How BIG is your dream for generosity? Have you allowed yourself to dream, really dream about what God has put on your heart and what He wants you to do about it? Join Kendra Vandermeulen, CEO of National Christian Foundation and Greg Leith, CEO of Convene as they explore strategies to see your generosity dream through the lens of ALL of what God has entrusted to you instead of seeing it only through the lens of your cash flow. Your big dream can be fuel in your engine for building value into your business and stepping up to another level of living out Ephesians 2:10, “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” Dare to dream BIG and see the Kingdom impact that unfolds.
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Dream Big For Kingdom Impact With Kendra VanderMeulen
Kendra, welcome to the show. I have been on vacation. I’m excited to do this when I came back. I think this is going to be something that will release some kingdom generosity so people can dream big for kingdom impact. Real quick, you founded NCF’s affiliate office in Seattle down the road two hours from where I spent twelve years in Vancouver. You served as the first president, then President of NCF Northwest. You have been a veteran of the telecom industry, Executive VP Mobile at Infospace, senior VP wireless data at AT&T, active in your church, Master of Science degree in Computer Science from, is it at the Ohio State?
The Ohio State University, yes.
A BS in Math. You and your husband met at Bell Labs. Welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it, and I’m looking forward to our conversation.
It should be good. You and I have been in this space of generosity for decades, and we’ve done a joint study on your constituents and ours, and people who are NCF constituents and Convene members are exceptionally generous.
Praise the Lord for that, and not surprising.
Where Business Owners Get Stuck (And How They Can Get Out)
The thing is, business owners sometimes get stuck and you, like me, have probably heard. I would say I’ve heard it for sure 50 times when I worked at Biola University. It would go something like this. Someone I was working with would say, “I’m excited to sell my company in a couple of months, and when that happens, I’ll have liquidity to be able to give the biggest gift I’ve ever given to ministry.” That is giving out of cash. That’s one of the places that business owners get stuck. Talk to our audience, who are all business owners, about where people get stuck and how we can help them get unstuck.
I think there are really several components to that. One of them is that you were blessed at Biola to be talking to people who had at least some dream. They had some idea of what they wanted to do, and that can be good fuel in the engine. Taking the time to dream, which I think some people don’t give themselves time to do, to really come to grips with God, what God’s entrusted to them, and what God’s kingdom might be able to do what they might be able to have the privilege of really moving forward as a result. Really putting fuel in the engine of some really amazing thing that God’s doing. Until they can do that, it’s hard to get focused on that, on what the next thing is.
I think that plays out in a couple of ways. One is, I talk to many business owners who say, “When I sell the business in two years,” and then the next time I talk to them a year later, it’s still two years. The next time I talk to them a year later, it’s three years. It is hard, very hard to really come to grips with business transition, whether it’s a sale or transition to insiders or heirs. All of it is complicated.
The complications and the questions about, “Am I ever going to have anything meaningful to do afterwards? What are God’s purposes for me beyond this business?” These are all really significant questions that tend to get in the way. There are other financial questions. The biggest opportunity of a lifetime that a business owner has is to steward their largest, most significant resource in a very careful way.
Giving cash out of a sale is not a bad idea. It’s actually a good idea to get a cash deduction at the same time that you’re facing a large capital gain, but it’s not the best idea. It’s a good idea, but it’s not the best idea. Often, the best idea is to give a part of the company before you sell, and therefore get a double benefit because you both get a deduction and you avoid some or all the capital gain. Those are the big issues. How big is my dream? How much vision do I have for what I might be able to do next? How careful and thoughtful can I be about the economics in the transition?
Give a part of your company before you sell to get a double benefit. You both get a deduction and avoid some or all the capital gain. Share on XGiving Away Part of Your Business During Transition
I know there are some people who are reading right now whose brain just went on tilt.
It’s like they blew up.
They had a little minor nuclear explosion when you said give away part of the company before you transition or exit. I know it’s complicated in some ways, but in other ways, it’s simple. Why don’t you just share with the person who’s reading whose brain just blew up? They know that we’re not talking about voodoo economics here. We’re talking about bypassing capital gains, increasing charitable contribution, good things like that.
There are two different parts of the tax code that come into play when we have this conversation. One of them is that you can give and deduct the fair market value of a business asset. That’s been true in the code since, I think, 1996, maybe before. You are allowed to deduct the fair market value. You have to get an appraisal, an independent, qualified appraisal, but you can do that.
You can take a portion of the stock. Often, it’ll not be a non-voting portion of the stock or a minority interest in the stock because the NCF and others that you might be using as an intermediary don’t want to run your business. They’re not interested in running your business. They’re interested in facilitating the generosity. That gets locked as a result of your business transition.
One part of the code is you can deduct the fair market value. That’s a reality. You can get basically the same deduction whether you write a check or you give some stock, but why would you give stock? It’s a lot more complicated, and that’s where the second benefit comes in. The second benefit is under the tax code, charities do not pay tax on certain kinds of income, and/or they may be able to pay less tax than you pay on other kinds of income.
I don’t want to drag you into all the issues around S-corps versus C-corps versus partnerships and unrelated business taxable income. Just suffice it to say that a lot of that tax, maybe all of that tax, depending on your structure, can be avoided for the shares that are held by charity at the time of the sale.
Somebody out there might be sitting on some Apple or Google stock that they got in 1990 and they’re pretty happy to receive their brokerage account that says it went from $500,000, $20 million, but we don’t want to give that stock away because, I don’t know, something might happen, but talk about appreciated stock real quick.
That’s a very good point. Giving appreciated stock is actually very simple, and all you do is call your broker and say, “Transfer this stock to this account at the donor-advised fund at NCF.” We’ll put it in your giving fund. We’ll put the proceeds actually in your giving fund. By the way, and to your point, what happens then is you get a deduction for the average price on the day you gave it, and we pay no tax, so the capital gain is avoided. However, you just pointed out that some people don’t want to give that stock up. What if you were repositioning some of your portfolio and you had cash coming out of other investments that you might want to use, and you are avoiding some tax by making a gift? You’re going to make a gift, so you’re going to deduct the fair market value of that gift. That’s tax avoidance.
What if you then turned around and used some of that cash to buy the stock back again? Now you still have the Apple stock or whatever, the Google stock, but instead of your tax basis being way down here at what you originally bought it for, your tax basis is way up here, today’s price. You have permanently moved that gain offline, where the tax rate on that gain is zero and you’ve used it, then you’ve used all that to fund fantastic stuff that the Lord may be calling you to do.
National Christian Foundation: A Christian Giving And Grant-Making Partner
Our readers mostly have heard of NCF, but in case there’s somebody who doesn’t have that knowledge, NCF gave away $2.4 billion to charity in 2022. In its lifetime, since Terry Parker had a file folder in his desk, which became a desk, which became a cubicle, which became a whole floor, NCF has given away $15 billion. Talk about just the general what is NCF for people who’ve never heard of it?
Yeah, I would love to do that. National Christian Foundation is what’s called a donor-advised fund. That means we hold accounts. You can think of them as savings accounts for givers where you put resources into the account, you get a deduction at the moment that you put them in, you can grow the money in that account or not. You can either grant it out right away, so that’s the third. There are three propositions, give, grow, and grant.
You put it in, you get it a deduction, you send it to your favorite charity, and if there’s any money sitting around in the meantime, it can grow tax-free. For many business owners as an example, it’s a fantastic vehicle because they can either time their deduction for their cash giving post to sale to the same year as they have the capital gain, or better, as we talked about earlier, they can give stock for the benefit of their fund, it gets cashed out when there is a sale, and then they have a pool of money.
I see two kinds of folks dealing with that money. There are folks who are very much about feeding it every year and then giving it away pretty quickly. They tend not to leave a lot of resources sitting in their fund. We’re pleased to serve those people because our mission is to deploy those resources. There are other folks and business owners are among them often where they know that this is potentially their one transaction of a lifetime. They want to steward the fuel over a period of time, and they have 3 or 4 big goals or more that they want, and some of them want to keep some fuel in the engine and grow it while they’re sending it out.
We see both cases and it’s really fun to support both kinds of people. National Christian Foundation is one of many. I think there are over 800 donor-advised funds in the country. What makes National Christian Foundation special is, first, our middle name. We are Christian. We serve givers. Our purpose is to see lives change to the glory of God through biblical generosity. That’s what we do. We are, according to all of our research, a trusted Christian giving and grant-making partner.
In fact, we’re the largest trusted Christian giving grant-making partner by far. We have the privilege of having become the largest Christian grant maker in the world for some number of years. We are also differentiated with regard to how we serve people. We have people in local cities all across the country. We have offices in 32 cities with people who are there to serve business owners and others in their journey of generosity.
We partner heavily with Convene and with others. We also partner with Generous Giving. We have a whole network of partnerships that we use to help people grow in this journey of biblical generosity. That’s a key issue for us. In fact, our mission statement says mobilizing resources and inspiring biblical generosity. That’s what we do.
Anonymous Giving Through An NCF Donor-Advised Fund
Let’s talk about a little micro element of using an NCF donor-advised fund that some people may not be aware of, which is some people may not want to be known that they give a gift. Let’s say you put $10,000 in your donor-advised fund at NCF, you can give that away anonymously. Can you mention that?
Absolutely. The way that the grant-making, the giving away process works it’s is very simple. You log into your fund, it’s like online banking for your giving, and you fill out a really fast form and you say, “I want to give this much to this organization.” There’s a little checkbox that says, “I want to be anonymous,” or not. You can check it or you can not check it. You can also say to us, “I want you to tell the charity what this money’s for. I want this money to be for this project or this initiative,” or whatever it may be. I do it on my phone in a few minutes max and I can send out tens of thousands of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
If I don’t check the anonymous box, what happens is a check goes from National Christian Foundation to your charity with a letter. On that letter, it says, “This money came from this fund and this family.” It will enlist the purposes that you put in that grant request on the check. That’s how it goes. If you click the anonymous box, we suppress the name of the fund and the name of the family, but still, we’ll keep the purposes. That’s how anonymous giving work. It can be very helpful for people who may be want to doing something under the radar for a while.
My last item that some people may not know about, which is, let’s say it’s December 27th and you say, “Only 3 or 4 days to go before I have to give this money.” I put $10,000 in my donor-advised fund. Now, with an NCF donor-advised fund, you don’t have to give it away to get a tax-deductible receipt for the year in which you gave it. Do you want to talk about that?
I think I touched on this really briefly earlier, but your deduction is based on when you make the gift to the donor-advised fund, not when you send the money out to the charity. Yes, timing deductions, for example, when you’re selling something to make sure that that deduction falls in the same tax year as the gain is really advantageous.
Dreaming Big For Kingdom Impact
I think we’ve helped people a little bit. Anything more to say on this notion of dreaming big for kingdom impact because I think if people just focus on cash giving, maybe the dream isn’t big enough. You have lots of stories about people who look with a strategic eye to their largest potential giving asset, which is their business, but they feel somewhat stuck because, of course, they haven’t sold it yet. What good is it? However, they can dream big for kingdom impact. Anything more to say about that?
Yeah, absolutely. How much time do you have? I’ve got a lot to say about that.
Make it a one-day episode.
I think several things are important. First is, we know that 80% of what people give is cash, but 90% of what they own is not cash. If you just put that in the perspective of God’s economy that says that we’re stewarding 10% of his stuff instead of all of his stuff because it’s all his. That has an impact on how big we dream because people tend to dream through the lens of their cashflow, through the lens of, “This is how much money I am making as a salary,” and not through the lens of all that God has entrusted to them. Take the business as an example. You’re taking a salary from your business, but also, you’ve got a bunch of phantom income based on distributed income that you need to take if you’re an S corp.
People tend to dream through the lens of their cash flow, not through the lens of what God has entrusted to them. Share on XThat income is showing up on your tax return, whether you’re taking it or not. To the extent that you can reduce the taxation on that income, that frees up more cash that you can then give. The question is, how bad do you want it? Do you have a dream of what God may be calling you to do you to? Is there something in the back of your mind that you’ve said, “If only I could participate in this, I could make this difference, I could complete this task, I could,” fill in the blank.
If you got a big dream, if you allow yourself to have a big dream, that’s really the question. Do you allow yourself to have a big dream? Do you ask the Lord, “What is it that you’ve prepared for me?” Ephesians 2:10. What have you prepared for me in light of what you’ve entrusted to me? As you think about that, pray about that and allow the Holy Spirit to guide you, the bigger your dream gets, the more urgency you tend to start to feel about it. The more you start to ask the question, “What is it that I have been entrusted with, and how can I best leverage that to complete this dream?” Anyway, I think dreams are important and that’s when we can really get busy on the subject of how to make them happen.
I have to do just a little quick moment because my Bible study that we’re working on right now is Henry Blackaby’s book Experiencing God where he would say, to add to what you just said, “I wonder if we’re just asking God to execute our dream if that’s actually big enough.” There are some pretty big kingdom things going on right now, and I wonder if people could dream even bigger for kingdom impact without having to invent something that doesn’t exist, which might be fine, but maybe they should just join what God’s already doing in some other things.
10 Days Of Biblical Generosity
Let’s get a little bit even more practical. I am excited about this little resource here that you all have and that we gave out to hundreds of business executives and their spouses at our last conference where you guys were. 10 Days of Biblical Generosity, illuminating how God can use generosity in your life. In here, there’s a quick ten-day excursion through generosity, motives matter more than money, giving is a form of worship. Time is of the essence.
You and I have, as I said at the beginning, been in this space for a long time. I have talked to very few people who have a giving strategy, without any disparagement meant to giving officers because I was one at one point in time. Some executives and their spouses give to whoever had the nicest last weekend event at a hotel or who they went fishing with on a special donor trip. They say, “XYZ ministry did this cool thing that we participated in, so we’re going to give to them.”
They have never sat down to say, “Of all the continents in the world, where is God calling me? Of all the causes in the world, where is God calling me? Of all the leaders in the world, who is having the biggest impact? Talk about that a little bit because I am a little weary of people giving to places that ran the best fundraising event last weekend.
I’m a little weary of going to those fundraising events. I bet I’m not alone. I think one of the things that having a giving strategy helps you to do is to have greater confidence in what it is that is you’re called to do that’s for you, as opposed to what you are being asked to do. I don’t know about you, but nothing makes me more distressed than making a significant gift and afterwards not experiencing the joy.
Why would I not experience the joy? I would not experience the joy because I felt obligated. There was some sense of obligation, or there was some sense of, “I’m at this event with all these people and they’re raising this money, and it sounds good,” but in my heart of hearts, I know I’m not in love with the thing, whatever it is.
There are other things I am in love with, to the extent that I have a giving strategy that’s really talked about just been really vetted with the Lord and is really talking about the causes that are nearest injurious to my heart, that are talking about my family and how that’s integrated into all this. It’s talking about my legacy and where that’s all going, then I start to have some clarity to be able to say, “Mr. Donor Officer, I love what you’re doing. It’s fantastic. I’m so glad you’re doing it. It’s just not the thing the Lord’s asked us to do. The Lord has asked us to do this set of things,” whatever it may be. Now you don’t feel guilty. You feel free to be able to do whatever it is the Lord’s called you to do and not do, not feeling obligated to do what the Lord hasn’t called you to do.
Success Stories On Dreaming For Generosity
It’s actually very freeing to be able to say that, to say, “Clean water is not what we feel called to,” or, “Sports ministry is not what we feel called to, but we are called to inner city homelessness in Philadelphia.” Whatever your thing is, once you have the clarity and conviction, because you’ve worked through causes and country and you’re no longer feeling obligated, as you say, because of the free weekend at the Ritz-Carlton, you are free to listen to what God wants you to do. That’s a good discussion. How about some stories of a business owner that put all of what we’ve been talking about into shoe leather?
Yeah, there are so many good stories, and they’re all available on our website through our generosity library, which I know we’re going to talk about in a minute. I would really encourage you to look at several of them. One of the stories I really love is Jonathan Reynolds, who owns Titus Talent. The reason I love this story is, is because we use Titus Talent to help us acquire talent for NCF and some of the talent that we need to bring in is very difficult to get and very difficult to really source well. Titus has been doing a fantastic job with some of these really sophisticated positions.
Meanwhile, Jonathan decided one day that he was going to not just have a company meeting, but he wanted to inspire generosity. He started taking his team on a mission trip, his whole team across the whole country. They’re an entirely remote company. The inspiration of generosity that resulted from that was fantastic. Here’s a case where Jonathan is using his company as a platform to teach generosity.
This is not so much an example about how he gave part of his company and lock, unlock the value of it, but it’s what he used his company to inspire generosity for a whole group, another generation of people in his company, which is going to hold him in really good position when he starts to think about transitioning his business. Now he’s got this whole fleet of people who get it, who get what’s going on.
There are also other good stories. Greg Latimer, you can find his story on our website. They have a plastics injection company, which was going crazy during COVID because they were making parts for ventilators. He knew that that was a gift from God. That was a moment, a God moment that was delivered to his company, and he was going to grow like crazy.
He took that as a moment to do some technical planning with the business, but also legacy planning with his family. The family is completely behind what he’s doing in terms of giving the company away. At the end of his life, his wife’s life, that company will go to charity and undoubtedly, the heirs will buy it back, but they will be in charge of distributing the wealth, any of the wealth that doesn’t get distributed during Greg and his wife’s lifetime.
There are many more. I could go on and on. There are lots and lots of business owners who are taking advantage of these strategies in a variety of different ways. It’s impacting their family, it’s impacting their community, it’s impacting their employees. Everybody’s coming alive in generosity as a result of what they’re doing.
Helpful Resources To Check Out
Thanks for those. For those people who are interested in finding out more, go to NFCGiving.com. If you’re interested in getting one of these journals, 10 Days of Biblical Generosity, you can go to NFCGiving.com or call us here at Convene at (714) 515-6821, and we’ll get you one of these through NCF. What other resource websites do we have, Kendra?
There are two ones I would encourage people to look at. If you go to NFCGiving.com, at the top, obviously, there’s a bunch of banners like every place else, and you can pull down the Resources tab and underneath, there’s a Generosity Library, and that has just a vast amount of stories, video, written. You can find stories just about anything that will be helpful to you, whether it’s technical or spiritual or inspirational. All of that is available and freely downloadable from our website.
There’s also a section on NFCGiving.com/business, and here you’ll find resources that are specific to business owners, both about business transition planning, and how to manage, how to really deploy those resources. The devotional is available there that Greg’s been talking about, and of course, it’s available through Convene as well.
There’s also something available called the Giving Strategy Guide. The Giving Strategy Guide, there are several steps. There’s getting deep with what the Bible really says about resources and money. There’s talking about legacy, talking about family, talking about the causes that you have on your heart, and only then talking about your wealth and where that wealth might be deployed as it relates to your legacy, your family, and the causes that God has put on your heart.
It’s a fantastic strategy document. I would encourage people to engage with their local offices if they have them, because those people have all kinds of resources, but also access to community. We know that real spiritual change takes place in community. Most business owners at church or wherever else, are not in a place, except through Convene, where they are with other people like them, and taking this generosity journey with other people like them through Convene and/or through the local offices of NCF, who are happy to serve them as well. It’s just a fantastic opportunity.
Real spiritual change takes place in community. Share on XEpisode Wrap-Up And Closing Words
We’re excited about our partnership in a number of locations, including South Florida with NCF down there, with Stephan Tchividjian and here in Orange County with Brian Feller. We’re excited about that. Now, you’ve given me this great entree for us to close our time. Apparently, I’m famous for saying real learning happens over time in community, and that is what Convene is all about.
It’s not sage on the stage, listen to a great message, go away. Not sure what that person said three days later, but groups of men and women, CEOs and/or younger leaders who work together month after month, or every few weeks in online groups that meet together. We like to say that it’s business owners helping each other to build a great business on a biblical platform.
Some people reading may be saying, “I’d love to talk more about this in person.” They could certainly go to the websites we’ve suggested. Kendra, I am really glad that we spent time together. We’ll spend more time together and we’ll continue to work together to release generosity from the people who are sitting on the assets that could be released.
Absolutely. Thanks so much for your time. It’s been a delight. I appreciate it.
Thank you.
