correction: Chip Ingram is now CEO of Living on the Edge, an international discipleship ministry.

In Part One with Chip Ingram, Senior Pastor of Venture Christian Church in Los Gatos, CA, Henry has Chip walk through his experience pastoring many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. While Chip’s own entrepreneurial persuasions began at an early age selling Halloween candy in late November at a significant markup, he realized early on in his life as a pastor that he could teach and inspire far beyond his leadership capabilities.  His start as a spiritual coach to entrepreneurs began as a simple exchange: his Santa Cruz church was growing at breakneck speed and he needed wisdom and skillsets to support that growth. He reached out to the entrepreneurs in his congregation and became friends with them, creating a safe and respectful place for these leaders to share what was really going on in their lives. The grass isn’t always greener, to say the least. Struggles with identity, purpose, and the tension between the world’s values vs. those of the kingdom plague these individuals as much as anyone else with one major exception: the extreme loneliness as a result of an inability to find authentic, no strings attached relationships when you command significant power, influence and resources.

 Henry encourages Chip to dig deeper on the loneliness challenge by asking for wisdom on how these individuals can overcome the temptation of being a recluse. Chip gives us a mandate to care about who we become more than anything else, as well as a construct on how to have the right view of both God and ourselves. 

 We hope you enjoy Part One with Chip Ingram. We’d love to know how you’ve overcome “the great identity crisis” by changing your view of who you believe God to be. Please share with us in the comment section below.

Photo by Matthew T Rader on Unsplash

In Part One with Chip Ingram, CEO of Living on the Edge, Henry has Chip walk through his experience pastoring many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. While Chip’s own entrepreneurial persuasions began at an early age selling Halloween candy in late November at a significant markup, he realized early on in his life as a pastor that he could teach and inspire far beyond his leadership capabilities.  His start as a spiritual coach to entrepreneurs began as a simple exchange: his Santa Cruz church was growing at breakneck speed and he needed wisdom and skillsets to support that growth. He reached out to the entrepreneurs in his congregation and became friends with them, creating a safe and respectful place for these leaders to share what was really going on in their lives. The grass isn’t always greener, to say the least. Struggles with identity, purpose, and the tension between the world’s values vs. those of the kingdom plague these individuals as much as anyone else with one major exception: the extreme loneliness as a result of an inability to find authentic, no strings attached relationships when you command significant power, influence and resources.

 Henry encourages Chip to dig deeper on the loneliness challenge by asking for wisdom on how these individuals can overcome the temptation of being a recluse. Chip gives us a mandate to care about who we become more than anything else, as well as a construct on how to have the right view of both God and ourselves. 

 We hope you enjoy Part One with Chip Ingram. We’d love to know how you’ve overcome “the great identity crisis” by changing your view of who you believe God to be. Please share with us in the comment section below.

Photo by Matthew T Rader on Unsplash

It’s a Monday, the day where we release an inspirational video to get you fired up for the week. Today we get to match two loves of ours….the Monday video, and a story about chaplains. But this is no ordinary story!

Want to get a sense for selfless love and throwing yourself in to the work you do to save a life? This 4 and a half minute video will make an impact. Don’t think that it’s the ordinary video on chaplaincy. Don’t punch out after 2 or 3 minutes, watch to the end. Incredible.

Special thanks to Alexei Scutari on Unsplash for the cover photo.

— Bill High

The following post was first published on billhigh.com by our friend Bill High, co-author of Giving It All Away…And Getting It All Back Again: The Way of Living Generously.

I speak often on the subject of giving and taxes.  Probably more than 2 years ago, I spoke to some ministry leaders and I told them, “Friends don’t let friends sell businesses.”

Roger, one of those ministry leaders, heard me.  One of his good friends was preparing to sell a business.  And all he knew was that his friend shouldn’t sell unless he talked to us.  Roger got his friend to talk to us, and as a result, his friend the business owner is paying less tax at the time of the sale while at the same time increasing his giving.

This bears some explanation.

We are heading into the season where many business sales are going to wrap up and close before year-end.  Typically, there are lots of good reasons to close a deal before year-end. 

But here’s the net effect:  when a business sells, the owner or owners will face the highest tax liability they will ever face.  That liability is locked in the moment the owner signs the purchase agreement.  Unfortunately, in the rush to complete the sale, the only thing the owner does is to calculate his taxes.  In other words, the owner is simply told how much that he or she will have to pay.

What’s the answer?  That’s where “friends don’t let friends sell businesses…” comes in.  It’s pretty simple.  If an owner donates some of his or her ownership interest prior to the sale, they can deduct the fair market value of the shares donated.

Taxes go down. Giving goes up.  But the magic is that the gift of the ownership interest must occur before the purchase agreement is signed otherwise the opportunity is lost.

The power of this opportunity is that the business owner can take that tax savings and increased giving and create a family foundation.  There, they can support causes they care about, get kids involved and impact the world.

Do you know of someone selling a business?  Perhaps you can be the one to encourage them to think smarter about that sale!

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Editor’s Note: If you liked this piece from Bill, we encourage you to check out his other FDE blog:

FDE Blog – Can Money Buy Happiness?

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[Special thanks to rawpixel on Unsplash for the cover photo.]

I’m going to start with a confession. I heard the 2-part interview of Andy Stanley, founding pastor of North Point Community Church, with Coke Consolidated’s CFO, Dave Katz and thought that we should have him on the FDE Podcast. He would be great, no doubt, but the reality is that we wouldn’t do any better of a job than Andy in interviewing him.

We also want to be a site where we direct you to other places that have great content. We do that a bit in our Resources Section, and this is a great time to send you to an awesome podcast. I highly encourage you to listen to this (episodes on “accelerating culture” parts 1 and 2). I was skeptical (I’m not typically a fan of companies that distribute mildly drugged sugar water), but Dave is the real deal.

As you listen, you’ll note that Dave summarizes each interview with 3 takeaways. I love that.

Part 1

• Purpose is culture. Culture is purpose. Being very focused that those two things are one in the same. The culture we are trying to create is that purpose statement.

• It’s now been 8 years or so since we had that purpose statement and it has not changed. There are four items and they’re pretty easy to remember and we’ve stuck with them.

• These things need to be caught more than taught. These things are what we can model as leaders and as teammates.

Part 2

• Relationships are everything. So this group mentoring environment definitely builds relationship.

• Culture being a reflection of the leader and the actions of the leader. Everyone’s a leader. When I do life with you and see the content and context together, I get to see how you act in these situations.

• Real motivation comes from vision. And I get true vision when I can do life with you and see how you do life.

Listen to Andy Stanley’s 2-part interviews with Dave Katz

(Episodes for parts 1 and 2 on “Accelerating Culture”)

Special Thanks to rawpixel on Unsplash for the cover photo.

— Henry Kaestner

Every so often I (HK) hear a sermon that isn’t necessarily about being an entrepreneur, but is very much about being a follower of Christ, and so it has everything to do with being a FAITH DRIVEN entrepreneur. This is one of those.

I’ve now listened to this 5 times. Twice by myself, and 3 times with my boys, especially as he talks toward the end about buying and selling shoes at speculative prices online — something that my oldest son spends way too much time thinking about. But this sermon, and that illustration, is not just for him, but for all of us.

As a bonus, Toby goes in to the work of mimetics as advanced by Rene Girard. I love Girard not just for his work, which is great, but because in endeavoring to perform academic research as an atheist/agnostic he came to understand and know God and become a follower of Christ. Another example of this comes from Rodney Stark through his work of “Rise of Christianity” and “Triumph of Christianity”. He was an agnostic during the former, and a follower of Christ by the latter.

Toby asks us:

“Do you know what is shaping your desires? Do you know why you want what you want?”

I think that this is important for us, but I also think that we need to think about this dynamic when we think about how we market and advertise our products and services.

Toby talks about some of the most effective advertising campaigns being those that are about shaping our desires by selecting the type of people that promote our product and their setting. I won’t give this topic the weight that it is due (though maybe we’ll tackle this on a podcast), but I think it’s really important. Our nation is expected to spend more than $183 billion on advertising…that’s more than $700 for every man, woman, and child. Selling and advertising are good. Are we thinking though about what we are doing as we shape others’ desires too? There is far more here than I can properly summarize.

Toby does a great job of giving us a series of Scriptural references that help us to understand what we are to imitate and how our desires might be shaped in a Godly way, how we can live in this world, and how God wants us to live.

Sounds simple, and you might expect what passages he might select, and yet he does it very, very well, and it’s very much worth you listening to it. Maybe not 5x….but maybe.

Christ Church San Francisco – Shaping Your Desires by Toby Kurth

Some quotes that I love:

“Do I know why I want to what I want to do when I wake up on a daily basis? Do I know what about my motivation and my desires is tainted by sin and bad stuff and brokenness, and what part is God speaking to me through his Holy Spirit? Do I have a grid to even understand that?”

GK Beal says this in his book, “We become What We Worship”. “All humans have been created to be reflecting beings and they will reflect whatever they are ultimately committed to. Whether the true God or some other object in the created order. We resemble what we revere either for ruin or restoration.”

“You knowing what you desire and why you desire it directly impacts your relationship with God and your relationship with others. How you exist in the world is shaped by knowing your identity at a deep enough level to be able to identify these types of things. Is the impact you’re having for good or for bad. Is it to make things whole or to break things down.”

If you like this sermon at all, I want to encourage you to check out another one of Toby’s sermons we highlighted a few months ago:

I am the Light of the World by Toby Kurth

Want to see other sermons that we think are particularly helpful for the entrepreneurial journey? Search the category Sermons on the blog page.

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Special thanks to Aaron Sebastian on Unsplash for the cover photo.