With the help of faith friends from our gathering of Faith Driven Investors, we’ve begun drafting a set of Unifying Principles. Our hope is that we can begin to come together under these thoughts and ideas to work toward a more full vision of what it means to let our faith drive our investments.

If you have thoughts, questions, concerns, things you’d change or add, please let us know! We’re relying on you, our community, to make this resource the best it can be.

Christ followers have become known for what we are against—no alcohol, tobacco, adult entertainment, gambling, etc. While acknowledging the good negative screen funds that exist, we desire for our movement to be more known for what we are FOR in how we place our investment capital—things like human flourishing, job creation, redemptive businesses that restore the world to God’s original design in the garden, etc.

The focus is less on which negative investments to avoid and more on where resources can be positively stewarded to do the most good. Of course, this is not a movement that is about delineating what Christ followers should or should not invest in. Some investments may be clear to avoid (those that produce and distribute pornography as a material part of their business model might be an example), and others may be less clear (those that make some food products that our doctors would tell us to avoid).

Regardless, we look to what Jesus said about His disciples—that they would be known by their love. Jesus didn’t send His disciples into the world to be known by the things they avoided. Yes, some things are worth staying away from, but that is not the focus of this movement. Instead, we search for the places and investments that we can lean toward.

Jesus sent believers out to live and love intentionally. Financial resources act as vehicles for this type of lifestyle. Instead of being known by what we don’t do, our investments focus on the mission given by God for humans to do good, serve others, and love well. While God has given many “Thou shall not” commands, this movement focuses on what God says “Thou shall do” to make God’s name known and to reveal His glory.

When we are engaged in a problem, we are committed to understanding the ins and outs of the community affected and always strive to come up with a solution that serves everyone involved. Instead of avoiding the problems and sins that plague this world—real as they are—the Faith-Driven Investor movement hopes to take an active and engaged role with what God has put in front of us.

Using Scripture as Our Guide

• Ephesians 5:11 Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.

• Galatians 5:22-23 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.

• Proverbs 16:8 Better is a little with righteousness than great revenues with injustice.

• Matthew 22:37-39 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’This is t he first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’

• Proverbs 13:11 Wealth gained hastily will dwindle, but whoever gathers little by little will increase it.

• Colossians 3:2 Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.

• Matthew 28:19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations.

• Hebrews 13:16 And do not forget to do good and to share with others, for with such sacrifices God is pleased.

subscribe to the podcast here

Faith-Based Employee Resource Groups. This term may be new to you, or it may be something you’re already participating in. Either way, this episode is for you. Christeen Rico is leading the conversation around ERGs, and what she shared in our conversation was both informative and insightful.

If you don’t know, ERGs are groups within companies that foster community and conversation among like-minded people. Companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Toyota, and many more are creating these types of groups, so we’re grateful that Christeen dropped by to give us the inside scoop. 

If you’re an entrepreneur looking for ways to foster faith-based conversations within your business, Christeen will tell you exactly what it takes to form these groups. Or, if you’re an investor looking to get involved with companies that already have ERGs, Christeen will help you understand why these groups are important and how they add value.

Apart from that, Christeen was also a fun person to spend time with, and we think you’ll find this episode one worth listening to. Enjoy!

We’re so excited to have Aimee Minnich on the podcast this week, and in preparation for her interview, we thought we’d share something she wrote about gleaning. In addition to being on our first podcast episode, Aimee was one of the presenters at our recent event for Faith Driven Investors, and she was gracious enough to share a copy of her talk with us. Below is a transcript of her presentation about the concept of gleaning. If you like this, look for her episode being released tomorrow!

by Aimee Minnich

Brittany Underwood built Akola from nothing — each item of jewelry handmade in Uganda and distributed through their warehouse in the States where most jobs are held by women recently released from prison. It’s an unlikely story for a company whose jewelry is sold for $300+ in Neiman Marcus and has been featured in Vogue and People StyleWatch.  With 70% margins and contracts with other major retailers she’s poised for growth and needs both a line of credit and an equity partner. A top VC firm in her industry was offering favorable terms and promising to help make the company even more profitable. Earlier this year, she sat across the table from them and turned them down. Why? Why would someone do that?

The difference between 70% and 80% profit margins the VC firm wanted would mean eliminating jobs that our young entrepreneur worked hard to create for women coming out of prison. The impact of those jobs for the women and their families was worth more than an easy equity raise and more revenue.

Brittany’s company Akola is modern example of gleaning — when an investor or business owner leaves some monetary gain on the table to provide access for a group that society has largely left behind.

Brittany’s decision may appear counter-intuitive, even to those of us pursuing faith-driven investing. We want to move up and to the right — that’s success, right? More profit, more impact. And often that’s the line that secular impact investing keeps feeding us. A major study by the Global Impact Investing Network suggests there’s no trade-off between profit and impact. 

Does that need to be our definition of success too? Or does our faith compel us to a different standard? In Scripture we see at least 4 uses of capital commended. We are familiar with the first three — charity, tithing and traditional investing for return. To be clear, all of these are worthy of our effort and money. I love investing for market-rate financial return and many of you could do a much better job than me discussing those issues. But I also believe it deserves more attention.

I’ll focus on gleaning since it is one of the most unaddressed and important uses of capital.  

Remember how Ruth gathered at the edges of Boaz’s field? Boaz was following the command from Leviticus to allow for gleaning.

 The Theology of Work Project explains:

“Gleaning is a process in which landowners have an obligation to provide poor and marginalized people access to the means of production (in Leviticus, the land) and to work it themselves. Unlike charity, it does not depend on the generosity of landowners. In this sense, it was much more like a tax than a charitable contribution. Also, unlike charity, it was not given to the poor as a transfer payment. Through gleaning, the poor earned their living the same way as the landowners did, by working the fields with their own labors. It was simply a command that everyone had a right to access the means of provision created by God.”

Our economies may not be as ag-centric anymore, but gleaning nevertheless is instructive for all of us because gleaning has to do with “provision” rather than harvesting crops.

 In fact, there are plenty of you in this room practicing modern-day gleaning within your own businesses. One of you has a business inside a prison, providing jobs and dignity and reducing recidivism. One of you operates a cattle feed lot, slaughterhouse, and distribution business in Ethiopia to provide jobs and access to the global economy for local families.

I’ve observed that it’s sometimes easier to practice gleaning within our own companies than it is to understand how to do it as investors. For over a decade I’ve worked with generous families of wealth helping them steward their philanthropic capital for maximum positive effect. What about these families, for whom the “field” that they’ve been given to work is managing philanthropic capital? How are we to think about the concept of “gleaning”?

I think we many are afraid to consider “investment gleaning” because it seems that accepting less than full market rate return is the purview of the unsophisticated. If I lend money at 8% when everyone else is getting 15%, doesn’t that make me the fool in the room? Others fear that it provides an excuse for lack of excellence from the entrepreneur.

Those things certainly could be causes of poor returns, but that’s not what gleaning entails. True gleaning involves excellence, access, work and sacrifice.

In ancient times, a farmer leaving some of his fields unharvested meant he had to be even more efficient, more effective with the portions he was working. In order to make enough to feed their family and follow the command to leave room for the poor to glean at the edges, God’s people had to be the very best farmers around. Excellence is always a hallmark of gleaning.

The next two items go together. Gleaning means access for the poor and marginalized. Access isn’t the same as a handout. Access to the means of production means wages for work. I would never advocate for eliminating charity, but I do fear that if we aren’t creating pathways to employment through our philanthropic capital then we may be doing more harm than good. If you’ve been to Haiti, you’ve seen this first-hand. There are instances where aid given to the poor and marginalized can create access – scholarships for education or career training are a great example. So is aid in the context of a disaster or mass displacement. But at some point we need to begin asking when “access” looks more like a job than a gift.

Sacrifice is the last hallmark of gleaning. It’s also the scariest. What looks like sacrifice to others often feels like simple obedience to the person making the sacrifice. Maybe its time to rethink our risk/return paradigm. If God is omnipotent, His return horizon is eternal, and we’re just His money-managers, then really the only meaningful risk we encounter is disobedience. When we get to the pearly gates, I don’t think He’s going to ask us whether we got a 15% IRR or beat our benchmarks. I am confident, though, that the ways in which we provide for His children who are poor and marginalized will be remembered.

Tim Macready has been a frequent contributor to this website, and he was also one of the presenters at our recent event for Faith Driven Investors. Below is a transcript of his presentation about his failure to find the pure faith-driven portfolio and what it looks like to invest in sinners.

by Tim Macready

What a blessing to be in this room. A room of Christ-followers who share a common faith in God as sovereign over everything, including the investment markets in which many of us work day by day. But more than that, we share a common goal that the name of Jesus be glorified in that marketplace; that as stewards we be found faithful with what God has entrusted to us.

Henry and Luke have asked me to share a little of my journey in Faith Driven Investing. As many of you know, I lead the investment team for an Australian pension fund – a Christian fund that stewards over $1bn on behalf of 27,000 Australians who have chosen to have their pension managed in accordance with their Christian values. In 2005, the Board decided that it was all-in on faith-driven investment; on aligning values with portfolio. And they – perhaps foolishly – hired me to help make that happen.

I wanted to create the pure faith-driven portfolio. The portfolio that would truly reflect God’s desires – would remove all evil companies and instead invest in shining examples of redemption. I imagined myself as the arbiter of good and evil; the one who would decide what was good and what was evil.

I have utterly failed. I feel further from that goal than when I first started. Because I now recognize that goal not only as futile but as completely arrogant. Just as I am powerless to mould my own heart into sinless perfection, I am unable to create an investment portfolio that perfectly reflects God’s heart. I am a sinner, investing the money of sinners in companies that are managed by sinners and through markets that are run by sinners.

But in the process of accepting that I am not God, judging between good and evil, I have realized that there is deep satisfaction to be found in being obedient to the call to pursue the glory of God in every aspect of the way that we design and implement our investment portfolio, to be redemptive.

What is needed is not a set of Christian investment rules, but a movement of stewards with a deep desire to invest in ways that glorify God – whether with thousands or billions, in listed or unlisted markets, in every geography and every point on the capital structure. Stewards who accept that something about how we invest will be different because we are looking after the master’s money.

And so, at its heart, faith-driven investing must be about asking the question; What does it look like to invest in ways glorify God? To be redemptive investors?

In beginning to answer that, I want to share what faith-driven investing looks like for us. As we have wrestled with what it looks like to invest in ways that glorify God in our context, we have adopted eight principles and four practices. I offer them to you – not to be prescriptive, but to show what, for us (a diversified pension portfolio) being faithful looks like.

Eight principles:

1.    We start with a Christian worldview, letting scriptural wisdom influence the way we invest.

2.    We understand that our assets are entrusted to us, and we have a responsibility to be God’s steward.

3.    We recognize the deep value of creation as reflecting the beauty of God.

4.    We acknowledge that we have a duty of care to prevent harm.

5.    The purpose of investment is to promote human flourishing

6.    We show Christian distinctiveness

7.    We reject corruption and any unjust accumulation of wealth

8.    We pursue excellence as investors

And four practices:

Negative Screening. Some companies have a track record of so utterly and comprehensively damaging and destroying of human flourishing that we find it difficult, in good conscience, to invest in them. It is difficult to see God’s plan for human flourishing and dignity being fulfilled by companies that consistently and systematically work against it.

Positive Screening. Some companies do a better job of stewarding their resources than others – by valuing employees, customers and other stakeholders; by being efficient in their use of natural resources.

Active Ownership. We exercise our rights as owners of companies, and where we can we speak to company management to communicate our ideas about how they can operate responsibly.

Impact Investing. We actively invest in ways that cause social, environmental and spiritual flourishing – in financial inclusion, social enterprise, faith-led business, housing solutions that offer dignity, and more.

I’m not saying that faith-driven investing means doing all of those things. It may mean doing one of them, or even something completely different.

But being redemptive always means doing things differently. Jesus’ followers always look different to the world. And so if faith-driven investing means anything, it means being able to genuinely tell the story of how the way we invest is different because we love Jesus. It means our faith is inside the room – not outside the door or back home waiting for Sunday, but in the room as we ask how we can bring glory to our creator and our savior through the assets that we have been given to steward.

Our journey of faith-driven investing has been hard. We’ve had to wrestle – really wrestle with a lot of fundamental questions; to ask where are our blind spots, where we can be different and where we want to be different but can’t – yet.  And yet, I can honestly look back and see just how much progress we’ve made – how far we’ve walked. How as the Lord has led us over each hill and we have seen the unclimbable mountain ahead of us, yet we have looked back and seen how far He has carried us.

Whether you’ve been applying your faith in your portfolio for years, or you’re making your first tentative steps, this is not a journey to be taken alone. It will require us to work together as we wrestle with deep questions. Questions like:

Are we willing to accept the lordship of Christ over the investment portfolios we steward?

Are we willing to put aside our differences – theological, ideological and practical – so that we can spur one another on towards faithfulness?

Are we willing to accept that there will be perhaps as many expressions of faith-driven investors as there are faith-driven investors? But that each expression must genuinely answer what it looks like to be faithful in that investor’s context?

Are we willing to invest in one another? To support each other on this journey of what it looks like for each steward to understand how to be redemptive in the way they invest?

What does it look like for each of us – in our role as stewards – to discern how to be redemptive in our portfolio?

I suspect that your presence here means that the answer to those questions is yes. I know mine is. I find so much joy in walking this challenging path with each of you. And I think we’re only just beginning to see what Faith-Driven Investing can be.

Just over ten years ago, the impact investing movement as it is known today was born in, of all places, Las Vegas. Its influence grows year by year as more and more capital is deployed. Its heroes become more prominent with each passing year.

My hope and prayer is that we will look back in five or even ten years’ time and see this moment – this day – as the day that faith-driven investing as a movement took a pivotal step, catalyzing a movement of glory to Christ and deep influence and blessing to the world. And a movement where we are not the heroes, because we already know the one true hero of Nazareth; of Calvary.

Our movement must be good not just for us and the tribe we represent, but for everybody. What we need is the ability to be Salt and Light into an investment community – into a world – consumed by greed and covered in darkness.

We are not the managers of society – nor would we be if we thought we were. We don’t have to save democracy and the free world; we don’t even have to save ourselves… Should we be ineffective, our cause it not lost; should our efforts bear fruit, this will not be their justification. Our living in the present reality of the kingdom and the triumphant coming of the kingdom are not connected like the links in a causal chain, but like promise and fulfilment, as the artesian well to the distant mountain lake. We serve not in order that the kingdom might come, but because it is coming; the certainty of victory is the beginning not the end of our course. – John Howard Yoder.

With the help of faith friends from our gathering of Faith Driven Investors, we’ve begun drafting a set of Unifying Principles. Our hope is that we can begin to come together under these thoughts and ideas to work toward a more full vision of what it means to let our faith drive our investments.

If you have thoughts, questions, concerns, things you’d change or add, please let us know! We’re relying on you, our community, to make this resource the best it can be.

One of the goals of this movement is to create an anti-Tower of Babel mindset among investors. It’s so easy to bifurcate the world of investing over and over again with groups splitting and keeping to themselves. The Faith Driven Investor movement is all about going in the opposite direction—instead of spreading apart, we’re coming together.

The secular investment world is known to work well together through the formation of investment syndicates and conferences that share best practices. Why shouldn’t the Christian world be the same? In fact, we should endeavor to be even more unified as we resist the move toward sectarianism and denominational tribalism that has characterized much of recent church history. We were designed to be in community and fellowship with God and to receive wise counsel from others that know Him. Iron sharpens iron.

Though impressive in its scope and ambition, the Tower of Babel failed because of the impure motives of those that labored. We are working together in the hopes, not of bringing glory to ourselves, but of offering a worthy sacrifice to God.

We believe that we can work together in community with excellence as we build something with God’s guidance for His glory. Therefore, we endeavor to check the purity of our motives regularly—which is something we need each other’s help with!

Because we come to this movement with a conviction of abundance, this foundation should give us the ability to work well together in sharing ideas, deals, and investors. We worship one God and our work is all for Him.

Using Scripture as Our Guide

• Psalm 133:1 Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity!

• 1 Thessalonians 2:8 Because we loved you so much, we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well.

• Romans 15:5-6 Now may the God who gives perseverance and encouragement grant you to be of the same mind with one another according to Christ Jesus, so that with one accord you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

• Philippians 2:2 Make my joy complete by being of the same mind, maintaining the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose

• Proverbs 15:22 Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed.

Wendy Rogers was one of the presenters at our recent event for Faith Driven Investors, and she was gracious enough to share a copy of her talk with us. Below is a transcript of her presentation about utilizing investment advisory firms and building alignment inter-generationally.

by Wendy Rogers

In Ted Style Talks, the experts say in order to drive your point home, you must divide your talk into three parts to be inspiring. Make your talk:

– Emotional

– Novel

– Memorable

Well, I must say the emotional part was the thought of me, a true southern woman, trying to bring home an effective point in under 5 minutes. In all seriousness, the topic of wealth management can get pretty emotional when families are not intentional around the vision of the wealth and the positive or negative disruption it can stir through the generations.

This is important stuff and it is not for the faint at heart. There is an expression from a Hermes Family Descendent that says, You do not inherit a family business, You borrow it from your grandchildren. And when I mention family business I am not just thinking about operating companies.

The Novel aspects of what I would like to share today would be the visual picture of what my grandmother taught me years ago. I grew up learning how to care for pecan groves and many times when we lost a tree due to disease, we had to be strategic in where we would plant a new tree. Ecologists taught us that a young tree grows better when planted in an area adjacent to the older, stronger trees. The roots of the young tree may actually graft themselves to one another creating an intricate, interdependent foundation. Let me provoke you a little—when you think in wealth and specifically in transferring any kind of wealth, what do you think is a healthy balance of independence and interdependence within a family or a family enterprise? 

Now to the memorable part. This picture here: I am a third generation family business owner stewarding wealth from a business my sweet grandfather started, my very determined father significantly grew, and then as a family we made a decision to sell to a Fortune 100 company. Here is a fun fact: I am one of three girls and we each have three girls, so there are, or will be, 13 women running the show.

The day after selling our operating company we knew we were in the family office business and we knew we had a great deal to learn about the preservation aspects of wealth, but we then had to get real focused on the growth aspects of those assets.   

We learned a lot about ourselves and also about our future need for surrounding ourselves with great strategic investment advisory partners.  

The transition from family business to business family is more about a mindset change. We, as family members, had to switch our mindset over to owners or stewards. We needed to learn a new industry…strategic investment management. 

In order to create, sustain and adapt family culture and values over generations, the family must be aligned, make fast and effective business decisions, and implement them. This just doesn’t happen overnight. Even to families who all love Jesus! 

The process by which the family owners collectively organize themselves to develop resilience in dealing with both the internal family affairs and the external business challenges is what many would call GOVERNANCE.

We had to learn to balance the many voices, then to translate this input into effective operations, clear decision practices and adaptive responses to new challenges.

Here again, we come back to independence and interdependence concept. I wish I would have understood those two words better 15 years ago.  

But before we could do all this, we had to revisit/collectively declare what we knew to be true about our family. How we were raised, what values defined us and held us together and the passions that pricked our hearts in making sure we clearly defined both our philanthropic and our investment vision and mission together. What was the purpose of this liquidity event and what did it mean to each of us? We sat around and discussed this at length. 

 We knew that inside our operating company we had values and an operating philosophy, a mission and guiding principles to guide how we worked and now as we set up new ownership structures we were going to need the same thing.

Family Enterprise Governance is the structure by which elements of the generative family alliance become aligned and integrated into practice. They need to listen to and balance the voices and perspectives of each group of stakeholders: Matriarch/Patriarch owners, young family owners to be, married in spouses and outside advisors. We knew we needed to work to create this framework and practice it and model it because we are now in the process and transition of on boarding new owners and the next generation, which as I mentioned are all female. 

We had to work hard to build this intergenerational alignment in investing, spending, giving and in living. This was not done overnight and we can never rest that it is complete. We instituted governance structures, shareholder agreements, management companies, estate plans and a family council. These were the fierce conversations to formalize and now we are living out our continuity plans. Picking partners and guiding these partners was a huge part of the process. The search, onboarding, and alignment of these partners is the role of family leadership.

We took the time to thoughtfully create and design an outside board of directors just like we did inside our operating company. This board is the core instrument for the family to build and sustain its distinctive culture and exercise faith -based oversight. This board upholds the legacy and values and defines the relationships among owners and across generations and is also open to anticipating and initiating change to take advantage of new possibilities  and respond to the expansion of the family. Mindset development is huge here as family members need to be tutored in ownership mindset. 

If we believe God owns it all, how do we live that out in our decisions about investing? In our decisions about spending? Bob Goff has said that all the rules change when you are flying under the banner of Jesus Christ. It changes everything…or it changes nothing.  It can’t just change a couple of things.” 

Many of these years proved to be like the old college science class of Lecture and Lab. We spent time and resources in the lecture section of this life -long class and we had to get clear as to the formal education we needed…we needed to invest in ourselves, but also trust our internal “knower” around who to align ourselves with. How to lead and yet learn from these partners. This is the lab part. We are doing this each day, each quarter as we listen to their advice and yet also find other outside, non -family  board members, partners in new private equity ventures and bring in thought -leaders to work with our family.  

Are we efficiently and intelligently using the resources God has granted us to generate returns but also generate human flourishing? This a recurring question we keep asking ourselves…the scorecard so to speak.

If we see ourselves as stewards and our Lord as the owner then we better get about the business of stewarding that well and that should never mean compromising or resting on our laurels to not cultivate growth and returns. We also had to act like geese and honk from behind in those leading us to stir bravery in each other, to live in faith and to continue to ignite purpose in our own lives but also in the lives of those around us.