A gift can meet a real need and still leave everyone where they started: the giver giving, the receiver receiving, and no one asking who should be leading. So how would you know whether your giving actually strengthens the communities you want to help? You judge it by asking who holds decision-making power in the organizations you fund, and whether the people they serve are becoming people who lead and give. The need in a photo and the good intentions behind a check do not answer that. Plan on about ninety minutes of reading and discussion, alone or across two group sessions, plus a forty-five minute audit of your own giving between sessions.
The material comes from a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation between Lisa Fields and BJ Thompson, executive director of Build A Better Us. Both lead what they call minority-led organizations. Their argument rests on several assumptions that donors rarely say out loud. The work here is to find those assumptions, state them plainly, and test them against Scripture and against your own records.
First, get the terms straight
Arguments about giving go badly when two people use one word for two things. Start with the distinction the whole conversation depends on.
Thompson describes a pattern in charitable work: the fundraising and marketing often center on Black and brown people, yet “though they may be the recipients of goods and services, they are not those who facilitate.” Fields gives the structural definition. A minority-led organization is minority founded and minority run, with a board led mostly by minorities. A minority-served organization may place a few minorities in key roles, but “the organization is really tailored and structured by majority culture.”
This is a distinction about authority. It asks who sets direction, who approves the budget, and who tells the community’s story to donors. Two organizations could run identical programs in the same neighborhood, with equally sincere staff, and still fall on opposite sides of this line.
Task. Write two sentences in your own words: one defining a minority-led organization, one defining a minority-served organization. Then write a third sentence naming something the distinction does not claim. In a group, compare third sentences. Most misunderstandings of this topic hide there.
Map the argument before you react to it
People often respond to the argument they expect rather than the one being made. Laying the reasoning out in steps slows that down. Here is a fair reconstruction of the case Fields and Thompson make:
- How Christians treat people with the least power reflects the reality of their faith.
- Giving that keeps people permanently in the receiving position does not serve them well, even when it meets real needs.
- People who lead from inside a community tend to know its needs and its dignity better than outsiders do.
- Christian money tends to follow relationships, and relationships tend to stay within racial lines, so minority-led work is often overlooked or underfunded.
- So Christians should deliberately give to minority-led organizations, with the same scrutiny and the same generosity they give elsewhere.
Step 1 is a theological claim, and the next section checks it against the text. Step 2 is partly empirical and partly a claim about what love aims at. Step 3 is a claim about likelihood, not a guarantee. Step 4 is empirical. Step 5 follows only if the earlier steps hold, and it asks for less than it first sounds like. It leaves room for donors to keep supporting minority-served groups. Fields is explicit: “it’s also important that you equally support minority led organizations and think through who the board of directors is.”
Task. Mark each step as theological, empirical or practical. Then circle the step you find hardest to accept. Hold onto it. You will come back to it at the end.
Read the text the argument rests on
Thompson grounds the conversation in Matthew 25:31-46, and he draws a broad conclusion from it: “how we treat those with the least amount of power is truly a reflection of our Christian faith.” Before accepting or rejecting that, read the passage itself.
It is a judgment scene. The Son of Man gathers the nations and separates them. The standard is concrete: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and the imprisoned. The King’s verdict in Matthew 25:40 is “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” The mirror verdict comes in Matthew 25:45: “Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.”
Three observations keep this reading honest.
- Neither group expected the verdict. Both ask when they saw him. The passage measures actions, and both groups were wrong about themselves. That matters for anyone trying to assess their own giving.
- Interpreters differ on “my brethren.” Many Christians read it as anyone in need. Others read it more narrowly as Jesus’s followers, especially those sent out in his name. Faithful readers hold both views. On either reading, how people treat the vulnerable is tied to how they treat Christ.
- The passage says nothing about boards, donor portfolios or grant programs. Applying it to how Christians choose which organizations to trust is an extension. It may be a sound one, but you should know you are making an inference.
Task. Reread verses 35-36 and list each act. Beside each, ask whether it involves only handing something over, or also presence and relationship. Does that change how the passage applies to giving at a distance?
The premise most donors never examine
Most giving rests on an unspoken assumption: if my gift meets a real need, it helps. Thompson’s argument challenges exactly that.
He points to the documentary Poverty, Inc., which in his summary surveys decades of international aid and finds that communities given food, water and shoes were not more capable years later. His conclusion is that philanthropy “when it’s mature, has to lead to the empowerment of those who are receiving.” Then the sharper line: “It can’t just be that they nurse on us paternalistic, and then we feel good.”
Meeting needs is good work. Thompson’s claim is that mature giving also has a direction. He offers a test you could check in principle: give in a way that equips people “so that when we come back 10 years later, those individuals are not just someone we give to, but they’re someone that we receive from.”
This is where the led-versus-served distinction does real work. If the aim of giving is that people move from receiving to leading, then a donor who funds only outside leadership has left out the very thing that would show the aim was reached. Funding people who already lead from inside their communities is part of the goal itself.
Fields names a second premise. Fundraising that shows a community only in its worst moments carries a message about the relationship between giver and receiver. Her summary of that message: “And so it’s almost like we gotta help them because they’re not our equals.” A donor can absorb that framing without ever choosing it, simply by responding to the appeals put in front of them.
The strongest objection
State it fairly: I give based on faithfulness and effectiveness, not the leader’s race. Asking me to favor minority-led groups is just another kind of bias.
This objection deserves a real answer, because the principle behind it is correct. Christians should not lower their standards for anyone. Thompson agrees. He tells donors to make sure the books are in order and the work is good, and his instruction is to “do your research then, but write the big check as well.”
So the disagreement concerns whether the donor’s standards are applied evenly. Fields turns that into a conditional test: “if you are hesitant to give to a minority led organization, but you freely give to a white organization, then that shows your inherent bias.”
Look at the logic. It accuses no one in advance. It names a pattern that would count as evidence: more scrutiny and smaller gifts for one kind of leader, trust and larger gifts for another. If your records show no such pattern, the objection stands for you. If they do, the claim to give purely on merit is not describing what you actually do.
The pattern can form without anyone intending it. People give through friendships, schools and churches, and those are often racially separate. Speaking of the bias Fields described, Thompson says “It’s the absence of awareness oftentimes.” That is why he calls for deliberate effort: “You have to be intentional since there is a lack of proximity to those things.”
For facilitators. This section can turn into a defense of individual group members. Keep the conversation on the structure of the argument and on records, not on anyone’s character. The test is meant to be run privately on your own giving, not on someone else’s.
Where the evidence stops
The funding gap rests on one account. Fields reports a conversation with someone over a grant program at a Christian foundation, who told her she might need two or three more years to prove herself, while a white woman or man would have been funded in about six months and she would likely receive half the amount. That shows an insider believed the difference was real enough to warn her. It does not measure Christian giving as a whole.
Insider leadership also has limits. Proximity gives knowledge and trust, but it guarantees neither wisdom nor agreement. Thompson himself pauses to say “I don’t like to speak for all black people.” And the ten-year test fits development work best. Care for the dying or emergency relief may never produce a former recipient who becomes a donor, and that work is still obedience to Matthew 25.
These limits leave the core argument standing. Hold it as a strong reason to examine your giving rather than a verdict already reached about it.
The practice: an audit of trust
This practice turns the argument into evidence about yourself. Do it before your next session.
- Gather the record. List every organization you gave to in the last twelve months, with the amount. Use bank or tax records. Memory flatters.
- Classify by authority, not mission. Look up who holds the top leadership seat and who makes up the board. Mark each as led from inside the community it serves, served by an outside organization, or unknown. Count the unknowns.
- Compare your scrutiny. For your three largest gifts, write down what you knew before giving: finances, results, leadership. Do the same for your three smallest. Did the amount of checking follow the size of the gift, or something else?
- Apply the ten-year question. For each development-focused gift, ask whether the people served are being equipped to lead. Write “yes,” “no” or “I don’t know.” “I don’t know” counts as information.
- Find one organization. Identify one minority-led organization working on something you already care about. Study it with exactly the diligence you would give your largest current gift. Fields’s questions are a good start: who the leadership is, and “how is this money being allocated to serve the group?”
Then read 2 Samuel 24:24. When Araunah offered David the threshing floor for free, David answered: “Nay; but I will surely buy it of thee at a price: neither will I offer burnt offerings unto the LORD my God of that which doth cost me nothing.” Fields draws on this scene, saying David “understood that anything that he offered to God had to be a sacrifice to him.” The passage is narrative. It describes David’s act and sets no rule about charities. What it models is a posture. Thompson ties that posture to its source: “Money should be the outworking of what grace has already done in our lives.” Ask what a gift that costs you something would involve here: money, research time, or the discomfort of trusting people outside your usual circle.
Questions for discussion
- Which step in the argument map did you circle as hardest to accept? What evidence would move you to accept it, and what would move you to reject it entirely?
- How many organizations did your audit mark as “unknown” for leadership? What does it suggest that you gave without knowing who decides how the money is spent?
- Can a gift meet a real need and still teach the giver something false about the people receiving it? Give an example, real or hypothetical, and say what makes it false.
- Fields’s test compares how you treat two kinds of organizations. Is there a fair reason a donor might apply more scrutiny to one, such as size, age or track record? How would you tell a fair reason from a rationalization?
- On the two readings of “my brethren” in Matthew 25:40, does your view of this topic change depending on which reading is right? Why or why not?
- If giving flows from grace, as Thompson puts it, how would that differ in practice from giving out of guilt about the issues raised here?
What would change your mind
Return to the step you circled. Write one sentence completing this: I would accept this step if I saw … Then a second: I would reject the whole argument if I found … If you cannot finish the second sentence, you are holding the argument as a slogan rather than a conclusion. If you cannot finish the first, you may be holding your current giving habits the same way.
Thompson’s description of charity gives the reason the test is worth running: “And charity is just saying, God, this is yours, not mine.” A steward handling someone else’s resources owes the Owner an honest look at where the money goes, and why.