Last Thursday evening, my wife and I had the opportunity to attend a special meeting of CrossGlobal Link, The Mission Exchange, and the Evangelical Missiological Society/EMS. It was a dinner meeting held in honor of the lifetime achievements of my former boss and mentor Dr. Ralph Winter.

We stayed for an after-dinner panel discussion among four Christian leaders from the “Global South.”

At one point the panelist from Uganda noted, “It is said that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words.’ But sometimes it is worth nothing at all. Or maybe it is worth less than nothing.”

This kind of perverse result occurs, he said, when, for example, a photograph becomes more important than the people who are being photographed.

He told a story to illustrate his point.

There was a pastor in a village who was to receive a shipment of 50 Bibles. Because he pastored a very small congregation, he had to work at a regular job in order to support himself and his family. Well, the shipment came on a Thursday. The courier had to return on Saturday.

“I would like to take some pictures of the recipients getting their Bibles,” said the courier. What he really wanted was a group shot.

Of course, this created somewhat of a dilemma for the pastor. On the one hand, the request would force him to make the distribution at–shall we say this delicately–a rather inconvenient time. He had not thought of gathering all the recipients at one time, during the work week, in order to create a “photo opportunity.” And even if he had, when he happened to mention that he was planning to give Bibles to five people, the courier was distressed. Five wasn’t a “big enough” number.

“I thought you said you have 17 members in your church,” he said.

“That is the number of people who attend,” said the pastor. “But several of them are not yet believers. But more importantly, the five people I told you about are the only five who are able to read. –It would do no one any good if I gave Bibles to any of the others.”

The panelist accompanied this story with several observations. I share three here:

• Donors need to be careful of creating perverse incentives–as we saw in this story–to cover or hide the truth. For example, it is easy to see how strong the temptation would be for the pastor in this story, for the sake of maintaining a flow of resources his way, to hand out Bibles to people for whom the printed word would mean nothing. By contrast, how difficult it was for him to maintain integrity and explain why a broader distribution would not make sense.
• A cynical comment: ” ‘Faith comes by hearing’ (Romans 10:17) but money comes by seeing.” –And so the pressure for photographs.
• “You get what you want, but what you want may not be what you get.” –Is it possible that the means by which you attempt to measure your success may get in the way of what you really want to achieve?

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