Episode 024 – Reading Scripture Out Loud in Gardens and Cities with Andy Mills

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. We’ve got a really special guest today, a friend of mine, Andy Mills. And I’ve been looking for this episode for a long time. Andy is great leader in the marketplace. Here a little bit about his background here in a second, about what he’s done in all different aspects of financial services. He’s been, as you probably heard in the intro from Rusty, part of the theology and work project on their board. He started something called Faith in Financial Services, which I think is super cool. He’s been a leader in the Lizanne movement and just a very thoughtful guy, said he’s an ex rower and continues to get out there on the concept two rowers. So we’ve got that in common. But the most important thing, of course, we’ve got in common is a great shared faith and an intentionality about using the different places that God has put us to work for God and his glory, which is actually, of course, the thing that we’ve got in common with our audience as well. So, Andy, thank you very much for being with us this morning.

Andy Mills: It’s great to be with you. And looking forward to our conversation.

Henry Kaestner: Me, too. And there are thousand different ways we could take this. And what I’d very much want to make sure that we get to toward the end of this interview is a project that you’ve been working on for a long time about the public reading of scripture. And I think that that’s unique. I think you’ve been very thoughtful about that. And then a lot of things around that. Then I want to get into. Well, before we do that, I’d like for you to walk through your background. You’re a professional in the financial services space. You’ve been in there for a long time and no different facets of that. And just bring the reader up to date. Talk to us about who is in e-mails and then from there will launch in a faith in financial services and all these other things would be great.

Andy Mills: Well, let me first just give you a little bit of the biography. And then if I could, I just want to give you a little bit of a spiritual biography. And I think those three things will give you a good sense of who I am. I’d like to say first, I’m a family man. I live up in Boston with my family. My wife is Gail, 37 years. We have two children. Fortunate enough to have three young granddaughters who completely whined me around that little fingers. I just love him so dearly. We’re very close as a family. My wife and I also spent a lot of time as foster parents. We did twenty years of foster parenting and had over 40 children in our home during those times. And so family, as you can say, is really important. And being close, particularly at times like we have today, is so very important. I grew up in England. So for those of you thinking, what’s that strange accent? It’s a little bit of Boston, but it’s a lot more of England. I grew up there. I went to university there, still took my first job in London selling textiles. And then after a couple of years, the company said, go over to the U.S. and sell textiles for us over there. So I landed in New York in the mid-70s, did a couple of years there, and then went up to Boston for grad school because I love being in America. So very much joined the Boston Consulting Group out of grad school late 70s, early 80s was a great time to be at BCG. A lot of very innovative work being done, great organization. But, you know, I knew consulting was not for me long term because I like playing the game, not just advising or consulting. And I found a small company that was kind of going out of business in the information space. The financial services, a company called Business Research Corporation. And I joined that and we turned that around. Some of you in the financial services business have been in long enough will remember. First of all, that was our major product and the business was acquired back in the early 80s by the Thompson Corporation. And then I had the opportunity to build Thompson Financial that many people will remember.

Ran ll the legal publishing acquired West publishing and then an interestingly enough, in 1996, about to have a change of leadership for the whole Thompson Corporation. My name was in the hat among other people. It’s an interesting story, but I just decided that even though that’s what I wanted to be ever since I was a kid, the CEO of a major global corporation, it just wasn’t right for me, largely because of family issues I was having being on the road 200 days a year. And so I stepped back from that. And after a couple of years, I left Thompson and began a kind of fifteen year not for profit saga working in different areas, theology of work that you’ve mentioned. I started a social enterprise fund in Africa and Uganda called the Mango Fund. I was the chairman and president on several occasions at the King’s College in New York City. And I did a lot of speaking about theology of work and faith and work, and I assume that would be the rest of my life. But God had different plans. I met Bill Wong, who many of you know, just a great investor under the famed Tiger Cubs and Bill and I. He’s a great Christian gentleman. And Bill and I just loved each other’s company. We love the word together. We spent time in the world. We talked about faith and work. And so six years ago, he asked me to join him to help run his private family office and his foundation called the Grace and Mercy Foundation. So that’s kind of the potted history. One thing I would say is when I grew up in England, I went to church on a regular basis. This is my spiritual biography. But I think it was just more. That’s what you did on a Sunday morning. And I never saw any evidence of really faith in my family and my parents. And so I went, but it didn’t really mean anything. And as soon as, of course, I went off to college. I didn’t know anymore. And it became, you know, I always believed in God, but I somehow never really thought much about that. Definitely the unexamined life, I would have to say. And every so often, I felt the need to go to church and I’d kind of go to church and I’d really enjoy it. And I enjoy the liturgy and the music. But then, you know, there was always something better to do on a Sunday morning sometimes. So I kind of slipped away again and left it for another year or two before I went back again. And then three things happened and God really got my attention. Firstly, I sold the company that I was talking about to the Thompson Corporation. And that’s kind of what everybody wants to do is the American dream. You build a company, you sell it, and it just felt totally meaningless to me. Was this what I’d really been working so hard for? What was the meaning in this? That was a really hard thing to think about. It happened at the same time that my father died and my son were born within two weeks of each other and fortunately, they never saw each other. My son has my father’s name. And that led me to a whole sort of existential question about what is a human being? You know, are we the Disney circle of life or is there something more important to being human? And then the third thing, which was the killer blow, as I came home one night and my wife told me that she’d become a born again Christian. So once you, you know, wipe me off the floor and tried to figure out what had happened to my otherwise rational wife.

We started talking about faith in a serious way. And I had to first really serious conversations about faith. Who is God? Who is Jesus? What’s the Bible? And I realized as a smart guy, I had no answers. I just had no answers. And so my wife just challenged me to stop studying it because I’m a kind of analytical type of guy. And so I started studying. And over an 18 month period, God showed himself in so many powerful ways that, you know, I got to that place where it would have taken more faith to have rejected him than to have accepted Christ as my savior, frankly. And so you would have found me on Christmas Day 1988, kneeling in the snow on a bike ride, accepting Christ as my lord and savior.

And, you know, two things really changed dramatically from that point. I mean, obviously, one, my eternal destiny, which is something we all need to really think about. But the second thing is my work, because, you know, even though I was a very immature baby Christian, I just had a strong sense that God was simply asking me this question.

You’re a CEO, but now you’re a Christian. What difference does that make? Because I had a strong sense that if it didn’t make any difference, what was the point? And so that’s really begun, Henry, I’d say 30 plus year now journey for me, exploring God’s word, exploring with other people, mentoring, speaking, studying the theology of work, all of these kinds of things, and then putting these things to practice in the workplace.

And it’s been a most fascinating time. And one of the great joys I have is sharing some of these ideas that I and others have kind of you know, it’s now that we’ve discovered or made, all we’re doing is understanding what God’s word says and then bringing them up to light and then challenging people to think about. So what does that concept mean for your work? And obviously, everybody has to respond differently with the body of Christ. But it’s a fascinating discussion. So hopefully that’s a little bit of my background for those of you that know the EPL. My home was Newcastle. I’m an avid supporter of Newcastle. United, I believe, black and white. So away the lads, America.

Henry Kaestner: That’s very good. I don’t know that we’ve ever had a Newcastle fan on before, but maybe we have. I do know this. We’ve never had anybody that’s had such a cool accent on before. And for that reason, maybe our audience will permit us to go a little bit longer on this episode. And I want to get into a bunch of different things. But you’d spoke to some things there toward the end about putting your faith into practice in the business. So take us back. You’ve kneeled in the snow, you go back to work. Presumably you don’t have a well articulated thought through theology of work on day one back at work, but with time, of course, and the work that you’ve done with messenger at theology of work, you’ve developed that once you talk to us a little bit about that and then bridges in to how you see that play out in the financial services industry and maybe speak a little bit about the faith and financial services movement.

Andy Mills: Yeah, there’s a lot in there. So if I’m missing some stuff, keep guiding me.

Henry Kaestner: You mean it’s not fair to ask you five questions in one?

Andy Mills: You know, I’m getting old. My short term memory is not that good. Henry you know, when I became a Christian and God challenged me with that question, you know, what does it now mean to be a Christian as a CEO? The first thing I did is, you know, what we do as business people is we go out and we ask questions and we find people who are in the same place and we learn and we think about best practices. And so I went out and spoke to a bunch of people who were in leading positions as Christians and companies. And it was fascinating that the summary of I think what I heard was he had to do two things. Number one is you’ve got to work ethically. And number two, you’ve got to be prepared. If anybody wants to talk about faith and Jesus, you’ve got to be prepared to talk about Jesus. And look, those two things are wonderful. And you’re not going to hear from me that you shouldn’t do either of those things. But the question that came to me very strongly was, is that all? I mean, we’re spending all this time at work. I mean, is that all we’re doing is just make sure you work ethically. And if someone’s talking about Jesus, you’re ready to talk about Jesus. And so I started reading books because that wasn’t really satisfied and there weren’t really any very good deep books on.

You know, there are people who are talking about their own lives and their wonderful stories. But there was not a lot of what I would call theology. In other words, that’s a big, highfalutin word. But what is God’s say about this particular thing? Because that’s what I wanted to know. Right. When you’re a newcomer to the kingdom. The only thing you care about is what is God? So, you know, I’ve been introduced to the father. I want to sit at my father’s feet and I want to hear what my father is saying. And so the only place I could go then was back to scripture. All right. Because there was nowhere else to go. And interesting enough, what I found in scripture was that there are really three great mandates in scripture.

That’s the great commandment, right? Love the Lord, your God with all your heart, soul, mind strength and love your neighbor as yourself. And that’s the greatest commandment. Jesus says that’s greatest commandment, no question. The second commandment, most of us think all the time is the great commission, right, Matthew? And that’s obviously the mandate to evangelize. But, you know, when you open Genesis 1 and 2, you find another mandate. It’s called the cultural or the creation mandate, which is we are given, you know, the earth and all of God’s creation to steward or to look after or to manage. And as I began to think about why people talked about doing what was right and or helping people learn about Jesus, what I recognized as those were those first two mandates. There was the great commandment and the great commission. And when you think about what happens at church, that’s primarily what gets talked about a church. The great commandment and the great commission, you know, personal holiness on the one hand and reaching out as a church to evangelize and bring people to Jesus again, wonderful things. But the church almost never speaks about the cultural mandate, which is living every day in the workplace, which is where all of us in the congregation live for the majority of our time. And yet the church is kind of silent on that. So you get this sort of, you know, one sided Christianity focusing on God and focusing on personal holiness and focusing on evangelism, but not this whole aspect of work. And it’s not therefore surprising when you talk to most Christians in the workplace, they’re really kind of confused, you know, why am I working? What’s the purpose of my work? Is it just to make money? And if so, how much money is enough? You know, those are the kinds of questions you get into. But there’s really not a deeper sense of what’s the purpose of work. Why do we work a lot of discussion about how, but not a lot of discussion about why. And so that’s really where I started my thinking and my research basically coming out of Genesis Chapter 2. And you know, in Genesis Chapter 2, most people start with to15 that says then God put man in the garden to tend and work to God. And that’s clearly a work mandate and a cultural mandate. It’s kind of interesting because if you go a little earlier to 2 5, the creation exists. But it says in 2 5 that nothing was growing. Nothing was happening. And it gives two reasons for nothing being productive. One is there was no water and we kind of figured that out. So what did I think growing we get? But the second thing is this there was no man to work in. And, you know, that just struck me. And he obviously solves that problem in 2 6. He brings water from the deep etc rain. And in 2 7 he obviously creates men from dust. So there’s a problem in 2 5. It’s not productive. He solves the two problems in 2 6 and 2 7. But I started to think about that and I said, wait a minute. God could have done this creation thing any way he wants to. But we as human beings, he’s created us to be an integral part of his creation. And those without us, his creation doesn’t move forward because don’t forget, we start in the garden. We finish in the city. Right. If you start Genesis 1 2 and you end up in Revelation 21 22, you end up in those perfect places and community with God. But we’re not going back to the God. We’re going to a very complex city with many, many people. And this is what God is doing. His creation is progressing to the benefit and flourishing of humankind as we go along. And we as humans are part of that process. In fact, we are vital to that, because without us, it doesn’t happen. And all of a sudden works suddenly moves me from being a thing that you had to do as a utilitarian kind of exercise to be able to make money to do whatever.

Or more often, unfortunately, it’s an exercise in idolatry. Right. Look at me. And it was for me, it was it was an exercise of idolatry and pride as much as anything else. But we’ve moved from that to being a fundamental co-creation with God of the progression of his creation from a garden to a city. And when I started to figure that out, I mean, it changed everything. That’s one of the stories I wanted to tell everybody who fits my garden to acidity that story and how fundamental and important that work is a creative exercise that we’re doing in partnership with God for the flourishing of humankind. And all of a sudden, when you think about it that way, you know, you understand things like calling. I mean, it becomes so much more deep and so much more powerful. And then something else. And so then when you think about that, you know, how does one create you know, you create with products, you create an environment, you do that inconsistently with God’s commands. You think about the way people are treated. You think about the way creativity takes place. You think about how you serve. You serve customers. You serve stockholders. I mean, all of those things start to come together in a much more sort of creative sense.

William Norvell: That’s good. It’s funny, I don’t know if you’ve read this, but have you ever read Garden City by a pastor named John Markhommer?

Andy Mills: No, I have not.

William Norvell: It’s real good. I mean, it’s this whole premise. And he sort of pulls it out in. The first half of the book is about work. And the second half the book is about rest. But the overlaying architecture is about how exactly when you. Exactly what you laid out, how we started in the garden and we’re going to a city and we’re going to have jobs and we’re going to have things to do and you know, there will be farmers, but all of us won’t be gardeners. Right. That is not where we are heading. And it’s a book on faith and work. And he just has a really excellent job, in my opinion, of laying out some pieces of what you walk through.

Andy Mills: Yeah, I think a lot of people are a little worried about heaven because they go, and how can I do eternity sitting on a cloud with a harp in a white dress? But no, we’re actually going to return to work and to society. But it’s gonna be without sin. And, you know, it’s impossible for us to actually appreciate that.

Henry Kaestner: I have a question on that. Will there be financial services in heaven?

Andy Mills: You know, I think there will be, because financial services are the medium by which goods and services gets transmitted, delivered. It’s really the matrix of the building blocks of society. And so I know that was another part of your question is how do you relate that to financial services? And so, you know, the way I think about financial services as God writes about money all the time in the Bible.

Right. I mean, money is a very necessary medium in the Bible. And it’s very clear how moving away from a barter system to a financial monetary system has developed, you know, systems of commerce and has allowed us to develop so much more quickly. It’s allowed specialization to take place. If you go back to Adam Smith and all these kinds of things, you know, without money, none of those kinds of things happen. And also then without things like lending, whereby I take, say, excess that I’ve got, I provided to somebody else who needs to apply it to create more value and environment. They are working in a business they’re putting together so that they can create a new economic engine so that out of the benefits of that, they can then repay me with some, you know, interest level to allow me to want to be able to do that. So it’s an important measure of how we do commerce. But on the other hand, the accumulation of wealth also allows us then to borrow and to lend in such ways that we can actually create more productive assets more quickly. And to me, that’s as a financial professional, that’s really important. We know we’re public investors, so we invest in companies that are bringing products and services to bear in the marketplace. I spend a lot of time in Africa. You know, it’s undeniable the value that, for example, drugs and medical products have had in Africa. It’s undeniable the impact, for example, of cell towers and cell phones. And so you think about companies that are doing that. And on the one hand, you can say, well, they’re just producing a cell phone. But on the other hand, you can look at how they are changing the way societies work and people work by having better information, more safety, being able to understand markets, better bring products to the right marketplace to get the best returns for their labor. I mean, when you start to see all of these things, it’s really exciting to be able to invest in these kinds of companies because we’re investing in companies that are moving flourishing forward.

And that’s really why I love the financial services side of things, because, you know, it is the medium that accelerates the growth of products and services and ideas that a rapidly expanding globe global population, 1871 billion today, seven point three billion.

And yet we’re living at a much higher standard. All of this, although there’s a lot to be done, you know, with the gradation of poverty, et cetera. But we’re all living at a much higher standard than we were in 1870. So not only has the population multiplied by seven times, but, you know, the standard of living is improved. Pick a number four to five time. So we’re looking at like a 30 times increase in product and services and offerings. That’s incredibly productive and that’s being done through work. And that’s going back to Genesis 2 5, making us as human beings, taking God’s creation, making it productive, using imagination and moving it forward. And that’s exciting.

William Norvell: Amen. And, you know, and that’s a big piece of that Garden City concept right now. But, you know, it’s bringing heaven on earth, right. And those two things will merge into the city one day. And as you think about that and you’ve started a movement of some sort. You know, with faith in the financial services industry, could you talk a little bit about how that’s working? What are the goals and the mission behind that and sort of how that’s participating in building that city that we’re going to live in one day?

Andy Mills: Good. Well, let me just start by saying I am just one of a number of people doing this. I want to make sure that we’re clear on that. This is not a me thing. There’s a great team of people in New York. But this came out of a an observation that there are a lot more Christians in New York City and the financial community than most people are aware of. And most people live an isolated life.

And most people hide the fact that they’re Christians because of, you know, minor forms of persecution by persecution, nonetheless being ridiculed or whatever, and so people kind of left Christianity in the closet. And what then happened is they just became like everybody else in the workplace. They work like everybody else. Nobody knew that they were different. And if they were different, nobody knew the reason why. And they were isolated and get caught up. If you you know, the old one log in, a fire doesn’t burn. But if you have Lenny, they will burn strongly. That that isolation. I really believe is one of the enemy’s great strategies is to divide us and separate us and isolate us. And so the whole idea of faith in financial services is twofold.

Number one is to gather people together so that people begin to form a network. We had an event in September. We just sent out a few invitations that became viral. We had 300 people turn up to a hotel lobby just to gather. And you could see people looking around. People were saying to me like I didn’t realize there were 300 Christians in the whole financial community in New York City. I mean, they were shocked by what they saw. One guy came up to me at a major bank. He said, you know, I’ve just met a guy.

He and I sit 30 feet apart from each other. And we have done for the last 10 years and we didn’t realize we were Christians until we met here. You know? So talk about isolation. And so the first thing is to gather people.

But the second part is, you know, just gathering people, it’s good. But what we need to do is we need to transform folks so that they become impactful for the kingdom within their communities. And we do that by doing two things. And we talked about earlier, which is called the public reading of scripture. So when we gather in groups, the first thing we do is we listen to God’s word, because, you know, we spend a lot of time listening to man or listening to woman. Right. But the reality is we’re not spending enough time listening to God. And frankly, he’s the only person in many ways I want to hear from. It’s kind of nice to hear stories from people. And it’s kind of nice that your listeners will be listening to me. But I’m just a man. And I would much rather you listen to God’s word and just listen to me. And so we listen to God’s word. We take a little time for reflection and then we take an aspect from the theology of work that reflects on the scripture. We’ve just heard. And then we have a discussion about so what in the workplace? So what does that mean for practice? How could we do something different? And so what we’re trying to do is we’re doing spiritual formation, because if you don’t form people spiritually, too many baby Christians right now, but if they’re not formed spiritually, they can’t stand in a tough environment like New York City’s financial services community. And our belief is when people are in community, when they’re being spiritually formed, when they’re being encouraged by each other, and that wonderful linkage is taking place now. People are helping each other with jobs, with ideas or the setting. When we stand together, we can begin to take a stake in the stands for God in the workplace to begin to change the way we work with people, to begin to change the sort of attitudes towards work and time at work and how we think about bonuses. And so all of those things become so very interesting. And that’s what faith in financial services is all about.

Henry Kaestner: Andy I want to switch gears a little bit. You and I have talked a bit about the concept of faith driven investing. And was it look like as Christ followers are starting to understand, of course, that as God owns it on his entrusted assets to us, he cares very much about how we think about giving it. And he cares very much about the concept, I believe, of ownership and in our motivation behind these things. But also, he cares increasingly about how we deploy investment capital and that there can be a mindset of I want to make as much money as I possibly can over my Fidelity account or wherever batteries acquire. Just make as much money as I can so that I can give away as much money. But maybe there’s a concept in that the actual creation of wealth through financial price and services might bring about God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. Up until the time that there is an exit event and you have liquidity to then go ahead and give to things like young life and American Bible society. Fill in the blanks. Riff with us a little bit about that. What are your views on that? What are your hopes and your dreams? What do you think?

Andy Mills: Well, you know, the first thing I would say is I’m always very leery about someone who says to me, my spiritual gift is making money or the idea that I’m going to spend the first 20, 30 years of my career making as much money as I can so that I can give it away, because that’s obviously going to be the greatest benefit to the kingdom.

You know, I’m very skeptical about that because frankly, what I find is mostly that people are justifying the fact that they want to earn a lot of money. And the Bible’s very clear says, you know, he who loves money never has enough. And, you know, if you were to say, OK, I’m starting out at twenty five, I want to make ten million dollars a month, it made $10 million, then I’m going to stop. I’m going to change my lifestyle. I’m going to sort of give it away. And it’s that I never see anybody do that.

If you’re lucky enough or fortunate or hard enough working to get to 10, you know, by the time you got to 10, the numbers 40, by the time you get to 40, the numbers 100. And by the time it’s 100, your life’s over. You know, the story of the rich landowner continually build his bonds and store away is, you know, I think a very provocative parable. And obviously he was called a fool. And I think people are foolish to think that way. And because I think they’re not thinking well enough about the deceitfulness of their own heart, quite frankly. And they you know, they kind of want to do it their way and they want God to bless it. And they think that’s a way to do it. So I’m pretty strong on that, I have to say, maybe more strong than I should be. But I’m not sure that I really met anybody who I think the purpose of their life is to make money so they can give it away.

Because part of what that does is it delays the kingdom part till 20, 30 years down the road. And it kind of gives you a free pass on the now. Yes. And my belief is the kingdom is now. Yes. And that everything you do today is the kingdom. And you can’t have a God. Give me 30 years off and then I’ll get back to you. It just doesn’t work that way. And so even if you’re an entry level person as a Christian, you know, there’s a word in the New Testament, Oikonomides, which appears ten times.

So okionomos as Oikos is home and know Moses law. So it’s the lawgiver of home. It’s the master, if you will. It’s translated many times, but it’s also translated other ways. It’s really the intrusted one one place. It’s translated as the guardian as of a son. And I think we have to think that way. We are economy and of God’s creation. And so wherever we are in our little workgroup, our entry level work group, whatever it might be, that’s the place that God has given us of his precious creation. He loves his creation. He’s given us this part of his precious creation for us to be the Econoline of that, to be the kind of his trustee in that area. And so from the first day you move in, I think everybody should be thinking as OK, as a Christian, how can I impact this place? This place needs to be redeemed. What does that look like? And I’m just not talking about walking around with the Bible and telling everybody Bible verses. I mean, that’s part of the worst way to do it. But I’m talking about the quality of the work you do, how you work in teams, how you encourage other people, you know, all of those kinds of activities and in the investing world to make sure that the investments we’re making are going to places that will add value and, you know, kind of like that about the investment process, because withdrawing funding from businesses that are no longer as relevant as they were or who have gone wrong in some way or who are abusing whatever aspect of life is. And we’re moving constantly towards the new ideas and the ideas that are bringing progress. And that transitioning and that constant movement, I think is something that’s so very important in the financial community. So I just want us to be in the moment doing the best we can with what we’ve got and bringing a kingdom to the place that we’re in right now. In every decision we make, whether it’s a business decision, it’s an investment decision, whether it’s a people decision, it’s a culture decision. All of those just how we’re spending time even, you know, isolated today. Right. I mean, nobody’s watching what we’re doing as knowledge workers. How does anybody know? Well, God knows. You know, how we spending our time doing the best we can, even in the circumstances we’re in today.

Henry Kaestner: Andy I think that was really profound. I think that it’s really important for us to hear that as we accumulate assets with the idea that we’ll go ahead and participate in God’s kingdom in 20 or 30 years. That’s really the workings of, as you called it out of, for knowing that there’s also a different camp of people. And we’ve had some of them on the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast, for instance, I think about Alan Barnhart, who goes ahead and freezes how much earnings he makes and he gives everything else away. And yet there’s also a huge maybe where most of us end up being in this place where we look at investment assets, the investment assets in American in the world greatly dwarf that of philanthropy and of giving and charitable resources. How do you think about how those investment assets that are so large and are being deployed by different firms? How do you see them being done in a way that brings back God’s kingdom on earth? Now they’re just anythings as you just observe the financial services industry and say, you know what? That seems to be an approach and a thoughtfulness that’s hastening the New Jerusalem or bringing back God’s kingdom. And that’s a way that isn’t so.

Andy Mills: Yeah, well, it’s an interesting question. Let me just say upfront, I don’t think there is a one answer for everything. All right? We are God’s people. God’s community are all built of different people with different gifting and different calling. And I think that’s really important to understand that diversity. So, for example, you talked about Alan, who feels called to give away a lot of his resources. God bless him for that. And look, there are a lot of wonderful ministries and Mercy Ministries, et cetera, that without that kind of funding, millions of people would live. Horribly worse lives. And so, you know, I have a big category for that. I do a lot of giving myself to those kinds of things.

But I also have the category that says long term, the average quality of life across everybody in the world is being raised by business.

And if you look at Africa, for example, you know, I think you can say philanthropy’s done a very good job on the medical front, but it’s done a kind of a lousy job on the business front in terms of creating economic activity by which people can grow and communities can grow. And that’s being done by business.

Henry Kaestner: Talk to us a little bit about the Mango Fund, because that’s something that you’ve been very intentional about for a long time. I think a lot earlier than people were talking about faith driven investing. You had started the mango fund. Walk us through that paradigm and that dynamic about how you seen investing in commerce in hard places like that is bringing my guys kingdom in Uganda.

Andy Mills: Well, the Mango Fund, like so many things when you’re working with God, is kind of like we had no idea what we were doing. But thankfully, it did. And so it just came out of me traveling to Uganda because my daughter was over there for a missionary semester and she turned 21. And my wife and I said, we’re not going to have our little girl turn 21 without us being there. And I went to Uganda and I’ve never been to Africa before, ran global businesses, but never been to Africa before.

And I looked around Kampala, which is a capital city of Uganda. And I just saw people kind of bartering and trying to scratch a living. And, you know, the old adage is, when you’re in hammer, everything looks like a nail on the business guy. But everything looked to me like a business, right. They needed to grow businesses because if they didn’t have businesses, they’re not producing things that operating wealth. And then I went up to a place called a rule, which is in the West Nile region of Kampala was bad. I mean, a rule was off the charts. It’s a marginalized dollar a day kind of place. And I just felt led by God to keep going back to this place. I had no plan. I had no strategy in place. You know, I’m so enamored by people who have these global rollout strategies. Henry, you’re a little bit like that. I’m not that kind of guy. I’m just kind of go and do and try and be faithful.

And I started meeting with people. You know, when I say someone in the transportation business, I mean, they had a bicycle and I tried to help them think a little bit about how could they begin to grow? How could they do more revenue? How could they hire another person? And the church was very instrumental in introducing me to people like that. By the way, they had a theology of work up there, which is work is evil. Therefore, why should Christians be involved in work? Wow. And it’s not surprising, therefore, that most of the work done up in a row is done by the Muslim community and the Christian community was condemned to poverty. And so, you know, I had to work with the bishop there and all kinds of things. But ultimately, what I realized is this thing called a missing medal and it’s talked about now. I mean, I’m talking ten, fifteen years ago now. But, you know, you have the micro-finance one hundred dollar, one hundred dollars.

And then you have the structured finance from the bank, which may be 50 to 100 thousand dollars. But that’s not where most of people are living. Most of people are living in small businesses with two or three people milling or extracting oils or doing some repair work or a little bit of manufacturing or whatever.

And they have no cash. I mean, there’s just no cash. So even if they have a good idea, there is nothing they can invest in that idea. Their families don’t have money. You know, they can’t go to a bank for money. There’s no lending into that area. And that’s called the missing middle. And so we just decided that because we believe in the theology of work, the people should be productive.

The people should be working. That it does yield returns when done. Well, those returns can be reinvested and grow and multiply, etc. It’s this virtuous circle because we believed in that from the Bible. We started investing in some of these little players and that was the beginning of the mango fund. So today we have about 13 people on the fund working on the fund. We have investments all over Uganda where in about fifty two companies right now I think. I mean, heaven only knows what will happen as a result of this coronavirus. I mean, the whole thing might just die.

It’s possible. But we have seen businesses grow. We’ve seen employment double. We’ve seen just wonderful things take place. And people, when they’re productive at work, you see a change in their lives. You see a change in their attitudes because they’re doing what God’s designed them to do. God is not designed to sit around in the marketplace waiting to be hired. Right. God has designed us to be worked to use our hands, our brains, and to see people beginning to work like that is really just such a joy.

And even as the thing goes away, I’m convinced we’ll start all over again and work with it and try and build that, because I just think that’s so fundamentally important.

William Norvell: Andy, as we come to a close, let’s switch gears a little bit to something Henry mentioned in the intro, which is your it sounds like some of your friends are renewed vigor for the public reading of scripture and God brought that alive to you in a new way and you all really took action on it. Could you tell us a little bit more about that effort in New York and within your circle?

Yeah. Thank you. It’s something we’re very passionate about. And you know, again. Credit for this goes to Bill Hwang. Bill is a pastor’s son who had a hard time reading scripture. He knew he wanted to read scripture, but he had a really hard time consistently reading scripture the way we’re told that we need to get on to it every morning and read fifteen, twenty minutes and be in God’s word every morning just because of his work, but also because of who he was. He had a hard time doing that, so he always says so he went to Amazon to solve this problem. And at Amazon, what he found was some audio drama Bibles. And he ordered a couple of these audio drama Bibles. And he started listening to these audio drama Bibles and suddenly found out that, you know, while he’d listened for half an hour and he’d really enjoyed it and received it the same time he and I were talking together. And I remember once in his office we were opening up Nehemiah Chapter 8 and went as we read the scripture. Bill is such a man of action that he immediately started a Friday morning public reading of scripture session at his office whereby he invited people from Wall Street and anybody wanted to come to listen to God’s word for an hour on a Friday morning. By the way, that was about a 10 years ago. That’s still going on today. So that led us to you know, on the one hand, we had a practical experience that people were really enjoying this and getting something out of it. But at the same time, we then looked into scripture and we said, oh, well, lo and behold, actually, scripture talks about it itself as one of the ways to read scripture. Right. So you go all the way back to here, the public declaration of God’s word throughout the Old Testament, obviously, into the Jewish first century life. And then, you know, this is what Paul talks to Timothy about in first Timothy 4:13, who says, devote yourself to the public reading of scripture, to preaching and teaching. So all three of those things are important. And I think what we’ve done in the church typically is we’ve done a lot of teaching and preaching. We do very little of the public reading of scripture. By the way, when I say the public reading scripture, I’m not really talking about, you know, standing on a milk crate on the corner of a thing with a loudspeaker. You know, in Times Square, just having scripture bleeding out. Also, folks that do that, God bless them. I think that’s amazing. What we’re talking about is communities gathering together around tables in community together to come regularly, to listen to large portions of God’s word and to do it together. And so we do it four times, including faith in financial services in our office. We’re finding churches are doing it more. Colleges and universities are beginning to do it.

So something that happens when we come together. Listen to God’s word in community. You know, that’s something that’s very humble about listening and having someone else read to you because you’re not in control of that. When I read scripture, I’m in control of it. You know, it’s kind of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I’m not necessarily putting any emotion in. It’s not really challenging bit. But when someone is a voice actor who’s taking the words and is really putting emotion and emphasis into it, it really has a very different impact on us. And we have to humbly listen to God’s word. And when you’re listening with 20, 30, 50 other people in a room, I can’t explain it to you, but you concentrate harder. You’re listening more. You don’t get distracted. And the Holy Spirit is just so much more powerful. And we just see when people are finished, they just sort of sit there and people writing notes and we’re seeing people get so much more out of this. So this is a practice that we think is so important because, frankly, biblical literacies as low as it’s ever been today. The strategy of go off onto your own and read your little bits of 15 minutes at a time if you can do it is fine. My wife can do it. She’s unbelievable icon. And for the majority of people, the majority of people don’t you know, you start off with a Bible in a year. And by the time we’re in Leviticus in February, you know, it’s all over, frankly. And this is a way of gathering people together to hear God’s word. By the way, God’s word is only 90 hours. I mean, that’s all it is, 90 hours. People are shocked by that. So if you meet a couple of times a week for an hour at a time, you through the Bible and much less than a year. And, you know, you just keep at absorbing God’s word. You’re constantly in it.

And that’s something that happens when you listen for an hour or half an hour as opposed to listening to a chapter or a part of a chapter that you hear at church, because you have no context to it. And there are themes that come through when God is talking to us in these practices and in these chapters that that become so important.

I mean, to read a letter. Twenty three of the books of the Bible are less than 20 minutes. You read the whole letter. We just did. First John and second John, actually, for our latest Faith in Financial Services last week, when you read the whole letter, we had N.T. Wright in our offices and he heard first Peter with us. And at the end of it, he just said, you know, I’m a renowned first century scholar, a New Testament first century scholar. So that’s the first time I’ve ever received this book, the way it was meant to be received in college. You know, as a group read out as a letter outloud. And he was blown away by it. And so anyway, I could go on and on and on. But this is something we’re pushing very hard now with Finding ministries. Prison Fellowship International. Taking it into prisons all. Can you imagine prisoners hearing word in their language and just being able to listen to God’s word? Nobody having to tell him anything. Just let God speak. And that’s really the movement is to let God speak to us again.

William Norvell: Amen, Andy as we do come to our final clause. Sounds like you’re getting a lot of it. Weekly, what piece of God’s word is coming alive to you right now? Could be in the season, could be this morning or something you’ve heard and had read over you. What would you mind share with our listeners? Is God doing in your world?

Andy Mills: Yeah. Well, so much. But I would say a couple of weeks ago we listened to the Book of Roots and we had a very fruitful discussion afterwards about tithing in the 21st century. And how do we use our wealth and how do we help them or marginalized? And then I’ve been struck by acts. Chapter 2 was at 42 and on 45 in particular, which is they gathered together and sold possessions to help each other. You know, we’re in an unprecedented time right now. I mean, the unemployment figures are just coming out.

Businesses are closing. I mean, this is gonna be a really difficult time. And I think for me, those kinds of passages really. I mean, in some ways, I think God was preparing for this. But, you know, one of the discussions I’m having with the elders of our church is, OK, we’ve already got like half a dozen people unemployed in that church that just happened in the last couple of weeks. So how are we going to deal with that? Right. I mean, how do we come together as a community to help each other? And then how do we come outside the church community to help everybody else so that the church can be the church? So I do a lot of work with the Salvation Army. And I mean, they’re having to change the way they deliver food. But that’s so wonderful. They put themselves out on the front line. And, you know, that’s the church being the church. So that’s kind of what’s on my heart right now. What’s on my heart is how do we that have more help with people that have less at a time of great stress like this? And I think that’s what God’s been putting on my heart.

William Norvell: Thank you so much for sharing that. Thank you so much for sharing your time. This has just been a wonderful journey through scripture, through God’s word, through his view of financial services and view of faith and work as a whole in view of just how he’s going to culminate and bring things to work in eternity. And just really thankful for your time and for for spending with us.

Andy Mills: So it’s great. Is exciting stuff, isn’t it, guys? This is really good stuff to get a hold of. And I’m so frustrated by when I see Christians in the workplace just kind of living out the string, if you will, without really thinking about what is God’s purpose for them. And that’s if I had a message at all. That’s that. Think about purpose. We what purpose is God had for you and bring a completely different attitude to work. You know, we can change the world.