I’d like to start a conversation around the theme of evaluating faithfulness.  The tension I’d like us to focus on (at least to start with) is the tension between the needs of donors and implementers in areas that require innovation.  For example, reaching resistant people groups, high-risk contexts where security is critical, and emerging areas such as internet evangelism.  Both donors and implementers want to be faithful stewards, and both need some handles to evaluate shared efforts. 

In the spirit of “spurring one another on to love and good deeds” and “iron sharpening iron,” this might be a productive conversation.  At the end of the day, we all want to hear, “Well done, good and faithful servant,” and it makes sense that our metrics here are aligned with the way we will each be judged before the throne… acknowledging that the glory for the fruit belongs to God :-) 

Let’s start broad and see where this goes.  To start with, maybe we could frame the issue this way:  How does one evaluate faithfulness on the part of both the donor and implementer in situations where the outcome is critical, the method untested in this context and the cost is significant?