How to Love the Alien and Fight Bureaucratization: The Tyranny of Donors

Temptation 2: The Tyranny of Donors

Missionaries, artists, and university administrators know this temptation well. We feel the wonderful blessing of receiving aid with which to do good work, but that aid comes with a dozen other demands. Demands for methods, demands for progress reports, demands for proof of results, and more.

I pray that the Church would be willing to attach fewer strings to its generosity.

On numerous occasions during my time in the Middle East, donors demanded more than local workers could give. For projects taking place amid the bloody fury of the war in Syria, donors required that photos be taken of a certain size and quality so that they could go in their newsletters. Donors requested that priests and aid workers braving war also spend hours accumulating data that was largely irrelevant, but might look good in a handout. Constant check-ins and updates were a plague for workers already experiencing war.

I do not mean to be unsympathetic. It is reasonable to want information on one’s investments and to stay in the loop with how money is being spent, but I come now with a simple word and plea: thank you for your giving; please also give your trust.

The Church should desire to support the efforts of those in the trenches more than their own efforts and brand. Donors have their agendas, and that’s not wrong, but refugees and first responders rarely have the luxury of sticking to agendas. Let that be okay.

Let’s acknowledge that there is always going to be the problem that some portion of aid is distributed incorrectly. A percentage will always feel wasted, will always go to people who don’t need it, will be dispersed imperfectly. It’s called “inclusion error”. But an agency taking a cut or a family receiving aid they don’t need isn’t a reason to not give aid to a thousand other desperate families.

The constant need for reports, data, analysis, project proposals, progress reports, completion reports, story-writing, photo compilations, presentations, phone calls, trainings, etc., has a tendency to get in the way of the actual work. The Church cannot be so overbearing in its donor-worker relationship that it harms the work itself.

And in trying to bring a slice of heaven, the Church must be cautious to not bring slivers of hell.

Again, the Church has every reason to want insight and evidence about the effect of its giving, but let’s complement our generosity with trust that good work can and is being done, even if aid workers don’t snap the photograph to prove it.