The Convene Podcast is joined by Dr. Scott Rae, Dean of Faculty at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University. Together, Dr. Rae and Greg Leith explore the meaning behind “faith at work”, and break down what people mean when they say your business can be a ministry. Work in itself is an act of praise to God, but the restorative power of work ripples beyond the simple task and into the lives of those that the task affects. Dr. Rae pulls from his extensive studies and book, “Business for the Common Good: A Christian Vision for the Marketplace“, to help provide relevant examples of what utilizing your business as a ministry can look like. We hope this conversation is enlightening and reaffirming, especially during this particular time in history (podcast recorded May 2020).
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The Restorative Power Of Work With Dr. Scott Rae
Capitalism, Crisis, And Business For The Common Good
I’m excited. We’re here in the Convene Studios, but we’re not in the Convene Studios because we’re in our houses because of COVID-19. It’s 2020, and the world is locked down in its homes and coming out of hibernation. There’s something fascinating that Fast Company magazine said in December 2019. Scott, not so long ago. Fast Company magazine said, “Capitalism is dead.” That’s like Vogue magazine saying, “Style is dead.” It’s like car drivers saying, “Cars are dead.” The bastion of business said, “Capitalism is dead.” You’ve written a book called Business for the Common Good, and you have this incredible background of theology degrees and economics degrees. You understand business, and you wrote a book about it, Business for the Common Good. Welcome. I’m so excited to talk with you.
Thanks. It’s a delight to be with you. I love all the stuff you guys are doing with Convene. Through you, I’ve had lots of good associations with Convene in the past, not to mention red-eye flights to make Convene conferences from time to time. It’s my pleasure to be with you and with all of the Convene folks that are gathered for this. I am delighted to be with you.
Why Theology Of Work Feels Affirmed But Still Confusing
Thanks. I was on a call at the crack of dawn with some of our team leaders in Atlanta, and this issue of the theology of work is not deeply understood at its core. When we asked this group of people on a 1 to 10 scale, with 10 being high, “Do you believe that God is excited and wants to honor your work?” Everybody said 10. When we said, “What does that mean?” Everybody said, “I’m not sure.” How do we take this from the theological head knowledge that says, “I think God loves my work, but why is it that every time I want to go dig water wells in Africa, I feel like I did something better for the kingdom of God?” Why is that?
I come at this maybe a little bit differently. I’ll ask business people and folks in the marketplace regularly, I say, “Tell me about your ministry in the workplace. What does that look like?” What do you think they say? It’s, “I pray for my coworkers. I show compassion to them when I can. If I have a chance to share my faith with them, I do. I may be involved in a Bible study, a reading group, or something like that with people I work with.” At which point, I point out to them, “All of the things you’re describing are things that you are doing when you are not doing your job,” which constitutes a very small fraction of what people do in the workplace.
The first step in getting this into the fabric of people’s lives in the workplace is to recognize that the very work they do is maybe the biggest part of what matters to God in the workplace. This is where I think in our churches, we haven’t done a great job of explaining what the ministry of business looks like. How does business contribute to the common good? It’s not just through charity. It’s not through what I would call the side projects that a business does. It’s through the goods and services that the business provides.
Getting work into the fabric of daily life is to recognize that what we do might be the biggest part of what matters to God in the workplace. Share on XThose are the things that keep our society humming. They enable wealth to be created. They enable prosperity to come to people. They enable people to flourish in their lives. I often ask people, “Think about what your life would be like if there were no plumbers, no air conditioning repair people, no construction people, or fill in the blank.” A lot of times, the test would be something like, “If my business disappeared today, how long would it take my community to notice that I was gone?”
That’s a good one.
Business As Service, Not A Side Ministry
That helps frame this in a way that we don’t often do, which is seeing the business itself as part of our service to God. Not all of it, but it’s a big part of it. If we substituted the term service and used that instead of ministry, because ministry has this church baggage attached to it. It’s the nonprofit baggage attached to it that doesn’t belong there.
When the New Testament talks about ministry, the term it uses is most often translated as service. To see your business as a service, you’re serving your clients, your customers, and your employees. All the things you are doing to make their lives better are a part of your ministry. It’s part of your service, not only to your community, but also your service to God.
Ministry in the New Testament is often translated as service. Seeing your business as service means you’re serving clients, customers, employees, and everyone your work touches. Share on XYou’ve spent 4, 5, 6, or 7 years in higher education pursuing a couple of degrees. Old Testament, philosophy, and theology. Sit down for a hypothetical cup of coffee with me at the local Starbucks and squash that knowledge into a 30-minute cup of coffee with me. I say, “What do I need to know besides these concepts?”
“I believe what you said, but fundamentally, what does God’s Word have to say to demonstrate to me that when I created a great spreadsheet that helped my company, I honored God, or when I loved on an employee, I honored God, or when I made the manufacturing process more efficient, I honored God, or when I painted a wall, I honored God? I don’t get it. I feel like all I did was something that doesn’t matter.
Creation, Fruitfulness, And The Meaning Of Work
Maybe the best way to start on this is to go big-picture for a minute. If I could give our audience the big story of the Bible here in about 15 to 30 seconds, it would be a good place to start. The big story of the Bible has four chapters in it. It’s creation, fall, redemption, and consummation. As the late Chuck Colson put it, it is the way things ought to be, the way things are, the way things could be, and the way things will be eventually.
In most of our theological education, whether it’s formal or informal, we get these two chapters well. In my theological education, I could tell you more about sin and redemption than I knew what to do with. The consequence of that is that we’ve neglected the bookends on this, the creation and consummation. What we find is that in both of those bookends, in paradise, God not only ordains but also blesses work as an intrinsically good thing.
Adam and Eve are given the mandate to be fruitful, to multiply, to fill the earth. Those two, be fruitful and multiply, are separate. They don’t go together. It’s to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, and rule over. There are five different imperatives, and they’re all separate. The be fruitful part means be economically fruitful or vocationally fruitful.
Be economically fruitful. Be vocationally fruitful. Share on XThat’s a big idea right there because I think everybody thinks that means having kids.
It has nothing to do with having kids. The “Multiply” part has to do with having kids. The “Be fruitful” part is a stewardship, vocational, economic command. Human beings as a whole are mandated to be economically fruitful by unlocking what God has embedded into creation for the common good. One of the questions I have, which we can talk about if you like, is how come it took human beings so long to figure out that market-based systems were the best way to do that? I would tell Fast Company that the eulogy for capitalism is a bit premature. Fast forward to the other bookend, where, after the Lord returns, this may not be great breaking news for your folks, but we will still be working.
Do you mean there are no white roads, white clouds, and white hearts?
I hope not. Most people would say, “I’m out if that’s the case.” We’ll still be working. The prophets talk about beating swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. That’s the implements of war transformed into the implements of productive work. We’ll still have trade and exchange, and we’ll still have money. Whether we’ll have the Federal Reserve or not, I’m not so sure about that. The marketplace will be free from sin and corruption.
Work has this intrinsic value, which means it’s good in and of itself, regardless of what else it accomplishes. Work has been touched and tarnished by the fall, too, which is why we have ethical dilemmas and why you have jerky people to deal with. Who knows? Maybe you’re one of the jerky people that other people have to deal with.
Ask my staff.
That’s a possibility. It was you generically, not you personally. It’s all been impacted by that, which is why even people who feel like they have found their vocational niche have days when they want to throw in the towel and days when they want to do something else. The other shot of this is that we’re hardwired for our work. There’s something in our design that’s supposed to be satisfying about our work if it’s aligned with who we are and with our gifts, skills, and talents.
Some people hate their job because they’re a misfit. Some people hate their job because they’re in a managerially-challenged environment, where their work is not valued. Those are other kinds of management leadership types of issues that we can talk about in a bit. I look at a biblical text that summarizes all this. What Paul says to household servants in Colossians chapter 3 is, “Whatever you do, do your work heartily as unto the Lord, for in whatever you do, it’s the Lord Christ whom you are serving.”
Whatever you do, do your work heartily as unto the Lord. Share on XThat’s the big idea on this. Whether it feels like it or not is beside the point. In doing your work well, you are serving Christ while, at the same time, you are serving your customers, your company, your investors, and your community with the products and services that you provide, in addition to other types of charity and other things that the wealth of business generates and enables you to do.
Fruitfulness Lived Out In Real Business Decisions
Let’s camp on a more efficient manufacturing process. One of our members had a very significant piece of manufacturing equipment go down. It took them 3 or 4 days to get this manufacturing assembly line back on track. They felt great when it was over because everybody was back to work. We’re not sitting around waiting for the repairman. They found the secret was this part, this person, and this company, and it was all fixed. That’s part of being fruitful. They should be satisfied and pleased, and God’s going, “Way to go.”
You can take it a step further to say the reason God is pleased fundamentally is because you’ve been fulfilling the dominion mandate to be fruitful, rule over, and have dominion over God’s creation. Manufacturing processes, human beings didn’t think this stuff up on their own. God embedded this into creation and gave human beings the tools through what we call His common grace to enable us to unlock those things. It’s not an accident. God’s not up there biting His nails because human beings have come up with all these creative things. God celebrated that human beings have unlocked what He has embedded into His created world. That’s part of human beings having dominion over the world that God created.
Two things. One, I want to applaud you. This has probably been said before by somebody. In all the thinking I’ve done for 30 years of faith in the marketplace, work as ministry, business for the common good, whatever wordsmithing you want to use, whatever book I read, I have never heard anybody say what you said about the word fruitful. Most business leaders think that means tending a tomato garden or being a nice guy. You have blown that up and put it in proper theological terms. Thanks.
Thank you. My wife usually tells me I’m insightful like that.
Work, The Fall, And Why Frustration Is Part Of The Story
That’s right. I will write to Sally after and tell her you’re awesome. One more thing. The late, incredible Dr. Colson said in the panoply of time, things were a certain way, which was better, in the Garden of Eden. Things are what they are now, and I want to camp on that for a minute. Let’s pick on the manufacturing plant for a minute. The conveyor belt went down. We can’t find anybody to fix it. We can’t make our product. We’re losing $50,000 a day. I am so frustrated. Why did this happen? How can I fit that into a theological construct that will help me to be less frustrated next time? Somebody quits. Somebody doesn’t say yes to my job offer. My EBITDA is down. My bank called off my loan. Why isn’t stuff going well?
There could be a whole host of reasons for that. It may be as simple as a look in the mirror for some. It may be because poor decisions were made, or the right planning didn’t take place. Let’s assume that somebody has done everything right. Life happens to people. In a broken world, life happens, and it happens indiscriminately to people.
In a broken world, life happens — and it happens to everyone, indiscriminately. Share on XWhy does it happen, or why does God allow those things to happen? The scripture doesn’t tell us much about that. Job never got a great answer from God, at least he didn’t get a rational answer for why all this tragedy befell him. Ecclesiastes speaks to this pretty nicely. Solomon in Ecclesiastes 3:12 says that God has made everything beautiful in its time and everything appropriate in its time, and yet He has not given it to human beings to fathom how it works from beginning to end. That’s a rough paraphrase.
In other words, if our lives are like this giant jigsaw puzzle, God hasn’t given us the box top for this. By looking at the pieces, we can see how some of this stuff fits together. We look at life from the underside of an Oriental rug. It’s got lots of knots and holes. If you look closely, you can faintly make out the design. Once we are on the other side of eternity, we see it through the design for all its intricacy.
The question of why this stuff is happening, unless it’s to find out where we can fix things so that things don’t happen like this again, is largely unfruitful in its ultimate sense. I don’t think that on this side of eternity, God has given us the answers to that. If He did, we would undoubtedly ask for a Plan B or some other alternative.
Job’s friends have gotten quite a lot of trouble for trying to give logical, rational explanations for these inexplicable things. Why does a tornado take one person’s plant to the ground and jump over the next guy’s? Who knows? God’s got those answers on the other side of eternity. He knows that we are not capable of handling those things.
Profit As A Signal And The Common Good
The coffee is getting a little chilly. We’ve got a little bit of time left. You know that I used to work for a company called ServiceMaster. Bill Pollard wrote a book. I know you’ve read and interviewed him. We’ve interviewed him. Here’s what he says in the book. “When profit becomes an end goal, you can lose the soul of the firm.”
To unpack a little more, “As an end goal, profit and wealth can become addictive and self-consuming. They can become your God. When this happens, management of people becomes a game of manipulation to accomplish a series of tasks for profit, with the gain going to a few.” That’s a pretty fascinating thought.
In the same book, he has a whole chapter called Profit is a Virtue. Every time he says that to somebody, they go, “Profit is a virtue? Are you kidding me right now?” Bill used to say to me, with a look of confidence in his eyes, “Greg, if we don’t have a profit, we don’t have a company to honor God, so get on budget.” Talk about that a little bit.
I would put it this way. Profit is like food. You have to have it to survive. If all I think about is food, we say there’s something seriously wrong with that picture because food is a means to an end. It’s not an end. We need to demystify profit. Profit is a market signal. That’s all it is. It’s a market signal that an organization is using its resources efficiently. It doesn’t say anything about the end.
We need to demystify profit. Profit is simply a market signal showing how efficiently an organization uses its resources. Share on XPornographers are very profitable. We said, “So what? Nothing follows from that about whether that’s good business or not.” The way I extend this is to say that a profit for a good business is an indication of how successfully a company is fulfilling that mandate to be fruitful and how effective they are at fulfilling the dominion mandate.
We’ve got bad business. We’ve got business that produces intrinsically evil things, like human trafficking. A lot of business is mixed. You have good things, but some business has a dark side to them. That’s why I’m in business in ethics because there is that side. For the most part, a business that’s aimed at serving its community well through its products or services, the profit they make is an indicator that they are fulfilling the mandate to be fruitful.
Let’s go a little deeper into that. We talked about this a little bit before we jumped on the show. There’s a relatively new book called Completing Capitalism by Bruno Roche, the Chief Economist from Mars candy. That’s a multibillion-dollar firm. His partner in writing the book is Jay Jakub, Senior Director of Research at Mars.
After many decades of thinking globally with this multibillion-dollar company, they said this. Business can simultaneously drive profits and wider mutual benefits to people and the planet through understanding multiple forms of capital. Multiple forms of capital, they say, are human, social, natural, and shared financial. I wonder. Is this an opportunity to reposition the business as a restorative power that has to do with multiple bottom lines? What are your thoughts on that?
I think we’re going to find out here in the next year or so because the notion that capitalism is dead is going to be proven dramatically in error by the way in which our economy rebounds once COVID-19 is under control. There are going to be some companies that are not coming back. What I’m looking forward to seeing are the new industries that are going to emerge in the aftermath of COVID-19. We’re going to have a lot of new industries. It’s going to fundamentally reshape the way we do business.
It’s only in a market system where companies are forced to be responsive to customers’ demands and use profit as the measuring stick of how responsive they are. That is our best hope at economic recovery, and to frame business in terms of profit and common good instead of seeing them in collision. Think about how many companies could turn a profit if they weren’t providing a product or service that a decent segment of the population thought was bettering their lives.
Profit and service go together. There are so many ways in which that is almost self-evident. How many companies will say in public, “We are in business only to serve ourselves.” Nobody says that. In private, they might say something different, but the way almost every company portrays itself to the public is, “We are serving our communities.”
It’s back to Adam Smith’s model of business being parallel to the professions. You did your service in order to benefit the community, and you could expect a reasonable standard of living as a byproduct of that. If we see profit and service as in conflict, fundamentally, that’s a flawed model of what business is about. The skeptics about profit need to go back and understand profit as the economists do. It’s a market signal. There’s nothing magical about it.
Why Your Work Matters For Eternity
I love John 17, where Jesus is praying. He knows that things are not good at all. He’s in the garden. Everybody’s asleep. They’ve been following Him for years, and it’s this final moment. He says to God, “You gave me these people. I showed them You. Now, I give them back to You.” A few days later, He is out of here.
It says to me that at the end of the deal, He didn’t do a PowerPoint to have all the disciples remember the three things that He wanted them to remember the most. He was saying to God, “You gave me these people. I showed them You. I give them back to You, and I’m out of here.” We used to say at ServiceMaster, where I worked, that ServiceMaster is not going to heaven, but the people of ServiceMaster may or may not go to heaven, and that’s what matters.
I would take it a little bit further. Even though the company is not going to heaven, that doesn’t mean that the work it does doesn’t matter for eternity because it does. God is not burning up the world when He comes back. God is transforming the world, which is a very big difference. That means that the work we do matters for eternity.
God’s not burning up the world when he comes back; He’s transforming it — which means the work we do now matters for eternity. Share on XWe get a mistaken application because we often hear that the only two things that last forever are the word of God and the souls of human beings. For one, that’s not quite true because our bodies last forever, too. We often conclude that, therefore, the only two things that have eternal significance are those that invest in the word of God and the souls of human beings. That’s simply theologically not true. All creation, Paul tells us in Romans 8, is groaning for its redemption, which implies that all creation is going to be redeemed. It’s going to be transformed, which means that the work we do matters for eternity.
One of our leaders of the chair in Atlanta likes to talk in theological terms. You know him, Dr. Tom Lutz. He likes to talk about whether the trash never got picked up. One day, he was talking to a new group that we had launched in Atlanta. One of the members of that group, whose business is called Trash Taxi. He actually does pick up the trash in much of Atlanta. I thought that was this iconic moment. People call Trash Taxi and get a little bit upset if their trash didn’t get picked up, rightly so. Trash Taxi wants to be the best that they can be at picking up everybody’s trash. You’re saying that the work that Trash Taxi does matters to God.
It matters to God. It matters for eternity. It contributes to the flourishing of our communities. The shalom of our community is that’s the goal. It has an economic component to it. It has a physical, earthy component to it. Otherwise, Jesus coming to Earth as a man in a body tells us that our physical needs and the needs of our communities matter.
Scott, it has been a real joy to speak with you. If people want to grab a copy of your book, Business for the Common Good, that’s available. Is there another book you might recommend that you’ve written that might be something people want to pick up?
My colleague, Kenman Wong, did Business for the Common Good with me. We’ve done a text on business ethics called Beyond Integrity, which we think is pretty helpful. About 40 or 50 colleges are using it at the moment. I did another one with my colleague, the late Austin Hill, called The Virtues of Capitalism: A Moral Case for Free Markets. That might be helpful too.
Your work is a big part of your service to God. Share on XThose are available on Amazon, I imagine?
Yes.
Great. If you’re not a reader and you’re somebody who likes to listen, go to the Convene channel on YouTube. You can find Dr. Rae giving a 45-minute talk at one of our summits in the past. I think it was in California, but I can’t remember. You’ll find it on YouTube. It’s been a joy to be with you. Any final thoughts for people who are saying, “I’m game. I’m in. Give me some final thoughts to take away that would say my work matters.”
Your work is a big part of your service to God, which is ultimately the reason the Bible says to do it well. God’s ultimately the boss. You work for Him. You work for Him not only when you are sharing your faith with someone, but when you are doing the nuts and bolts of an audit, or figuring out how to fix a manufacturing machine. You work for Him in all of those arenas.
Dr. Scott Rae, author of the book Business for the Common Good, faculty member at Talbot Seminary in Biola University, and Dean of the faculty at Talbot, thank you so much for being with us. We’re very grateful.
My pleasure. It is always good to be with you. All the best to all the businesses that Convene represents. I hope your business owners are hanging in there.
Thank you. Bye.
Important Links
- Business for the Common Good
- Beyond Integrity
- The Virtues of Capitalism: A Moral Case for Free Markets
- The Soul of the Firm
- Does Work Really Matter – Dr. Scott Rae
- Convene on YouTube
