LIFE @ VSIG

Losing LIFE with Generosity at Velocity-Scale-Impact in Mind

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David A. Sims, JD PhD AIF® CKA®
Ordinary Time, Saturday, September 14, 2024

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VSIG = Generosity @ Velocity-Scale-Impact.

Those who know me know that I like acronyms and neologisms.[1] The reason I chose VSIG instead of GVSI is because VSIG is easier to say than GVSI. But they mean the same thing.

Velocity-Scale-Impact Generosity = Generosity @ Velocity-Scale-Impact.

The VSIG flow this morning.

I woke up at 5:03 am.

My good friend and brother in Christ Ben Peays had invited me to my first Radical donor retreat (RDCL WKND). It’s at this fantastic place called the Lost Pines Resort and Spa outside Austin. We finished last night on an incredibly powerful and uplifting high note woven through Word, prayer, worship, and exhortation to give radically to the Great Commission by David Platt and his Radical team.

If you get invited to one of these, please go. You. Will. Not. Want. To. Miss. It. Trust me.

So anyway, I’m super tired last night, finally falling asleep around 11:00 am, fully expecting to sleep in until at least 7:00 am after a shorter than expected sleep the night before. But that’s not happening. My mind begins to wander into last night, which Ben and I wrapped up with a brief walk-talk and prayers.

As I try to fall back asleep, VSIG = Generosity @ Velocity-Scale-Impact popped into my head, and I knew I had to get up. Make some coffee. And write this.

LIFE @ VSIG.

I’ve recently explained how VSIG came about conceptually for me through meeting Daryl Heald back in August of 2022.[2] First time I heard the LIFE acronym was in a Generous Giving video interview of Pete and Deb Ochs (https://generousgiving.org/pete-and-deb-ochs-jailhouse-generosity).

What is a LIFE? It’s our:

Labor

Influence

Finances

Expertise-Experience

We could add “Time” and the “Wisdom” gained through time and experience. But that would make the acronym cumbersome. Of course, both are understood and woven into LIFE.

So a LIFE @ VSIG, in my mind, is a LIFE lived intentionally with VSIG as its telos, as its end game. The way we put it in our advisory practice is to Begin with the End in Mind (BEM) of becoming a generous steward who leaves a lasting legacy.

That’s impact. It’s relational impact first and foremost. It’s a profound way to leverage your Influence for God’s glory through the magnification of Jesus and the gospel.

Influentially Laboring to leverage our Finances with relational wisdom guided by our Expertise-Experience brings about Generosity @ Velocity-Scale-Impact. It changes lives. It’s LIFE @ VSIG. You can see it as a way in the 21st century to lose your life for the sake of Jesus and the gospel (Mark 8:34-35, 10:29-30).

The Holy Spirit working in God’s children through generous giving and generous living creates rippling impacts upon the God-neighbor relationality in the world, expanding God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven bringing glory to God in the church and in Christ Jesus, as Paul puts it.

Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen.

Ephesians 3:20-21

What came together this morning from last night.[3]

Pun intended, it was “Radical.”

It’s what I shared with Ben at the end of last night’s session. Thanks to my inaugural RDCL WKND (which, by the way, was excellent, enriching, and reviving in every way), here’s how I see a practical LIFE @ VSIG passion projects coming together for me.

As Ben knows, I’m passionate about Third Millennium Ministries (IIM) (https://thirdmill.org).

Biblical education.
For the world.
For free.

It’s first-class biblical education too. And right now IIIM is being used by over 2,000,000 pastors and church leaders around the world in about 24 of what are known as “gateway languages” in the world today.

For free.

IIM wants to get its curricula into all 44 gateway languages asap.

I had the privilege of forming IIIM back in 1998 and filing its Form 1023 with the IRS, helping it secure its 501(c)(3) exempt status just before moving with Tamara and our five children at the time to Little Rock to join FamilyLife.

Richard Pratt had the vision for IIIM. He was one of my seminary professors at RTS Orlando when 13 of us formed the first class in the fall of 1989. Tamara and I have been partners with IIIM ever since, but in 2021 we came much more deeply vested in it after Richard and I were reconnected through the loss of our mutual dear friend and brother in Christ, Tom Dewitt, who lost his life to COVID earlier that year.

I have a vision for, and am both believing and working toward, God using my LIFE with others’ LIFEs to help IIM expand its mission in the world at VSI. In particular, I would like to help IIIM raise an endowment of $160M, which prudently managed could fund IIIM’s infrastructure costs and free up resources to accelerate its mission over the next several decades.

Last night, I saw the same thing for Radical. It’s budget is $12M/year. To fund that at a prudently invested rate only $228,136,882 would be needed for an endowment. Let’s round that up to $230M.

So after last night’s session, and in view of everything I heard the night before and throughout yesterday, I turned to Ben and said something to the effect of: “Bro, Radical and IIIM need to be working hand-in-glove. With $130T – $180T out there in the hands of wealthy Christians,[4] I believe we can use our LIFEs to syndicate $390M to provide endowments for Radical and IIIM.”

Ben’s wife, Lynae, and their friends Health and Tabitha Hale were in on the conversation. Ben said, “Yes. We need to the same for Bless.” Heath and Tabitha founded Bless (https://bless.world). Bless is doing a mind-blowing leveraged and important work in helping reach UPGs (Unreached People Groups).

I ran the numbers. Rounded up, that would take just another $40M.

So all in we’re only looking at $270M.

With the work Ben is doing with Daryl Heald at 100Fold (https://www.100foldgiving.org), and with the major donors in the vested relational networks of Bless, Radical, and IIIM, it should be easy to syndicate $270M for those endowments.

That’s LIFE @ VSIG.

With $130T to $180T of wealth out there in the hands of American Christians, it’s going to take a lot of work and an army of servants and stewards to pull off the LIFE @ VSIG task before us.

But think about it. The way you eat an elephant is one bite at a time.

Bless is but one bite.
Radical is another.
IIIM is the next.

And on and on goes the feast, until the $130T to $180T is fully deployed and invested in Jesus-and-the-gospel-centered-kingdom-expanding-good-works-on-earth-as-it-is-in-heaven.

Ora et labora, and steward on, my wealthy brothers and sisters with “great possessions”![5]

 

[1] In January of 2006, I had to defend my neologism “the AAEC = the Affluent American-Evangelical Child” in my thesis defense at the University of Durham in England. I was sweating bullets, but by the grace of God the defense was successful. Eventually, I was able to publish my thesis under the title, The Child in American Evangelicalism and the Problem of Affluence: A Theological Anthropology of the Affluent American-Evangelical Child in Late Modernity (Sisters, OR: Pickwick/Wipf and Stock, 2009).
[2] “The 100Fold CFO: Charitable Family Offices and the Charitable Family Officer” (https://www.davidsimsjdphd.com/2024/09/100-fold-cfo/).
[3] Something similar happened to me in October of 2022 after I attended my first Hope Summit at Belmont University in Nashville and heard Dr. Greg Jones interview Dr. Kim Tan (). And shortly after that, my good friend the Netweaver Kay Hiramine wove a personal meeting with Kim. I woke up the next day and just had to start writing this essay “The Rights of the Poor” which I finished the next month.
[4] For more on this, see “The 100Fold CFO: Charitable Family Offices and the Charitable Family Officer” (https://www.davidsimsjdphd.com/2024/09/100-fold-cfo/).
[5] Remember: if you know Jesus you are already unfathomably wealthy and possessed with everything Christ owns. The Bible saliently points out that every believer is wealthy and rich beyond anything that can be imagined. They are so wealthy and rich it’s “unfathomable” according to Paul (Ephesians 3:8; see also Ephesians 1:3 and Colossians 2:10). The Greek word translated “unfathomable” is anexichniastos, which means beyond finding out, unsearchable, cannot be tracked out. It’s the idea that the blessings possessed now by those who believe in Jesus and the gospel of his bodily death, burial, and bodily life after bodily death are blessings of wealth and riches in Christ too deep to be measured. The finite simply cannot comprehend the infinite.