Jesus Christ: Not Your Typical Company Man

Gary Moore

On Reintegrating Business and the Christian Ethic

“The local synagogue would have gathered to mourn Joseph’s death. On the saddest day of Jesus’ young life, the synagogue would still have excluded him from their midst [due to his questionable parentage]. Possibly because of the synagogue’s disdain for him, one of the most striking characteristics of Jesus’ later teaching was a deep skepticism about religious authority.” —The Rev. Dr. Bruce Chilton, Rabbi Jesus

My friend David Miller is a bright fellow. You have to be to teach graduate students in both the divinity and business schools at Yale. He can even sound like Thomas Jefferson—particularly when describing how most clergy avoid helping people in business understand the implications of their faith on their business lives. That should concern the clergy; Jefferson once wrote that Christian ministers “are the greatest obstacles to the advancement of the real doctrines of Jesus.” Similarly, Dave writes these words in his new book God at Work:

The evidence strongly suggests that the church in general seems uninterested in, unaware of, or unsure of how to help the laity integrate their faith identities and teachings with their workplace occupations, problems, and possibilities. . . . There is a gaping chasm between what is heard on Sunday in one’s place of worship and what is experienced on Monday in one’s place of work . . . The higher up the church hierarchy one climbs, the less interest—let alone awareness—there is in speaking to the Sunday-Monday gap . . . The church too often has an internal focus on its own institutional life and existence, at the expense of an external focus on living out the mission and purpose of the church as the body of Christ.

That last sentence caused me to reflect on the old quip, so familiar to anyone who’s been the president of a church board, as I have of two: “For God so loved the world, he did not send a committee . . . much less a corporation, congress, or church!” I should note that Miller is hardly “anti-clergy,” nor is he “anti-business.” He is bilingual, understanding and at home in both worlds. He was a senior executive in international finance before discerning a call to study theology, earning an M.Div. and then a Ph.D. in Christian ethics. He is now an ordained Presbyterian Church (USA) minister, in addition to his teaching, research, writing, and other roles at Yale.

Still, my fifty years of studying political science, working on Wall Street, and maturing to more spiritual endeavors give me cause me to believe that institutional self-centeredness is not so much a characteristic of the church as of modern institutions in general. And we might well wonder if judgment on a society doesn’t still begin in the house of the Lord. Who among us hasn’t noticed pastors’ recent focus on “church” growth, even though Christ taught us to pray for the growth of his “kingdom”—which is much larger?

Perhaps self-centeredness begins at the top as well. An influential megachurch pastor recently confessed that despite having been to three Christian institutions of higher learning, he’d only recently noticed all the passages in the Bible about God’s love for the poor. His recent best-seller barely mentioned the poor, even though Jesus said the reason he came was to bring them good news. And the pastor’s local paper has noted he rarely bothers his affluent neighborhood with tough teachings about “the root of all evil.” Such a situation is all too common and is likely why one corporate chairman recently told Christianity Today that Christians “have been set in positions of significant leadership, but their business influence has accelerated way past their spiritual preparation. . . . I have colleagues with tremendous business influence who are starving spiritually in their local churches. There’s zero feeding; there’s zero reinforcing of the call they have in the marketplace.”

Similarly, who hasn’t felt lately that our leaders in Congress and corporate America are more interested in their own “institutional life and existence” than the interests of voters and customers—much less the poor of the world who can’t vote or buy? And who hasn’t noticed that the problem only seems to grow worse the higher up the institutional hierarchy one climbs, such as when CEOs and presidents and candidates lose touch with the daily lives of even American laborers and voters? It seems to be the nature of life that institutions become large by serving society but then go into decline as they, and particularly their leaders, begin to serve themselves. The only real question is whether they then go out of business and lose power, or reform by refocusing on society and reorganizing to serve its needs.

This is hardly an original insight on my part. Peter Drucker made a career of preaching that the organization must “start with its purpose. Its purpose must lie outside the organization” (Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices). He even went so far as to declare that in the greatest change since Plato, future society will not be organized around the concept of power but around the concept that all organizations, but particularly teaching institutions, which includes churches and ministries, must accept social responsibilities for those things in which they have expertise (Post-Capitalist Society).

Notice the nuance and balance of that last phrase. As Miller also intimates, unlike many liberal pastors, Drucker did not expect corporations to solve all the problems of our world simply because they steward significant wealth. Nor would Drucker have advised the newly enlightened conservative pastors—currently refocusing from church growth to social issues—to suddenly decide to “save” Africa by getting directly involved in foreign affairs they can’t possibly understand.

Drucker most likely would have simply encouraged corporations—including financial institutions like mutual funds—to transcend the simple drive for profits in our poorer areas and the Third World by responsibly aiding in their development. And he would have expected Christian ministers to embrace, rather than shun, their responsibilities to develop and teach the Christ-consciousness of the “least of these,” and to promote the application of Christ’s teaching of regard-for-neighbor-as-self to all business and financial dealings.

That is simple imitation of Christ. Richard Niebuhr once wrote that there are “as many ways of associating Jesus Christ with the responsible life as there have been ways of associating him with the ideal life or the obedient or the dutiful one,” and that the “Christian ethos so uniquely exemplified in Christ himself is an ethics of universal responsibility” (The Responsible Self). In other words, Christian doctrine says that while Christ didn’t create a single problem on earth by sinning, he accepted social responsibility for all of them on the cross. Yet Christ didn’t aspire to be president or a member of the Forbes 400. He did not build anything more than a small band of disciples. Mother Teresa noticed this about Christ and famously reminded us that we too “can do no great things for God; only small things with great love.” The paradox is that teaching ordinary people to do small things with great love is the only way to change the world.

The failure of religious celebrities to understand Christ’s example of humbly focusing on the daily lives of fishermen, tax collectors, and prostitutes is most likely why Drucker was forced to make this sad confession for American business:

Ethics, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, is the affirmation that all men and women are alike creatures—whether the Creator be called God, Nature, or Society. There is only one ethics, one set of rules of morality, one code, that of individual behavior in which the same rules apply to everyone alike. And this fundamental axiom business ethics denies. Business ethics, in other words, is not ethics at all . . . Business ethics assumes that for some reason the ordinary rules of ethics do not apply to business (The Ecological Vision).

Let’s pray that one day soon our clergy and educators will accept responsibility for reintegrating the Christian ethic into the lives of all those tempted to sell their souls for the almighty dollar, for the Jewish carpenter was quite harsh with religious leaders who confused worshipping in the temple with working in the kingdom. In the meantime, let us businesspeople who say we follow Christ imitate the Christ who showed us how to live in a religious organization without being of it.  

Gary Moore, an investment counselor and founder of the Financial Seminary, has written six books integrating faith and finance, the latest of which are Spiritual Investments and Faithful Finances 101. Like Miller and most business leaders, despite loving Christ’s church, he is often frustrated with leaders of the institutional church. Gary has been an advisor to the John Templeton Foundation; a member of the board at the Crystal Cathedral, where he chaired the endowment committee; and the board treasurer of Opportunity International, a micro-enterprise ministry that makes tiny loans to Third World entrepreneurs.

3 Responses (comments are closed) • Features, Business, Character and Ethics, Leadership, Mon 07 May 2007