This article was originally published here.

Check out The Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics for other quality content!

by Hugh Whelchel

Are wealthy people greedier than others?

According to a report in the Los Angeles Times, wealth breeds greed and other vices:

The rich really are different from the rest of us, scientists have found—they are more apt to commit unethical acts because they are more motivated by greed.

Is this reality or a stereotype? Has the media contributed to a perception that wealth and capitalism equal “greed”?

In the 1987 movie Wall Street, Gordon Gekko proclaims that “…greed—for the lack of a better word—is good.” Oliver Stone’s film sent a message that the free market system promotes greed and gives unscrupulous businessmen, like Gekko, a vehicle to line their pockets at the expense of others.

Real life events in the last 30 years have also reinforced this image, from Michel Milken and Enron to the subprime mortgage crisis.

The reality is that we are all susceptible to greed, rich and poor alike. Greed arises from man’s fallen nature. This fallen nature impels man to satisfy his desires with the least possible expenditure of effort, which often requires his satisfaction at the expense of others.

Cultural vs. Biblical Definition of Greed

Webster’s Dictionary defines greed as “a selfish and excessive desire for more of something (as money) than is needed.” Although most people, including many Christians, embrace this definition, where do we draw the line regarding “more of something than is needed” or what do I “deserve”?

Many have slipped into a relativistic definition of greed. Who decides not only what is needed, but when someone has more than enough? Who decides what one needs and deserves? Most of these cultural definitions of greed don’t address these questions.

In the New Testament, the Greek word pleonexia, originating from the Greek πλεονεξια, is the word that is most commonly translated as greed or covetousness (see Colossians 3:1–11; Luke 12:13–21; 1 Thessalonians 2:5; 2 Peter 2:3).

Biblical commentator John Ritenbaugh describes greed as a “ruthless self-seeking and an arrogant assumption that others and things exist for one’s own benefit.”

New Testament Greek scholar William Barclay describes pleonexia as an “accursed love of having,” which “will pursue its own interests with complete disregard for the rights of others, and even for the considerations of common humanity.”

There is an important thread that runs through the biblical definition that further qualifies the typical definitions of greed. It is the idea that greed fosters the taking of something that is not rightfully ours. Our culture’s current relativistic definition of greed does not address this component.

Yet, even with the biblical definition of greed, many still have a problem with the reason many have become wealthy in a free market system: self-interest.

A Biblical View of Self-Interest

There is a very clear difference between greed and self-interest. Self-interest is the willingness to do something of value for others to secure the things that benefit oneself.  In other words, our self-interest, or pursuing and using our own gifts, talents, and resources, informs how we will be useful to others. Without responding to our self-interest, we might wander fruitlessly trying to find a vocation.

The Scottish moral philosopher known as “the father of modern capitalism,” Adam Smith, wrote in The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations that,

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

This is a very biblical concept.

Yet today, many associate the word “self-interest” with selfishness. Dictionary.com defines self-interest as, “Regard for one’s own interest or advantage, especially with disregard for others.” That second clause is problematic.

“With disregard for others” was not the way Smith understood the term “self-interest,” nor is it true to the biblical definition. Smith’s position, and the Bible’s, is that you serve your self-interest when you serve the self-interest of others. The idea of wanton pursuit of unrestrained desires would have been objectionable to Smith, and should be to us as well.

The Bible does not condemn the pursuit of legitimate self-interest. Philippians 2:4 makes this very clear when Paul says,

Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.

Echoing Paul’s admonition, Scott Rae, a professor of Christian ethics, writes that self-interest isn’t unbiblical, but must be balanced by love for others:

…there is a place for legitimate self-interest, to which the bible periodically appeals, only it must be balanced by a compassionate concern for the interest of others.

In his booklet, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism: Thirty Years Later, the late Michael Novak explains that “self-interest” is not evil in and of itself; it manifests in different ways depending on the heart of the individual:

… “self-interest” is a morally neutral word. Sometimes it stands for something transcendently good: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” [Matthew 8:36] It is more in our self-interest to love our neighbor as ourselves and to love God above all. …Some self-interests are evil, some are neutral, and some are very good.

So, while the Bible cautions that self-interest can devolve into the sin of selfishness and greed, biblical self-interest enables us to become well-functioning, contributing members of God’s community.

This is the way God made us, and it is important for us to understand self-interest in the context of our work. The biblical idea of self-interest, rightly understood, allows us to work creatively, using all our God-given gifts in a way that serves our own needs whileserving the needs of others.

This video was originally published here.

Synergy Village started when Loren and Adele Funk invited homeless people to participate in a Christmas celebration. After singing carols and handing out gifts though, they found out that there was something more these people needed—homes.

Watch this video to find out what happened next in their story…

This article was originally published here.

Check out Greenmoney for other quality content!

by Jeffrey Decko

More than thirty years ago, I began work in the community investment field as a Jewish activist working with people of other faiths, races and national origins. Working now at the Calvert Foundation, I have found an eagerness among other faith-based investors to continue growing the impact investing field which has become much larger and more financially sophisticated than it was a generation ago.

Faith-based social investing in low-income communities was a much narrower field then, but it was unquestionably a leading edge of what has become the highly visible and rapidly growing impact investment sector. Led by orders of nuns who bravely risked their own retirement funds and institutional assets, the movement grew to include mainline Protestant churches and one small but innovative player that initiated a program to stimulate Jewish American participation in low-income community investing. As the field grew, so did participants’ skill sets. Today faith-based impact investors are no longer simply prophetic advocates and committed organizers; rather they have learned to be skilled financial experts, innovative dealmakers and risk evaluators, efficient administrators, experienced salespeople and marketing mavens, and technology wizards.

But although faith-based social investment has grown to include hundreds of actors, the predominant mode of activity has been overwhelmingly defined by silo-defined involvement. Only rarely have social investors from faith-based communities joined together to increase the volume of their investments and leverage their complimentary skills and capacities to increase their impact. An important exception to this denominationally limited social investment model was the establishment of the Isaiah Fund after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Then, approximately a dozen-and-a-half faith communities combined to establish an advisory body that supervised a small organizing and technical staff to invest some $7 million in a pooled fund which was dedicated to rebuilding New Orleans and to creating a structure that could be used to respond with financing for low-income communities affected by other major disasters such as Hurricane Sandy.

Over the past decade-plus since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region, a new spirit has arisen within the faith-based social investment movement. This ethos has been wonderfully exemplified in part by the activities of the Isaiah Fund and the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR). Alongside the dramatic expansion of both domestic and international social investing, faith-based communities have been expanding their vision to include classic religious values of celebration and outright community building in their embrace of the generally secular model of impact investing. Through their evolving efforts, faith communities may actually be adding a deeply humanizing feature to impact investing which already exhibits consistently increasing degrees of cooperation and collaboration, if only to increase leverage and outcomes.

Recently, in numbers of meetings and conferences as well as in individual conversations, I have heard faith-based investors repeatedly express great re-dedication to the principles that originally motivated them to direct their religious activism through the use of personal and institutional financial assets to develop their neighborhoods, regions and nations and to sustain our planet. In their framing of it, the preeminent of those values is Justice which stands as the keystone that strongly binds all the others. Beyond their efforts to stimulate commitment to impact investing within their own religious and ethnic communities, faith-based impact investors now seek to meet the current historical moment by transcending the borders of their respective traditions to stand together as stakeholders of all that we hold in common: our families, communities and the planet itself. Happily, representatives from the great scriptural traditions, both West and East, have stood up to be counted as advocates for the worldwide impact investment movement. They have identified the web of planetary interdependence in which we all reside and the prophetic responsibility to act that we share as individuals and as members of the range of institutions with which we are affiliated. Leadership for this effort has notably been offered by some of the world’s great religious leaders including the Dalai Lama and Pope Francis.

Now, that sensibility is being activated and brought to scale. Recognizing the trends and tendencies among faith-based investors, Calvert Foundation has chosen to take advantage of its own financial strength and staff capacities to establish the Jubilee Assembly an umbrella forum dedicated to impact investing for self-identified faith-based individuals and institutions. “Jubilee” refers to the overall process described in the Hebrew Bible, of restoring capital to the most economically deprived sectors of society. It is a term with deep social justice resonance for all three of the great Western religious traditions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

The Jubilee Assembly will bind together and brand the dozens of religiously-based impact investors who already hold Calvert Foundation’s Community Investment Notes® and it will attract others at both the national and congregational levels across faith traditions. Besides providing a public forum for faith-based investors to promote Impact and low-income community investing, the Jubilee Assembly will provide access for them to make customized selections within the existing context of Calvert Foundation’s Community Investment Note®. (Even so, precisely in order to help build the field, Jubilee Assembly members will not have to purchase CF’s Community Investment Note® to enroll: www.calvertfoundation.org/faith )

Besides reaching out to various faith communities, one innovative aspect of the Jubilee Assembly is the Tzedek (Justice) Alliance which provides Jewish Americans with a unique venue for impact investing that coincides with the Jewish ethical tradition of reaching out to those in need with empowering investments which are preferred even to grants and charity. In addition to that, the Jubilee Assembly will include representation from both Christian and Muslim communities. Some of the initial partners in the Jubilee Assembly are Azzad Asset Management, Faith and Money Network, Praxis Mutual Funds, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, Trinity Health and United Church of Christ.

Calvert Foundation (CF) is both a logical and excellent home for the Jubilee Assembly. For over 20 years, Calvert Foundation (www.calvertfoundation.org) has offered a convenient and risk-mitigated way to invest for social good. As the only deep impact, fixed-income investment opportunity that is available with a CUSIP through brokerage firms, the Community Investment Note has allowed investors to receive consistent financial returns and measurable social returns[1]. The capital CF raises through the Note is used to make loans to non-profits and social enterprises throughout the U.S. and around the world. CF has helped over 15,000 investors channel over $1.2 billion into organizations creating social impact with a 100% repayment rate. In all that time, CF has built strong and continuing working relationships with dozens of faith-based leaders and institutions that have bought CF’s Notes and created remarkable impact investment projects throughout the U.S. and worldwide. Not surprisingly, some of their most remarkable deals have involved the nexus between key concerns of faith communities: environment, energy and poverty as reflected in Calvert Foundation’s environmental portfolio and women’s investment initiative WIN-WIN.

This and other similar impact investment work is being adopted increasingly by religiously-oriented (and also committed secular) investors to realize one purpose: to create greater financial equity for people and communities at the margins in order to bring greater financial opportunity and sustainability for communities and the environment, to do Justice! Equally significant, these impact investors are being joined directly on an ever increasing basis, by people at the margins both in the U.S. and throughout our ever more globalized world. Partly as a result of the impact investing and fair trade movements, those folks have not only benefited from financial investments, they have also been educated (and educated themselves!) to become more financially knowledgeable planetary citizens. In that way, the beneficiaries become partners and benefactors so the aspiration becomes material reality through effective impact investing that transcends mere good intentions.

If “community” is a value of American civic religion, it is certainly an aspiration of traditional religious teachings. For that reason, faith-based investors have readily identified with impact investing based on their historical participation in community investment initiatives ever since the Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) movement began. In the religiously alive consciousness of those investors, there is no distinction between lenders and borrowers; they are all stakeholders in a commonweal of connection and mutuality. Of course this attitude is not exclusive to faith-based investors but it is their hallmark. For them “community” is an inclusive honorific and not an objectifying euphemism for the needy and disempowered. Similarly, “impact” describes the social and economic benefits to be realized by everyone in the process.

Faith-based investors recognize that low-income community investing and impact investing are effectively the same. Both have the capacity to help bond together and even heal disparate segments of our fragmented nation and world. Calvert Foundation’s Jubilee Assembly and various other denominational and religiously inspired community and impact investment projects aim to link unexpected partners from within our society and across the globe. These faith-based investor activists engage in impact investing that is premised on initiatives which model a transcendence of borders, going beyond the boundaries of our conventional and predictable expectations to accomplish material ends with spiritual dividends for all parties concerned.

Article by Jeffrey Dekro, who has been a community and money organizer for almost 40 years. In 1980, he founded the Non-Profit Energy Management Corporation along with a subsidiary loan fund that helped finance energy conservation measures by Philadelphia faith-based congregations and nonprofits. Jeffrey founded The Shefa Fund in 1988, which he led for 18 years before initiating a merger with Jewish Fund for Justice that created the Jewish Funds for Justice, now Bend the Arc. At Shefa, Jeffrey established the TZEDEC Economic Development Campaign, which stimulated more than $50 million in American Jewish and faith-based investment for low-income community development to promote affordable housing, small business loans and vital social services. In 2008, after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, he conceived and founded the Isaiah Fund with other faith-based activists and institutional partners.

Jeffrey is now the Director of Faith-Based Initiatives for Calvert Foundation (CF), a new position designed specifically for him. CF is a non-profit that enables people and institutions to invest in its Community Investment Note to provide community development financing and services to under-served communities in the US and worldwide. Through the Community Investment Note, CF connects individual investors with organizations around the globe that develop affordable housing, create jobs, protect the environment, and working in numerous other ways for the social good. Since 1995, more than 15,000 Calvert Foundation investors have invested more than $1 billion.

This article was originally presented at The Christian Economic Forum 2018.
Check out CEF for other quality content!

The Christian Economic Forum hosts a world-class Global Event each year to connect the top industry leaders and experts from around the world with other individuals who are compelled to act upon the principles of God’s economy. The following paper was presented at CEF 2018.

— by Tim Macready

The Bible teaches that we are stewards of all we have. Everything, including “our” money, has been entrusted to us by God so we may faithfully steward it for His glory and our joy. This is true of each dollar (or pound, euro, shilling, or peso!) we have, whether we spend it today, save it for later, or give it away. Our financial choices should reflect our faith.

Christians have been leaders in giving for centuries. One of the distinguishing characteristics of the early church was the way she provided not only for her own poor, but also for the poor from the societies around her. Christians are more likely to give—and give more—than their secular counterparts (although sadly not necessarily more than followers of other religions).

Christians have also been leaders in responsible spending. The modern fair-trade movement traces its roots back to Mennonites, Quakers, and the Salvation Army. Its origins, however, lie even farther back in the efforts to stamp out the slave trade through a boycott of West Indian sugar—efforts fired by an understanding of the slave as “a man and a brother” made in God’s image. Dr. Martin Luther King, in his final sermon, reminded his listeners that withdrawing economic support sends a powerful message to companies and industries.

Likewise, when it comes to investing, Christians were early adopters of the idea that moral considerations matter. As far back as 1758, the Quakers prohibited their members from “investing” in slaves. John Wesley’s sermon, “The Use of Money,” articulates a well-developed understanding of the way we as Christians are to engage in trade—avoiding industries that harm people or that are involved in fraudulent activity.

Sadly, many Christian investors lag behind their secular peers in using capital responsibly and for good. We have often settled just for screening out a few companies from our portfolio on moral grounds. Or even worse, we have divorced our investment and our faith entirely, creating a secular-sacred divide that doesn’t care about how our portfolio grows, so long as the proceeds are used faithfully.

In the meantime, secular investors push ahead. Responsible Investment today is a US$20 trillion industry. Over half of Australia’s $2 trillion pension assets have divested from tobacco stocks. Mainstream investors the world over have bought into the idea that environmental, social, and governance factors are relevant not only to the investment performance of our portfolios, but also to how the finance industry as a whole plays its part as a positive and responsible contributor to society.

If we are truly about seeking a just economy and society, Christians must awaken and see their investment portfolios as an expression of their faith that can be a powerful tool for good. We should be early adopters and leaders in this transformative effort to shape our economies and investment markets, pursuing human flourishing and creation care.

What does it look like for Christians to wrestle with investing not just for profit, but also for impact? There are many questions to ask and much discernment is needed.

As we seek to avoid harm, at what point do we hold a company accountable for its contribution to harm, when other parties (subsidiaries, consumers, governments) rightly share responsibility? How do we maintain integrity and faithfulness in the way we invest since every company has flaws and faults? We must find an appropriate balance between avoiding investments that create harm and recognising that most companies do much good, especially by creating jobs and providing valuable products and services.

What does it look like to invest for flourishing? What is the view of the good life we are seeking for those impacted by our investments? How can we invest in such things?

We must also wrestle with questions about performance trade-offs. As followers of Christ, we value justice over profit maximisation. But we cannot forget we are stewards entrusted with assets and an expectation of return. Those of us who invest in a fiduciary context often feel constrained in our ability to adopt responsible investment strategies, fearing we might experience lower performance or higher risk in the pursuit of responsible or impact investment goals.

There is, however, a growing pool of evidence that these strategies can improve long-term investment performance. At the same time, the idea that a fiduciary exists solely for the financial benefit of its beneficiaries is increasingly being challenged. As Christians, we affirm that stewards are to act faithfully. Even so, beneficiaries of pension schemes, managed funds, and other pooled investments are demanding their values be taken into account in the way that portfolios are managed, regardless of the financial implications. As Christians, we should be engaged in this debate—at its core is a question about the fundamental purpose of investment markets and the very structures of our economies. We have an opportunity to

remind the world that money and markets are a tool for human flourishing and creation care, not a mindless exercise in profit maximisation while destroying lives and pillaging God’s creation.

Knowing Christ transforms our lives; how can it also transform our investment portfolios? As Christian investors, we expect to answer to the Master about how we have been faithful with the portfolios He entrusted to us. We will give an account not only for our financial returns, but also our non-financial outcomes.

Wrestling through these questions takes time and persistence. Perhaps we need new categories of investment and new intermediaries who will help us as Christians to invest faithfully. These might include:

• Venture capital firms investing in businesses that integrate Christian faith.

• Property funds that adopt Christian approaches to every facet of real estate.

• Equities managers who integrate Christian principles across their investment strategy.

• Advisors who will help us align our portfolios with our faith.

In God’s providence, many such organisations are emerging, giving us more opportunities to be faithful with what has been entrusted to us, so that it not only grows financially, but also leaves a good and faith-filled legacy.

Read the whitepaper in its original form here.

subscribe to the podcast here

Our friend Frank Chen stopped by the Faith Driven Investor podcast to talk about how he’s helping entrepreneurs change the World at the Silicon Valley Venture powerhouse of Andreessen Horowitz. As Frank describes it they are “helping entrepreneurs build software companies that are eating the world.” (he’ll give you a little more info about what that means in our interview). 

Frank Chen is a self proclaimed former product and user experience design junkie with specialties in venture capital, artificial intelligence/machine learning, fund raising, product planning, product launches, product development process, enterprise software, UX design, Web hosting, and managed services. With a breadth of expertise like that, you can see why we were excited to have him on the show.

In addition to all of that, Frank also shared a vision for what it could look like when investors view themselves as servant leaders. So often, we think of the relationship between entrepreneur and investor as a constant power struggle, but Frank upended that idea and offered a much more redemptive approach that we thought was so helpful.

It was a fun, enlightening and engaging conversation, which we hope you enjoy. As always, thanks for listening.

Useful Links:

Marc Andressen on Why Software is Eating the World

GDP/Capita over the last 2000 Years

Frank Chen LinkedIn