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Today’s episode finds us in Tennessee talking to Donnie Smith, who previously served many years as CEO of Tyson Foods and oversaw record growth and some pivotal acquisitions.

Donnie’s contagious enthusiasm and passion characterized his tenure at the company, which he joined in 1980 at one of the entry-level management roles. He led Tyson Foods to be a company with a conscience, focused on feeding the world great, affordable food, while also making a positive difference in people’s lives. On a national level, fewer high profile companies have utilized chaplaincy as a tool to care for a diverse workforce. 

As we think about how faith and chaplaincy intersect with the world of public equities we couldn’t think of anyone better to share about their experience. Tune in to hear Donnie talk about what it was like living out his faith in a publicly-traded company and some of his personal experience in Faith Driven Investing.

Useful Links:

Donnie Smith RightNow Media Videos

Truth at Work: Donnie Smith

Former Tyson CEO Focuses on Family Legacy

This week, we featured Donnie Smith, former CEO of Tyson Foods, on the podcast to share about the role of chaplaincy in their organization. And recently, CNBC featured an article that dealt with an employee-related problem at Facebook.

When it comes to large, publicly-traded companies, it’s time to ask the question: how do we ensure that we’re doing everything we can to care for our employees? How do chaplains and employee resource groups play into this? As Faith Driven Investors, it’s our responsibility to push this conversation forward. Below is one example of why this matters…

Why I Quit Facebook to Become a Mother

A year ago, I had to make the hardest decision of my life: Choose between my dream job and my baby girl.

I loved being a data scientist in Facebook’s Social Good department. The open culture and shared sense that we could reach so many people and improve their lives made me enjoy my work even more.

Facebook’s benefits for new parents were quite generous by US standards, including four months’ paid leave, $4,000 in “baby cash,” partial reimbursement of childcare expenses and ample lactation rooms in every building.

I was incredibly lucky to work there for five months while pregnant with my third baby. My 5-year-old and 3-year-old spent the day with a patchwork of family members and babysitters, while my husband worked as a software developer. Working full-time left me just enough time to feed my kids, tuck them into bed and catch enough sleep for myself and my unborn baby. I was both exhilarated and exhausted.

After my daughter was born, I soaked up as much time with her as I could. I loved her tiny yawns and delicious toes — and dreaded the end of my leave. During wakeful nights of nursing, my mind ran in circles scheming on how to return full-time. I wished for on-site child care so I could bring her to work and take nursing breaks.

Maybe I could leave early and make up the hours after my kids went to bed. I’d catch up on missed sleep over the weekends. Holding the baby who saw me as her world, I tried to convince myself that I could leave her all day. I couldn’t.

Read the full article at CNBC

This article was originally presented at The Christian Economic Forum 2019.
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 2019.

— by Anders Torvill Bjorvand

In our postmodern world where religion has been privatized and individualized, living out our faith in the workplace is something that can end up being done in secrecy. As we all know, secrecy and solitude can quickly lead to a separation between our faith life and our professional life. Our prayers and disciplines of the faith end up directed inwardly at worst and merely towards the salvation of our co-workers at best. Thus our vocation remains completely disconnected from our faith practices. 

How can we turn this around and integrate our faith in the workplace? How can we achieve faith-based fellowship at work? How can we build a solid platform for being salt and light in the company office? My answer, based on more than 10 years of experience in living this out, is corporate prayer rooms and corporate prayer practices.

A testimony from our beginning

We are a small IT company (18 on our staff), serving government and the social sector with specialized software that we build. More than 10 years ago, we started with a daily prayer practice in our company. Before this, prayer meetings at work had been more sporadic, but we made an intentional decision to make it a discipline—something we “just did”—like breathing. Soon after this started, we found ourselves between a rock and a hard place with one of our vendors. They were the largest provider of geographical information systems (map software) in our country at the time, and even though they were skilled, we didn´t end up with solutions that served our customers well. After presenting the case to the Lord in prayer, an unusual clarity came over me and I found myself exclaiming to my colleagues, “What we need is a land surveying company with somewhere between 5 and 10 staff—large enough to be capable yet small enough for our customers to matter to them!” Immediately after this statement, one of my colleagues said, “Anders! Your phone is ringing in your office!” I ran down the hall and unhooked the phone (this was before everyone had cell phones only), and on the other end of the line a friendly voice said, “Hello, we´re a land surveying company of 7 people, and we wonder if you guys might need some help?” We had not at all talked about this need outside of our prayer meetings, so for me this was a clear answer to prayer. God, who has prepared our tasks beforehand, walks alongside us as we carry them out. But sometimes I think He wants us to ask Him—to welcome His solutions by inviting His presence.

A testimony from when we developed a permanent prayer room

Seven years ago, after renting offices for many years, we finally bought our own—4,500 square feet of prime real estate across the street from city hall in our small suburban town outside of Oslo (the capital of Norway). After a few years of hosting daily prayer for everyone at lunch time in one of the offices, we finally could set aside space for a dedicated prayer room. When dedicating the room, we invited the local newspaper as well as the mayor of our town, and we showed the mayor that the view from our prayer room was to his workplace in city hall. We told him that if there were ever any prayer requests for needs in our local community, we were ready! This impacted the mayor so that he shared this with all his close colleagues at city hall. And they shared this with us, since some of them go to the same local church as some in our company.

A couple of weeks later, I talked to a manager of another quite large business in the same building. He asked if we had experienced problems with the office building being haunted. I am not a big believer in ghosts, but I try to meet such views with respectful curiosity, so I asked a few followup questions. It turned out the other company had felt this to be a problem for many years; in fact, it became such a big problem for them that they paid a shaman (occult priest) handsomely to come and do a “cleansing” of the building. I asked them when this shaman had been there, and when I looked up the date, I could witness to them by stating confidently, “I don´t think this newfound sense of peace in the building has anything to do with the shaman. The day you are referring to is the exact day we started up daily prayer meetings in the room just one floor above your offices. That is what has shifted the atmosphere here.”

Inviting the Lord´s presence is a mighty testimony in itself, but it is also how the Kingdom of God can break through just as we pray in the Lord´s prayer, so that He can have dominion and influence.

Daily prayer is mostly a very ordinary thing

The staff at our company are not exclusively Christian, but almost all are. They come from all walks of Christian denominations and faith practices. Most people participate in daily prayer unless they are travelling or in a meeting. Prayer time in our company is paid time, and it takes place in the prayer room at a fixed time before lunch every day. On a regular day, fire does not come down from heaven when we pray. Most days we pray for many of the same things. We often repeat ourselves. But that is ok. We don´t need this to be exciting. We need the discipline of inviting the Lord´s presence into our company and into our lives, both on glorious days and on days where we don´t feel a thing. It´s not about us.

Bear in mind that we are mostly engineers; charismatic expressions seldom occur outside of differential equations or well formed mathematical expressions. Our prayers are simple. We pray for our families, our fellowship at work, for performing our tasks well, for customers, and even for competitors. We thank God for the gift of creation and we praise Jesus for the gift of salvation. We pray for the Holy Spirit to speak to us individually and to move us in fellowship. We ask God to keep us humble and serving. If someone is sick, we ask God for healing. If we are in a sales process, we ask for God´s will. If we fail, we ask for grace to stand our ground humbly and in unity, and we ask for blessings on the client we lost. If we win the client´s business, we ask for even more grace and humility to serve well.

Inviting guests

When we have guests in the office, we often invite them to join us during our lunch time prayer, regardless of their views on faith. We make sure, of course, not to make the guests uncomfortable, so we always give them the option of doing something else while we pray. Prayer should always be welcoming and inviting, never intruding. Through this practice we have had everyone from pastors and heroes of the faith to agnostics joining us. We have had people receive prayer for healing and afterwards asking where to pay (There were no payments of course!). And we have prayed for “that darn neighbor to come to his senses.” It can be refreshing to join with people who are not active church goers and see how they relate to faith and the opportunity to address God Almighty.

Once when a large non-Christian civil society fundraising organization visited our offices, we gave them the tour of our offices like we always do. When we came to the prayer room, they were in shock and exclaimed loudly, “I am NOT going in there!” We told them it was completely fine and they did not have to join our prayer. We would never force our beliefs on anyone and we we assured them that we were just thrilled to be able to serve them through our software. Half a year later, the same people bumped into the leadership of a major Christian denomination at a fundraising conference. The denomination people were contemplating becoming our client, so they asked this civil society organization for their experience with us. They shared enthusiastically that our software served them well and that we were nice to be around. And then they shared, “And you know what; they even have a prayer room!” So now even non-Christians were bearing testimony of our faith practices to leaders in the church communities. It was no longer only strange to them, it had turned into a fascination.

Inviting the Lord 

The famous Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper is credited with the quote, “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!’”

So often we as Christians ask God to come and bless our work and our ideas, or to rescue us when our ideas and our egos have put us in a heap of trouble. We make prayer all about us and we reduce God to someone who can help us. We remain the masters of the universe and God remains a puppet.

Our delusion might be that God is following us. But God´s truth is that we are called to follow Jesus Christ. We shouldn´t try to invent good works to impress our Father in heaven, but we should unravel His good works so we can join Him in what He is doing. Work is not worship in itself. Work becomes worship when we do it together with the Lord. It´s the fellowship and the alignment of our hearts with His heart that makes it worship—when we join in God´s movement of love towards His creation.

That´s why it is critical to let prayer be focused on God´s heart, and to seek Him earnestly to reveal His plans and to give you His perspectives on your circumstances. If you are facing a technical challenge, God already has the answer. He might want to give you the tools to be the blessing for this domain of His world. And even more importantly, He will give you His perspectives on the world and the people He loves so much that He chose to die on the cross for them. Seeking God´s will and aligning with His heart on a daily basis is what a daily prayer life comes down to so you truly can walk into the world and represent Him well.

What if I don´t have a prayer room at my workplace?

This paper is mainly targeted toward Christian business leaders and business owners who have the authority to establish a prayer room in their business. If you don´t have this level of authority in your workplace, just work with what you have. Ask your boss to let you use a meeting room before work once a week for starters, and ask regularly if there are business needs you might pray over. Very few bosses, Christian or not, will be negative to such a free and generous act towards the workplace.

This article was originally published here.

Check out Jeff Haanen for other quality content!

by Jeff Haanen

Financial advisors play a critical role in the future of America.

They are stewards of a sacred trust, helping clients to save money for when they can no longer work, live a life of generosity, invest in businesses that align with God’s purposes for the world, spend wisely, and re-discover their calling to work and serve their neighbors over a lifetime.

If you’re a financial advisor, or you know one, what might it look like integrate Christian truth into this entire field, a $27 trillion-dollar industry that is shaping the destinies of millions?[i] (Click here to access a free downloadable pdf of this “Manifesto for Financial Advisors.”)

Here’s a place to begin.

1.Christian financial advisors help clients save money for when they can no longer work.

Saving is wise (Proverbs 21:20). Financial advisors have the privilege of encouraging people to prepare for the day when they cannot work due to old age or health. They also have the honor of helping clients still have enough to share with others (Proverbs 13:22; 1 Timothy 6:17-19).

But Christian financial advisors resolutely resist the narrative about saving for retirement built on utopian dreams of travel, never-ending vacation, and a care-free lifestyle. They recognize that sin and the Fall have affected all people, both wealthy and poor, and that there is no such dream of heaven on earth until Christ comes again. They also boldly call into question fear-based motives for saving in retirement, pointing people to trust God alone for their daily bread.

Also, since retirement (the cessation of work for a lifetime) is essentially a foreign concept to the Bible, Christian financial advisors work diligently to help people save for the day when they can no longer work due to health concerns, not for the day when they don’t want to work.

To work is to be human.

Financials advisors help their clients save money for retirement in order to provide for themselves in old age or illness, their family, and their community.

2. Christian financial advisors encourage clients to live a life of generosity.

God’s call to generous giving could not be clearer (Matthew 6:19-21; 10:42; Luke 21:1-4; 2 Corinthians 8:12-15; 1 John 3:16-18; Proverbs 11:24-25). Generous living most closely reflects God’s grace toward his people (2 Corinthians 8:9).

Christian financial advisors counsel clients toward sacrificial giving toward the mission of the church, the well-being of the poor, and the critical social, economic, and cultural needs of our day. They explore creative ways to facilitate their clients giving their cash, assets, time, skills, relationships, and influence. They lead by example.

Even though Christian financial advisors often don’t have a financial incentive to encourage generosity amongst their clients, they do so anyway because God first gave generously to them (John 3:16). 

3. Christian financial advisors counsel their clients to invest in businesses that align with God’s purposes for the world.

Christian financial advisors believe that God owns everything (Psalm 24:1), including both their client’s money and also the money that is invested in companies through stocks, bonds, and mutual funds.

They are leaders in the space of socially responsible investing (some Christians also call this values-based investing, or biblically responsible investing). They believe God’s purpose for business is to provide for the needs of world by serving customers and creating meaningful work, while giving glory to God.[ii] Profit, therefore, is a means to an end, not the end of business. They believe investments are intended to help businesses grow and bless their communities. Christian financial advisors also believe business has been tainted by the Fall, and today corporations, like individuals, are bent toward greed and injustice (Micah 6:8-10). There are no “neutral” investments.

Inasmuch as they are able, Christian financial advisors seek out investments for their clients that align with their client’s values and God’s good purposes for business. They take leadership in providing ample returns for their clients and multiplied societal blessing through their client’s investments.[iii]

4. Christian financial advisors counsel their clients to spend wisely.

God has given us money to be enjoyed and spent wisely. But Christian financial advisors also recognize that “godliness with contentment is great gain,” and Christian history is filled with vows of poverty and commitment to simple living for the sake of more deeply enjoying the riches of Christ (1 Timothy 6:6, 17-19).  Frugality is not a curse but a means to experiencing the abundance of God’s love, care, and heavenly riches.

Christian financial advisors are uniquely able to speak to our cultural moment and the current “retirement crisis” because they believe God himself, not the pleasures of this world, is our greatest joy. They believe in a deeper wealth than what money can offer.[iv]

Christian financial advisors counsel their clients to avoid debt, live within their means, defer gratification, and discover non-consumeristic ways to enjoy life and God’s good world.

5. Christian financial advisors counsel their clients to consider the different seasons of work over a lifetime.

Christian financial advisors see God’s pattern of six days of work and one day of rest as a blessing that lasts for a lifetime.

Rather than preparing clients to completely cease from work at retirement, they encourage sabbaticals and seasons of rest to renew a sense of calling for the next phase of life.

Therefore, they are instigators of a deeply counter-cultural movement. They begin to help clients save money for both sabbaticals and for when their clients can no longer work. They ask pointed questions to help their clients see a deeper purpose to life than entertainment or pleasure.  Christian financial advisors, then, become sages, mentors, theologians, and philosophers who help their clients prepare for the next season of work, whether they are 60, 70, or 80 years old.[v]

Christian financial advisors are the innovators who call for a new movement of work, sabbatical, and re-engagement based on God’s design for work over a lifetime (Leviticus 25).[vi] They openly challenge the Let’s vacationparadigm of retirement, and honor the men and women who work later in life as the dignified elders of our churches, communities, and society.

They are the first to point out the valuable, brilliant, and creative work of men and women stewarding their skills, knowledge, and abilities into the sunset of their lives.

For a free downloadable version of this manifesto, visit https://www.uncommonretirement.com/financial-advisors.

[i] Nick Thornton, “Here’s What the $27 Trillion US Retirement Industry Looks Like,” Think Advisor, 2 January 2018, Accessed on August 10, 2018: https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2018/01/02/heres-what-the-27-trillion-us-retirement-industry/?slreturn=20180714204623.

[ii] Jeff Haanen, “Theology for Business (Video),” Denver Institute for Faith & Work, Accessed on August 1, 2018: https://denverinstitute.org/video-the-purpose-of-business-today/.

[iii] Organizations like the Christian Investment Forum and faith-friendly mutual funds like Eventide Funds actively explore how to pursue competitive returns for their shareholders while upholding Christian values. For examples of philosophies of Christian faith and investing, watch the video “Investing 360 – The Story of Eventide Funds”: https://vimeo.com/223488058 or read “Integrating Faith Into the Way We Invest,” by Tim Macready, CIO of Christian Super, an Australian Pension Fund: https://denverinstitute.org/integrating-faith-way-invest/.

[iv] For an excellent treatment on faith, money, and retirement, see: Chad S. Hamilton, Deep Wealth (Denver: PFI Publishing, 2015).

[v] I recognize this is almost unheard of today. But my thesis in this book is that this rhythm of work and rest is more biblical than the contemporary idea of retirement and it more closely aligns with God’s intent for us to work, in different capacities, over a lifetime.

[vi] Rob West, the CEO of Kingdom Advisors, a Christian ministry to financial professionals, says, “One of the roles of the advisor is to not only help the client to answer the question, ‘How much is enough financially?’ – in terms of our financial finish line so we can maximize giving – but also, ‘What are you going to do in the retirement season?’ Even if we stop our vocation, what are we going to do to be of service to the Lord full-time for God’s glory?” Both Rob West and Ron Blue, the founder of Ron Blue Co. believe both wise financial decisions and a lifetime of work, which changes in different seasons, are biblical.

By Mike Sharrow

I’ll never forget one of the most haunting phone calls I received while a C12 Chair in 2013. Sitting at my desk in San Antonio I answered the phone for a call from Austin. The caller was a manager in an Austin-based company, whose former CEO was a C12 member. The CEO had successfully sold the company recently. The leader said, “You know, all that Christian business stuff is a bunch of bologna (or something like that)! I always wondered if it was true.” Shocked by the random assault, I asked what he was talking about. “Oh, our former owner was always talking about how he was a ‘steward’ and this business actually belonged to God along with everything else in his life and that he viewed us as special, even called it a ‘ministry’ and would pray about things, and all that jazz. That was all fine until he got the exit he wanted. Then we were just an asset and sold to the highest bidder. He got his money and disappeared. Now it’s business as usual. I think all that religious talk was just nice words to make him feel less guilty about making himself wealthy through the business!”

Ugh. I hated what I heard this man interpreting from the chain of events. I was grieved knowing that if the former owner heard those words he’d be nauseated himself. That was not the vision in the deal!

Not too long later it happened again. A “successful exit” by a couple where an exit needed to happen. Promises were made about what the transition would mean for the employees, but then reality set in and the all too familiar “sellers remorse” emerged. The beauty of their God-honoring legacy evaporated within mere months.

How do we stop these stories? That was the question I was asking, and our board of directors were asking. We surveyed our membership. In 2016 we found that of our then 1,300+ member companies served, almost 250 were anticipating an external transaction-based exit within the next few years and almost 270 were needing growth capital >$1M within 2 years to support current trajectories. Their #1 concern? It wasn’t finding buyers or capital – there’s a lot of “powder” in the market for well-performing companies. The #1 anxiety was “how do I know that the source of capital will preserve my God-honoring legacy in the business post-transaction, or that with the capital partnership my missional intent will not be handcuffed?”

As an organization with a mission to “equip Christian CEOs and business owners to build great businesses for a greater purpose” towards a vision of “changing the world by advancing the Gospel in the marketplace,” the perils of exits and growth capital transactions is a real threat to our members and our very mission. We do a lot of work around educating for succession readiness, about capital options, funding growth, exit scenarios, and structures…but the perils of seeing these great “business AS ministry” platforms fizzle out due to inevitable transitions was disturbing.

So, in the abundance of problems we were seeing a hypothesis emerging to be tested. Could it be, that in God’s abundant Kingdom economy, that there were Jesus-loving capitalists as equally perplexed about how to find triple bottom line investment opportunities as there were God-honoring businesses needing capital? I believed the answer was YES.

I set out to see if the marketplace already had the resources necessary to assemble what I smoothly called the “Consortium of Like-Minded Capital Providers.” Our marketing team later scrapped my brilliant label for a cooler brand identity of the 3Ten Coalition. We began convening investment bankers (we found at least 3 of the 4 Christian ones!), VCs, PE firms, advisory groups, brokers, ESOP advisors and those who had previously exited to explore the issue with us. We found a number of problems:

(1)   How do you find high-performance companies that have a Christian legacy to invest in, where faith is not an excuse for performance and where the faith of the owner means more than just decent morality but an actual Kingdom impact factor?

(2)   How do you know that a Christian capitalist won’t just tolerate your faith but actually gets what a faith-fueled business enterprise means?

(3)   What are the scorecards and covenants that can normalize intention for the true preservation and even maximization of a Godly legacy through the business? Just as one would hope that 10 years later the operation will have scaled from a capital event, shouldn’t the expectation be for the eternal impact of the business to have likewise scaled beyond just charitable giving from a liquidity event?

(4)   How do you moderate such an ecosystem to match benefits and risks for all parties?

(5)   How do you create an efficient nexus of key players who are aligned to a shared vision for Gospel-shaped economics, for Kingdom investment principles, for a system of intelligence sharing and accountability?

(6)   How do you foster a shared lexicon of meaning when you even talk about legacy, ministry, Kingdom business principles, faith-driven entrepreneurship, missional business, business as ministry and the like?

Those were just some of the “problems.” However, we began to see that in the abundance of problems there was an opportunity to bring a mutual solution to market that might truly pay legacy dividends for years to come. If enough people share a problem, that’s pretty much the definition of a “market,” and one worth addressing in this case!

As relative newcomers to the arena, we’ve recognized the challenge of matching (how to ideal parties find one another in a noisy marketplace?), alignment, education, clarity of meaning/language, and aggregation of the existing resources already deployed.

I don’t believe that the call of God upon any believer is held back for a lack of true resources…but of vision, clarity, and unity. Sometimes leaning into the problem is the beginning of revelation for a breakthrough and I believe the Christian marketplace is clamoring for such breakthroughs!

What are the challenges you see facing the “faith driven investor” arena?