that’s expressed most often in our lives today is through what we do with our money and possessions.

Stewardship is another way of expressing our dominion. How are we exercising the cultural mandate in Genesis 1 over the things God has given us, for His glory, His honor, and His purposes?

As we learn how to do that better, we’ll see our hearts and character grow to reflect more of the goodness of Jesus.

Katie: Amen. I think that’s a great place to end. Thanks for your wisdom.

Eric: Thanks for being here today, Katie. I hope we get to talk again.

Katie: Let’s do this again.

Eric: All right, that’s a deal.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability. The conversation has been preserved, with verbal fillers, repetitions, and recording artifacts removed.

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