September 2008

Charity Navigator, “America’s Largest Charity Evaluator,” has several “Top Ten” lists for charities that stand out in particular ways (sometimes good ways, sometimes bad ways). What caught my eye was seeing the Christian Research Institute at the top of the list of 10 Charities in Deep Financial Trouble.

In explaining why these ten charities are considered to be in deep financial trouble, Charity Navigator says,

If an organization owes more than it owns, that’s a bad sign. If the bills it owes by the end of the year are more than it can pay, that’s an even worse sign. These 10 charities are insolvent. Not only do their total liabilities, or what they owe, exceed their total assets, they also maintain negative working capital — that is, the bills they owe in the next year exceed the short-term assets they can use to pay those bills. While these charities may not be facing bankruptcy, their fundamental insolvency puts these charities in a very dangerous position.

They give CRI one star (out of four) overall. Revenue was down significantly for CRI in 2007, leaving them with $-374,464 of net assets and $-2,471,537 of working capital.

Is this just the unfortunate result of the struggling economy, or is something deeper going on here? Are people just not able to give as much, and CRI hasn’t been able to adapt quickly enough; or is there a fundamental flaw behind the reason why giving has dropped off or why CRI is spending more than they are bringing in?

I enjoy listening to the Bible Answer Man radio broadcast. I think Hank Hanegraaff gives good answers to most questions, and I appreciate his knowledge and ability to explain things clearly. I’ve also appreciated some of the articles produced by CRI. (Many articles from their Christian Research Journal are available on the CRI website.)

However, Google “Hank Hanegraaff” and you’ll also find this site detailing some decidedly un-Christlike behavior on the part of CRI’s current president. I’m not going to go through on the dirt on Hank Hanegraaff has run CRI, but it does make me wonder: is their current financial state a reflection of integrity within the leadership of the organization?

The upcoming elections have me thinking about the different approaches to social economics.

Democrats tend to talk a lot about being for the little-guy, the middle-class, the worker, and doing things that will rescue people from poverty. Republicans have the same desire to help the little-guy, the middle-class, and the worker, but they take a different approach. Democrats tend to talk about the people and the goal. Republicans tend to talk about the task and the means. That’s not to say that Democrats don’t talk about the tasks they will undertake to help people or the means of accomplishing those tasks, or that Republicans don’t talk about the people that will be helped by the tasks they hope to accomplish or the goals that will be achieved by the processes they hope to use.

Not only do people at different ends of the political spectrum communicate differently, they have different ideas about how to accomplish their (shared) goals. And this is the difference that really matters. If Democrats and Republicans were going to do the same things, and just talked about them differently, then it wouldn’t really matter what your political views are, we would get the same results in the end. However, since they mostly have different ideas of what it will take to reduce poverty (the shared goal, in this case), it is important to evaluate whose techniques actually work the best.

(Note: I’m using the words “Democrat” and “Republican” in this article, because those are the two major political parties in the US, and they represent ideologies that tend to be distinct and in opposition. There are other words that could convey similar distinctions, like “liberal,” “conservative,” “socialist,” “capitalist,” etc. If you like some of these or other words better, feel free to substitute them in your mind as you read this article.)

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