June 1, 2025 • 29 mins
Larry O'Nan brings over 50 years of experience in Christian nonprofit fund development to share transformative insights about biblical stewardship. After unexpectedly losing his dream job in music ministry, Larry discovered his true calling when handed 28 boxes of unclaimed pledge cards worth nearly $2 million. This moment launched a career that would revolutionise how Christian organizations approach funding and partnership development.
Throughout this conversation, Larry challenges common misconceptions about stewardship, explaining how it encompasses far more than just financial giving. He shares the powerful concept of "freedom to fail" that enabled him to build one of the largest fund development entities in Christian work, growing from a desperate situation to managing 125 people across seven departments. His book, "Intentional Living and Giving," offers both theological foundations and practical guidance for understanding our role as stewards of God's resources - including our time, talents, and treasure. Larry's approach transforms fundraising from transactional exchanges into genuine partnerships where people own the mission alongside the organisation.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:08):
Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen.
Welcome, I'm so pleased to have your company today for this episode.
Dozens more episodes filled with hope and inspiration are waiting for you at bleedingdaylight.net.
(00:32):
As you listen, consider who else might benefit from this episode and then please share it through social media or word of mouth.
What do you think of when you hear the word stewardship?
Is it just about money?
Today's guest has built a career on helping people to think differently about life stewardship.
(01:03):
Today, I'm thrilled to introduce Larry O'Nan, a seasoned fund development consultant with over 50 years of professional experience in the Christian non-profit sector.
Larry has guided countless organisations through funding strategies and culture change.
His journey from leading a small team to managing 125 people across seven departments is a testament to his belief in intentional living and the freedom to fail philosophy.
(01:31):
His recently published book, Intentional Living and Giving, offers practical guidance on lifestyle stewardship, not just about money, but about managing what's entrusted to us with purpose.
Today, Larry will share insights that can help anyone move from feeling stuck to thriving.
Larry, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
Well, it's a joy to be with you, Rodney.
(01:53):
Thank you for the invite.
I want to go back to the early 70s when what you thought was going to be a short-term project turned into a way of life for you.
Tell me what was happening for you back then.
Well, Rodney, I'll wind the clock back a few years before that.
I was into a job that I just literally loved.
I had graduated from the University of Colorado and they thought I was going to become an English theater coach.
(02:20):
I went into full-time Christian work.
Soon after that, I got into a job that just really used all my giftings and abilities.
I had a great interest in the theater.
At one time, before God got a hold of my life, I thought I would be in either New York or Hollywood for residence for the rest of my life.
That was probably vain imaginations, but for five or six years, I loved that imagination.
(02:43):
But in that particular process, I was learning a lot about who Larry was and how he functioned.
I found a job eventually that used a lot of the skills that I had acquired in my education.
I was putting together Christian music groups back in the day before the Jesus movement really took hold.
We were key probably to making the Jesus movement happen.
(03:05):
I was putting groups together.
They would go into secular environments and do really classy shows, not old quartets or choirs.
This was a very different world.
I had one traveling in Asia, one traveling in Europe, and I had five here in the United States.
I just was really enjoying doing that because it was using my directive-type skills to take something from nothing and put it together.
(03:28):
In the midst of a very large event that was held in Dallas, Texas, with 80,000 people in attendance, I heard that I lost my job.
They announced the new director of the music ministry for this particular organization, and I was out of work.
They never even had time to get to me before they announced it.
I heard it literally as the audience heard it and was introduced to it.
(03:51):
Christian life is not always fun and games.
That summer, I was kind of wandering around trying to figure out what do I do with the rest of my life now that my favorite job—at least I thought it was my favorite one—was gone.
I was asked to come to the office of the vice president of the organization, and he said, I've got a problem here.
I don't know how to solve it.
(04:12):
I don't know if there is a way to solve it, but I've got a commitment of almost $2 million from 80,000 people that attended the conference back in June of that year.
Ninety days later, 28 boxes of pledge cards were still in his bathtub.
His bathtub was really a converted hotel room.
(04:32):
He literally had a bathtub in his office, and he'd stacked 28 boxes in this bathtub.
He said, this is worth around $2 million.
It's 90 days old.
They've not been opened.
I don't know if there's any way to recover anything, but would you take these boxes?
I just picked up a friend I met 10 minutes before, and he says, could you two go through them and figure out a way to follow this up if there's any way at all?
(04:58):
That is the way I was introduced to fund development.
I had no clue what I was doing, except I was using the skills of taking something from nothing and making it something.
I knew how to start at scratch, and I did that.
That took me down the road to where I got a career of fund development consulting with Christian nonprofits.
(05:18):
I spent 20 years with that organization in total, and I've spent 30 years doing consulting worldwide for Christian nonprofit organizations.
I retired a few years ago because the travel was getting kind of old after many, many years of that, but I continued to do some of that kind of work.
I helped churches.
I helped nonprofit organizations.
(05:39):
Then I have grandkids, and I also write books, and I have other things that interest me as well.
But the key thing I think that happened that day is when I thought everything was over and I could not see the future, God was really getting me ready for my future.
While I didn't have any knowledge of the subject, I had acquired skills that God had already given me, and I applied those skills to that time.
(06:04):
It seems that God was already building the skills into you for the next section of your life, for your next career, even though you didn't know it.
I wonder how many times people miss the point that God may be building skills into them, not for what they thought right now, but for what he holds for them in the future.
(06:25):
I think many people in their Christian life are trying to figure out who they are and what they're supposed to do in life, and they're wandering from pillar to post.
They just don't know what's going on, and they've never sat down and said, God, what is your plan for me right now?
I was open to what that plan was, and God led me in a direction that says you can start scratching again with this subject.
(06:46):
Twelve years later, I had 125 people in seven departments, one of the largest fund development entities in Christian work here out of the United States at that particular time.
It was a wing and a prayer, but it was also God leading because I was trusting him, and it was in that process, Rodney, that you mentioned it in the introduction, I learned what was called the freedom to fail.
(07:08):
I think many, many people are afraid to step out and believe God for something because they're afraid of the failure.
They don't know what's going to happen to them, and I had a friend years ago, a mentor of mine, that said, Larry, you've got the freedom to fail.
Nobody's going to beat you up for not making it perfect.
If you don't make it right, you can sit down, think about it, and try it again.
(07:29):
So I was never afraid of failure because I was coached that that was not a negative.
It was not sin to not make your goal.
That got me into believing God for things that I never dreamed I even had any capacity to do.
Then as I got into the fund development consulting a little bit later, I worked with boards and leaders and Christian nonprofits where they were stuck and did not know how to get over the big hurdle that they had, which many times the vision costs money.
(08:00):
They get stuck because the vision is greater than they see their resources, and they do not know how to put together the process, the journey that gets them to where they want to be.
So I was a process consultant.
I would come in and figure out what their problem was, and then I'd say, I'm going to walk you through the process.
The principle was I'll stick with you as long as you need training wheels on your bicycle.
(08:22):
But when you start riding well and you don't need me anymore, you probably don't need me hanging around.
So my commitments to the nonprofits I worked with were three to four years at a time.
I became a part of what they were doing, a paraclete, so to speak.
That got me going.
But I tell you, the rough times were when you didn't know where God was going to show up.
(08:43):
And I think many times people are afraid when they think that God's not showing up, but he's really right in the midst of it anyway.
I find it interesting that you're talking about helping nonprofits to actually find the resources to do what God has called them to do, because we certainly need to be doing that in a way that is God-honoring, that is the right way.
(09:04):
And so often we've seen it done badly.
We've seen people try to manipulate others out of money, thinking that the ends justify the means.
And yet that's clearly not the case.
Well, that is not.
You're right.
We need to be walking alongside God the whole process.
Where was the thinking for you in that?
(09:25):
How did you come to a point of saying, no, there is a way to honor God in this?
Rodney, the day I was given those boxes, 28 boxes, I only knew the words fundraising.
Fundraising is a technical term, but fundraising is a very secular thing.
Fundraising almost always includes an exchange.
(09:47):
I'll do this for you.
You do this for me.
There's something exchanging back and forth.
So if you go to a big gala and you say, you go to a silent auction, you're going to get something for your commitment financially.
And they entice you with wrapped up gifts and paintings and sports paraphernalia and all kinds of things.
(10:08):
But there is an exchange going on.
If you're invited to play golf at a golf tournament for a fundraiser, you are basically saying, I'll give you money so I can go play golf on this course.
It's not about the mission.
And what transformed my life is a few years into it, we were seeking to raise a billion dollars for God's work, Great Commission worldwide.
(10:30):
And nobody in Christian circles had ever talked about a billion dollars being raised.
And we brought some consultants in that basically became mentors of mine.
But in that process, they said, if you do not start teaching people biblical stewardship, not money, but stewardship, you're going to make competition within the Christian world rather than getting people to embrace God's generosity and God's abundance.
(10:56):
The organization I was with was not wanting to start another emphasis of another organization.
It was really wanting to raise the resources.
And in a heated argument in that meeting, it was let's sign that job off to Larry, let him figure out what this thing called stewardship is really all about.
I had no clue what I was going to do with it.
(11:18):
I had no clue that anybody else knew what I was going to do with it.
I think it was really a tactic to get off the subject and they had assigned it to somebody in the room and they can move on to their subjects.
But I got into that subject.
What in the world is biblical stewardship?
And I learned very early on in that process, I took some of my leadership and we started studying that together.
(11:41):
And we realized that fundraising was really that exchange business, but fund development was getting individuals to own the mission.
And there was rarely any gifts given as a result.
We were not enticing with teddy bears and we were not giving pins away or blankets or hats or anything.
Now there's nothing wrong with any of that stuff, but that stuff only leads you to the exchange.
(12:05):
It does not lead you to what the mission is.
And I believe that God showed us in that process of study that multiple millions of dollars can be realized for God's work when individuals are seeing the mission as the goal rather than the exchange being the goal.
(12:26):
I wouldn't even allow fundraising terms to be used in my office teams anymore.
I said, we are partners with people.
We're not looking for donors.
We're seeking partners.
We are seeking to do this, join hands with somebody.
And when you do that, they own the mission as much as we as the organization own the mission.
(12:47):
So there's a radical difference.
Now, I'm not against fundraising.
I don't think there's a lot of quote, sinfulness going on in that business, but it is a very difficult way to exist because you're always looking for the exchange.
That even if you get a foundation to grant money to an organization, there's strings attached.
You've got to do specific things with it or they're going to want their money back.
(13:10):
I'm looking for people to see that God placed them as stewards here on earth to take care of all of his resources.
And there's probably a hundred things that anybody listening today could give to further God's work here on earth.
And one of those hundred is what they call money.
That's all it is.
It's an exchange item.
(13:32):
It's interesting in the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, God says to his people, he wanted them to tithe.
And everybody thinks, oh, that's what money is.
Okay.
No, God says, I don't need your money.
Frankly, I don't need what I'm asking you to do.
But by you giving money to help advance the kingdom work in Israel, in that particular case, you are learning to put me first in all things.
(13:55):
I need you to give money so that you learn something out of it, not because I need it.
And I think that's what really started to transform with who we did things.
We were no longer looking for donors.
We were looking for partners.
We were no longer asking.
We were inviting people to join us in the mission.
And the words that we use, the spirit that we carried, made a huge difference in how people responded.
(14:20):
And yes, we were working toward a billion dollars.
When I worked with that strategy for probably 20 years, I think we raised close to 700 million dollars or more when I was last involved in that particular strategy.
It was not overnight.
It was not in three days.
It was not in three years.
But it was a process and a commitment with a philosophy and a theology that said, you who are watching ministry are as equally involved in the ministry as the people that go do it.
(14:50):
It's one thing to, I guess, change the mindset for a team that may be known as a fundraising team to make them understand, no, we're actually developing.
We're developing the funding that is needed.
We're not actually just going out and fundraising that exchange that you talked about.
But I guess the bigger part of that is then taking that to the people who are going to then resource that to become partners, to help them to change their mindset.
(15:19):
And I guess that's a big part of your book is about is actually helping everyone understand, no, no, I don't just get to resource what others do.
I get to partner with them in what they're doing.
Rodney, what I do in the book, Intentional Living and Giving, the cover has got a lot to do with the philosophy behind that book.
It's got to be intentional.
(15:39):
That's not a mistaken word there.
And it's both living life and it's intentionally giving what God has entrusted to us in the first place.
The book reflects what we learned in the early 80s at the very beginning of this, and it transformed what we did and it was transforming people's lives.
(16:01):
We were teaching seminars.
We were helping business people, executives learn that they were not less because they had made money and they were not in full-time ministry.
But since God had blessed them with the ability to make money, they were responsible for their time, their talent, and their treasure, just like I was in my full-time ministry role.
(16:23):
I believe many people, thousands, tens of millions around the world are frustrated, wondering how they fit into what God planned for them to do.
I believe that God saw Adam and Eve in Genesis 1, and he said, I want to have a relationship with them, and I'm going to put them in charge of something.
This was in this case, the Garden of Eden that everybody knows the story about.
(16:46):
God put them there as stewards of his resources.
He never gave them the garden.
He said, take care, name the animals, care for this place.
That's a steward.
A steward is one who manages the affairs of somebody else.
That's all that it is.
God says, I've got stuff for you, Adam and Eve, and as you trust me and work within my guidelines, you're going to be abundantly blessed, because I want you to be blessed.
(17:14):
I want this relationship to bless you with abundance.
Now, in chapter 3 of Genesis, we find that they blew it pretty badly.
They had a little bit of a hiccup called eating the wrong fruit, but if you see the scripture all the way through, even to where Jesus came many years later, 2,000 years ago, he was coming to fulfill the means for us to be the stewards that God planned for us to be in the first place.
(17:40):
So intentional living and giving is really in two parts.
One part is the theology, if you want to think of it that way.
It's just nine chapters, but it's what is God's plan for me as a steward.
And the latter half of the book is, now that I understand what the theology is, what God designed me to be, how do I practically live that out every day?
(18:02):
So you had my life every morning when I get out of bed, before I even get to my feet to the floor, and I say, okay, what do you have in store for me to do today to fulfill my stewardship responsibility to you?
I think that way.
I work at my desk and I'm thinking, okay, how do I use the next hour of my time?
You're giving me another hour of my stewarding it correctly.
(18:24):
Now, I have some resources that I can give, but I also have wisdom to give.
I've got grandkids I need to engage in life so that they're productive, but everything is about my life is being a steward of God's resources and whatever I've got.
You see, I don't own anything.
I don't own a house.
I don't own a car.
(18:45):
I don't even own clothes.
I'm simply entrusted as a steward to take care of the property that God's given me for my time of life here and my car.
So when I think of my vehicle in the garage, I'm thinking, I've got to be careful how I drive it and take care of it because it's not mine.
And I want to keep it up so I can get long-term mileage out of it.
(19:05):
And I don't want it to break down.
So I'm thinking about taking care of what's been entrusted to me.
Intentional living and giving is a person's way of saying, I want to be what God really planned for me to be.
Everybody is designed to be a steward.
I had a pastor's wife, probably in her sixties, that was almost teary-eyed and said, I don't know what God called me to be.
(19:29):
I know what he called my husband to be.
But what did he call me to do?
She had missed the point that she was stewarding the raising of her sons, doing a ministry herself, and she thought she was a nobody because she could not figure out who she really was.
And when she started to see that, she started to realize, you know, my life is really pretty fulfilling and abundant because I've learned what God wants me to do.
(19:56):
I've seen people, small gift, big gifts, whatever it is, when they realize that their time can be converted into money by their skills and their expertise, they have a great time giving away multiple millions of dollars.
And it's not because anybody was trying to finesse them or manipulate them.
It's because they joyfully saw that there was a capacity for them to put back into God's economy what he'd trained them and equipped them to be.
(20:23):
So in my lifetime, I've seen people give multiple millions of dollars away with generosity and thankfulness because it was fun.
God had blessed them and they were simply returning the blessing and they saw themselves as giving God's money back to him and circulating it to the world.
A steward is realizing that God gives to me and I give to others.
(20:47):
And the more I give to others, the more God can give to me.
We made a significant change when we changed our attitude and our mindset and our biblical view of what God put us here to be in the first place.
You are a steward.
Are you going to be a good one or are you going to be a bad one?
You can't get out of the fact you're going to be a steward because God's placed every one of us on earth here to do that and how he wants us to thrive or be disappointed and depressed and confused.
(21:19):
And I think many people are living in confusion because they see everything they've got, they see they don't have enough.
So it's about me, about getting, about manipulating, get more or get another job.
The spirit behind all of this is just living out how we can see God teach us to thrive rather than be disappointed in life.
(21:39):
And that really turns the prevailing thinking upside down.
Because a lot of time, even for Christians, we've bought into this idea that I'll give God 10%, then the rest of it is mine and I'll do with it what I like.
And we've lost that idea of stewardship.
It used to be something that was talked about a lot more, even in Christian circles, this idea of stewardship.
(22:02):
And yet we seem to have lost that with, I'll give some to God and then I can do what I want with the rest because I'm an individual and I deserve it.
And yet we know that that's not satisfying.
So when we turn it around to what it's meant to be, we're going to find that satisfaction, aren't we?
That's exactly right.
In fact, I'm a preacher's kid.
(22:23):
I was born and raised and burped in the church.
I mean, I came on the scene right after World War II.
My dad always taught stewardship was those three or four weeks a year that he had to preach on money.
He did not like it.
I have never met a pastor that thrives in wanting to teach people about money.
The result is that many churches think that that's all that stewardship is.
(22:45):
It's stewardship Sunday and he's now going to pitch us for the bucks.
We got to give to this and it's going to be a miserable experience.
It's all negative.
That's what I thought stewardship was until I got into scripture.
The principle of giving money is simply to teach me so.
When was the last time you walked next door and helped a friend work on a car or took a baked goods next door and just listened to a friend for an hour?
(23:13):
That is giving because that person needs somebody to relate to them.
Life is full of opportunities for us to give and it has nothing to do with our money side.
It has to do with our heart side of being free and generous with what God's given to us.
I consult with churches.
I help them on many different things.
I'm running into church after church that's got a pastor that wants to avoid talking about money and thus avoid the whole subject of stewardship.
(23:43):
Friends that are listening, they can go to my website larryonan.com.
They can get a free copy, a digital copy for their kindle or whatever they read books about.
They can just do with that if they want but there's also resources of how you teach this in small group studies.
There's an eight-week plan of teaching the same content in the context of a small group in a church because the vast majority of Christians today do not relate stewardship as being life.
(24:13):
They almost always see it as being about they're after my money when he talks in that subject.
If you really understood stewardship, you'd be looking for opportunities to give your money because it's one of the fun things to do.
You can actually see your money work.
There's good outcomes in seeing that.
Do I give to everything?
(24:33):
No.
I have a rule of myself.
I don't give to panhandlers or the people on the streets looking for money because I'm looking for a place where my money is leveraged faithfully.
Now, I'm not against helping people in need but I'm not going to be helping extend their refusal to realize who God made them in the first place.
(24:54):
So, I'm not helping them by giving them money on the street.
If I can work in the soup kitchen, be involved in something that is going to produce for them, yeah, let's look at that.
Let's look at the strategy but I'm not just giving to feel less guilty.
I'm giving to be leveraged and to have an impact on the world.
Whether it's driving across town, doing something, helping somebody, a phone call, whatever those things are, I'm thinking all the time, how is this going to make an impact?
(25:22):
How is this going to make the difference?
How can I help somebody have hope today?
How can I listen enough and give a little bit of direction where that person feels like I can be an asset to them rather than just somebody else?
So, I'm just trying to help people that are confused and disappointed with life.
It's a process and everybody that's listening to us say, okay, if they could just realize I am indeed a steward, I need to learn how to be a good steward.
(25:49):
I'm sure that even before you wrote the book, throughout the years you've been helping people to understand this idea of whole of life stewardship.
You must have encountered a number of people that have taken this on and seen how freeing it is and that must be empowering and really encouraging for you when other people get hold of this whole of life stewardship and start to understand its impact in their own life.
(26:17):
I remember one guy that came to a weekend seminar where I was teaching the theology part of it in a workshop, about six hours of training that weekend.
And at the end of his session with us, he was retiring from his business and he was very successful in the business and he thought he wanted to go into full-time Christian work, whatever those quotes meant.
(26:39):
And he came up to me at the end of and he said, you know, I'm retiring from my business and I was going to go full-time into Christian work, but I've realized that for the last 30 years, God has trained me and equipped me to make money.
So rather than me going into full-time Christian work, I'm going to start a new business and give all the profits away because I know how to do that well.
(27:03):
And he went back into business, started a totally unrelated business to his other business.
Within two years, he was given a million dollars away and probably before he retired the second time, so he could have five years of experiencing quote, Christian work.
He probably gave $2 million away out of the resources and sold the business with profit and blessed people all the way through it because he was on a mission.
(27:31):
I've seen people transform by being able to just trust God with small amounts.
I've seen people that never thought their money was anything and was given 30 or 40 million away in a five-year period of time.
The amount was not the deal.
What was really the big deal is I am a steward and God's entrusted me to do my gifting through this means.
(27:54):
I was never capable of doing financially what they were doing, but I was capable of helping them think right.
So I had the equal part, not just in giving the money.
I was able to watch them transform their thinking to where they were using their influence of resources and their season.
Sometimes people give for three or four years extraordinary financials and then they retire and they do something else.
(28:18):
The season changes.
That doesn't mean God's finished with your stewardship.
He means he's got something else for you to do.
I loved music and I don't get involved in music.
I love theater.
I take my grandkids to theater shows and I sit back thinking I'm glad I'm not doing that, but I enjoy theater.
Those were seasons of my life that were very important to God building character and building skill packages in me, but the outcome of it is I'm a steward all the time.
(28:50):
All the way through my life, I've been a steward.
God was just preparing me to do something with it.
You've mentioned that the book is available, Intentional Living and Giving at your website, and I will put links for the book and certainly for your website so that people can download that free in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net.
But Larry, I want to thank you for writing the book.
(29:12):
Thank you for putting your experience into it, and thank you especially for spending some time with us today on Bleeding Daylight.
Well, it's a joy to be a part of what you're doing.
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
For further details and more episodes, please visit bleedingdaylight.net.
Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen.
Welcome, I'm so pleased to have your company today for this episode.
Dozens more episodes filled with hope and inspiration are waiting for you at bleedingdaylight.net.
(00:32):
As you listen, consider who else might benefit from this episode and then please share it through social media or word of mouth.
What do you think of when you hear the word stewardship?
Is it just about money?
Today's guest has built a career on helping people to think differently about life stewardship.
(01:03):
Today, I'm thrilled to introduce Larry O'Nan, a seasoned fund development consultant with over 50 years of professional experience in the Christian non-profit sector.
Larry has guided countless organisations through funding strategies and culture change.
His journey from leading a small team to managing 125 people across seven departments is a testament to his belief in intentional living and the freedom to fail philosophy.
(01:31):
His recently published book, Intentional Living and Giving, offers practical guidance on lifestyle stewardship, not just about money, but about managing what's entrusted to us with purpose.
Today, Larry will share insights that can help anyone move from feeling stuck to thriving.
Larry, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
Well, it's a joy to be with you, Rodney.
(01:53):
Thank you for the invite.
I want to go back to the early 70s when what you thought was going to be a short-term project turned into a way of life for you.
Tell me what was happening for you back then.
Well, Rodney, I'll wind the clock back a few years before that.
I was into a job that I just literally loved.
I had graduated from the University of Colorado and they thought I was going to become an English theater coach.
(02:20):
I went into full-time Christian work.
Soon after that, I got into a job that just really used all my giftings and abilities.
I had a great interest in the theater.
At one time, before God got a hold of my life, I thought I would be in either New York or Hollywood for residence for the rest of my life.
That was probably vain imaginations, but for five or six years, I loved that imagination.
(02:43):
But in that particular process, I was learning a lot about who Larry was and how he functioned.
I found a job eventually that used a lot of the skills that I had acquired in my education.
I was putting together Christian music groups back in the day before the Jesus movement really took hold.
We were key probably to making the Jesus movement happen.
(03:05):
I was putting groups together.
They would go into secular environments and do really classy shows, not old quartets or choirs.
This was a very different world.
I had one traveling in Asia, one traveling in Europe, and I had five here in the United States.
I just was really enjoying doing that because it was using my directive-type skills to take something from nothing and put it together.
(03:28):
In the midst of a very large event that was held in Dallas, Texas, with 80,000 people in attendance, I heard that I lost my job.
They announced the new director of the music ministry for this particular organization, and I was out of work.
They never even had time to get to me before they announced it.
I heard it literally as the audience heard it and was introduced to it.
(03:51):
Christian life is not always fun and games.
That summer, I was kind of wandering around trying to figure out what do I do with the rest of my life now that my favorite job—at least I thought it was my favorite one—was gone.
I was asked to come to the office of the vice president of the organization, and he said, I've got a problem here.
I don't know how to solve it.
(04:12):
I don't know if there is a way to solve it, but I've got a commitment of almost $2 million from 80,000 people that attended the conference back in June of that year.
Ninety days later, 28 boxes of pledge cards were still in his bathtub.
His bathtub was really a converted hotel room.
(04:32):
He literally had a bathtub in his office, and he'd stacked 28 boxes in this bathtub.
He said, this is worth around $2 million.
It's 90 days old.
They've not been opened.
I don't know if there's any way to recover anything, but would you take these boxes?
I just picked up a friend I met 10 minutes before, and he says, could you two go through them and figure out a way to follow this up if there's any way at all?
(04:58):
That is the way I was introduced to fund development.
I had no clue what I was doing, except I was using the skills of taking something from nothing and making it something.
I knew how to start at scratch, and I did that.
That took me down the road to where I got a career of fund development consulting with Christian nonprofits.
(05:18):
I spent 20 years with that organization in total, and I've spent 30 years doing consulting worldwide for Christian nonprofit organizations.
I retired a few years ago because the travel was getting kind of old after many, many years of that, but I continued to do some of that kind of work.
I helped churches.
I helped nonprofit organizations.
(05:39):
Then I have grandkids, and I also write books, and I have other things that interest me as well.
But the key thing I think that happened that day is when I thought everything was over and I could not see the future, God was really getting me ready for my future.
While I didn't have any knowledge of the subject, I had acquired skills that God had already given me, and I applied those skills to that time.
(06:04):
It seems that God was already building the skills into you for the next section of your life, for your next career, even though you didn't know it.
I wonder how many times people miss the point that God may be building skills into them, not for what they thought right now, but for what he holds for them in the future.
(06:25):
I think many people in their Christian life are trying to figure out who they are and what they're supposed to do in life, and they're wandering from pillar to post.
They just don't know what's going on, and they've never sat down and said, God, what is your plan for me right now?
I was open to what that plan was, and God led me in a direction that says you can start scratching again with this subject.
(06:46):
Twelve years later, I had 125 people in seven departments, one of the largest fund development entities in Christian work here out of the United States at that particular time.
It was a wing and a prayer, but it was also God leading because I was trusting him, and it was in that process, Rodney, that you mentioned it in the introduction, I learned what was called the freedom to fail.
(07:08):
I think many, many people are afraid to step out and believe God for something because they're afraid of the failure.
They don't know what's going to happen to them, and I had a friend years ago, a mentor of mine, that said, Larry, you've got the freedom to fail.
Nobody's going to beat you up for not making it perfect.
If you don't make it right, you can sit down, think about it, and try it again.
(07:29):
So I was never afraid of failure because I was coached that that was not a negative.
It was not sin to not make your goal.
That got me into believing God for things that I never dreamed I even had any capacity to do.
Then as I got into the fund development consulting a little bit later, I worked with boards and leaders and Christian nonprofits where they were stuck and did not know how to get over the big hurdle that they had, which many times the vision costs money.
(08:00):
They get stuck because the vision is greater than they see their resources, and they do not know how to put together the process, the journey that gets them to where they want to be.
So I was a process consultant.
I would come in and figure out what their problem was, and then I'd say, I'm going to walk you through the process.
The principle was I'll stick with you as long as you need training wheels on your bicycle.
(08:22):
But when you start riding well and you don't need me anymore, you probably don't need me hanging around.
So my commitments to the nonprofits I worked with were three to four years at a time.
I became a part of what they were doing, a paraclete, so to speak.
That got me going.
But I tell you, the rough times were when you didn't know where God was going to show up.
(08:43):
And I think many times people are afraid when they think that God's not showing up, but he's really right in the midst of it anyway.
I find it interesting that you're talking about helping nonprofits to actually find the resources to do what God has called them to do, because we certainly need to be doing that in a way that is God-honoring, that is the right way.
(09:04):
And so often we've seen it done badly.
We've seen people try to manipulate others out of money, thinking that the ends justify the means.
And yet that's clearly not the case.
Well, that is not.
You're right.
We need to be walking alongside God the whole process.
Where was the thinking for you in that?
(09:25):
How did you come to a point of saying, no, there is a way to honor God in this?
Rodney, the day I was given those boxes, 28 boxes, I only knew the words fundraising.
Fundraising is a technical term, but fundraising is a very secular thing.
Fundraising almost always includes an exchange.
(09:47):
I'll do this for you.
You do this for me.
There's something exchanging back and forth.
So if you go to a big gala and you say, you go to a silent auction, you're going to get something for your commitment financially.
And they entice you with wrapped up gifts and paintings and sports paraphernalia and all kinds of things.
(10:08):
But there is an exchange going on.
If you're invited to play golf at a golf tournament for a fundraiser, you are basically saying, I'll give you money so I can go play golf on this course.
It's not about the mission.
And what transformed my life is a few years into it, we were seeking to raise a billion dollars for God's work, Great Commission worldwide.
(10:30):
And nobody in Christian circles had ever talked about a billion dollars being raised.
And we brought some consultants in that basically became mentors of mine.
But in that process, they said, if you do not start teaching people biblical stewardship, not money, but stewardship, you're going to make competition within the Christian world rather than getting people to embrace God's generosity and God's abundance.
(10:56):
The organization I was with was not wanting to start another emphasis of another organization.
It was really wanting to raise the resources.
And in a heated argument in that meeting, it was let's sign that job off to Larry, let him figure out what this thing called stewardship is really all about.
I had no clue what I was going to do with it.
(11:18):
I had no clue that anybody else knew what I was going to do with it.
I think it was really a tactic to get off the subject and they had assigned it to somebody in the room and they can move on to their subjects.
But I got into that subject.
What in the world is biblical stewardship?
And I learned very early on in that process, I took some of my leadership and we started studying that together.
(11:41):
And we realized that fundraising was really that exchange business, but fund development was getting individuals to own the mission.
And there was rarely any gifts given as a result.
We were not enticing with teddy bears and we were not giving pins away or blankets or hats or anything.
Now there's nothing wrong with any of that stuff, but that stuff only leads you to the exchange.
(12:05):
It does not lead you to what the mission is.
And I believe that God showed us in that process of study that multiple millions of dollars can be realized for God's work when individuals are seeing the mission as the goal rather than the exchange being the goal.
(12:26):
I wouldn't even allow fundraising terms to be used in my office teams anymore.
I said, we are partners with people.
We're not looking for donors.
We're seeking partners.
We are seeking to do this, join hands with somebody.
And when you do that, they own the mission as much as we as the organization own the mission.
(12:47):
So there's a radical difference.
Now, I'm not against fundraising.
I don't think there's a lot of quote, sinfulness going on in that business, but it is a very difficult way to exist because you're always looking for the exchange.
That even if you get a foundation to grant money to an organization, there's strings attached.
You've got to do specific things with it or they're going to want their money back.
(13:10):
I'm looking for people to see that God placed them as stewards here on earth to take care of all of his resources.
And there's probably a hundred things that anybody listening today could give to further God's work here on earth.
And one of those hundred is what they call money.
That's all it is.
It's an exchange item.
(13:32):
It's interesting in the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, God says to his people, he wanted them to tithe.
And everybody thinks, oh, that's what money is.
Okay.
No, God says, I don't need your money.
Frankly, I don't need what I'm asking you to do.
But by you giving money to help advance the kingdom work in Israel, in that particular case, you are learning to put me first in all things.
(13:55):
I need you to give money so that you learn something out of it, not because I need it.
And I think that's what really started to transform with who we did things.
We were no longer looking for donors.
We were looking for partners.
We were no longer asking.
We were inviting people to join us in the mission.
And the words that we use, the spirit that we carried, made a huge difference in how people responded.
(14:20):
And yes, we were working toward a billion dollars.
When I worked with that strategy for probably 20 years, I think we raised close to 700 million dollars or more when I was last involved in that particular strategy.
It was not overnight.
It was not in three days.
It was not in three years.
But it was a process and a commitment with a philosophy and a theology that said, you who are watching ministry are as equally involved in the ministry as the people that go do it.
(14:50):
It's one thing to, I guess, change the mindset for a team that may be known as a fundraising team to make them understand, no, we're actually developing.
We're developing the funding that is needed.
We're not actually just going out and fundraising that exchange that you talked about.
But I guess the bigger part of that is then taking that to the people who are going to then resource that to become partners, to help them to change their mindset.
(15:19):
And I guess that's a big part of your book is about is actually helping everyone understand, no, no, I don't just get to resource what others do.
I get to partner with them in what they're doing.
Rodney, what I do in the book, Intentional Living and Giving, the cover has got a lot to do with the philosophy behind that book.
It's got to be intentional.
(15:39):
That's not a mistaken word there.
And it's both living life and it's intentionally giving what God has entrusted to us in the first place.
The book reflects what we learned in the early 80s at the very beginning of this, and it transformed what we did and it was transforming people's lives.
(16:01):
We were teaching seminars.
We were helping business people, executives learn that they were not less because they had made money and they were not in full-time ministry.
But since God had blessed them with the ability to make money, they were responsible for their time, their talent, and their treasure, just like I was in my full-time ministry role.
(16:23):
I believe many people, thousands, tens of millions around the world are frustrated, wondering how they fit into what God planned for them to do.
I believe that God saw Adam and Eve in Genesis 1, and he said, I want to have a relationship with them, and I'm going to put them in charge of something.
This was in this case, the Garden of Eden that everybody knows the story about.
(16:46):
God put them there as stewards of his resources.
He never gave them the garden.
He said, take care, name the animals, care for this place.
That's a steward.
A steward is one who manages the affairs of somebody else.
That's all that it is.
God says, I've got stuff for you, Adam and Eve, and as you trust me and work within my guidelines, you're going to be abundantly blessed, because I want you to be blessed.
(17:14):
I want this relationship to bless you with abundance.
Now, in chapter 3 of Genesis, we find that they blew it pretty badly.
They had a little bit of a hiccup called eating the wrong fruit, but if you see the scripture all the way through, even to where Jesus came many years later, 2,000 years ago, he was coming to fulfill the means for us to be the stewards that God planned for us to be in the first place.
(17:40):
So intentional living and giving is really in two parts.
One part is the theology, if you want to think of it that way.
It's just nine chapters, but it's what is God's plan for me as a steward.
And the latter half of the book is, now that I understand what the theology is, what God designed me to be, how do I practically live that out every day?
(18:02):
So you had my life every morning when I get out of bed, before I even get to my feet to the floor, and I say, okay, what do you have in store for me to do today to fulfill my stewardship responsibility to you?
I think that way.
I work at my desk and I'm thinking, okay, how do I use the next hour of my time?
You're giving me another hour of my stewarding it correctly.
(18:24):
Now, I have some resources that I can give, but I also have wisdom to give.
I've got grandkids I need to engage in life so that they're productive, but everything is about my life is being a steward of God's resources and whatever I've got.
You see, I don't own anything.
I don't own a house.
I don't own a car.
(18:45):
I don't even own clothes.
I'm simply entrusted as a steward to take care of the property that God's given me for my time of life here and my car.
So when I think of my vehicle in the garage, I'm thinking, I've got to be careful how I drive it and take care of it because it's not mine.
And I want to keep it up so I can get long-term mileage out of it.
(19:05):
And I don't want it to break down.
So I'm thinking about taking care of what's been entrusted to me.
Intentional living and giving is a person's way of saying, I want to be what God really planned for me to be.
Everybody is designed to be a steward.
I had a pastor's wife, probably in her sixties, that was almost teary-eyed and said, I don't know what God called me to be.
(19:29):
I know what he called my husband to be.
But what did he call me to do?
She had missed the point that she was stewarding the raising of her sons, doing a ministry herself, and she thought she was a nobody because she could not figure out who she really was.
And when she started to see that, she started to realize, you know, my life is really pretty fulfilling and abundant because I've learned what God wants me to do.
(19:56):
I've seen people, small gift, big gifts, whatever it is, when they realize that their time can be converted into money by their skills and their expertise, they have a great time giving away multiple millions of dollars.
And it's not because anybody was trying to finesse them or manipulate them.
It's because they joyfully saw that there was a capacity for them to put back into God's economy what he'd trained them and equipped them to be.
(20:23):
So in my lifetime, I've seen people give multiple millions of dollars away with generosity and thankfulness because it was fun.
God had blessed them and they were simply returning the blessing and they saw themselves as giving God's money back to him and circulating it to the world.
A steward is realizing that God gives to me and I give to others.
(20:47):
And the more I give to others, the more God can give to me.
We made a significant change when we changed our attitude and our mindset and our biblical view of what God put us here to be in the first place.
You are a steward.
Are you going to be a good one or are you going to be a bad one?
You can't get out of the fact you're going to be a steward because God's placed every one of us on earth here to do that and how he wants us to thrive or be disappointed and depressed and confused.
(21:19):
And I think many people are living in confusion because they see everything they've got, they see they don't have enough.
So it's about me, about getting, about manipulating, get more or get another job.
The spirit behind all of this is just living out how we can see God teach us to thrive rather than be disappointed in life.
(21:39):
And that really turns the prevailing thinking upside down.
Because a lot of time, even for Christians, we've bought into this idea that I'll give God 10%, then the rest of it is mine and I'll do with it what I like.
And we've lost that idea of stewardship.
It used to be something that was talked about a lot more, even in Christian circles, this idea of stewardship.
(22:02):
And yet we seem to have lost that with, I'll give some to God and then I can do what I want with the rest because I'm an individual and I deserve it.
And yet we know that that's not satisfying.
So when we turn it around to what it's meant to be, we're going to find that satisfaction, aren't we?
That's exactly right.
In fact, I'm a preacher's kid.
(22:23):
I was born and raised and burped in the church.
I mean, I came on the scene right after World War II.
My dad always taught stewardship was those three or four weeks a year that he had to preach on money.
He did not like it.
I have never met a pastor that thrives in wanting to teach people about money.
The result is that many churches think that that's all that stewardship is.
(22:45):
It's stewardship Sunday and he's now going to pitch us for the bucks.
We got to give to this and it's going to be a miserable experience.
It's all negative.
That's what I thought stewardship was until I got into scripture.
The principle of giving money is simply to teach me so.
When was the last time you walked next door and helped a friend work on a car or took a baked goods next door and just listened to a friend for an hour?
(23:13):
That is giving because that person needs somebody to relate to them.
Life is full of opportunities for us to give and it has nothing to do with our money side.
It has to do with our heart side of being free and generous with what God's given to us.
I consult with churches.
I help them on many different things.
I'm running into church after church that's got a pastor that wants to avoid talking about money and thus avoid the whole subject of stewardship.
(23:43):
Friends that are listening, they can go to my website larryonan.com.
They can get a free copy, a digital copy for their kindle or whatever they read books about.
They can just do with that if they want but there's also resources of how you teach this in small group studies.
There's an eight-week plan of teaching the same content in the context of a small group in a church because the vast majority of Christians today do not relate stewardship as being life.
(24:13):
They almost always see it as being about they're after my money when he talks in that subject.
If you really understood stewardship, you'd be looking for opportunities to give your money because it's one of the fun things to do.
You can actually see your money work.
There's good outcomes in seeing that.
Do I give to everything?
(24:33):
No.
I have a rule of myself.
I don't give to panhandlers or the people on the streets looking for money because I'm looking for a place where my money is leveraged faithfully.
Now, I'm not against helping people in need but I'm not going to be helping extend their refusal to realize who God made them in the first place.
(24:54):
So, I'm not helping them by giving them money on the street.
If I can work in the soup kitchen, be involved in something that is going to produce for them, yeah, let's look at that.
Let's look at the strategy but I'm not just giving to feel less guilty.
I'm giving to be leveraged and to have an impact on the world.
Whether it's driving across town, doing something, helping somebody, a phone call, whatever those things are, I'm thinking all the time, how is this going to make an impact?
(25:22):
How is this going to make the difference?
How can I help somebody have hope today?
How can I listen enough and give a little bit of direction where that person feels like I can be an asset to them rather than just somebody else?
So, I'm just trying to help people that are confused and disappointed with life.
It's a process and everybody that's listening to us say, okay, if they could just realize I am indeed a steward, I need to learn how to be a good steward.
(25:49):
I'm sure that even before you wrote the book, throughout the years you've been helping people to understand this idea of whole of life stewardship.
You must have encountered a number of people that have taken this on and seen how freeing it is and that must be empowering and really encouraging for you when other people get hold of this whole of life stewardship and start to understand its impact in their own life.
(26:17):
I remember one guy that came to a weekend seminar where I was teaching the theology part of it in a workshop, about six hours of training that weekend.
And at the end of his session with us, he was retiring from his business and he was very successful in the business and he thought he wanted to go into full-time Christian work, whatever those quotes meant.
(26:39):
And he came up to me at the end of and he said, you know, I'm retiring from my business and I was going to go full-time into Christian work, but I've realized that for the last 30 years, God has trained me and equipped me to make money.
So rather than me going into full-time Christian work, I'm going to start a new business and give all the profits away because I know how to do that well.
(27:03):
And he went back into business, started a totally unrelated business to his other business.
Within two years, he was given a million dollars away and probably before he retired the second time, so he could have five years of experiencing quote, Christian work.
He probably gave $2 million away out of the resources and sold the business with profit and blessed people all the way through it because he was on a mission.
(27:31):
I've seen people transform by being able to just trust God with small amounts.
I've seen people that never thought their money was anything and was given 30 or 40 million away in a five-year period of time.
The amount was not the deal.
What was really the big deal is I am a steward and God's entrusted me to do my gifting through this means.
(27:54):
I was never capable of doing financially what they were doing, but I was capable of helping them think right.
So I had the equal part, not just in giving the money.
I was able to watch them transform their thinking to where they were using their influence of resources and their season.
Sometimes people give for three or four years extraordinary financials and then they retire and they do something else.
(28:18):
The season changes.
That doesn't mean God's finished with your stewardship.
He means he's got something else for you to do.
I loved music and I don't get involved in music.
I love theater.
I take my grandkids to theater shows and I sit back thinking I'm glad I'm not doing that, but I enjoy theater.
Those were seasons of my life that were very important to God building character and building skill packages in me, but the outcome of it is I'm a steward all the time.
(28:50):
All the way through my life, I've been a steward.
God was just preparing me to do something with it.
You've mentioned that the book is available, Intentional Living and Giving at your website, and I will put links for the book and certainly for your website so that people can download that free in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net.
But Larry, I want to thank you for writing the book.
(29:12):
Thank you for putting your experience into it, and thank you especially for spending some time with us today on Bleeding Daylight.
Well, it's a joy to be a part of what you're doing.
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
For further details and more episodes, please visit bleedingdaylight.net.
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