by Jewel Burks

Since I’ve been able to work, I’ve worked multiple jobs. During summers growing up, I worked in the businesses started by my grandparents in Mobile, AL and passed down to my father and his siblings. You could find me doing everything from working the register at their BP gas station to preparing sandwiches in my father’s Subway. When I went to college, despite having a full ride academic scholarship at Howard University, I took full advantage of work study opportunities — working “security” in the evenings at the School of Business and working in the afternoons as a part-time instructor at MS², Howard’s on campus Middle School for Math and Science. Even as I worked my first full time job at Google, I moonlighted as a fashion model, signed to the now defunct, San Francisco based, City Model Management, and doing runway shows and local advertisements on the evenings and weekends to bring in an extra thousand dollars per month. Fear of being stuck in a generational cycle of debt and financial insecurity or not having enough money to pursue my dreams has always been a driving force in my life and decisions.

Click here to read the full article, originally by Jewel Burks

by Sound Financial Strategies Group

Emerging Markets are an often overlooked area of investment. Clint Sorenson joined The Chase this week to talk about international investing with Chris McAlpin. Check it out below.

by Bill and Dana Wichterman

Give someone a fish and they’ll eat for a day, but invest in a for-profit commercial fishery and their community could prosper and flourish for a lifetime.  Well, that’s not exactly how the old proverb goes, but it’s no less true.

And that’s why we’re leaning into impact investing: it’s sustainable, dignifying, cures and prevents poverty, helps people flourish, heals broken cultures, and draws from a much larger pool of funding to have a bigger impact.

Philanthropy is important, and it’s often the only way to address a problem. When someone is hungry and in need of their next meal, giving them a fish is the best thing to do. But it usually doesn’t address the underlying cause of the hunger. 

Plus, there is way more money available for impact investing than philanthropy. The average net worth of a family is around $100,000, whereas a tithing family will give just $10,000 annually. Harnessing the power of the liquid assets (in retirement and non-retirement vehicles) to intentionally invest according to biblical principles means the potential year-over-year impact of the investment dollars is far larger with a much longer tail.

Business is driven by two things: customers and shareholders. And in a sense, shareholders are more important because they also care about customers – without whom they won’t make money. Witness the power of shareholders shaping culture through ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) investing, prompting businesses to behave far differently than if their sole concern were sales. With Christians managing more than $150 trillion, the power to shape culture is huge. 

In the developing world, impact investing has far more potential to alleviate poverty and lead to human flourishing than charitable giving. Consider Sunshine Nuts in Mozambique. Founded by former Hershey Foods chocolate buyer Don Larson and his wife Terri, they are working to create a sustainable, for-profit cashew processing facility in one of the poorest countries in the world. They are providing good-paying jobs, training, and in a high-quality and safety-conscious factory shaping a culture of meritorious work for its employees and suppliers. The workers receive a small bonus every day they show up on time, upending the prevailing culture that undervalues timeliness. And Sunshine Nuts investors are betting on getting a decent return on their dollar so they can turn around and invest their appreciated capital in another start-up that has a redemptive mission. 

The Sunshine Nuts employees probably don’t feel any gratitude to the company investors, because as far as they’re concerned, they’re trading their labor for their wages, giving them a sense of accomplishment and dignity that is absent when the poor are handed a fish. Work is a reward in itself since it’s one of the ways we reflect God’s image. Empowering the poor to earn their wages is ennobling in a way that charity just can’t be.

Impact investing can cure and prevent poverty in the first instance. Plus, wages create taxpayers, potential donors and investors.  The unbending power of profits, deadlines, term sheets and spread sheets bring a real-world crucible to communities that government and philanthropic programs may lack. And it’s this market power that has the strength to straighten out twisted cultures (and all cultures need straightening to greater and lesser extents).

Impact investing is akin to the yet-to-be-invented perpetual motion machine that just keeps on going and going. But these machines need capital to be built in the first place. That’s where Christians come in.

We could seek a return-focused investment strategy without regard for the second bottom line, but why? If God wants to steward all our resources for His Kingdom, we shouldn’t ignore how we are making money. After having been challenged by Henry Kaestner and Greg Lernihan to use all of our resources in an intentional double-bottom line way, we’re systematically going through our portfolio, transitioning away from vehicles that have no regard for social and spiritual impact to those that do.  

Admittedly, this requires effort – more effort than most busy people have time to expend. How can we vet all the companies in an index fund, much less a startup half-way around the world?

Thankfully, there is a movement in the Church to create organizations to do just that. 

Praxis, Lion’s Den, Impact Foundation, Talanton, Eventide, Kingdom Advisors, and of course, Faith-Driven Investor are among the growing number of Christian-led organizations empowering Christians to unlock the potential of their capital to remake the world and lead to human flourishing. To us, it feels like a work of the Spirit blowing through the Church, and we couldn’t be more excited about it.

Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch Prime Minister 120 years ago, said, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’” This includes our money – and not just our tithe, but our investments, too.  

Article originally posted here by Eventide

by Shaun Morgan

The U.S. population is just over 330 million.

The world population is approaching 8 billion.

Even though we live in this giant world filled with billions of people, our functional worlds—the worlds made up of the people we interact with on an almost daily basis—are much smaller. In this way, we experience two worlds with two different orders simultaneously.

The Two-World Tension

Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian-British economist and philosopher, famously called these two worlds the “micro-cosmos” and the “macro-cosmos.” (1)

The micro-cosmos is made up of our immediate tribes—our families, close friends, and loved ones. We have a clear order of responsibility within this world. We are naturally inclined to be kind, generous, patient, and even sacrificial towards these people. 

The macro-cosmos consists of the world beyond our immediate tribes—the people we barely know or do not know at all. Strangers. Our order of responsibility is murkier in this world, and we feel a tension between wanting to act on our natural human inclinations to care for others but wondering if the burden is too overwhelming or even inappropriate to extend beyond our immediate communities.  

The Good Samaritan

One of Jesus’ most well-known parables and one that is accepted across many cultures is the parable of the Good Samaritan. Jesus tells this parable in response to a question from a lawyer. Wanting legal clarification on God’s command to “Love your neighbor as yourself,” the lawyer asks, “Who is my neighbor?”  

The good Samaritan’s neighbor was a complete stranger who needed help. It’s likely that the story was told with an intentional emphasis placed on the geographic and cultural differences between the two.

Though profound and revolutionary to the tribalized culture at the time, the parable points to an even greater reality that is instinctively familiar to every human heart. 

Embedded in all of us is a yearning to see the needs of others met. Indeed, we experience deep satisfaction when we can help. And this empathetic desire extends from the people within our most immediate tribes all the way to the strangers we encounter on the street.

Our Macro-Cosmic Neighbors

The two-world tension mentioned above is the modern-day version of the who is my neighbor question. In a world that is simultaneously growing in population and becoming increasingly connected, we are constantly having to ask the question, Who is my macro-cosmic neighbor?

Our macro-cosmic neighbors are all of the people in our periphery that may only be tangentially affected by our actions. As our world becomes more connected, however, our actions have a broader reach to even more distant neighbors. 

Your neighbor is the factory worker who knits together the shirt on your back, the farmer who grows the vegetables you eat for dinner. She is the cashier at the store who works double shifts at minimum wage so her grandmother doesn’t have to, the single parent who struggles to find time to work enough hours to buy groceries and help their kids with their homework.

Your neighbor is the co-worker who needs you to be competent and trustworthy in your work so they can be competent and trustworthy in theirs, the customers you serve at your work who rely on the product or service your company offers to add value to their lives. 

And your neighbors are all of the people who are affected by the products and operations of the companies you invest in.

The way we love these macro-cosmic neighbors will look functionally different than the way we love those in our micro-cosmos, but our innate sense of empathy does not end with our immediate communities.  

Getting to Reimagine

We may want to avoid thinking about the macro-cosmos because the feeling of never being able to do enough can be overwhelming. 

But what if there are two sides to the empathy that is embedded in us? Empathy causes us to feel pain for people who hurt, but it also causes us to rejoice when that pain goes away. 

So, as we look for more ways to care for our macro-cosmic neighbors, it could become an exciting pursuit of the pleasure that comes with imbuing a sense of loving purpose into our actions that seek their well-being and less about avoiding the shame of not doing enough. 

Perhaps Jesus’ answer to the question Who is my neighbor? was less about bestowing an arbitrary burden on his listeners and more about unveiling a slice of wisdom that reflects how they were wired to care for their neighbors both near and far. 

Perhaps we’ve got it all wrong. Maybe it’s time to rethink our paradigm. Instead of thinking that we have to love our macro-cosmic neighbor, why not rejoice in the fact that 

we get to love the stranger.

We get to love our most distant, macro-cosmic neighbor.

Which means we get to reimagine how we live, work, play, spend, give, and, yes, invest with a special purpose of loving our neighbors in both worlds.

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Note

(1) F. A. Hayek,The Fatal Conceit: Volume 1, The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 18, Kindle.

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Photo by Adelin Preda on Unsplash