At the end of every podcast, we like to ask our guests to share what God has been teaching them in this season of life. This week’s guest is Mark DeYmaz.

2 Timothy 1:7

For the Spirit God gave us does not make us timid, but gives us power, love and self-discipline.

God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and a sound mind. That has been a verse that sustained me certainly over the past 40 plus days in this current pandemic because I love the interplay of that verse. God has not given us a spirit of fear.

We have a spirit of faith. We have the Holy Spirit with us. We have a spirit of faith. But it goes on to say that that is a spirit of faith, power, love and of sound judgment or of self-discipline. 

And I love that verse both in terms of this time of pandemic and others, because it says, yes, we have faith, but we also exercise self-discipline, sound judgment. And that’s how God always works. 

I mean, how do people get saved? God just doesn’t write John 3:16 on the Rocky Mountains. He says, hey you. You go and tell people about me. So God in his sovereignty has set up the partnership. Yes, it’s him, but it’s also us on all of these things, from salvation to these money matters of the church.

 So, yes, we proceed by faith. But we also do it with sound judgment, wisdom, a sound mind, if you will. And together with God’s faith and a sound mind is what gets us power and love and helps us advance a credible gospel in an increasingly diverse, painfully polarized, and cynical society. 

[ Photo by Dimitri Houtteman on Unsplash ]

We continue to count down the Top 100 Books for Faith Driven Entrepreneurs with…

Dare to Serve

by Cheryl Bachelder

Cheryl Bachelder joined an ailing restaurant chain and turned it into the darling of the industry—by daring to serve the people in her organization well. In Dare to Serve, former Popeyes CEO Cheryl Bachelder shows that leading by serving is a rigorous and tough-minded approach that yields the best results.

When she was named CEO of Popeyes in 2007, the stock price had slipped from $34 in 2002 to $13. The brand was stagnant, the team was discouraged, and the franchisees were just plain angry. Nine years later, restaurant sales were up 45 percent, restaurant profits had doubled, and the stock price was over $61. Servant leadership is sometimes derided as soft or ineffective, but this book confirms that challenging people to reach a daring destination, while treating them with dignity, creates the conditions for superior performance.

Click on the book cover to check out the Reviews and Purchase at Amazon

This article was originally published here by Made to Flourish

— by Luke Bobo 

These three phrases — reconciliation, economic wisdom, and the church — belong together. Why? Let’s begin with a definition of reconciliation. Brenda Salter McNeil’s book, Roadmap to Reconciliation: Moving Communities into Unity, Wholeness and Justice, helps us.

McNeil, featured as one of the 50 most influential women to watch by Christianity Today in 2012, and associate professor of reconciliation studies in the School of Theology at Seattle Pacific University, defines reconciliation as “…an ongoing spiritual process involving forgiveness, repentance and justice that restores broken relationships and systems [institutions] to reflect God’s original intention for all creation to flourish.”

Click here to read the full article!

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[ Photo by Tabea Damm on Unsplash ]

This article was originally published here by Mats Tunehag

— by Mats Tunehag

There is good news and bad news. We can rejoice that the biggest lift out of poverty in the history of mankind has happened in our generation. Since 1990 more than a billion people have risen out of extreme poverty, and a large part of these in China and India, not through aid but trade, not by handouts or charity. Growing small and medium size businesses are key factors to this good news.

The bad news is that due to the corona virus, restrictions and lockdown measures, we risk a major global setback. United Nations, World Food Program, International Labor Organization, International Food Policy Research Institute, Business Sweden, and others are painting horrifying scenarios on a macro-scale: Around 50 million children could fall into extreme poverty. Hundreds of millions of jobs may be lost. 260 million face starvation, and three dozen countries risk famine. 2.7 billion workers are affected by the lockdown measures. Most vulnerable are people in the informal sector, and in India alone 400 million workers now face greater impoverishment. 50 – 70 percent of the population in 20 countries in Africa will run out of money and food after a 14-day quarantine.

When sales in clothes retailers like H&M went down around the globe, two million workers in the garment industry in Bangladesh lost their jobs. Their fate is similar to a message I received from a friend in Myanmar: “What this (lockdown) has meant for poor people, who are part of the informal economy, is no work, no money and therefore no food. There is no government social security net and certainly no savings.”

It may be, as the Stanford professor and Nobel Prize winner Michael Levitt recently stated: “When we come to look back on this, the damage done by lockdown will exceed any saving of lives by a huge factor.” [1]

In the face of these grim predictions, there is more good news! People and nations have fought pandemics before, risen out of abysmal poverty and conquered dreadful diseases. So, what can we learn?

“In 1575, plague descended on Milan. The city’s bishop, St. Charles Borromeo, hastened both to action and to prayer. Indeed, he exemplified the maxim, beloved of Dorothy Day and others, to ‘work as though everything depended on ourselves, and pray as though everything depended on God’.” [2]

Bishop Borromeo had a holistic worldview, working with God and people to meet physical, social, economic and spiritual needs. He persuaded rich people to help the poor. He created and staffed hospitals and quarantine houses. He instituted social distancing policies and had a particular love and care for orphaned infants. He moved church outdoors, to mitigate risk of spreading the disease. But he also created jobs or supported a large number of laid-off workers.

Borromeo realized that the plague didn’t cause just one problem, and thus there was not just one solution. He raised funds, and tackled immediate needs like hunger and healing. He also sought dignifying and long-term solution by creating jobs. While acknowledging and dealing physical health issues, and identifying socio-economic needs, he also addressed the spiritual welfare of the people. We must learn from his holistic views and multi-dimensional solutions.

Because jobs are not just a matter of income or survival; work is an issue of human dignity. What is the best way to help a poor child? Give the parents a job! Charity has a place, and relief efforts are needed. But for a long-term solution we need a paradigm shift in thinking and praxis, from handouts to job creation, from mainly non-profit responses to for profit solutions.

There is a need to embrace work as good, and we must acknowledge that business is a vocation (from ‘vocare’ – calling). Business has a higher purpose beyond mere sustenance or just financial returns.

“Entrepreneurs, managers and all who work in business, should be encouraged to recognise their work as a true vocation and to respond to God’s call in the spirit of true disciples. In doing so, they engage in the noble task of serving their brothers and sisters and of building up the Kingdom of God.” [3]

Like Borromeo, we seek holistic transformation of people and societies. That includes seeking a positive impact on multiple bottom lines for multiple stakeholders as we do business.

As the Business as Mission Manifesto (2004) states: “We recognise that there is a need for job creation and for multiplication of businesses all over the world, aiming at the quadruple bottom line: spiritual, economical, social and environmental transformation.” [4]

Worldview matters and ideas have consequences. We have too many examples of devastating ideology driven policies with limited regards for consequences. One can compare the health and wealth of people and nations with the same culture and languages like South and North Korea, and West and East Germany. We can witness how a potentially rich country like Zimbabwe has gone from being a bread basket to a basket case in southern Africa. The oil rich Venezuela is another tragic example of how disregard for basic wealth creation principles has destroyed a country.

The disastrous and murderous socialist policies of Mao came to an end in the late 1970’s when Deng Xiaoping opened up for business and led the country to a path out of poverty towards prosperity. He defended his non-communist but pragmatic approach by saying: it doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.

At the other end of the spectrum we have Israel. It is an example of a small nation with limited natural resources and with hostile neighbors, which in our lifetime has been transformed to a prosperous world-leading innovator.[5] Another example is Singapore which was poor and became independent as recently as 1965. But they learned from Israel. Today it is another world-leading country; well functioning, green, safe, clean, and prosperous.

Consequently, we need to be mindful of the consequences of the corona virus and global lockdown measures. But we should also learn from the past, from successes and failures, from Borromeo to Singapore and its prime leader for decades – Lee Kuan Yew[6]. We need to affirm the intrinsic value of work and business, and its power to restore and create health and wealth. We need ‘ora et labora’, to pray and work.

As stated in the Wealth Creation Manifesto[7] from 2017: “Wealth sharing should be encouraged, but there is no wealth to be shared unless it has been created. The purpose of wealth creation through business goes beyond giving generously. Business has a special capacity to create financial wealth, but also has the potential to create different kinds of wealth for many stakeholders, including social, intellectual, physical and spiritual wealth. Wealth creation through business has proven power to lift people and nations out of poverty. Wealth creation must always be pursued with justice and a concern for the poor.”

We know that businesses can be strong transformational agents for the common good. As Pope Francis says: “Business is a noble vocation, directed to producing wealth and improving the world. It can be a fruitful source of prosperity for the area in which it operates, especially if it sees the creation of jobs as an essential part of its service to the common good.” [8]

The need for God honoring and people serving businesses will increase during and after the pandemic.[9] Thus we must continue to affirm, equip and deploy men and women, young and old, on all continents, to grow, shape and reshape businesses with God and for the common good. We also need to build an eco-system of leaders from business, government and civil society, so different kinds of wealth can be created and health restored. And we must include the church. To that end, let me conclude with the appeal from the Wealth Creation Manifesto: “We call the church to embrace wealth creation as central to our mission of holistic transformation of peoples and societies.

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Footnotes

[1] “The Worldwide Lockdown May Be the Greatest Mistake in History”, by Dennis Prager. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/05/05/the_worldwide_lockdown_may_be_the_greatest_mistake_in_history_143119.html

[2] Catholicism in the Time of Coronavirus, by Stephen Bullivant Word on Fire, 2020

[3] Vocation of the Business Leader, published by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace

[4] https://bamglobal.org/lop-manifesto/

[5] Recommended reading: “Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle”, by Dan Senor & Saul Singer

[6] Recommended reading: “From Third World to First: The Singapore Story – 1965-2000”, by Lee Kuan Yew

[7] Three years ago, we concluded a global consultation on The Role of Wealth Creation for Holistic Transformation, of people and societies. Our findings were summarized in the Wealth Creation Manifesto, now available in more than a dozen languages. matstunehag.com/wealth-creation/

[8] Laudato Si’, 129

[9] See also “The Coronavirus Pandemic and BAM: Seven Things We Can Do”

https://businessasmission.com/the-coronavirus-pandemic-and-bam-seven-things-we-can-do/

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[ Photo by Jason Strull on Unsplash ]

Article originally posted here by Made to Flourish

— by Amy L. Sherman

A few years ago in a powerful op-ed in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof wrote that “the United States now has a greater wealth gap by race than South Africa did during apartheid. Whites in America on average own almost 18 times as much as blacks; in South Africa in 1970, the ratio was about 15 times.”

According to 2013 census data, median net worth for black households in the U.S. is $9,000 compared with $132,000 for white families.

It’s not an accident that we’ve gotten to this place. The reasons are admittedly diverse and complicated, but one thing’s clear. Racism has played a significant part.

Luke Bobo, Made to Flourish’s director of curriculum and resources, recently published a helpful yet unsettling monograph, Race, Economics, and Apologetics: Is There A Connection? In it, he briefly summarizes how decades of racial discrimination in housing, finance, employment, and the criminal justice system have systematically reduced wealth-building opportunities for African-Americans. Banks “redlined” African-American neighborhoods, meaning they avoided making home repair loans to black homeowners. As a result, those properties depreciated in value. Similar actions limited mortgage loans to black applicants, preventing them from homeownership. Discrimination by real estate agents and sellers/landlords further limited where blacks could live, contributing to racially segregated neighborhoods. Jim Crow restricted blacks from many job and education opportunities.

These are not just problems from long ago:

• A 2014-2016 research study led by Harvard professor Katherine DeCelles created resumes and sent them out for 1,600 entry-level jobs. Some resumes showed applicants’ minority status while others were “whitened or scrubbed of racial clues.” The result? “Employer callbacks for resumes that were whitened fared much better in the application pile than those that included ethnic information, even though the qualifications listed were identical. Twenty-five percent of black candidates received callbacks from their whitened resumes, while only 10 percent got calls when they left ethnic details intact.”

• A 2017 study of housing finance records in 61 metro areas found that black Americans are more likely than whites with the same qualifications and credit scores to be denied mortgage loans (in some locales, more than twice as likely).

• Considerable research indicates racial bias in sentencing, with defendants of color more likely to receive harsher sentences than whites with similar charges and backgrounds. Blacks are more likely to be arrested than whites for the same crimes. While the gap in rates of incarceration for blacks compared with whites has been shrinking since 2009, it is still the case that blacks are seriously overrepresented in prison: although they comprise only 12 percent of the general population they comprise 33 percent of the prison population. And if you’re in prison, you’re not working and earning.

The problems feel overwhelming. What can the average church do in response? A variety of approaches are needed: Education initiatives that provide better schooling for minorities and the poor, passionate advocacy for policies to redress the kinds of glaring injustices just noted,  job training programs, investments in minority entrepreneurs, and more. Congregations vary in their capacities for doing these things. But one thing many churches could do is shift some of their benevolence dollars toward matched savings programs.

One church’s story

Since 2013 North Avenue Presbyterian Church in Atlanta has offered “Faith and Finances,” a biblically based financial literacy class that includes mentoring and a 1:1 matched savings program. Class graduates can earn up to $1,000 in the months following the program. The church matches every dollar saved with one of its own.

Dion Miller used his savings to pay for truck driving school. His new commercial driver’s license earned him a position with a food distribution company that paid $1,000 a month more than his previous job. Dion and his wife, Renae, continue to save, working toward their dream of buying their first home.

Two other graduates have used their savings for college tuition, another bought a used pickup truck, and another replaced the windows on the house he’d purchased at a foreclosure auction. In short, graduates are increasing their human and financial capital. The program also gets people banked, says Matt Seadore, North Avenue’s director of mission and ministry. “We had a 90% unbanked rate upon entrance to Faith and Finances.  We have had nearly a 100% success rate with getting participants to open a savings account at a bank or credit union.” This cuts down on participants’ use of expensive check-cashing services.

Most churches respond to poverty by offering short-term income/consumption supports: free food, free clothes, a check to pay the overdue utility bill or rent. Such relief is sometimes needed and appropriate. But often it’s nothing but a Band-Aid that helps people manage their poverty for another month or so.

By contrast, asset-building strategies can actually help people escape their poverty over time. When a family develops a savings account, it has a buffer against “rainy days.” And assets can create more wealth: a house increasing in value or a mutual fund that pays a dividend.

An ambitious, randomized 2016 evaluation of matched saving programs by scholars from The Brookings Institution concluded that they’d contributed to a nine percent growth in participants’ liquid assets (e.g., savings, checking, and money market accounts); a 39 percent decrease in the use of non-bank check cashing services, and a 34 percent decrease in “hardships related to utilities, housing and health.”

So one important reason why churches should be running matched savings programs is that they work. Seadore was delighted to repurpose a $15,000 benevolence budget towards the 1:1 savings matches. “We were aware that benevolence monies were not always well-spent,” he says.

A second reason is that this ministry creates a context for relationships. As Steve Corbett, co-author of When Helping Hurts, explains: “The process of saving money for an asset purchase, even with match funding, is not quick….This is time that the church and its volunteers can spend loving the individuals in the program as well as their families.” These relationships have the potential to be mutually transforming and to promote cross-class and cross-race friendships.

But perhaps the most important reason for doing this kind of ministry is that for minority and low-income class participants it’s a small way of pushing back against economic injustice. Middle and upper-class Americans already have access to wealth-building opportunities through policies like the home mortgage deduction and retirement benefits like 401ks — which are essentially matched savings programs with employers contributing the matches. Since low-income earners rarely benefit from such programs the church can help by creating access to asset-builders like matched savings accounts.

Obviously, this approach alone isn’t going to reverse the wealth gap. But it’s one realistic concrete, and proven way a church can come alongside people long shut out from economic opportunities.

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[ Photo by Hans M on Unsplash ]

Today’s guest is thought-leading writer and recognized champion of the Multiethnic Church Movement, Mark DeYmaz. He’s the author of several books and is on the show today to talk to us about his latest, The Coming Revolution in Church Economics. 

Mark shared how churches can respond to the steady decrease in tithes and donations happening around the world—especially in light of recent events. He has some radical and creative ideas on how church leaders and business leaders can work together, and we think you’ll be interested in what he shared.

At the end of the episode, Henry and Rusty go back and forth on this topic, and we invite you to join in on this conversation as well. Feel free to comment, contact us, or reply to the newsletter. As always, we love hearing from you and making this show your show.