About

In 2012, I (Tony Dale) felt that the Lord was impressing me to bring together some friends to explore how our giving could be more effective and more accountable.  The Lord was blessing in our businesses. I am very involved in health care and health care economics of the most practical kind. I have helped start a company to negotiate medical bills and also a company to provide the corporate world with a non-insurance alternative to the health care model. If you are interested in our journey over the past 30 years of living in the states, see my free e-book, At What Cost, available on my blog. Felicity and I were aware that we needed to be as serious and as committed to effectiveness in giving as we were to the process of making the money in the first place. Having been involved in church planting movements around the world, we were already committed to the power of small groups.  So in praying around these ideas, I felt like the Lord was asking me to bring together ourselves and two other couples who I knew to be committed to generous giving, so as to see what we would learn through doing some of our giving together.

Quickly we began to experience the power of community in our decision making about our giving. The three couples all agreed that during the coming year we would each make $10,000 available to be distributed as and when we had unity over how the funds should be used.  From this small beginning, we all found our passion for giving and our commitment to see the giving actually accomplish something of substance begin to grow.  Over the next 18 months, we not only gave the $10,000 each, but found room in our giving plans to each commit a further $10,000, as the Lord blessed our businesses and gave us concern over the many opportunities to bless others through the giving.  So where should we go from here became our next question.

In praying over this, I naturally found my thinking going to the explosive growth that we have seen in simple church movements around the world.  When the power of an idea is released to all who grasp the idea, there is really no limit to how fast that idea can spread.  Just as simple house church movements multiply when ordinary people open up their homes and their lives, couldn’t business people, blessed by the Lord, come together to disciple each other into a more generous and effective lifestyle of giving.  So the initial three couples planned a dinner evening together to which we each invited two other couples.  The excitement of that evening led to each of the original couples now hosting their own small group, and so the multiplying “giving circles” was born.