Article originally hosted and shared with permission by The Christian Economic Forum, a global network of leaders who join together to collaborate and introduce strategic ideas for the spread of God’s economic principles and the goodness of Jesus Christ. This article was from a collection of whitepapers compiled for attendees of the CEF’s 2018 Global Event.

— by Jeff Holler

The term globalism is used freely in our world today, but what does it mean and/or imply? In reviewing many definitions and philosophies regarding globalism, I found a definition I like in an article by Colin Stief. He explains globalism as the process of increased inter-connectedness among all countries of the world, most notably in the areas of economics and economic development, politics, and culture. Ikea stores throughout the United States, U.S. fast food in South Africa, Apple phones with American technology manufactured in China, global customer service call centers in India, and the influence of the United Nations are a few small examples of globalization.

Conceptually, globalism seems to make sense as a strategy to improve everyone’s lives, in poor and rich countries alike. The idea is that everyone should benefit from increased efficiency of how people, knowledge, and things move and communicate throughout the world with constantly improving technology, and with the increasing ease of transportation around the globe. In theory, globalism should encourage free trade among all countries and should increase competition such that prices for everyone are ultimately reduced. It should also provide poor countries a chance to develop economically as developed countries invest in their people and resources as a cost-effective way to expand their own capabilities and reach. As poor countries grow economically, it should likewise create new markets for multi-national companies to sell their goods, as well as open new markets to which the developing country can export their goods and services. It is believed that this ease of transfer of information, ideas, people, goods, and services should also foster more transparent and democratic governmental systems throughout the world. And, as we learn more about each other through increased communication and interaction, the world should become a more open and respectful place for all cultures and people to peacefully co-exist. These are just a few of the many benefits cited by the articles available on the subject.

While we have, in fact, seen our interconnectedness help improve the lives of many around the world, globalism is not a utopia. There are winners and losers as jobs leave one country for another, localized and traditional values diminish, and some individuals with great power become self-serving and corrupt. Additionally, not every country plays the game fairly, which creates results that are far less efficient or beneficial than the ideal. Furthermore, the increasingly interconnected global monetary systems seem to be backed by less and less substance as global growth, and in some cases simply maintaining the economic status quo, are fueled by debt.

Most concerning to me, however, are the early indications regarding how the process of globalism is developing. While articles on the subject point to a lot of different dangers, my opinion is they all fall into one of three categories.

First, there has been a consolidation of power politically and economically. A smaller number of developed and wealthy countries and their politicians and bureaucracies are driving the political process. Likewise, a small number of very large and powerful multinational companies are exerting their influence. Combined, this relatively small group—rich, powerful, intellectual, and politically connected individuals and entities—are propelling the globalist policies and processes. Globalism is promoted as a solution to most of the troubles in the world today, but we are beginning to see that those who encourage and push its policies are benefiting more than others. For example, while extreme poverty is rapidly on the decline, there is a well-documented, growing gap between the richest and the poorest around the globe. The OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) states that the average income of the richest 10% of the world’s population is about nine times greater than that of the poorest 10%, which is the largest gap to date. It has also been documented that the middle class is in decline in many societies. Additionally, the UN Development Program reports that the richest 20% of the world’s population consume 86% of the world’s resources while the poorest 80% consume just 14%.

The second category of dangers is the loss of freedoms we are beginning to experience because the process of globalism is being built on a politically correct, faithless foundation. The pursuit of “globalist policies” and the associated large (and growing) godless government bureaucracies as a problem solver, are leading to the loss of many freedoms. These include the freedoms of religion and religious liberty, freedom of speech if it threatens the “accepted norm,” and even freedom of parental rights. For example, the United States Supreme Court will soon decide if a Christian baker in Colorado can be forced to create artistic expression that violates his faith. In Germany, Christian parents recently had their home raided and children forcibly removed and taken into custody. Their crime? Homeschooling.

The third category of dangers is rooted in a globalist trend toward a governmental “nanny state” approach to providing for individual’s core needs. In my opinion, this approach is proving to be harmful as it is diminishing individual responsibility, work ethic, and human dignity. A governmental “nanny state” is also eliminating the traditional role of the church to be the primary influencer, problem solver, and special needs provider in people’s lives. The “nanny state” approach is also expensive and unsustainable economically, as indicated by the growing global debt burden, much of which is being used to fund social welfare.

We also must consider how technological advances, particularly rapidly emerging artificial intelligence, will be used to advance globalism. What kind of decisions will machines make when God’s commands, teachings, and principles are not allowed to be considered in their programming? How will this technology be used in godless hands?

The problems with globalism are many and multi-faceted. I believe, however, that at the core of these problems is the removal of our Judeo-Christian history, practices, teachings, and values from the public domain, as well as an effort to silence the church in the public and corporate realms around the globe. What can possibly be more dangerous than taking God out of the equation and replacing Him with godless bureaucracies and corporations?

Ted Malloch, PhD, is chairman and CEO of The Global Fiduciary Governance LLC, a leading strategy and thought leadership company. He has served on the executive board of the World Economic Forum, held an ambassador-level post at the United Nations, worked in international capital markets on Wall Street, held a senior position in the U.S. State Department, and is author of Davos, Aspen, and Yale: My Life Behind the Elite Curtain as a Global Sherpa. In a recent article published on WND.com, Malloch said, “To some degree, I would say if you want to understand globalism, you need to get at the spiritual underlying currents in globalism, which is not only relativistic, but it’s a divorce, a great divorce, from religion and from any notion that there is a God who exists or that you can know him personally.”

Malloch goes on to convey that globalists have lost touch with the foundations of their culture in Western civilization, “which is actually Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian.” Furthermore, he believes globalists not only want to attack the pillars of Western civilization, but also are “radically against the family.” He implies that the globalists want to shape how people think and interrelate, a role historically and scripturally reserved for the God-guided nuclear family in conjunction with the church. Globalists want their global government solution to become our god, as it is theirs. Without a core of God’s natural law, serving God, and love for God’s people, I believe those who are driving globalism forward will become ever more self-serving and corrupt, and in the end will hurt significantly more people than they help.

Special thanks to Chelsea London Phillips on Unsplash for the cover photo

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The first of two parts, this week’s episode finds the team speaking with Mike Sharrow, President and CEO of C12, an organization that provides a confidential and intimate environment where like-minded peers share ideas, discover and plan for areas in their business that need improvement, hold each other accountable, and encourage one another to conduct business in a God-honoring way.

 Mike gives us a little of the history of the recent resurgence of faith in the marketplace during the last century that provide the foundation for what C12 has been doing since 1992. He shares with the team some of the most interesting impact stories of how leaders’ decisions to pursue relationship as a key driver of culture led to incredible levels of employee engagement and satisfaction as well as increased supplier commitment. The formula was as simple as finding out what was going on in the lives of direct reports that led to transformative changes in the lives of team members, including two saved marriages.

We think you will be greatly encouraged by part one of our time with Mike Sharrow and we ask that you share your stories of marketplace transformation with us at https://faithdrivenentrepreneur.org/.

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The first of two parts, this week’s episode finds the team speaking with Mike Sharrow, President and CEO of C12, an organization that provides a confidential and intimate environment where like-minded peers share ideas, discover and plan for areas in their business that need improvement, hold each other accountable, and encourage one another to conduct business in a God-honoring way.

 Mike gives us a little of the history of the recent resurgence of faith in the marketplace during the last century that provide the foundation for what C12 has been doing since 1992. He shares with the team some of the most interesting impact stories of how leaders’ decisions to pursue relationship as a key driver of culture led to incredible levels of employee engagement and satisfaction as well as increased supplier commitment. The formula was as simple as finding out what was going on in the lives of direct reports that led to transformative changes in the lives of team members, including two saved marriages. 

 We think you will be greatly encouraged by part one of our time with Mike Sharrow and we ask that you share your stories of marketplace transformation with us at faithdrivenentrepreneur.com.

Thanks to community member Eric Dunavant who responded to our request for great videos, here’s one that he thought would encourage and challenge our community of faith driven entrepreneurs on a Monday:

Favorite Quotes:

“You know you’re in a storm when you’re in a West Texas Storm”

“One of the years we gave away 82% of our net profits….we felt that God was saying that’s great, but you work with families. What do they know of my love for them?”

“Each home we build gives us an opportunity to interact with more than 100 businesses and contractors. We view the businesses and contractors as trade partners. Besides dealing them them honestly and paying them regularly, we seek to help them grow their own business, with loans, providing start up capital and business mentoring.”

“God has allowed us to live a life we didn’t even know to dream.”

Special thanks to AK¥N Cakiner on Unsplash for the cover image.

by Brandon Napoli

I love to go on long bike rides.  Whether it be from Vancouver to Tijuana, Maine to New York or around the Big Island of Hawaii.  In my opinion, traveling on two wheels is one of the best ways to experience the world and get to know yourself.  Not too fast so you can’t smell the roses. Not too slow so you can’t see new sights. And plenty of time to reflect.   

Last year, I went on two epic bike trips: down the west coast of Ireland and around Sicily.  My ancestors emigrated from these two places, and it was an incredible trip to see where my family come from.

As I pedaled, I wrestled with a question that I couldn’t seem to shake:  

What would our communities become if Christian places of worship and entrepreneurs helped each other become fruitful?  

For my entire life I have attended church. It is where I find my rest and hope. For my entire career I have focused on empowering entrepreneurs.  From directing a leading micro-lending institution in the US to testifying in front of Congress. This question was rooted in attending too many dying Christian places of worship and financing too many self-centered entrepreneurs seemingly not reflecting beyond their concept of success.  

Sacred Space was launched to re-imagine the local church as a place for these two seemingly mutually, exclusive problems to be solved symbiotically. Creating time, relationships, and purpose to flourish.  Sacred Space is a community space for our neighbors. All are welcomed. We focus on women, impact entrepreneurs, artists, students, and transitional workers. Our space provides business and educational services, day care, and spiritual formation for productivity, hospitality, and creativity.  We believe places of worship are perfectly positioned to integrate rest, family, faith and work.

It hasn’t been all clear, blue skies.  There are red skies almost every morning.  But I would rather be heading into a storm with direction than in calm waters lost at sea.  In Sacred Space storms have take the form of a church board members’ resistance to new expressions of church or a neighbor’s apathy for participating in our community.  In these times, questions have been a useful tool to uncover deeper truths. If, “Real religion, the kind that passes muster before God the Father, is this: Reach out to the homeless and loveless in their plight, and guard against corruption from the godless world.” (James 1:27 The Message translation), how many orphans and widows do we help?  How are we guarding against corruption? These question led us to start listening for an answer.

“Everyday I have to decide between being a present parent or a focused entrepreneur,” one day a Sacred Space member said.  This inspired us to create a pop up space for toddlers while their parents work. Others have stepped into the sanctuary to meditate, pray, and read.  And many have come in for the space, stayed for the community, and left asking how they can serve their neighbors?

A friend, Chris Chavez, who co-founded Prime Produce in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen was one who left with that question of how to serve his neighbor.  He came back with the goal to reinvigorate the civic spaces seeded by communities of faith through a group practice of silence, inquiry, and meditation. Simply – creating a moment to share questions -big and small – that we grapple with each and every day without discussion, conversation, or answers. Modeled after a Quaker style circle of community interaction, this experiment invites us to gather and hit the pause button on our desire for answers or exchange, in order to make space for vulnerable inquiry, however this vulnerability might translate for each participant.

To take this concept of shared inquiry even deeper, in Let Your Life Speak, Parker J. Palmer writes,

“You take a personal issue to this small group of people who are prohibited from suggesting “fixes” or giving you advice but who for three hours pose honest, open questions to help you discover your inner truth.  Communal processes of this sort are supportive but not invasive. They help us probe questions and possibilities but forbid us from rendering judgement, allowing us to serve as midwives to a birth of consciousness that can only come from within.  The key to this form of community involves holding a paradox – the paradox of having relationships in which we protect each other’s alone-ness. We must come together in ways that respect the solitude of the soul, that avoid the unconscious violence we do when we try to save each other, that evoke our capacity to hold another life without dishonoring its mystery, never trying to coerce the other into meeting our needs…Because they were not driven by their own fears, the fears that lead us either to “fix” or abandon each other, they provided me with a lifeline to the human race.  That lifeline constituted the most profound form of leadership I can imagine – leading a suffering person back to life from a living death.”

How many churches or faith driven companies’ culture would benefit from such vulnerable inquiry?  

Peter Thiel, Zero to One speaks to this need at a cultural level,

“Religious fundamentalism, for example, allows no middle ground for hard questions: there are easy truths that children are expected to rattle off, and then there are the mysteries of God, which can’t be explained. In between— the zone of hard truths—lies heresy. In the modern religion of environmentalism, the easy truth is that we must protect the environment. Beyond that, Mother Nature knows best, and she cannot be questioned. Free marketeers worship a similar logic. The value of things is set by the market. Even a child can look up stock quotes. But whether those prices make sense is not to be second‐guessed; the market knows far more than you ever could.”

Greg Ehlert, Campus Minister/UC San Diego and friend speaks this need at an individual level, “You’re right about questions … they are not just “informative,” giving us the data we need but “formative,” exposing the thoughts/intentions of our hearts.  The core of a question is “quest,” the pursuit for meaning and purpose.”

So, what is your pursuit for meaning and purpose look like?  Members of John Wesley’s Holy Club asked themselves 22 questions every day.  I’ve decided to make them my desktop background so it’s the first thing I see each morning, and is easily referenced throughout the day.  These are the ones that hit me the hardest:

• Do I thank God that I am not as other people, especially as the Pharisees who despised the publican?

• Am I consciously or unconsciously creating the impression that I am better than I really am?  In other words, am I a hypocrite?

• Am I defeated in any part of my life?

• Is Christ real in me?

God loves us to ask questions.  

Did you know the first conversation Jesus had with humanity was in the form of a question?  In John 1:38, Jesus asks the Disciples of John the Baptist, who have sinned, “What do you want?” Unlike Adam and Eve, the Disciples respond with a question, “Rabbi, where are you staying?” They totally use the Socratic method on Jesus!  Jesus responds by inviting them to “Come and see,” and they respond by coming, and seeing where he was living.  One of those disciples was the brother of Peter, who Jesus built his church upon.  

Did you know the first conversation God had with humanity was in the form of a question too? In Genesis 3:9, God asks Adam and Eve who have sinned, “Where are you?” Adam responds much differently than the Disciples, in a statement out of shame and blame.  I asked Paul Taylor, Pastor and blogger of Allthingsnew.tech, what would have happened if Adam or Eve would have acknowledged their sin, become humbled and asked a question to become reconciled to God like, “Where are you staying? (Because that’s where I want to be!!)”  Paul said, “Perhaps the Bible, the story of reconciliation between God and man, would be a lot shorter.”

I wish they had asked themselves whatever question(s) necessary to acknowledge their sin, become humble and ask a question to become reconciled to God.  The good news is we still can.

So what questions as a Faith Driven Entrepreneur do you ask yourself?  Here are a few to consider:

• How do you deal with adversity?  Does it stir hatred or sow seeds of peace?

• Who in business would call you a good neighbor?

• What parts of your leadership style would your staff say reminds them of Jesus?

• How do you include God in your decision making?  

• How do you find joy in the midst of hardship?  

• Do your financial statements reflect serving God?

• Where does your business respond to Jesus’s invitation by coming, seeing and living?

Special thanks to Dmitrii Vaccinium on Unsplash for the cover photo

by Rusty Rueff

Rusty Rueff is one of the co-hosts of Faith Driven Entrepreneur’s weekly podcast. This post was originally published on Rusty’s blog, Purposed WorKING.

“But I don’t want to bore you, so please give me your attention for only a moment.”

I was humbled to have had a phone conversation with an entrepreneur who told me of the story of how he created his product inside of a larger organization.  It was not his original purpose or calling to be doing what he is doing today, but because of his product he has far-flung influence and impact across a wide array of people and organizations. As he was speaking to me he talked about the importance of delivering operational excellence and predictable consistency in a service and product, but we also discussed the downside of that approach in that our customers and consumers can become “bored” or feel like they are in a “rut” because they get the same thing, the same experience, time after time and while they feel comfortable in that delivery, they like all of us, may try something else because they just are looking for a change every now and then.  So, this entrepreneur has begun to think about how to deliver “systematic surprises”.  These are surprises that keep the offering fresh and exciting, but behind the scenes there is no extra strain on the “system” so that these moments of surprise can be delivered flawlessly and with excellence.  This is no small task and one that demands thoughtfulness and deliberation.  But, I know this, that with this type of thinking and action, it is a winning strategy.

We are like this as God’s messengers in the workplace.  Without our consistency, discipline and predictability we can’t be the witnesses that we are called to be, but we also can’t be boring or come across as stuck in our ways.  The beauty of what we are taught (and challenged to do) is that we can deliver systematic surprises each and every day with acts of kindness, generosity, encouragement and the giving of ourselves to others.  There are tons of examples but imagine that today you were to leave a handwritten note of encouragement or gratitude on a co-worker’s desk so that it was the first thing they see tomorrow morning?  If that thought warms a little something inside of you, then that is the type of systemic surprise that you can be.

Reference:  Acts 24:4 (New Living Translation)

Photo by Darius Bashar on Unsplash