LANGLEY, BC—Mark Orr wants to gives Christians around the world a more intelligent way of responding to major disasters than just sending money to missionary or disaster-response organizations.

“What is needed are not more superstructures,” says Orr, who heads a new British Columbia-based ministry called Global Mission Innovation (xGMI).

“What we’re talking about is infrastructure: the underlying framework needed for networking, distributing money and providing information from anywhere in the world.”

Orr says while established non-governmental organizations (NGOs) do important work, their approach is top-down. He envisions a network that is bottom-up—that brings Christians on the frontlines of a disaster together with Christians wanting to respond.

Balanced response

Another part of the plan is to help churches develop a balanced, long-term response to disasters as opposed to exhausting all their resources in one place.

“Our system helps you say, ‘OK, this much money, or this much help or this much volunteer work, whatever it is, was needed and we’ve met that goal. Now let’s either continue to build a fund that’s there for other disasters, or let’s just save our energies,’” Orr says.

Recent events reveal the kind of uneven giving that can occur. After an earthquake struck Indonesia in May, hundreds of thousands of dollars flowed into the Christian charity World Vision U.S., the Baltimore Sun reported. Yet an appeal in response to the conflict in Lebanon just three months later garnered only $160,000.

“We’re scratching our heads trying to figure out how to crack this nut,” said Randy Strash, World Vision’s strategy director for emergency response.

“In a major, highly publicized disaster, you’d expect income in the seven figures at least.”

The aftermath of the South Asia tsunami also spawned some “amazing stories,” says Orr, of how some of the millions of donated dollars were spent.

“In Indonesia,” he claims, “NGOs came in with so much money. They needed local staff, so they started offering salaries that were up to 100 times more than what a local pastor was paid. So all of a sudden, the local churches couldn’t hire staff anymore because they couldn’t pay the going wage.”

Although Orr’s vision is still largely conceptual, at least some Christian charities appear to like what they know about it.

“The fundamental benefit would be to grassroots initiatives...that need to have a mechanism to gain access to resources here in the West,” says John Clayton, projects director for Samaritan’s Purse Canada in Calgary.

Orr has even found support within the larger disaster-response organizations.

“If we talk to the middle or lower-management people in the field,” he says, “they do get excited about this system. They say, ‘It’s an answer to my problems.’”

Among the top-level managers, he admits, “there’s probably...a little bit of doubt that we know what we’re doing.”

Clayton believes one of xGMI’s biggest challenges will be to comply with Canada’s rigorous charities tax law.

Tough charity law

“Canadian charities are mandated to maintain very strict direction and control over resources that we disperse,” he says. “So it isn’t just as simple as issuing a tax receipt to somebody and then sending the money on to a grandmother who’s taking care of 10 AIDS orphans in Uganda. I’d like to think it’s that simple, but it isn’t.”

But Orr counters that since the ministry is more about making introductions than soliciting donations, “it doesn’t necessarily have to be in the middle, taking in and then dispersing funds.”

In fact, disaster-response is just one part of xGMI’s global vision.

“We have a theology of collaborating,” says Orr. “Most people today say we need to work together. But how do you put feet to that? It’s a practical problem, and one that has tremendous implications for the Church of the future.”

For more information on Global Mission Innovation, see www.xgmi.net.