In recent years there has been a spate of literature rethinking religiously-motivated service. Everything from international aid to short-term mission projects has come under fire, and many of the titles speak for themselves. When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty without Hurting the Poor … and Yourself. Serving with Eyes Wide Open: Doing Short-Term Missions with Cultural Intelligence. Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (and How to Reverse It).

The authors of these efforts point to how frequently church groups (and others) fail to examine the concrete results of their service work. Brian Fikkert speaks of the “labor paternalism” in the form of displacing local workers during a spring break trip in Mississippi. Robert Lupton tells of a seminary in Cuba receiving servant-volunteers whose tiling work had to be removed after their departure. He says of the seminary president, “Oh what she could have done with the nearly $30,000 this group was spending on the trip!”

“Outcomes” is a buzzword that has become a channel for expressing much of the anxiety about such service work. Project planners, leaders, and participants, we are told, simply don’t think critically about the negative measurable impact the work might have on the local community. While Fikkert notes, “the methods used often do considerable harm to both the materially poor and the materially non-poor,” Lupton adds, “negative outcomes seldom make it into the inspiring reports of service projects and mission trips.”

We are too blinded by our desire to be saviors to see who, exactly, is being crucified. (Here, of course, John M. Perkins is the forerunner for what we often think are “new” ideas. He has been telling us for some time now that we have turned the church into an institution that serves us instead of God.)

This talk of the importance of outcomes both encourages and concerns me. On one hand, the negative impacts of service work can be worrying at best and horrifying at worst. These are much-needed voices among communities of faith, and we would do well to listen to them. On the other hand, they call to mind the perpetual struggle of non-profit organizations to “prove” their worth with demonstration of outcomes.

Mark Hecker, the executive director of Reach Incorporated (a non-profit committed to developing reading skills and leadership in children in the Washington DC public school system), recently wrote a blog post about the struggle to align outcomes with incentives. His board bristled at the following statement: “Incentives are not aligned to support the work we’re doing, but it’s important that we do it.”

Hecker responded with the following: “If a student comes to Reach reading in the 5th percentile, he or she can make 2-3 years of reading growth and still be labeled a failure on standardized tests. This means, in an environment with limited resources, it actually doesn’t make sense for a school to invest in that child’s learning. The incentives push schools to focus on those students that can go from failing to passing.”

Hecker doesn’t lack evidence that his program yields positive outcomes: his student tutors demonstrate GPA increases up to 125% and no current or former tutors have dropped out of school. But that doesn’t mean that “outcomes” tell whole story of his work. In particular, at the point where outcomes and incentives don’t align, there must be a deeper commitment that drives the work.

We hear this same kind of idea from Simon Sinek (Start with Why, 2009). In his TEDx talk – now the fourth most viewed video on TED.com – Sinek repeats over and over, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”

By showing that “what” we do and “how” we do it should always be driven by the deeper “why,” Sinek tries to displace outcomes from the center of our thinking without banishing them entirely. And he’s very convincing. Of course, it feels dangerously utilitarian when he says, “The goal is to get people to believe what you believe.” (Given that religious communities are elsewhere lambasted for saying such things, are we meant to believe it’s now an acceptable mantra for business? No thanks.) Nonetheless, his underlying point remains. “What you do simply serves as proof of what you believe.” Outcomes must find their place in relationship to deeper commitments.

To return to the topic of religiously-motivated service, I’m encouraged by the fact that many authors reflecting on these issues, while emphasizing material outcomes, also focus on the need to transform the character of service-based relationships. Lupton calls for navigating “churches and organizations away from traditional ‘doing for’ the poor models toward a ‘doing with’ paradigm.”

Corbett and Fikkert place service relationships on a continuum: doing to/doing for/ doing with/ responding to. We might add to this the emphasis on mission as friendship in Christopher Heuertz and Christine Pohl’s Friendship at the Margins, as well as the four-fold relationship model from Sam Wells and Marcia Owen in their recent book, Living Without Enemies: working for, working with, being with, being for.

At times, these efforts push too far in the direction of defining charity work strictly in terms of measurable outcomes. To do so obscures the need for outcomes always to be rooted in and driven by deeper commitments. It also exchanges one form of blindness (ignoring outcomes) for another (ignoring everything but outcomes).

At their best, however, these authors remind readers that charity and service work should aim to transform the relationships of all involved – turning receivers into givers, empowering followers to become their own leaders, and muddying the waters between the “haves” and the have-nots.” These outcomes, for many communities, including communities of faith, are rooted in the deepest of commitments. At their best, they are also proof of what we believe.