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Brett Johnson founded The Institute for Innovation, Integration & Impact, Inc. in 1996. His writings complement the work of this Silicon Valley think tank. Brett’s most recent book, Kingdom Economics, is an invitation to the faith driven investor who loves the nations and the planet too much to leave their money stuck where it grows but does not change the world for good.

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Brett Johnson: And this is the fascinating part about Faith Driven Investor. It’s a combination of capital and faith, whereas in the world system, it’s capital without faith. The world system is crafted carefully so that you don’t have to depend upon God. And one day, you know, I realized one of the reasons I’m asking God for a million dollars or ten million is that: I don’t want to pray ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’ That’s really why I’m praying for. But then I realized if God gave me $10 million, he’d give me a $20 million problem if I’m a kingdom person. That’s what God does. He gives kingdom people providence for breakfast.

Rusty Rueff: Welcome back, everyone to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. Brett Johnson founded the Institute for Innovation, Integration and Impact Inc. in 1996. His writings complement the work of this Silicon Valley think tank. Brett’s upcoming book, Kingdom Economics, is an invitation to the growing Faith Driven Investor community who love the nations and the planet too much to leave their money stuck where it grows. But it doesn’t change the world for good. We’re excited to talk to Brett about his new book and to learn from his four decades of experience, helping organizations discover a purpose that is greater than just the bottom line. Welcome to the Faith Driven Investor podcast with Brett Johnson.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. I’m here with my partner, Luke Roush from Nashville, Tennessee. Luke, how are you?

Luke Roush: I am doing great. Great day to be alive.

Henry Kaestner: So our guest is very close to you. Up in Chattanooga and so on. The odd man out being out here on the West Coast. But I’ll tell you the different guests that we’ve had over the last couple of months. I can’t think of anybody that I’m more excited about sharing with our audience than Bret Johnson. Bret has been in this space of Faith Driven Investor and for a very long time, much longer than Luke and I have probably had longer than Luke and I have combined and has a great international and emerging markets perspective, great ministry and practice towards developing leaders, which he’ll talk to us about. And then just a great framework for us to think about the ancient truths that come from scripture, how we think about investing and the instructions from other religions and other faith traditions. And hopefully you’ll walk away from our time together here today, being better equipped to be a great steward of all the capital that God has entrusted us. So, Brett, thank you very much for being on the program.

Brett Johnson: I’m very excited to be with you. Thank you so much, Henry. Luke, good to see you.

Henry Kaestner: So, so many different places to go with you. And maybe we’ll even get into a little bit later. But lest I forget, you have this incredible podcast where you break down exodus and talk about what that means about faith in the marketplace. And you think, gosh, you could probably take the gospel, you probably take acts, you definitely take Nehemiah, but exodus. But somehow you just made that thing sing.

Brett Johnson: Yeah, that was fascinating during the pandemic. I think there were a lot of people thinking through What do I really want to do and how do I restart? You know, there was this great reset, and I think it was an opportunity for people to reset their foundations. And God is no stranger to restarts and there’s a whole national restart. And it’s a fascinating story. How God did that? So I just pulled out 50 principles of restarting something. And I think this is apropos in our careers nowadays in our working lives, we’ll have to restart numerous times, so we have to go back to scripture and say what the principles about restart. Otherwise, we get blindsided.

Henry Kaestner: I thought it was very, very good. We’re going to have the link in the show notes. Maybe we’ll mention again at the end, but what we like to do with every one of our guests before we get started into the meat of your current work, your current ministry, the things that you feel that God is teaching you. Give us an autobiographical sketch. Most of us know what a Tennessee accent sounds like. It doesn’t sound like yours, like

Brett Johnson: your quarry where you come from. I’m from the south, but the south of Africa, that’s right. And I grew up there, grew up in a family, actually that was somewhat by vocational. So my dad was a business guy. But I remember as a teenager, I asked my mom, what would dad do if he had no money? And she said, plant more churches, and that’s what they did. They planted churches and did business, and only much later in life did he become as it were a vocational pastor. And so I grew up in that environment. And for me, there were three things happening together. One was business. I worked at Pricewaterhouse, a chartered accountant, which is like a cousin of a CPA and worked with them for 10 years at the same time. I had been through the Sunday School Youth Group and ended up running a church. And so when I was running the church, I kept my ears open. When was God going to tell me to quit Pricewaterhouse so that I could do the church? And he never did. So now I had two jobs. And then what happened was I got connected with youth with a mission in Africa, and I found out that they were looking for guitar players, evangelists, etc. and what they really needed. Was it finance, marketing, business analysts and I had those people in my church seriously under deployed. So we had business, local church and missions. I had three jobs and I had to figure out how to integrate them. And so that’s how I got going. And that was in from about 1981, a little while ago. And then in 1986, we came to San Francisco for one year, a couple of kids and some suitcases, $300 in my pocket. And as the plane landed, God said, This is going to be your home for quite a while. So we started asking why? And through a series of things, God said, I want you to start a new kind of organization that integrates business, local church missions, all of that stuff into a new type of organization. So that’s how we got going.

Henry Kaestner: And so you end up down here in the South Bay, by the way, $300 would get you two tacos and a coke right about now.

Brett Johnson: That’s right. I was very much at that, said A. Credit card. And I remember Pricewaterhouse sent me to New York on a trip, man. I could pull out $300 a day out of the ATM. The hotel was $330 a night. I remember pretty quickly I had to establish credit and get a credit card in the US, even though I preached against debt for years. Yeah.

Henry Kaestner: So speaking of debt, you have a book that’s come out called Kingdom Economics. This give us your best elevator pitch to queue up this topic for us.

Brett Johnson: Sure. Yeah, I would say that heaven has an economy and we don’t know a whole lot about it, but we see indications in scripture that this trade in the heavenly somehow and there’s a lot in physical trade about that. And our job is to figure out how to bring heaven’s economy to Earth. And that sounds a little bit fuzzy. But we do see clear enough principles in scripture about biblical practices and principles. Tons of them actually in scripture. And so the goal of king economics is to look at the world of economics, finance, investing capital through the lens of scripture. And I would say, even with the faith driven investor, it’s not to become Christians or people who are driven by their faith to make investments for good purpose, but to actually figure out how do we beat people who do investing based on these heavenly principles or these kingdom or eternal principles of finance? Obviously, with the good results that we expect. So I would say, you know, there’s an economy in heaven and there’s an economy on Earth, and the underlying assumptions of what we call just business as usual are fundamentally different in many respects. There is some good overlap, but there are some things that are completely different.

Luke Roush: So Bret, as you think about kind of that work in your book, to what extent do those principles really speak into our relationship with money and how we shepherd money or our relationships with the environment that we work and the people that are our customers, our vendors, our partners, our employees? Does it really go into both sides of that? Or is it really more focused on the economics of it all?

Brett Johnson: Good question, Luca. I think right now we’re living in an era where financial capital has become somewhat commoditized. There’s a lot of it around and we’re recognizing when I say we, I’m not just talking about people of faith. I mean, you can go to the World Economic Forum or universities around the world, and they’re understanding capital is bigger than just financial capital, of course. And this is way beyond the triple bottom line, and there are many other facets. So there’s human capital, relational capital, social, environmental, et cetera. And there’s a big piece of it, which is spiritual capital, which we have to understand. And if we’re going to be engaged as people in faith in the warfare, if you like that is business. We have to have spiritual capital, so you can’t just look at it. In fact, many years ago when we. Started working with business people around the world, we’ve done maybe five years to work with hundreds of companies. And I found out there was an issue still around capital and this was about 2008 and Christians running good businesses getting a good purpose for their business still had a problem with greed. And Mammon means greed deified. So you’ve got to get to the heart of the issue. So I thought, what do we do about it? And we decided to do a Kingdom Economics forum in Johannesburg. We decided to put some truth together, which has now ended up in the Kingdom Economics book and the repurposing capital book that we could put a stick of dynamite up the giant’s nose if you like and blow the lid off this thing because we could get great business practices, great products that would bless people, we could be intentional. We could have pastors in every business, we could have prayer meetings, we could do all that kind of stuff. But unless you get to the issue of what is capital, whose money is it? What’s it for? What’s our relationship with money unless you get to the heart of that thing? We’ll never win the game.

Henry Kaestner: So if I haven’t made it clear so far on the podcast, I can’t think of a book that I recommend more heavenly than Kingdom Economics. If there’s one right behind it, be repurposing capital. You write something in Kingdom Economics that I think is really profound. I’d love for you to expand on it. You write a new future where kingdom economics becomes reality is premised on a great awakening among God’s people and an influx of people into the Kingdom of God. So that feels kind of heady and it’s kind of out there, and I think it’s a theological truth. But unpack that for us. What does it look like for us to experience this divine reality? And what does it look like for us to invite more people into the movement? I say this, of course, because Faith Driven Investor as a ministry is about inviting people into this movement as a way to help them experience the life that is truly life. But that’s something you’ve seen unpacked in scripture to riff on that a bit, please.

Brett Johnson: Yeah. And I’m very excited about the Faith Driven Investor community and the movement and the young generation, if you like of people, that’s growing up with a new and freer idea about capital and having to play. So I think that that’s fantastic. And when I talk about that awakening, I’m not talking about getting to a tipping point of fifty one percent Christians in a nation and so forth. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m actually talking about the fact that unless we get to a spiritual awakening that goes in tandem with fully integrated with the deployment of capital, kingdom business, et cetera, we will do no better than the Sustainable Development Goals with a bit of prayer and Christian sprinkling on it. That’s not what we’re after. So reformation is essential, not just salvation. You know, if it was just about salvation, as you would know, Africa would be the best continent on the planet. I mean, there are so many Christians you can’t swing a cat and miss a Christian. So it’s not just about getting people saved, but it’s getting Sunday into Monday. And actually, I don’t think the devil cares what Christians do on a Sunday if you can have the other days of the week. So what this awakening? It gets to the heart of the matter. Unless you get to the heart of a business leader, the heart of somebody who’s an investor will end up doing good things but with the wrong tools. So I remember a Christian guy, he’d sold one of his companies in the Bay Area for a billion dollars back in 2000 or so, so it was a decent sized deal and he was not doing venture capital and so forth. He came to me, said, Brett, I’ve got this great idea. I want you to head up a company for us and what are we going to do? Is What if the supply chains of big businesses and if we find out that there’s any shenanigans in the supply chain, then what we’ll do is we’ll basically guilt them into hiring us to clean up their supply chain. And I said to him, No, I won’t do it this, why not? I said, Well, you’re trying to get rid of slavery in supply chains, but the spirit behind what you’re doing is exactly the same. And so we can’t tackle the problems in the world with the spirit of the world. You know, when scripture talks about Babylon or Egypt, it’s the spiritual principle driving economic systems that are independent of a dependance upon God. So we need an awakening. Otherwise, we don’t get to the heart of the matter. And once you get to the heart of the matter, then all sorts of creativity breaks loose in terms of how you invest, how you build a business where you go to the lengths you’ll go to. So this is a big issue at the heart.

Luke Roush: So, you know that that’s fascinating, and so the idea that sort of God’s ways are not the ways the world, the ways of the world are not God’s ways, an inappropriate analogy. You don’t bring a knife to a gunfight. Right? There’s something that’s more biblical than that that you could probably enlighten us with. But you know, I’d love just to kind of unpack that a little bit more because I think that there are a great many believers who are trying to do what God has called them to do in the marketplace, in their vocation. And yet some of the tactics that get used are basically the same tactics from the world kind of re-applied with some sort of gospel lipstick on it. Like, how would you challenge us, right? Henry and I and all of our listeners to like, reimagine what it looks like to bring sort of a set of gospel tools to those problems?

Brett Johnson: OK, great. I think I’d like to get to talk a bit about success because you’ve got to define the end game. I mean, why are we in things with God? Not for our own benefit? God didn’t put us on the planet to be blessed, to be happy, to live in Los Gatos, where the weather is fine and so forth. No, he put us on the planet to make a difference. To accomplish his agenda, he populated the Earth so that he had workers to accomplish his purpose. And we’ve adopted some evangelical notion that God was lonely. And so he made us so that he had his land. God could have got a puppy or a few more angels, and I know he created us to work with him in collaboration with him. So how do we define success? Well, it’s when God’s job gets done, not when the ROI is X or the return on capital or even the stewardship of capital is such and such a metric. So we have to define the end game. If we don’t define the end game well enough, somebody else will define it like the World Economic Forum or somebody you know, by 2030, you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy. No, no, no. We have to define the game. People from every turn tribe and nation living like God, looking like God, a flourishing living to their full potential, working like God and so on. So I think that we have to define the endgame. Then I would say, look, we have to understand that this three big economic systems in scripture as I see it. One is, let’s call it Egypt or Babylon, and the other is the promised land. And in between you have the desert. Now, Egypt is quite interesting, but Deuteronomy Chapter 11 says, Look, the land that you’re entering is not like the land you’ve come from where you watered your vegetable garden by foot. But the land that you’re going to is a land that I look after and it gets its rain from heaven. If you obey me, I’ll send autumn and spring rains. If you don’t, you’re toast. That’s what God says. So let’s unpack that a little bit. In Egypt, there was a predictable water supply. It’s still there today. All you have to do, take your bucket, go down, get it. Water your vegetables and you’re done. No dependance on God. Just a little bit of effort and you get your paycheck every month. Now, the desert is a bit different because you’re dependent daily for water, for manna, for quail on God. And, you know, every single day. And we call this living by faith. And we’ve made this the epitome, the ultimate of a Christian experience. I used to work at IBM. I used to work at Google. Now I’m living by faith, and we make that the ultimate destination. It was meant to be a temporary gap to get some Egypt out of our thinking and then get us into the Promised Land. And the weird thing about the Promised Land is that everybody had capital. Everybody had a piece of land. Every tribe had an allocation. Every family had a means of income production, and they had to exercise faith. And this is the fascinating part about Faith Driven Investor ERG. It’s a combination of capital and faith, whereas in the world system, it’s capital without faith. The world system is crafted carefully so that you don’t have to depend upon God. And one day I realized one of the reasons I’m asking God for a million dollars or ten million is that I don’t want to pray. Give us this day our daily bread. That’s really why I’m praying for it. But then I realized if God gave me $10 million, he’d give me a $20 million problem. If I’m a kingdom person, that’s what God does. He gives Kingdom people problems for breakfast. So being in the Promised Land, he says, OK, you’ve got a means of production and you have to exercise faith because if you don’t do things the way I want you to do it, there will be no rain and the place is going to be a desert. So it’s a strange combination of capital and faith. And we’ve separated capital in faith, but in the promised land, they fully integrated the ones not a substitute for the other. They’re just fully integrated.

Henry Kaestner: He gives Kingdom problems to people for breakfast. The. His faithful for breakfast, that’s amazing, that’s a very good that snip, it’s going to show up somewhere. That was really good. So you’re talking about a countercultural way to think about economics. Are you thinking about a counter-cultural way to think about money countercultural way even within the Christian circles about living by faith? What are some of the other countercultural things that you see Christ’s followers falling into and it could be in one of these two places? Number one, we’re told, of course, not to be conformed by the pattern of the world or the worries of the world and deceitfulness of riches. So how do we avoid falling into those traps? But then also, what are some of the traps that you see that doesn’t come from the Bible, but their Christian culture would have an investor buy into? That’s not biblical? And you alluded to that about the time in the desert, but expand on that concept, please.

Brett Johnson: Sure. We touched a little on success, and I would say the other thing is what’s normal when we go to money? We often think if I’ve got money, it’s an indicator of God blessing me. Or if you’re in another country such as India, if I don’t have money, it’s an indication that I’m spiritual when both of those are extremes. So in the West, we strive for comfort and a problem comes along and we expect God to take it away. And that’s what we pray for. And other parts of the world, they figure this is normal. In fact, in judges, it says in chapter three, verse two, it says in brackets there were some tribes left over that didn’t get conquered and it says in brackets and he left them only to teach warfare to a generation that hadn’t known war. As parents, we want our kids to be more comfortable than we are. Go to a good college, have a good dorm room, a good experience and so forth. And God says you’ve got to expose them to battle. So when people become believers, we should rip up their passports, give them a kingdom passport and a military uniform. We should let them know this is a war zone. You know, historically, there’s a battle between good and evil, and we going to deploy our business capital a time out talents one way or the other. And so culturally, we’ve got used to being comfortable. What makes me comfortable versus what gets the job done, no matter what it does to my comfort level? That’s a big factor. And so we’ve almost become acclimatized to if I’m being blessed by God, I won’t have problems and God is thinking, Well, is there anything, anywhere in the world that’s out of whack with the way I want it to be? And how can a deploy Luke or Henry to go and fix that problem?

Luke Roush: So, Brett, one of the things you talk about in Promised Land is around guard owning the key resources, just unpack a bit more. The key resources. What does that mean for us and how do we respond to that?

Brett Johnson: This is a dual thing, and you’ll see a bit of this in the book of Acts when you remember the the real estate guys and nice and safari, right? Not that I have anything against real estate people, but there’s an interesting concept over there because and it’s the same thing mirrored in the Old Testament between A.A. and Safire. Everything was guns, but between an alliance of fire and the apostles. Everything was this, Peter says, Hey, the land was yours before you sold it, the money was yours. After you sold it between us and you. It’s yours between you and God. It’s all God’s. So when they went into the Promised Land, they said, Okay, this area over here is for the Benjamins. This area is for this tribe, that tribe between the different tribes. There were clear boundaries and within that property rights, ownership of property, etc. But between the people and God, God says the land is mine. The gold and silver is mine. In fact, it is the people of mine. What’s the implication? Well, you can’t enslave each other. You’ve got to treat the aliens and the widows. Well, you’ve got to have justice, you’ve got to have equity. So there’s the strange paradox, if you like between us and God, it’s all God’s between you and me. There’s property rights, there’s rewards responsibility. And so.

Henry Kaestner: As you talk in kingdom economics, you suggest that other faith traditions have wrestled with these problems and have a framework through which they think about the allocation of capital. What about the way that Jewish people or Muslims and how they’ve processed some of these ancient truths about money? How can they be either an encouragement to us as Christians are maybe a wake up call? How might they be a warning? What’s different?

Brett Johnson: That’s interesting, Henry. When you think about the major eras of capital and just to simplify it, you know, I’ve broken that out in one of my books, but there was an era where Christians abdicated the world of capital. It happened after about 324 A.D., the Council of Nicea. They put a distance between the church and the Jews and Christians got out of the world of capital. There had been quite actively involved. I mean, they were actively working, banking, trading, financing and it became their band interest, a sort of a religious view that Jews never got out of capital. In fact, the banks, as you know, come out of the merchants of Venice, that situation, they brought the bench out. You know, the story, how that evolved. But Christians got out of the world of capital for about a thousand years, and during that time, Islam started up. Now I think that in many respects, the Jews and the Muslims have a more integrated view of capital and Christians. Do we have the secular, sacred dichotomy that says some things are spiritual and some things aren’t? The Jews don’t have that view. They’re much more integrated in their view of things. And the Muslims are more deliberate about the use of capital. I will invest in your business. It’s not alone like a Christian bank where we say, Well, if the collateral is bigger than the loan, that’s fine. It’s an investment. I’m a partner with you in the business. Therefore, I have an incentive to grow you as an individual. Otherwise, I lose my capital and they use capital to disciple people. I remember back 40 years ago, forty five years ago, a friend of mine said, who’d started why? When a youth with a mission in Africa that the biggest problem in Africa was leadership. Some years later, I was sitting down with a couple of people that, you know, in Cape Town, and I asked them, What’s the biggest problem you see in Africa? Because they’d been doing prayer gatherings around Africa? And they responded, The Muslims are buying up the place now. The Muslims are thinking multi-billion dollars to impact the continent. The Chinese are in their wake. And Christians are like 10000 for an orphanage or, you know, maybe 100000 in a good Christian business that’s doing a bit of fintech in Kenya or Cape Town because it’s cheaper than doing it in Silicon Valley. And we think we’ve done it a whole deal, and we have to think bigger in this regard. And I think that the Muslims and the Jews have done a better job in that regard.

Henry Kaestner: As president, it makes me think of the speaker we had at the first Faith Driven Investor conference, Kenny Kuruvilla, who talked about maybe the fact you mention the merchant of Venice. He talks about Columbus being from Genoa and presumably trying to raise venture capital among the Italian city states and going to offer and then going to Portugal and not getting any. And and that’s why they speak Spanish in Ecuador and Peru and Bolivia. They should be speaking Genovese, right, or Italian or something like that. And the extent of that thinking is what language is going to be spoken in the marketplace in Africa, a place where you have more entrants into the job market than Indian and China, are they going to be speaking secular or are they going to be speaking Christian? Are they going to be speaking Arabic or Chinese? Or are they going to be speaking the language of redemptive products and services and loving your neighbor and being thoughtful? And I think that your admonition there is kind of hits me like when I hear about people just like in their giving is like, really, it ends up being like tipping, right? Christians are giving like three or four percent. It’s not giving. It’s tipping. When you say, guys, you know, go ahead and write a check for $10000 for an orphanage. Are we really in Arab? Would you suggest, other than looking at some of these other faith traditions? How is it that you’ve been able to get to a place where you feel about being all in on investments and seeing that this is something that is not just a kind of a side thing, but how do you reconcile that with a listener? That’s listeners right now is like, Wait a second, I want to send my kids to college. I want to have a retirement. If I go all in on a place like Africa, like it sounds like this podcast is encourage me to do. I got currency devaluations. I get all these different things. How do you break through that? What’s the wrong thinking there or is that the wrong thing?

Brett Johnson: Well, I think the thinking is, you know, what is God up to? The question is, you know, many years ago, I think it was Ed Silver, so or one of those guys used to ask people it might have been one of the other guys used to ask who once got in their business and all the Christians would raise their hands. And he said it’s the wrong question, the question is, who wants to get their business into God’s business? Same thing with your portfolio, with your assets. It’s very easy to get God in your business. You have a problem. Everybody wants God in their business. That’s when we want God in our best. Same with our finances, with our investments, and we’ve got to see the bigger purpose. I’ll tell you a story I said in Redwood City. Sitting with a lady, she was a money manager. She’d invested in the South American country, and no sooner had she get the money in the country than they froze the bank account. So now she was upset and she would say to me, Brant, please pray that there unfreeze the bank accounts. After she’d asked me this so many times, I’m sitting at breakfast with her. I started laughing. She said, What are you laughing about? I said, to get a napkin and I said, You went into that country because you wanted to do a capital deal. Get your capital in, get a return for your clients. Get out. But God wanted to impact the nation. So he sent you a problem, and the problem forced you to understand what’s going on in the nation. She found out it was corruption. A politician didn’t like the bank managers, so froze the money. So she starts praying. She goes down with intersperses. She’s meeting with local pastors. What’s going on? She funds out the societal problems about education and health care and corruption and everything. She even goes to the president and says to him, This is what’s going on. If you don’t sort this thing out by such and such a date, I’m doing a press release to all of these media outlets exposing this thing, which she did. I said you went in to do a capital deal, but God wanted to change the nation. So now you’re involved in government, in business, in church, in media, in family and so forth. So I said to some guys recently they wanted me to do something in some country. I said, You want to go in and out and sell a product. God wants to impact the nation. You can decide upfront. God will give you a problem that gets you squeezed out like a good fragrance into that whole nation. So my view is start with what God wants to do in the nation. That’s the big picture or in your city. It could be. Chattanooga could be San Jose, California, or it could be, you know, Namibia or some other country like this. You pick the country and you say, What is God doing there? You could also pick an industry if you like and say, Okay, what does God want to do in the world of, you know, food security or energy or whatever it might be, whatever your giant is, pick then and then work backwards into your investments and then look at the metrics. I think that resets things. Otherwise, we bring old school thinking that God doesn’t care about, you know, am I beating the index? Am I doing this? Am I? I mean, it’s just really we’ve got the wrong metrics on the thing. We have to look at God’s endgame and understand that. And then how do we fit into that picture? So then, you know, go ahead, Rick.

Luke Roush: Now I was just going to say to the discernment process of trying to understand sort of what is God doing in this nation? And then how might I participate in God’s story? Not sort of my own story and inviting God into what I want to do in discernment process for a believer to kind of understand what that looks like, what would be sort of three pieces of advice you would give to someone who is trying to understand sort of where is God at work and how might I be called to participate?

Brett Johnson: I would say God is interested in all of the nations, of course, and it might be through relationships or other ways that you end up there. That’s great. Once you get in there and look for their assets because God is just and he gives every country the assets that they need for the blessing of that nation. Our Western mindset says I’m going to bring in my American thinking or my European processes or my laws, my Roman Dutch laws or whatever to fix your country. A biblical approach says there’s something about the glory of God in this nation, and there are assets that God has probably put in that nation. Now, what are the assets so that they can start thinking possibilities? And then, yes, in the Kingdom of God, we can bring in some additional IP, some thinking, some financial capital, some other things relationships to add to those, but assume that they have assets because God is just find out the health of the assets. I think a lack of stewardship of assets for under stewardship of assets is one of the big giants in the world. You go to India. I mean, the place hasn’t been painted since the British left, you know, and you go to other countries and the railroads are messed up and so forth. So failure to steward assets is a problem. So you can bring the concepts of asset stewardship. I remember I went to Egypt, got a bunch of people together in the Wadi did. And I’m asking them, what assets do you have? And they look at me with a blank. Then they say sand sun. But the question got them thinking, and a guy came to me a few days later and he said, I’ve got a farm out in the desert. I did a calculation. I think I could put in enough solar to power half of Europe. But he just never thought about it before. But if you start with the assets, it’s respectful. It’s a good thing to do. Then I would say look at the health of the sectors of society. Look at the giants, the problems, the things that God cares about and then say, Who’s already tackling those? Let’s invest in the mezzanine type financing growth, financing into people who are already doing something and can be taken to the next level. For example, I went to Madagascar, found a guy that had bought a piece of land and built a mill to make bread, flour, gluten free bread flour out of some local ingredients bread, plant and cassava, and a bakery for $30000. I mean, all of that for $30000. Well, you can replicate that out again and again and again wherever they have those ingredients. So it’s not some speculative thing. So let’s say find out who’s doing good stuff, invest in them and be in it for the long haul. I remember going to Bali and met a guy who went there when there were no churches in Bali. Then he had about 47 churches around the world and he told me, Bret, the Kingdom of God is trench warfare. You don’t go into Indonesia, have a rally, declare that Indonesia is transformed and leave again. So this concept of patient capital so that there is a bill I would say is a key.

Luke Roush: You know, one thing that came to mind in some of your early comments about God’s Kingdom come in kind of here on Earth. This idea of restoration and Wright has written a lot about that was surprised by hope. And it was just kind of reminiscent with some of your talk track there. So anything else that has been influential with your thinking around what does it look like for a new having a new Earth to sort of come to where we are versus sort of, hey, it’s all going to burn in the end anyway? So who cares? Right? It’s because it’s not just about salvation, as you said earlier. Any other thoughts on that?

Brett Johnson: Yeah, I think you know in the book Transforming Society, which I know we don’t want to get into too many books, but what I see actually is three responses which we could talk about to this question. The question is, do we still have a mandate? I mean, I have godly Christian people who actually do investing who say, No, you can’t do all of this stuff. And their view is that over spiritualized, the whole thing, they say, we’re just going to get people saved. If we can get a whole bunch of people say, that’s great. Don’t mess with the economy, don’t mess with politics. We’re not called to do all of those things. The Kingdom of God is above all of that separate from all that. So it’s not invoked. So let’s say there’s three responses, even with the, you know, in the repurposing capital, which changes three responses. One is interventionism, which we’re seeing heavily in western countries. The other is isolationism. We’re going to have a Christian bank. We’re going to take our guns and our seeds and head to the hills of Tennessee, whatever we are. I think somebody just moved to Nashville. That’s probably not on your mind. And or it’s evangelism. Well, if we can just get enough people saved. So I think those are the three. Maybe we should talk about those three big responses to the fact that the economies of the world are in a problem. And I think the world understands the economies are fragile. And then what’s our response? And I think for me, the danger look is that we we just throw in some Christian principles into investing our finances, stewardship, whatever we call it, but we don’t actually fundamentally believe that we can change the systems. So we haven’t talked much about. There are people who want to invest to bring hope, flourishing and so forth. And there are others who are saying, No, we actually have to change the systems and the systems can be changed. Now I see two groups of people over there. One like that says we could change the banking regulations. We could change the way the Fed operates. We could change the underlying policies and procedures. And another group that says, you know, we have to go back to the gold standard or, you know, bitcoin is the new gold and so forth and they looking for a replacement type of system. But I don’t know that there’s a deep belief that we could actually see God’s economy become the dominant economy, and it’s a little bit like revival. There was a book called Like a Mighty Wind Miltary. There was an Indonesian revival back in the day. East Timor. You should read about it. The guy by the name of miltary, he’s still alive. He wrote a second book called The Gentle Breeze of Jesus. He said Unless you had your eyes open, you wouldn’t see the revival, basically. And I think this is where we are in the world of capital and finance. It’s almost like the opportunity is at our fingertips right now and we have to have our eyes. And to see it and to believe that God’s economy can become the dominant economy,

Henry Kaestner: that was very good, that’s very helpful. And they’re just so much more for us to do in future episodes. I’m grateful for the time that you spent with us. I want to go on to something that we asked each one of our guests before we sign off, which is what are you hearing recently from Guy threw his word. And I know that you’re in tune with that. You’ve written a lot of books on that. We talked before about, have you even unpacked exodus for somebody who’s in the marketplace? But what are you hearing? And maybe it’s not today, but maybe it is. But recently that might be an encouragement for all of us.

Brett Johnson: Yeah, Henry, thank you for the question. What’s been exciting this year is just doing a read through the Bible in one year, which I’ve enjoyed doing and just got a little bit to go. And I’m sorry that it’s going to end in a way, but I’ll have a bit more time for journaling again. But what I see when you look at the broad sweep of history all at once, how all of these books of the Bible connect and when you look at it, there’s often times when it looks like God’s not involved. The world is in a mess. Politics is going one way health care. Another way the economy is going another way. The gap between the haves and the have nots. And the question is, where is God in all of this? And God is brooding watching over all of this? His fingerprints are all over history. And I believe that we’re at a crucial time in history right now. And as Christians, people of faith, we need to be alert to it so that we see what’s going on in the big game as it were. So I’m very, very encouraged that we’re at a time in history where we could make more of a difference than we’ve ever made before. If we’re awake, if we’re alert and I really think we’re living out some of the things that we see predicted through the people like Daniel and Ezekiel and the Book of Revelation and so forth. And I’m not saying gloom and doom, I’m saying opportunity, and it’s an opportunity to be grasped. So the fingerprints of God on things that are happening today, it’s like. There’s a bigger game that’s being played and we can get wrapped up in politics, in economics, etc. that God is sovereign and he’s working and he’s wooing us to partner with him in the big things he’s doing in the world.

Henry Kaestner: OK, that’s very encouraging to look on. Big takeaway for me here is and I’ve heard this repeatedly through what Bret has shared. I hadn’t expected to hear this, but it’s just pay attention, be awake, understand the winds of what God is doing. Look for the problems or the opportunities that he serves you up for breakfast and understand that we were built for such time as this, and that there are some ancient truths that help us to think about how to deploy capital, how to think about assets in the different countries and cultures and countries that we invest in. And I’m just I’m grateful. I’m grateful. This was a great time

Luke Roush: is really high, high quality Britain. The other takeaway that I have is that as believers, we need to be very careful about applying secular solutions to problems that God’s call us to solve. Let’s just not rinse, repeat the solutions from the world. And that’s part of what I, you know, I think we see all around us, particularly in the last two or three years that has created some divisions and even some confusion around the witness that we have in broader society because of how we’ve at times as believers body, the church tried to use conventional solutions to resolve differences or other things so that that also is going to come up for several weeks in my mind.

Henry Kaestner: Great. Thank you. Very, very grateful for your partnership, your leadership in getting out there. We’re going to put the links to the books in the show notes link to the Exodus podcast, and we’re just grateful for you.

Brett Johnson: Thank you so much. It’s been a privilege to chat with you, and I love the work that you’re doing.

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Filmmaker Jon Erwin has worked his way from operating cameras at sporting events to producing a major motion picture about a sports legend. His move from the sidelines to the studios has been earned through hard work and perseverance. It has also come by way of Jon’s strong desire to draw people to the hope and the truth of the Gospel. On the Faith Driven Investor Podcast, Jon shares about the early days of his career. He also talks about the making of “American Underdog,” how it came to the big screen, and why he believes in the power of strong stories that positively influence culture.

Episode Transcript

Richard Cunningham: Jon, we are so grateful you’re here. I’m actually going to start reason for having me because it’s so impressive. And then we’ll have you fill in some of the gaps, though. All right. Here’s some of the Jon Erwin story. Jon Erwin began his career as a teenager working for ESPN as a camera operator in his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. In 2002, he founded a production company with his brother, Andrew, the brother were directing videos and producing concerts and television programs for platinum recording artists such as Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith, Casting Crowns, Switchfoot, Skillet and others. They received 11 GLAAD Award nominations and three wins for Music Video of the Year. In 2010, Jon and Andrew began exclusively developing dramatic feature films. The features of all opened in the top 10 box office on opening weekend, and they received the coveted A-plus CinemaScore twice. Some of those titles are October Baby, Moms Night Out and Woodlawn. Additionally, the list also includes the surprise hit ‘I can only imagine’ which became the number one independent film of twenty eighteen, earning over eighty three million at the box office. In 2019, Jon and Andrew launched the Kingdom Story Company alongside their partners Kevin Downs and Tony Young, and the production company just released the new feature film American Underdog. Based on True, an inspiring story of Hall of Fame NFL quarterback Kurt Warner and his wife, Brenda. So if you don’t have plans this weekend, you’re going to watch American underdog. There’s a lot of your Bible Belt, man. Let’s start with the basics. Who are you? Fill it in. Then what has God done in your life to bring you here today?

Jon Erwin: Well, I mean, my name name’s Jon. I appreciate you guys having me. You know, I think I’m a living testament that God can use anyone. And we all have unique gifts. I had to do what’s done in the bios. I had to do kindergarten twice because I was an ADHD disturbance to the class. It was more everyone else’s grades than it was mine, but it was like I was that much of a disruption. And you know, you can’t grow up further away from L.A. or from Hollywood than Birmingham, Alabama. So I just think, you know, as the Bible says, God uses the weaklings of the world to confound the wise. And he’s given us all gifts and there’s nothing more fun and fulfilling vocationally than when you can really find, you know, there’s a lot of things that we can do. There’s only a few that that we can uniquely do, and I think even fewer that we’re sort of called to do. And if you live in your calling and your unique ability and you do it for God’s glory and for reasons beyond yourself, vocationally life does not get more fulfilling than that. So I’m one of those lucky people that gets to, I say, the coolest job in the world. And, you know, we say that, you know, we work for the fans. Everything we do is is about the people sitting in the seats and the experience they’re having with the movies. And I’m very grateful to have the job I have, you know, and to tell stories for a living. And so we say we’re storytellers serving the greatest storyteller of all time. And you know, it’s interesting. God is really, really on the move in Hollywood in ways that are really cool to be a small part of.

Katherine Trout: Thanks for sharing that, Jon. I know one question I’m sure you get a lot is how did you get to where you are today and where you just see the hands of a in that? And he started you in a surprising place on the sidelines, operating guys.

Jon Erwin: Yeah, yeah. I can’t recommend this story, but I can tell you what happened. It’s I mean, first of all, desperation is a powerful motivator. And so sometimes it’s like when your only option is to figure it out, you keep going. I’ve heard it said success is long obedience in the same direction. And, you know, the Bible echoes that that, you know, in due season will reap. If we don’t lose heart, we don’t quit. Which was really the theme of the Kurt Warner movie American Underdog, which we wanted to do that film. But for me, I started working at a cable station when I was 12. My dad helped show there and he was a radio show. And then when I was 15, I had apprenticed for a cameraman from my church. You know, I think you get big opportunities when you do small things, well, you know? And so I had just carried around Australia and helped them out, and I was super curious, you know, as a kid and try to maintain that. I think if there is a nitroglycerin to success at any level, I’ve found it’s sort of the the two most valuable elements, I think would be just a level of resilience and a level of curiosity, like if you just watch those people that has a high pain tolerance and won’t quit. But you also love to learn and love to stay curious. Eventually, you’ll figure it out. And so when I was 15, that cameraman was on a University of Alabama football game. I should say roll tide and somebody got sick randomly a cameraman about three hours before the kick off. I lived an hour away, and so this guy, my mentor Mike, called me and said, Get over here right now. Don’t tell anybody how old you are. Just don’t say anything. You know, lies a strong word, but you know, basically just neglect to inform anyone of the actual truth. And so I went over there and I had the time of my life. I just, you know, 15 year old homeschooled southern Baptist, you know, in the reddest of the states. And all of a sudden it was like joining the circus and I had just a blast and did the game. They pay me $300. We’d have any money. So I had never seen that much money at one time and accruing agent called me the next week and just said, I guess they looked at the list and said, Are you a freelance camera operator in Birmingham? Because it’s right in the middle of the assessee? So there’s lots of televised games. I didn’t know if that was three different jobs or a single job, you know? So I literally just said, yes, that’s what I do that that’s that’s me. And I did a game on Auburn and then just started doing games every week. My brother quickly followed my dad with money. He did not have helped me buy a camera when I was 16 and help me get a loan, which you should be 16 for $10000 for editing equipment. And we just were off to the races and my brother and I, we started making stuff and I like this. There’s a Malcolm Gladwell book Outliers that talks about the 10000 hour rule. And, you know, basically that anybody that’s really successful has been 10000 hours refining their craft. And that was sort of what it was for me. And we were just we had the good fortune of charging people a little bit of money, like a $500 wedding. We videotaped orthopedic trauma surgeries. You know, we did birthday parties. I mean, anything that you could possibly do just to make stuff and just to refine our craft. And that’s how the whole thing sort of began.

Richard Cunningham: I cannot tell you how much I love that story. That is a wild 15 year old sideline of Alabama football game. We have one of the co-hosts of the faith driven podcast William Norvell would be just jumping out of a seat to hear that story. He is a diehard Crimson Tide family. All right, so incredibly humble beginnings. So cool to hear about how your dad also gets involved and kind of help with this passion, this calling. Now it’s 2002. You’ve got this incredible experience, the camera. You’re talking about 10000 hours and you and your brother just mastering this craft. You guys decide to go out on your own producing music videos, working alongside a lot of these Christian artists. What was that like? Yeah, I like the fact that

Jon Erwin: sometimes you have to have in life, you know, the courage to leap. You know, my kids go to the school, behold. And you know, they say that in the Bible, it’s based on the version of what God says. Behold, I’m doing something new. You know, can you see it? And for me, when there’s nothing really left to learn, that’s where vocationally I’ve got to move somewhere. And so I love working for ESPN. It was a great sort of 10 years of my life, but in my early 20s, we were trying to start really get our production company off the ground. And sometimes you can’t serve two masters, as the Bible says. And so, like Cortez, had to burn his ships, you know, to motivate his men. And I just remember calling all of the crewing agents and say, this has been a wonderful season of life and I have this dream. At the time, it was to direct music videos and commercials and really going to go for it. And I think I just need to chase it fully, and if I fail, I’m going to call you and beg for a job. But I’m going to I’m going to try and, you know, I have never regretted those type decisions. You know, looking back where I have regretted hesitating, you know, and maybe being afraid of what God could do. And there’s been, you know, three or four of them in my life. And so jump to music videos and commercials and did a ton of music, a lot of Christian music videos, some country music videos. And really, that was great fun. I mean, that was really where we found our sort of visual style and voice, and we did some fun videos at the time. The label would submit a song and you would have to typically write a six eight page treatment with a bunch of nonsense and adjectives like amazing and nuanced, and the band’s going to look beautiful. And it’s, you know, all these words that I don’t even know. They mean, you know, just to try to get the video awarded. But we had gotten popular and we’d won via the year a few times. And I remember we did a video. It was a we did a video for Skillet, this Christian band and literally the whole treatment was the band is singing at night. Things start to blow up. Then it starts to rain. Then it rains and things blow up. Then everything blows up the end, you know, and that was just the type of things that were just great fun to just do stunts and explosions and car chases. And, you know, each music video was like this little mini movie. So again, it was a way for us to refine our craft. And then sometimes the questions can be the most powerful agents of change. And I went to direct second unit on a faith based film called Courageous that Sony was doing in this real Cinderella story. A church out of Georgia was making movies. And as luck would have it or whatever George Washington called the Divine Hand, you know Sony was trying to get into Faith-Based films after The Passion of the Christ. And so they acquired these films from this church, Sherwood and started releasing them, and the first one to ten million a football film called Face the Giants. The second one called Fireproof, did like 30, and it was this big sort of thing. And so they wanted to do a film called Courageous, but they were making their films primarily with church volunteers. So it’s an incredible story. And so I went into direct because it was a police drama and there were car chases and action sequences and foot chases. You never want to combine car chases with church volunteers. It’s like that’s where people can die. And so it

Richard Cunningham: was really massive red flag, right?

Jon Erwin: Yeah, yeah. So I had directed all these music videos like the skill at one. And so it was my job to come in with a smaller group of professionals and some people and go do those action sequences in that film. So nobody died. And you know, it’s a Southern Baptist church in Georgia. And so, you know, exaltation is a big thing. And I remember Alex, the director of that film, got right up in my face right away and basically said, You know, we don’t quite understand you like, what’s your purpose and the purpose of your work? And what is the question everyone should ask themselves like? It’s a great book. Simon Sinek wrote it called Start with Why and that great leaders and organizations don’t begin with what they they begin with why. And they sort of emanate from the wire, you know? And so when you join great companies like Apple, I still I love Southwest Airlines and I just fly. I still stay on that airline just because I love the spirit of the airline and I love the way of it. And so it’s a great question, but this question I can answer. And so I for a long time, while doing those sequences on that film, I thought about that question like, why do I do what I do? It all just happened. My career plan was like. Indiana Jones, where like, I don’t know, making this up as I go, like from age 15, it it all just sort of manifested and I had gotten opportunities that people that dream of being a filmmaker from like birth and then go to film school don’t ever get. I mean, it was unbelievable some of the breaks that I got and some of the sort of the providence involved. And so I really that was my moment where a career became a calling and I realized I could fuze this thing that I had sort of practice for a while with my faith and that, you know, we’re this rare generation of Christians, and I think this is why Faith Driven Investor is so important that could actually accomplish the great commission in our lifetime. You know, when Jesus says take the gospel to the whole world, I mean, he said, it’s a people that know this content we’re on would exist for like 400 years. And so we’re this first because of technology generation that can really get it done. They can get the gospel all around the world. And I think the way we would have to do it is really to to harness some of the mechanisms. I love it where Paul says of David and actually serve the purposes of God in his generation, like the gospel never changes. The true truth never changes. But the way you get it to people really does. And so I love that phrase in his generation. You got to sort of own your time in mass media is just a great way to tell stories, a great way to communicate. So I think that that was the turning point where a career became a calling. Functionally, we went from a service company where, you know, sort of like Han Solo. So I got this ship. You need to go somewhere. You pay me and I’m out. I’m done as a service company to an intellectual property company where we were actually developing. You know, that was the business of it all. And that was another huge jump, completely different business. And, you know, like the line where Mike Tyson said every boxer has a plan until he gets in the ring, gets punched in the face. So beginning to sort of raise money for our own films and whatnot. It was, you know, we just you have to just get in and figure it out. But it was definitely we embodied that line for sure.

Katherine Trout: In Twenty Eighteen, that’s when you produced the film. I can only imagine which has quickly become a household name and not just Christian films, but films in general. We’d love to hear you share a little bit more about specifically for financing that movie. What was the process like? What ActionScript had you actually taken to get that up and running?

Jon Erwin: Well, from a financial perspective, it was very interesting project. We had raised money. Every filmmaker should. There’s two classes of money that you have to pull together to release a feature film in theaters. Now, as we do this podcast, we’re at a moment of disruption. It’s so fascinating. I could I could talk you off about a very similar COVID is is reshaping the movie industry in a very similar way that Napster reshaped the music industry. It’s that sort of level of disruption is permanent behavioral change. It’s like ten years of change in 18 months, and it’s just so fascinating to be in this moment of rapid and rapid change. But typically, there’s two classes of money. There’s the equity that it takes to make a movie, and then there’s what’s called pay, which is printed advertising, which is the advertising budget. And what’s interesting is I actually think that failure is actually the great teacher. There’s a great book from I think he runs the largest hedge fund in the world radio. It’s called principles, and he talks about just the power of a process he calls looping, which is basically just learning incrementally from your failures. And so we had made films that all open in the top 10. All of them had made money. Nothing had broken out, made a ton of money. And then we got to this film called Woodlawn that we did before. I can only imagine. And they say a filmmaker finds their story and tells it over and over again. Woodlawn is where we found the power true stories. And you know, tens of thousands of young people got saved because that movie I remember watching 800 teenagers go forward at a screening of that movie, and it just I feel like a movie doesn’t do the work. The movie just sets the stage. It’s like, we call it setting a volleyball that other people spike. It’s called emotional instigation. And no wonder Jesus told emotional stories, you know, and then explain them. But we spent more on that movie than we ever had before, and then we raised some of the money, but not all of it to market it. And that was the first time we didn’t recover the entire investment. We recovered about two thirds of the investment. And film is definitely a high risk, high reward. It belongs in your alternative portfolio. And if you’re a filmmaker out there, one of the big moral things to do is just never take money people need. When you make money, you make a lot of money, but it’s a volatile game. And so you just have to structure it right. And I think being honest about that upfront is actually a better way to raise money. But it just wrecked me. I couldn’t I couldn’t sleep at night and I couldn’t stop. I just I am hyper competitive, and so I have this thing. I say, either I win or we play again, like, I’m OK losing, but just please, let’s just go again. And so we did a five month postmortem on that movie. And really, you know, what’s interesting is that I’m in an industry where there is a category of people, literally. Called critics like it’s their job to criticize, and you have to separate your identity from the work and understand that’s OK. But what’s interesting is we never really solicit criticism from people that really care about us and want us to succeed. And it’s one of the funny things about business at every level is like because so much of it is just solving problems. And I think we don’t ever take the time to say, I wonder what I can learn. And I think a lot of times it’s actually worse in faith based film because we sort of back up the finish line to the results achieved. And then what I say is we sort of throw the God card in the sense that we say, well, we got the gospel out. So and we sort of don’t ever admit to not accomplishing our goals, and we certainly did with that movie. And it was the first movie that had this sort of burst of evangelical sort of use, but it didn’t. We didn’t accomplish our financial goals, and so we just confronted that head on. And one of the best things ever on a piece of paper was, you know, Woodlawn failed, and it’s my fault, and let’s figure it out. And so that led to this sort of study and so much came out of that process of learning. And that led to the way we were able to spot the value of I can only imagine when no one else saw it because of the data and because of what we had learned about theatrical, moviegoing and brands and it being sort of a branded driven event business. And so many people know and love that song. And so we saw value where other people didn’t see value. And that’s, I think entrepreneurism in general. You have to be looking at the same thing everyone else is and see what no one else sees, and it enables to do that. And then a very innovative financial model came out of that that no one said would work in the status quo of our industry. And basically, it was that these two categories of money, you have this equity category of money and then you have advertising put on top of that, this pay, which is debt, it’s last in first out that in the way most people, if you know anybody that ever lost money in a feature film, they’ll typically what happens is if the film implodes and doesn’t get made well or when it gets released, all of that money that it took to release it sits on top of the equity in your equity. Investors end up buried at the bottom of this totem pole of inequality. And then also, you don’t have leverage to negotiate your deals. Like in my business, I’ve found and I think in any business, the two most important words are control and leverage. And so you have to build cases of leverage. And when you only have the movie but you don’t have any money or plan to get your product to a consumer, you don’t have a business plan and so that you get into this acquisitions world. In the studio system, these are a publicly traded, diversified companies that can just bleed you out and wait till you’re broke. And so the fees were way too high with wood line and distribution fees and a lot of the fees on top of that. And so what we did is we just said, why can’t we? We did two things. We said, Why can’t we just take this sort of, you know, vertical inequality thing and just turn it over and raise money into a blended vehicle where if you invest in it, 40 percent of your money is deployed. Equity 60 percent is deployed to advertising all your money making money. But it becomes this thing that nobody thought could be achieved, which it was a dollar one return to the first investor and which was not the status quo. And so we actually went out raising money based off informing people of why they would lose money in film deals or had or knew somebody that had. And so it was this sort of whistleblower pitch. And then what we were trying to do about it, and it’s funny that honesty is what raised the money. We raised it quicker than we had ever raised money before, and it created this scenario. The other thing we did is I remember sitting my pastor at the time when I lived in Birmingham was Chris Hodges, which I still love him, and he’s one of the smartest guys in the church. And I was sitting in church. And I think a lot of business people have this sort of attitude towards nonprofits or towards the church that the business practices aren’t. But the Church of the Highlands, which is his church based off just a few very shrewd principles, is one of the most well-run organizations I’ve ever seen and debt free like a hundred and fifty million dollars in cash and assets. And it’s incredible. And his basic principle is this principle of margin. He basically does an annualized budget that’s 90 percent of the previous year’s spending, even though they typically grow 20 percent year over year. So that leaves this 30 percent margin that they just put away in the bank. So they never do, you know, financial drives. Basically, he plans forward based off where he’s been in terms of budgeting, and that hit me like a ton of bricks. I remember that service. I’m like, you know, he’s right, and we were so aggressive in where we thought we could grow that we forgot about margin. And so I can only imagine was built based off that principle with this blended vehicle to break even financially break even right at Woodlands box office of 15 million. Well, we did that in two days, and so everything between 15 million and 86 was margin, and so everyone did really, really well, and it led to the Lionsgate deal that we’re still in. Joined today, and so I just think that the enduring sort of things to consider are, you know, really take the time to learn from your failures. You know, I love to win, but I’ve found I don’t learn near as much when I when I actually learn a lot more, when I so just learned to micro fail and learn and apply quickly and just ask, you know, just have this curiosity to ask people what they thought, you know, you could do better or what went wrong. And then there are some principles that I love. A friend of mine, Craig Rochelle, is a pastor. He said, When you get around, great people don’t learn what they do. Your pride in their business, but learn how they think. And sometimes these simple principles of how to think can be pretty life changing in business. And so that’s how we raise the money for that movie. And then it led to the landscape you.

Richard Cunningham: I just we got to stop and point out real quick. Just some of the quotes you’ve pulled in that you’ve got a book of acts to Mike Tyson is just,

Jon Erwin: I you know, I’ll tell you this if you ever want to give me a birthday gift I collect, I love quotes, I just collect quotes and I have like your notepad on my phone. Is this ever running list? I love a good quote, and it is no

Richard Cunningham: secret you’re a storyteller because it is just amazed where you’re pulling from. All right, so I can only imagine massive success. You talk about the margin that happened between eighty six and fifteen and just love your humility in the way you all approach that and just kind of thinking through, like, how can we strategize on the failure we had prior so powerful? So the Lord gives you this amazing windfall and this audience right now we’re talking to is Faith Driven Investor, as many of you are credited who have probably had a similar situation. An amazing windfall and an opportunity now to steward some success they’ve been given. We’d love to hear about you and Andrew’s kind of mindset. Once that took place post, I can only imagine and say, Hey, how can we use this position of influence capital and how almost maybe our pick of the litter of what we want to do next?

Jon Erwin: Yeah, a really interesting thing happened. Normally in our, you know, entertainment is driven by a power law in terms of economics. And there’s some, you know, biotech is like that. And you know, basically it means that it’s a winner. Take all game and I love it for this reason. It’s a hyper competitive industry. And once you succeed, you know, it’s an industry where most things fail. There’s this natural inclination to sort of want to guard what you’ve learned and guard your brain and be like back away and sort of, you know, because it’s just so competitive. But I began to think, OK, if the real goal is to really substantively reclaim the imagination of a generation with the gospel, I give the gospel to our generation, our time. You know, that is something to be a part of that’s bigger than any one initiative. And what I had learned is these things that these anomaly events in faith film that really tipped like I can only imagine or what’s happening now. The great friend Dallas Jenkins and his show that shows and if you hadn’t seen it, it’s amazing. What a Kellyway that is. You should have him on your show. But you know that or even, you know, Phil’s company, the idea that the VeggieTales or even maximale movie The Passion of the Christ, it’s like there were these anomaly moments or Divine Franklin’s films, the Kendrick’s films, but nothing coalesced in the sense that there was no sort of snowball effect. There was no combined effort, and I began thinking about that. And just, you know, normally when a filmmaker succeeds, it becomes all about you. And it’s like, What? What do I want to do next? And I just began to think of this question, really that I felt God spit. Some have it in my life where our son, who’s eight now and he’s great, but he had sort of these health things we couldn’t understand up having to have immediate sort of open heart surgery when he was three and I was in the middle we imposed on, I can only imagine and I was actually directing a documentary called Steve McQueen American Icon, and I was immediately sidelined. You know, as they say, the show must go on, and that documentary was slated for the actual release in September. And it was not finished and people were buying tickets to it. And all this happened in June, and I had to recruit and empower another filmmaker, which was not my style. Prior to that, really, you know, I created things myself or with my brother and that filmmaker Ben Smallbone, he did so well. I remember sitting in that premiere thinking he didn’t do as good as me. He actually did better, and he took the ideas deeper and I was actually more fulfilled, having helped equip and empower him than I was doing the work myself. And that’s the moment that it sort of clicked. I’m like, Oh my goodness, we could scale like we could scale our processes, you know, you could always scale a system, you know? And so I’m like, This is, I think there’s a scalable system here, and I think that we could actually incubate and empower other filmmakers. And so I began to look at models like where these singular events, these anomalies, like a movie like Star Wars, actually birthed a company like Lucasfilm or Toy Story, birthed Pixar. And we began to think, what if this was bigger than our name? Because up to that point, it was called Irwin Brothers, and we just kept coming to this name Kingdom. And that led to Kingdom Story Company, which the idea just became this orbiting question. What can we do together that none of us can do alone? And it’s a very powerful thing. There’s a documentary series that I can’t recommend, but it’s great, but it’s called especially for an entrepreneur. It’s called the defiant ones, which is this guy, Jimmy Levine, who did this company called Interscope and Dr. Dre. And they’re sort of Jimmy’s company. Interscope and RJ sort of rise through hip hop, and they do beats together and sell to Apple. It’s really entrepreneurism story. And one of the things that Jimmy Iovine says to Will.i.am and that has become my my season of life that I’m in now that I’m really enjoying, which is, he said to Will.i.am. He said, You’re talented enough. If you can just keep your seat at the table, you’ll be successful. He said, or become the table. And he walked away and will.i.am was like, What does that even mean? And then it really clicked for him. If you can become the place where the right people can gather. That is a very powerful thing. And so what I realized is because I sort of love the business and love the creativity, and I see the art in the business and the business in the art that I could be uniquely useful at serving the visions of other creatives and really seeing them shine. And that’s really what this season of life that I’m in now is I’m loving that more and more, and it is unbelievable when you get a conspiracy of friends together in a common ideal and objective what can be accomplished and God’s just moving all over Hollywood. I remember when we did the Lionsgate deal was very good deal, and they dumped a ton of money into our films, our brand. But I was with felt the CEO and I came out and one of the heads of the other divisions was like looking around and he’s like, Hey, get over here. And I’m like, what? He said, literally, like, he told me his name. He said, I’m a Christian

Richard Cunningham: and there’s a few of us. And I’m so glad you’re here.

Jon Erwin: I kind to go, you know, and I’m like, I think this is you can come out about it. Like, I came through the front door. They’re paying us to be here. And it’s just. But there’s a lot of Christians in the industry at all levels that God has placed, and there’s just a lot going on. And I’m I’m really happy to be a small part of it, and it’s fun to just pull those people together that have never really worked together before. We’ve been what we call competitive allies. You know, but now we’re getting to work together, and it’s just an exciting time and exciting thing to be a part of.

Katherine Trout: Wow, that’s such a powerful story. And it reflects what the body of Christ is really designed to look like is to be collaborative and to be as one rather than competing against the other. So especially in a place like Hollywood, where it feels really isolating to be a Christian there, having that community is so inspiring, Jon. I also wanted to ask you, of course, about your new movie that’s in theaters now. American underdog? Yes, St. Louis native myself. OK, art has been always has held a special place in my heart. I believe that was my first ever football jersey was Kurt Warner.

Jon Erwin: That’s amazing.

Katherine Trout: Very exciting.

Richard Cunningham: I did not know this over here. It hit the big screen.

Katherine Trout: So tell us a little bit about what made you decide to tell the story of Kurt.

Jon Erwin: Well, I mean, as a filmmaker, I think you have to realize that you’re the first viewer, you know? And so I think, you know, it has to be a story that moves me, that I can’t stop thinking about that. I then feel like, OK, this is our story to tell, and there has to be a cause behind the movie that I believe in giving time to. So like I remember with, I can only imagine. I remember asking him because we’re documentary filmmakers first. So we do these sort of interviews. And I remember asking Bart, you know, if I were to literally put a gun to your head and say, Is Jesus real? What would you say? And he said, yes, and I said, And how would you know? I’m just always curious to answer that question, he said. Because of the change I saw my dad, he said, I I watch this monster transform into the man I wanted to become and into my best friend. And you know, his faith is the only way to explain that. And so we all know the song I can only imagine is a song about heaven. Come to find out it’s a son singing for his father, and I thought it was a very powerful thing. And so the idea and I remember, you know, it’s cool. There’s actually been over 400000 of these type responses, but there was a woman watching. I can only imagine there’s another woman in her and her son leaving, and this woman didn’t get obviously couldn’t and said, Are you guys Christians? And they said, Yeah. And she said, I’m not. But whatever happened to Dennis Quaid in this movie, I need to happen to me. I need someone to explain it to me. And they they witness to it right there. And so that’s sort of why we do what we do. What I love about Kurt Warner is I love the idea of I wanted to make a film. And I think anything I did, especially in the times in which we live. Famous story, well known story, one of the great underdog sports stories. But to me, it was about the audience and making a film so that people could see it and say, You know what, if he can accomplish his calling in life and his dream, you know, maybe I can, too. And if they can stay together and love each other, maybe we can, too. And it’s just it. It’s just such a thing. You could not be further away from your dream than Kurt Warner was from his, and yet, you know, we all you bought his jersey, you know, and I think that that’s the amazing thing and it’s just so much of life and success and fulfilling a calling is just never, ever, ever giving up. And you just never know. Funny with I can only imagine my dad when he bought me a camera, a 16, he actually said, Hey, dream ball, dream. Big dream, the impossible. And then he says, if you give 20 years of your life to something, you’ll be successful. And it was almost 20 years exactly to the success of I can only imagine. And I think that there’s something to that. I think a lot of people give up at your 19 or you’re 17, which is where all the work is, you know, and they just don’t endure long enough. And you just never know when that breakthrough moment in life is right around the corner. And so I loved the story for that reason, and I also loved the idea that Kurt Warner became a champion off the field and then brought it onto the field. He had the arm of a champion. He had the talent of a champion but didn’t have the heart of a champion. He found that in his relationship with Brenda and her son and her kids and their son specifically, who’s disabled? You know, I understand that part of the story well, and it was actually him really her faith rubbing off on him and him falling in love with her and her kids and embracing a world that was bigger than he was finding his faith, becoming a Christian, becoming a father and all those things that he learned off the field. And it’s it creates as much of a love story as it is a sports story. And they really won together the entitled son of Vince Gill, and we got and seeing as love changes everything. And it really is true for this story. They really won together, but I loved all that he learned. He found his character off the field, and that’s what allowed him to become a champion on the field. And I just love that part of the story. And I just want to make a story that reinvigorates the dreams of the audience. You know, we’ve all had a really tough year and a half, and our dreams have never felt further away. So I wanted to tell a story about someone that was as far from his dream as you could ever be. And yet he still endured and accomplished it. And, you know, willing to give it a platform for Kurt and Brenda to talk about their life and their faith and their love story. And so that was sort of why we did the film, and I don’t know if this is like everyone’s going to come out, but it’s still in theaters and lovely to see it. And then I think it’s Super Bowl weekend is when it’s coming to pulmonary edema.

Richard Cunningham: Awesome. So fitting come and come to home Super Bowl week and I love that.

Jon Erwin: Yeah. Yeah, yes. Good timing.

Richard Cunningham: Love this. So practical. How can investors invest in a portfolio of faith based films most effectively would love to hear you just riff on that for a second, Jon?

Jon Erwin: Oh man, let me get back to you because it’s a, you know, we’re we’re dreaming about that right now. You know, I was very fortunate in God’s providence to get in business with the movie studio Lionsgate after I can only imagine because our next film came out, it was funny. I can only imagine that huge run, never one a minute film of 2018, but we were never number one at the box office. We just sort of like, we’re a little Honda Accord that got behind the tractor trailer semi-truck that was Black Panther, and we just glided behind it. But you know, the film we did after that, I still believe, actually is no. The only time we’ve been number one number one movie the night it opened on Friday, the one in America. But that was March 9th, 2020, and so not the best we can to release a film that, you know. And so everything was shut down and we had to go digital. And what’s interesting and you know, I think the thing for those raising money is just always believe fully in everything that you put in front of investors. And you know, what’s funny about that? And there’s a ton of opportunity in the disruption. But COVID has ended up reshaping behavior in an incredibly fundamental way that I think while it makes one form of getting a movie to people, which is a theatrical movie business much more difficult not only for faith films, reward films and, you know, musicals and Pixar and a lot of the box office. Because during COVID, you know, basically it was the streaming wars. And so for new streaming services were launched. Everybody sort of upgrade their technology very similar to in the music business when the album was pulled apart and you could buy your favorite song for 99 cents. That just reshaped an industry, the revenue still there. It’s in different places. So I would say as disruptive as that is to the economics of the moviegoing business in general and the studio business and everybody, it’s also opened up some incredible opportunities elsewhere in the home. And so that’s what we’re really researching right now and really building is I think that there’s enormous opportunity and I think there’s an extent that we have to no one go where people want the content. And also and I realize this is a very political answer, and I’m sorry. The point is we’re building a strategy that really believe in that. I’d love to get back to you on. But I think that when you look at the streaming wars and this mergers and acquisitions bloodbath, that is the entertainment business, the end of that is. Basically, everywhere you consume, content is going to be owned in these sort of super conglomerates, ultimately owned by one of the four tech giants. And I just don’t see that sort of Silicon Valley mindset and political worldview sort of allowing overt Christianity in that sort of downstream. So at least my home, I’m probably not the best for controlling my home, but the way I feel is screens have sort of overrun my home. And if I look at the future, I could see three or four years a situation where it would be very difficult to get content on those screens. If we don’t act now, we don’t act in a very big way. And so I think that that’s what I’m really diving into, and I love the moment that we’re in the moment in time in our industry because it’s that mass disruption that just accelerates change that we’ll be talking about for a very long time. And I think if you’re willing to let go of old ways of thinking and see where the value is, there’s enormous value, but you have to sort of embrace change and embrace change very quickly. So I would say that the current model for what has worked up to this point, that was very difficult for an independent film where all your eggs in one basket. The question is right. You have to sort of diversify risk and, you know, go with a whole portfolio mindset. And then I think there’s just a lot of work to do on the economics of how these things, you know, we make money, not off people consuming entertainment. We make money off how they consume entertainment. And so when the how changes abruptly and quickly, it just takes time. And it’s these enormous opportunities open up and then other things sort of change rapidly what we’re seeing now. You know, just over the last two months, especially after Spielberg’s movie, that people’s expectations of where they want the content and where they would most enjoy the content are permanently changed. It’s got nothing to do with safety. It’s now have it loops that have been built, and I could talk your ear off on those just fascinating. So I think that there is an answer to the question, but it’s in sort of re-engineering the value chain of where the content is. And I think I wish I could say we’re close to being able to say what I really do believe is next and where there is a lot of value for films. But it’s going to look all different. The theatrical window will survive, but it’ll only be for specific things, and there’s a lot of things that were theatrical prior to the pandemic or not. So that’s my vague political answer. We’ve got it. We’ve got to build a different engine to the car.

Richard Cunningham: Jon, thank you again. Let me ask you this. But again, we are grateful. Thank you for the way you have used the story of Jon Andrew Irwin and the many, many gifts you’ve given them to Steward and the positions you’ve given them steward. And finally got it. It is all about your son and may we make much of his name? And thank you for the way people like Jon are doing that in the ever changing kind of spiritual warfare landscape of media. And so we just ask that you would be with Jon and the many endeavors that are in front of him be with all those that are on this call today. Thank you so much for the privilege together. We love you, King Jesus Amen Amen.

Jon Erwin: Appreciate you guys. I wish I could stay. There’s so many questions in the chat that I wish I could answer, but maybe next time, but come

Richard Cunningham: back any time we’ll take you, we’ll take you any time. Thank you, everybody.

Katherine Trout: Thanks, Jon.

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If you haven’t yet watched The Chosen, we would highly recommend putting it at the top of your to-binge list. It’s an amazing narrative of the life of Jesus that has enjoyed significant popularity. Dallas Jenkins is the creator, director and co-writer of The Chosen, which in addition to being the first multi-season series about the life of Christ is also the most successful media crowdfund of all time.

Episode Transcript

Dallas Jenkins: I reached a point in my career shortly before the chosen, where I was genuinely OK with never making another movie because my movie failed. The movie that I had done, I had finally gotten to this place where Hollywood wanted to make movies with me, financed my movie, produced my movie The Resurrection of Gavin Stone, released in theaters. Everything was great. They wanted to make multiple movies with me over the next ten years. I was a director with a very bright future, and then my movie completely bombed. And in my lowest moment, confused wondering why God allowed this to happen, wondering where my future was. I genuinely got to a place where I didn’t feel responsible to feed the 5000. I only felt responsible to provide the loaves and fish.

Rusty Rueff: If you’re listening today to our podcast that you haven’t yet watched the chosen, well, we would highly recommend putting it at the top of your to binge list. It’s an amazing narrative of the life of Jesus that has seen increased popularity recently, and today we’re talking to the man behind the show. That’s right. Dallas Jenkins is the creator, director and co-writer of The Chosen, which, in addition to being the first multi season series about the life of Christ, is also the most successful media crowdfund of all time. Let’s hear from Dallas and let him explain how all of this has come to be.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur and at Faith Driven Investor podcasts were really fired up about today’s guest. I mean, any time we have a crossover podcast when we’re talking to Faith driven entrepreneurs and Faith Driven Investor, it’s kind of a big deal around here and it’s a big deal for me as a father of three teenage boys. It is definitely a big deal for William. If you’re not seeing this on video and this is an audio podcast, so we’ll do some video snippets. We put up on the website. William is sporting a t shirt today. What is the t shirt say? Get used to different, get used to different. And I think that if there’s something that you are more of a fanboy about other than Alabama, everything, it may be the chosen.

William Norvell: It very well could be. This is one of the highlights. This is definitely the first time I’ve ever worn a podcast t shirt to his interview and not really being ashamed about it. Like, you know, there’s certain times where you’re like, You know, I know I’m doing it and it’s going to be weird, but it has had such a profound impact on my life. I am so grateful for the work the Dallas has done and is a slogan get used to it. I ordered so many things with us because it it motivates me every day as as so many things throughout the series is done and just change my family’s life, the conversations we have and my walk of Christ profound way. So yes, I am wildly excited about today’s episode.

Henry Kaestner: So Dallas, thank you. Everybody now knows who our special guest is. It’s Dallas Jenkins, creator of the chosen Dallas. Thank you very much for being on the program.

Dallas Jenkins: Oh, I appreciate that and you look great. I know the listener can’t see it, but get used to different t shirt. Looks great, and that is based on episode seven of season one, when Jesus says that to Simon Peter, so get used to different. And that phrase really has become, I think, a calling card and a call to action for the show and for people who watch the show because I think it applies to Jesus, his ministry. I think it applies to everything that we’ve done with this show from day one. Everything about it has been different. So I feel like it’s something we say to the audience. It’s something Jesus says to us, and it’s something we say to ourselves. So I love that you’re that you’re bringing that T-shirt onto the podcast. I think it’s actually appropriate.

Henry Kaestner: MIT indeed. Indeed. OK, we like to do this with every podcast guest that is to understand a bit of your background, who you are, where you come from, the things that led you up until your creative career. Just give us five. Or please.

Dallas Jenkins: Well, my father is Jerry Jenkins. She’s the author of the left behind books, and even before the left behind books exploded in popularity, sold 70 million copies by the time I was getting out of college. He had written well over 100 books before that as well. So I grew up in a storytelling family. I grew up in a very strong conservative, fundamentalist Christian home, and I was actually sheltered a little bit from movies. Even my dad happened to be a big movie buff, but when I was growing up, they kept a pretty tight rein on things. I wanted to kind of protect my innocence until I got to about middle school when my dad started introducing me to some of the great movies of all time. So the storytelling side of me was developed from a young age, but the movie side of me didn’t come until I was in high school when I was growing up the

Henry Kaestner: set of those movies. I’m sorry to interrupt, but there’s a number of parents are listening to this and say, Oh my goodness, Jerry Jenkins Dallas Jenkins the inspiration in his he’s holding up dad. I want to see these movies, and then all of a sudden there’s like 12 that he’s kind of held back. And now, Son, I’m going to sit you down and we’re going to watch it. And maybe no one’s not the godfather. Where are they?

Dallas Jenkins: No one was The Godfather. Actually, I was actually literally going to say, Well, the first one was The Godfather, and that was when I was about eighth or ninth grade, and my dad started to say he basically started telling me, I’m a big movie buff. I watch all the movies just, you know, and I’d seen some as well. It’s not like my parents had me for movies and they were pretty. They’re pretty strict about what I watched. And then it became movies like The Godfather, and

Henry Kaestner: that makes me feel so much better about that being my number one. This is like, this is cathartic for me, so thank you. But he wanted

Dallas Jenkins: to introduce me to some of the great movies of all time. And I remember when I was a freshman in high school, I saw the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and that movie is what changed my life. It was there’s a scene in One of the Cuckoo’s Nest where Jack Nicholson is denied the opportunity to watch the World Series. And so he’s so angry about it. He goes over to a TV and just stares at the blank screen and starts broadcasting his own made up World Series game, and all of the other patients at the mental institution start getting into it and cheering and going crazy. And that scene, I was so emotionally engaged and I was so inspired watching it. I thought, whatever that is, I want to do that. I want to arouse in audiences the same kind of response that this scene is getting in me. And I thought in all the faith based movies or shows that I’ve ever seen, that never happens. I’m almost never moved emotionally. I’m almost never inspired. Sometimes I enjoy them. Sometimes I don’t. But I’m never emotionally engaged in biblical projects in Faith-Based projects, and there weren’t actually all that many back when I was growing up. So that’s when I turned from being an athlete, which was always kind of my goal and maybe a sports broadcaster to, OK, I want to make movies. I want to tell stories. And that’s when everything kind of changed in my life. And then when the left behind books exploded, when I was in college, I had the opportunity to work for the company that was going to make them into movies, just a small production company out of Louisville. And they were the ones who got the rights and were developing. And I went to work for them as a low level secretary, and I was just like an entry level, almost like I was like a paid internship. But over the first three and a half years or so, I worked my way up to help them with a lot of the things I really just decided while I was working there. I’m going to make myself valuable. I’m going to make myself irreplaceable. And so I’m going to try to find the things that they don’t understand or don’t know or need help with in the business, and I’m going to learn those things. And then by the time that they were ready to make the first left behind movie, I actually and my dad realized this movie isn’t actually going to be what we were hoping it was going to be. And maybe let’s do our own thing. So my dad and I started Jenkins Entertainment, which by that point he had the financial means to do something like that because of the success of the books. And so we decided to make our own movies. And that was the thing that we noticed really quickly. While we were kind of getting involved in the Hollywood scene was in the independent world at least. There were lots of people who were talking about making movies and developing movies, but there weren’t a lot of people actually making them. So we figured we could set ourselves apart by just going ahead and making one. So I was twenty five years old and we went ahead and produced my very first film. Hometown Legend High School faith based football movie before high school, faith based football movies were cool. We were a little bit ahead of our time and the movie didn’t do extremely well, but it got picked up by Warner Brothers, which when you’re an independent filmmaker, 10 percent of movies get picked up. I mean, most of them, don’t we? Right out of the gate got picked up by major studio, which is really cool, and that kind of began the last 20. I’m forty five now since twenty years ago that all that happened. So but that was that was the beginning that was kind of the Reader’s Digest version of how this all got started.

Henry Kaestner: What was it that you saw back then in just every action was about trying to solve a problem and lean into an opportunity? And just like the guys in the Cuckoo’s Nest are just trying to create their own experience and trying to to make something happen. There must have been something that you looked out there and just saw. Gosh, nobody’s doing things this way. We need to tell stories that do this with this type of quality to tell this type of story. What was it that drove you to that? What was it that you didn’t see with a company that was trying to do that with left behind? What was it that fueled you into this entrepreneurial space?

Dallas Jenkins: Well, yeah, it just seemed to be all or nothing. I mean, it was either movies coming from Hollywood that had a completely agnostic, atheistic secular. I don’t like to use the term secular too often, but when I would watch movies or television shows, I never saw myself represented, I never saw faith represented. It didn’t reflect the world that was. Not only did it not reflect my world, I don’t think it reflected the world at large. Art is supposed to reflect society in some way. And when you know, half the country, maybe a little bit less of the country are Christians, or at least have some sort of faith journey. And then the world of art and popular culture have none of that represented, just like 99 percent coming from one political, socioeconomic and religious worldview or lack of religious worldview. I just thought there needs to be more in that. There needs to be something involved in the pop culture conversation that includes faith or it includes my experience when it does happen, when it did happen, usually in the independent world, because the gatekeepers on the large scale pop culture world just had no interest in it, nor should they ever it wasn’t. I don’t expect them to necessarily care about a world that they don’t really participate in. But it was always really low quality or it was cheesy, or it was so Christian that it didn’t really connect. And I just thought there has to be room for a movie or movies that feel like normal movies. They just happen to have people of faith or happen to have a spiritual journey in some way that’s accurately presented. And so that was the hole that I was willing or eager to fill. Now the problem was, I don’t think I was good enough when I first started to make a movie that could truly compete on the pop culture level. So when I made this movie, Amen legend and Warner Brothers picked it up and I’m like, Oh great, a big, major studio. Well, the first thing who they wanted to do was try to appeal to a niche market, one that they didn’t understand, which was the faith based market or faith based market that hadn’t really evolved yet. The Passion of the Christ hadn’t come out yet. Left behind was popular, but that was on the book side of things. No one had really cracked the code. And so my movie was fine. It was good, but it wasn’t good enough to really break out into kind of the mainstream. So anyway, I ended up for the first, you know, kind of 15 years of my career operating in the faith based space and just coming to the conclusion that, all right, maybe I’m not going to reach kind of the pop culture mainstream, and that’s OK, but I’m going to at least do my very best to make the faith based media world as good as it can be, or at least what I can do to make it as good as it can be. So that was that was part of my journey and those were the holes I was trying to fill in. They tended to change over a couple of years. I think my calling shifted a little bit. At least my understanding of what I wanted to do shifted a little bit until probably twenty six or seven when I really felt God calling me to not try to shift any of my content. I’m just going to be unashamed and, you know, do content that brings people closer to Christ that isn’t trying to be cute or nuanced. While nuanced. I shouldn’t say that I’m trying to be nuanced, but I’m saying it’s not trying to apologize for its faith. Content is going to be unabashedly Faith-Based.

Henry Kaestner: So it’s clear that you’ve got a creative drive, and we did talk a little bit later about this on the podcast on a focus on excellence, but I’m intrigued by the relationship that you have with your father. It’s not often that an entrepreneur with a lot of vision and a passion gets started in a business with their dad, particularly one that’s a creative one like yours is. What was that like? There must have been a view that he had of what society needed in the stories it needed to be told, and you must have had the same or the same general concept. But what was it like starting a business with your dad when your dad had already been creative and maybe you wanted to taking a different direction? And, you know, left behind has a stern view on some aspects of theology. And one of the things that comes through now through the work that you’ve done is a more holistic view by, of course, examining the Gospels with so much more that’s in there. But what did that look like starting a business with your dad? And I shouldn’t ask a leading question as to presume that there are differences because maybe there weren’t but talked to us through that process.

Dallas Jenkins: Yeah, I wouldn’t say there were strong differences much. I mean, I didn’t have the same passion. I mean, left behind. We really wanted it to be a big movie that could really compete in the mainstream. We knew that it wasn’t necessarily going to be a movie for nonbelievers too much, but we really wanted it to kind of really be out there and be high quality, and we thought that that wasn’t going to happen. I think both of us had the same passion just to create something that felt like the kind of movie we would want to go see in theaters. And we didn’t get there initially. I mean, we didn’t. I don’t think we accomplished that for a little while, but I think we had the same passion. I mean, my dad is a genuine movie buff. He sees almost everything. And we had the same taste, for the most part. But he recognized that he was hands off when it came to the content for the most part, I mean, he would speak into the storytelling, but he recognized that there’s a big difference between writing books and making movies. And so that was really the only difference. Otherwise, he’s always been extremely supportive and has always been on my page when it came to the kinds of movies that we wanted to make. So my dad and I have been very, very close. As long as I can remember, I mean, I think he was always my dad, of course. But when I got into college is when we became friends as well. And we’ve just always kind of had the same passion, the same desire to impact the world. We love the same Jesus. We read the same Bible and want to make Jesus known. In the most fascinating thing is the journey that I’ve been on, that he’s been a part of and been able to watch in many ways to watch what has happening with the Chosen Today and how the left behind series came out 25 years ago. And to see it kind of follow a similar track, you know, to get out into pop culture relevance and to do that, it was not at all trying to be pop culture relevant. It was solely focused on like the left behind books were just solely focused on telling the story of the gospel in an interesting way, and that’s what the chosen is trying to do. So that may be a scattered answer to your question, but I don’t think we’ve ever really been in opposition to what our goals are, what our mission is.

Henry Kaestner: So as you look at taking on the gospel and you start off with some more general storytelling and then you get into like the greatest story ever told, I think about a staff meeting we had the other day. And William, who’s about to come on here in a second, was talking about how powerful one of the episodes was that he’s watching in season two. And one of the people that was on our staff, me said, Don’t tell me what happens. And then he realized, actually, I know what happened, right? Because we all know the story. And yet the way that you’re able to bring that out is done so well. And so it’s a question of like, how do you do it? And you know, is there going to be something that’s so memorable that creates this new shirt like, you know what we’ve got with season one, episode seven? Talk to us about that initial process, though, as you go ahead and say, we’re going to take on the gospel. Was that like, super intimidating?

Dallas Jenkins: Well, that’s a really good question. Yeah, I guess I have a bit of a superpower in that I don’t really care about the response to my work other than I want to have impact. I want to impact people’s hearts. And when I say I don’t care, of course, I don’t mean that in the arrogant sons. It just means that if I believe I’m doing the right thing, if I believe that God has called me to do something, and at that point, the train has left the station, so I’m not intimidated by it. I get excited by it. And I reached a point in my career shortly before the chosen, where I was genuinely OK with never making another movie because my movie failed. The movie that I had done, I had finally gotten to this place where Hollywood wanted to make movies with me, financed my movie, produced my movie The Resurrection of Gavin Stone, released in theaters. Everything was great. They wanted to make multiple movies with me over the next ten years. I was a director with a very bright future, and then my movie completely bombed. And in my lowest moment, confused wondering why God had allowed this to happen, wondering where my future was. I genuinely got to a place where I didn’t feel responsible to feed the 5000. I only felt responsible to provide the loaves and fish. And so all I cared about was making my five loaves and two fish is good and healthy as they could be. And when I really got to that place mentally, spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, all of that and I genuinely believed that all I cared about was that if I handed my loaves and fish to God and he deemed them worthy of acceptance, the transaction was over and I was comfortable with that. So. I wasn’t intimidated by doing this because I was like, what have I got to lose? I mean, it’s all gravy from here. I didn’t expect any of this to work. I mean, I did a short film for my church’s Christmas Eve service about the birth of Christ. From the perspective of the shepherds who was only going to be seen by my church. I shot it on my friend’s farm in Illinois, 20 minutes from my house, and there was no pressure. And while I was making it, I had this idea for the show. And so then when the opportunity came to release the short film to the world and to ask if people wanted to crowdfund season one of a show about Jesus, I figured we’d raise, you know, fifteen hundred dollars. And when we ended up shattering the all time crowdfunding record and raising over $10 million from 19000 people. I’m like, What the heck is going on here? Like, OK, fine. Sure. All right, let’s keep going. I haven’t had time to be in Tim Keller. I’ve had time to stop and think about it. And every time I sit down at a blank screen, the blank screen for season three, which we’re writing right now, doesn’t give a crap about how successful season one was or how much people love season two or anything. I just haven’t had time to care about those things. All I have time to do is make sure that what I’m doing is as good as it can be and as pleasing to God as it can be. So I’m not intimidated by the critiques that I’ve gotten. I don’t. Every day I’m called a heretic or blasphemer or a cult leader, and then that doesn’t bother me. And then every day, I’m also called by some people, the greatest filmmaker who ever lived in making the show that’s changed their lives. And that doesn’t impact me either, other than to just make me really humbled and grateful that I’m part of something that God is doing. So I hope I’m coming across OK because I don’t mean to sound arrogant and I don’t mean to sound condescending. It really just is a I feel like I’m playing with house money here. I know maybe a worldly gambling term isn’t great for a spiritual experience like this, but I just don’t like how I’m intimidated. I don’t know this God’s doing so many cool things. I just think it’s really exciting and fun. So that’s really what’s been part of it for me.

William Norvell: I think that’s amazing and that amazing perspective. I love how you said just like, yeah, it’s just about offering the loaves and fishes and what God does with it. And that’s every entrepreneur’s journey, right? If you don’t get to that point, if you don’t find your identity there, you’re going to find it and everything else, and that’s always going to ultimately disappoint. And so I think,

Dallas Jenkins: Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to. Go ahead. I’m reading a book right now called Billion Dollar Loser. It’s about the rise and fall of WeWork, which was, you know, this unicorn company. And then it completely collapsed. And the founder, you know, collapsed and all that. And I’m early in the book, but I read a lot of books like that, you know, books about the rise or the rise and fall of certain entrepreneurs. And it strikes me that so many people seem to build companies with the goal in mind of, you know, changing the world. And I think we do that ministry to I think faith based ministries or faith based entrepreneurs tend to have the same kind of goal. And it’s a good goal because you’re thinking, what’s wrong with wanting to change the world for Christ? The problem becomes when you are thinking about the result and when you are thinking about the number of people who are going to be impacted instead of thinking about the very first step that you’re taking and make sure that it’s grounded in what God wants from you. And I’ve read all about, you know, be bags, and I’ve read all about the five year plan and all of that. And you know, Sylvester’s book me, myself and Bob, which is one of the top five books I’ve ever read. And for any entrepreneur, any business leader, any ministry person, anybody, I mean, I think it’s great book for anybody. But if you want a book on a blow by blow account of what it looks like to rise and fall and rise and fall and be steered and go your own way and all this stuff, I mean, it is an extraordinary book. Phil Fisher, the creator of VeggieTales and he’s the one who said Where you’re at and five years is none of your business. And that is in the same universe as it’s not your job to feed the 5000. It’s only provide the loaves and fish. And when you truly get to that place and it’s hard to get there, and sometimes you may have to fail to get there, but when you truly get to that place, I’m telling you it is life altering and freeing and exciting and not intimidating, and it makes the journey exciting and fun, regardless of whether you have success or not. I have been preaching the same message for the last three years, including before the chosen even existed. I was telling people I found joy, I found this freedom and that it’s not my job to feed. The five thousand is only provide the lowest dish. I have no idea what’s going to happen next, but I’m telling you I’m in a better place than I’ve ever been in my whole career, and I’m at my lowest point in my career. And that was before the chosen even existed

William Norvell: at this school. How did that play with your family, with your friends? So I’m hearing that and I’m inspired. I’m interested. I’m listening to entrepreneurs out there. Is that something that they heard and said, Yes, Amen. Or did they fight that? How did that message eventually take root? What was that? An encouragement discouragement? How did you walk that journey?

Dallas Jenkins: Well, that is a great question, and my family’s involvement in this is really cool because there’s an episode in. Season one of the chosen where Simon is home. Seven Peter and his wife, Eden, who’s not explicitly discussed in scripture other than to say that Simon had a mother in law, but she is really upset at Simon because she can tell that he is straying from his faith. He’s trying to do things his own way. He’s trying to solve his own problems, and he ends up staying up all night, trying to solve his own problems, fishing all night and he can’t catch a fish. And the next morning he encounters Jesus and Jesus. You know, does the miracle of the fish. It’s a famous story in the Bible, and it fills two boats full of fish, and all Simon’s problems are solved from a fishing standpoint, and then Jesus asks them to give up everything and follow him. So Simon comes home to his wife, and he has to explain to her why he’s literally giving up everything and to follow Jesus and their earthly possessions might be in trouble because he doesn’t have a source of income anymore, and he expects her to be really upset and she starts crying and he’s like, Why are you upset? She’s like, I’m not upset. This is the man that I married, and she gets emotional and she’s like, This is what I wanted from you all along. And for my wife, Amanda, I wouldn’t say she was necessarily. Wanting for me all along to not have a future in this business, she was just as crushed as I was. But when we were sitting there crying together. It’s not a negative memory, but I get emotional thinking about it because we were home alone and just so confused and so broken, and God was pushing us to read the story of the feeding of the 5000, it was my wife who we pushed to read that story. And we were trying to figure out what he had for us in that story. At four o’clock in the morning when I was writing a 15 page memo on everything that had gone wrong and everything that I had done wrong and every choice that I had made that was wrong. And how could I avoid doing this again? You know, the mortem that most of us do after a success or failure and a man across the world who was in Romania, God laid it on his heart. Kal Dallas, it’s not your job to feed the 5000. It’s only to provide the loaves and fish, and he’s like, really, god, that’s what you want me to tell them. And it’s like, Yes. And he told me that at four o’clock in the morning, just out of the blue, I put out a Facebook message and I. For a moment, I wondered if my computer had been recording what my wife and I had been talking about all day long is the feeling at five thousand. Yeah, exactly. Bill Gates has been tracking us all along. So then he says, Yeah, it wasn’t me. God just wanted me to tell you that. So my wife was completely on this track of we don’t know the future, but we just want to be in God’s will. One hundred percent. One hundred percent. And then I resigned from my job for lots of different reasons. I was working at this church and there was a scandal and it was all a big deal. And so I resigned from my job and didn’t have income, didn’t have benefits, just had this hope that the chosen would in fact crowdfund millions of dollars so that we could make a multi-season show about Jesus based on a short film I did on my friend’s farm. None of it made sense, but my kids were certainly confused and a little nervous, and we sat them down and we said, Here’s what God we feel is leading us to do, and we are not going to have benefits. And yes, a month into our not having benefits, we had gotten this Christian Health Care Ministry. We had applied for that. This called Samaritan Ministries. And I’m not trying to do a plug for them, but it’s one of those ministries where you, you know, everything is self-pay and and it’s not official health insurance. And that’s what we were doing us all we had and that’s what we were able to afford. And I didn’t have I didn’t have a job, so I wasn’t on a health plan. And within the first couple of months, we had more health problems than we’d had in the previous 20 years combined literally $100000 worth of things from like me having a appendectomy to my daughter shattering her collarbone. I mean, everything went crazy and I didn’t have a job, and we just sat our kids out here like we believe that the church is going to provide. We believe God is going to come through and let’s just walk through this together. And it’s been so cool to watch my kids get a front row seat to not only God showing up for our own family, you know, and through this amazing Christian Health Care Ministry taking care of everything. But to see the chosen do what it’s doing and every now and then when I’m able to read to them someone saying my entire family has been transformed because of this show or someone in Iran saying, because you’ve done this show and because you guys have made it free and because you know, you’ve put it on an app, I mean, a country hostile to Christianity, and I was able to download it and save my soul. I’m able to read that to the kids and go to remember three years ago, it was just three years ago when we were sitting at the table and had no idea what our future holds. I encourage people to when they are in God’s will or when they are following a spiritual path as opposed to just doing it on their own. I encourage them to include your children in that process so that when God provides that, it may not be financial, it may not be physical. But when he shows up and you see the consequences and the results by consequences, I mean, in a good way of surrendering to God and not caring about earthly success, it can be a really beautiful thing for your family to experience.

William Norvell: Hmm. Hey, man, thank you for sharing that. I imagine lots of entrepreneurs that have felt similar feelings and been in that moment because as we know, this is not a journey where everything works. You know, obviously, I don’t think we have time to go into the whole story, but you mentioned pieces of it. I’ve heard you talk before. I think people could look at the success that you get. Wow, viral hit. You know, he did it. And you know, really, your story’s more of a 15 20 year overnight success of a long obedience to the same direction. And I think you even met Jonathan Rumi. Wasn’t he one of the thieves in your short video? Yeah, you had met him years before even God was sort of riding that path.

Dallas Jenkins: Yeah. So Jonathan Rumi, who plays Jesus in the chosen play Jesus for me eight years ago when I was doing short films and vignettes for my church, I was doing it for Good Friday services. And I did one about the crucifixion of Christ to the eyes of the two thieves on the cross. Jonathan played Jesus. He was only on screen for about five minutes and I thought, My goodness, this is the best depiction of Christ they’ve ever seen. Like his performance, I just loved it. And then we started doing it each year for Good Friday. And so when I had the opportunity to make the show, he was obviously the first person cast. But yeah, I’m telling you, sometimes it’s easy for people to go well, yeah. Viral hit. It’s easy for you to say now that you just trusted God, you just submit to do as well. And then, look, now you’ve got this international success and everything seems to be going well. I’m just telling you, I was giving the same message when I had no job. I mean, I remember I gave a speech to a Christian film festival and I was speaking to 750 people and was sharing the story of how God had worked in my failure. And I got up and I said, Look, I can’t give you much advice on filmmaking right now because I coming off of my biggest career failure. And the only thing I just did a couple of weeks ago was a short film for my church. But the. Birth of Christ. So all I’m just telling you is I have more joy than I’ve ever had, and I understand how God works more than I ever have. And you know, I feel like my whole career I’ve been seeking the wrong thing. I think I’ve been trying to be approved by Hollywood. I’ve been trying to be successful. I’ve been trying to be impactful. I’ve been thinking about the results and now I’m in this place where I don’t. I just I don’t care about that anymore as long as I’m going to God what he wants from me. And I think it’s two years later, I came back to that same festival. And it’s like, funny story since I talked to you last time, look at what’s happened. And they were they had already known they’d seen it, they’d seen the results. It was just so cool for the people at that festival, for my family, for friends to see this journey and to see what it looks like to be broken by God and to be surrendered to him and to not care anymore what your results look like. And then the cool thing to see what happens next and it won’t happen for everybody, you know, at least in terms of the results financial of the results being successful. But I do believe that there’s freedom and joy in that.

William Norvell: It’s amazing. And I want to switch to one thing we haven’t touched on much. You had the greatest crowdfunding campaign in history. Talk us through a little bit of that. Why did you do crowdfunding? Why was that the decision? Right? I mean, there were lots of different ways to fund this operation. You’ve been making movies. You had tons of connections. Why? Why did you go this direction and kind of what have been the results of it?

Dallas Jenkins: Well, I didn’t have tons of connections at the time because the movie that I’d made it failed. So all the companies had wanted to make future movies with me, you know, backed out, and I didn’t have much of a future. So the crowdfunding idea certainly wasn’t my idea. I thought it was ridiculous and I didn’t think it would work. You know, typically, the all time crowdfunding record was $5.7 million from projects like Mystery Science Theater. 3000, which had big crowds already behind them, had a big fan base, and I was coming off of a career failure, and our Facebook page that we started for the show had a couple of hundred people and it just friends and family. And it was Angel Studios, the company that saw my short film were blown away by it, heard my idea for the show really wanted to do it. And they said, We want to raise the money through crowdfunding, and I was like, Oh, that’s ridiculous. Now, crowdfunding doesn’t work. You usually see it on social media. People are trying to raise money for some small project or some little thing that they’re doing for their friends. And you never see the bar get all the way to the end because they never quite raise enough money. And I’m like, We need a few million to do a show like this to do it right. And the all time record is 5.7 million. When the world are, we think it’s going to happen. But I was in this loaves and fishes state where I’m like, Well, it’s not my job to worry about. That’s not my job to feed the 5000 that bringing my loaves and fish, my loaves and fish happened to be a short film on my friend’s farm in Illinois. So, you know, we’ll see what happens. And then I think what happened was, you know, because people have asked me, Well, how did you do it? You know? What’s the secret sauce? And I think the secret sauce is you do have to have, you know what we would call a proof of concept. And now our proof of concept, for whatever reason, was guttural, impacting people. I mean, the people, the 19000 people who invested, some of whom I mean the minimum was $100. And some people said, and I’ve never done this before. They don’t even have hundred dollars typically to put into something like this. But when they watch the short film, something about it compelled them. They just felt like when they watched it, something happened. Something supernatural happened, probably. And they just thought I had to contribute. I had to be involved in this. God was just like hitting me with a sledgehammer. And I don’t know why that is. You know, I don’t think I’m someone special who I don’t think I’m capable of doing something transcendent. And I think God had something to say. You know, I hesitate to say things like that because I don’t want to claim spiritual authority, but it sure does feel like God is doing something. And the proof is in the fact that through the show, people are reading their Bibles more than ever. People are praying more than ever. We’re just hearing that over and over again. And I think, OK, that seems to be the proof text that God has something to say and want something to happen as opposed to just doing it on my own, if that makes sense.

Henry Kaestner: At the outset, you talked about the fact that there are 19000 or there were 19000 that were involved in the crowdfunding, and there’s something really powerful about that and it hits home for me because we’ve run a ministry called Faith Driven Investor and Faith Driven Investor. So much of what we do there tends to be focused on the qualified purchaser or the accredited investor. And yet we know that it was the what owner might that really had the gift that really mattered to God. And what crowdfunding means to me is that faith driven investing doesn’t need to just be the purview of the rich young ruler. It’s something that can now be democratized as somebody that received money investment money from 19000 people. Can you just speak to that? A little bit more about what that means for you as you get out there and you rally the crew together and you focus on, let’s go ahead and let’s produce some more. What does it mean for you to have that many people rooting for you with real skin in the game?

Dallas Jenkins: Yeah, that’s such a great point. Yeah, I’ve talked about in that first round that we did for season one out of the 19000 people. There was one who invested $300000. There were a few others who did 100000, several who did 50000. The ones that meant the most to us and that were the most humbling. Like, we got one investment of two hundred and fifty two dollars. You know, clearly that woman she was from the Midwest, that was kind of the last of her disposable income for the month, you know, because it was such a specific figure. That meant as much or more than the gentleman who gave $300000. We think about that often, you know, we think about the people who are paying our salaries. I think there’s something really special about that. And when we got investors, you started to approach us and say, you know, we think we can get $30 million for you to do the next couple seasons and not have to worry about raising money all the time because it doesn’t stop there. Once we start doing season one, if we want to do future seasons, we have to continue to crowdfund. And this is a whole nother story of our decision to make the show totally free. But when we made the show totally free and now have to rely on people choosing to pay it forward if they want to, you know they don’t have to. We don’t force them. The show is totally free, but to keep the show going, they need to pay it forward if they so choose. And so we still have to pitch if for lack of a better term, our future seasons. And so yet when people came forward and said we want to invest, we just didn’t feel right about it. We didn’t want to diminish the share value of the nineteen thousand. It’s what keeps us up at night is making sure that we are honoring their faith in us. I mean, and they did that based on this short film that I did. They didn’t know if the show was going to be any good. They didn’t know it was going to be what it is. And I would say every single one that I’ve met has said, I don’t care about the return. I don’t care about the financial gain of it. If there is any, I’ll probably just put it back into the show and now their investment. I mean, we have done a valuation, a hardcore valuation, but their investment is probably worth five to ten times what they put in. The widow’s mite is going to return to them in a significant way. And there’s just something really beautiful about it, like you said, and it does remind me every day, you know, gosh, this is just something that we can never take for granted that our financiers are people who are not the kind of people who you’d normally expect. There’s a few of them, of course, but that’s not why they did. It is to make money. And that’s just so cool.

William Norvell: I mean, yeah, we are some version of that family. Our listeners may know I’m living with my in-laws right now, and we have lots of DVDs of the shows in here, and I’m not sure we have a DVD player. It is in the pay it forward mentality of my father in law just keeps buying them because he so wants to hand it to other people to let them know the story that you’re telling. And yes, this is not a promotional, but I’m going to promote it. The story of the disciples. I’ll let you tell it. Tell us a little bit. Give us a couple of minutes as we come to a close on why you chose to tell, like so intricate stories of the disciples and kind of their interactions with Jesus.

Dallas Jenkins: Yeah, I believe that if you can see Jesus through the eyes of those who actually met him, you can be changed and impacted in the same way that they were. If you can truly connect with one or more of our main characters, whether it’s Simon, Peter and his desperate attempts to provide for his family while being oppressed by the Romans and overtaxed and financially struggling. Matthew, the tax collector or someone who we portray as being on the autism spectrum and who is an outcast because he’s hated by the Jews for being a tax collector and disrespected by the Romans for being Jewish. Mary Magdalene, who’s oppressed by demons, has vices, has addictions, has fallen away completely from her faith. Nicodemus, a lifelong religious believer and leader, even someone who knows the scriptures and who is now coming face to face with something and someone who is turning his world upside down and wants a personal relationship with him, something he’s never had. If you can identify with their struggles, if you can identify with their questions, then you can hopefully identify with the answers to their questions and the solution to their struggles. And that’s why we take the time that we do. I mean, the first episode of season one, if you haven’t seen it yet, it’s been confusing for a lot of people, especially Christians. Non-Christians seem to have no problem with it. Because they watch it like they do any other show. Christians are like, wait a minute, what versus this based on? I don’t recognize this Bible verse. Who’s that guy? Where’s Jesus? I thought this was a Jesus show because we take the time to show you who these people are before they encounter Jesus. We take the time to establish their personal lives or personalities, their struggles, their story arc. And I think that’s what makes the show unique. And I think that’s what makes season by season shows unique multi-season shows as the characters. You really want to fall in love with these people so that you can engage with them over the course of multiple seasons. And so I just think that’s good television. I think that when you just take the time to really develop a story arc and a character arc and a journey for all of these people, it’s just that much more engaging than if you’re just strictly plot driven. Or in the case of the Jesus show, you’re just going verse to verse Bible, verse, the Bible, verse, miracle to miracle, and you don’t get a chance to understand or know anybody who is the recipient of these miracles. So there’s really no emotional connection. There’s not much you can learn from it. You’re just basically watching a reenactment of something you’ve already read. And I think that’s what sets our show apart and can sometimes be uncomfortable for people. You know, sometimes people are like, Wait a minute, that’s not in the Bible. You’re not supposed to add to the Bible, what are you doing? And we just have to remind people, this isn’t the Bible. Your Bible hasn’t changed since the show came out. This is a historical drama based on the people of first century Galilee, with using the Bible as their primary source of truth. And I think that that has been what has unlocked for people. So many of these stories and we hear constantly the Bible once one person said something we really loved. I felt like the Bible was in black and white, and now it feels like it’s in color. And it’s not because we’ve changed anything. It’s just because they’ve now, for some reason are understanding it better and being able to picture it now so that when they do read the Bible, it feels more alive than they did before they they understood it like they are now. So that’s a long answer to your question. I’m sorry, most of my answers have been long, but but that’s the why. That’s the reason is we want people to be more engaged when they read scripture Amen.

William Norvell: Now it’s a perfect answer. And you know, I can think of so many scenes from the wedding scene that I now see differently to the unbelievably dramatic conversation between Nicodemus and Jesus to the latest episode five where my brother texted me it got real. You got to watch it now. And, you know, unfortunately, we have to come to a close here, which means we may have to beg you for before

Henry Kaestner: we do that for you, I

William Norvell: might get a producer come in. We’re not. No, I’m

Henry Kaestner: not the executive producer. But I have a question that I love yet. It’s really very clearly it’s not all of it’s not scripture. Anybody who’s read scripture in the Gospels knows that some of the dialog you have is not part of the canon, right? And yet, because this is a tool that helps people to understand the God who loves them so much, you have decided to broaden these characters out so that people now watching it might be able to identify with them. But that’s some pretty heavy stuff, right? To be able to actually think about who this, you know, upon this rock, I’m going to build my church. I mean, this is Peter. I mean, he’s not supernatural and self, but I mean, he’s a pretty major historical figure, an incredible figure in the early church. And you’re endeavoring to understand what he look like, how he dressed and just the things that he wrestled with. What’s the process? You go by to just pray about that, to think about that, and then you’re the guy now who’s, you know, kind of defining for a lot of people what these Bible characters look like. How do you stay humble and all that? And that’s two questions the first good podcast host. I want to ask two questions all at once, but I’m trying to squeeze them in at the end. I’d love for you to go on a little mini recession on that, if you can.

Dallas Jenkins: Yeah, that is the scariest part. But I remember several years ago I was in Israel doing the research for the show, and I was in Magdalen, which is the birthplace of Mary Magdalene, and I was at a synagogue that had been on Earth. You know, just two decades earlier, they had found this synagogue under the Earth that had existed for 20 years. And I felt God laying it on my heart, and I don’t say that lightly. I say that with actually trepidation because, you know, how do you ever know fully that it’s God and not your own brain? And I didn’t hear an audible voice, but I felt God laying it on my heart that in several years, when people picture these disciples and Christ followers that the chosen is going to be what they have in their mind. And there hasn’t been up until now a definitive portrayal of these people like I didn’t have before the chosen, I didn’t have a picture in my mind of anybody other than Jesus, occasionally from a few movies. And you know, at the time when I felt, God blame it on my heart, I don’t know, you know, of course, at the time, I wasn’t sure if that was really God or just kind of my own thoughts. And I just thought, Wow, that’s really weighty, and I feel the weight of that and the pressure of that. But I felt also God kind of letting me know I’m not going to let you screw this up. This is going to be this is too important. And flash forward to now, and I hear every day someone will post on social media or send a note or something that says, this is who I picture when I picture the followers of Christ. And that is extraordinarily humbling because it makes you on one hand, you go along, that’s really cool. On the other hand, you go, Oh my goodness, I really need to be cautious. And we try to be cautious. But you mentioned episode five just now. You know, someone said it’s got real. Well, we made the choice to portray Mary Magdalen, who’s been delivered from demon possession. We made the choice of her to to backslide, to show her getting triggered by multiple things and backsliding and relapsing, basically. And if you haven’t seen episode five yet, I guess that’s a spoiler, but we give hints of it in the trailer and all that stuff. The Mary struggling. And for a lot of people, not the majority, but a lot of people really uncomfortable to really upset by it. Some people offended enough to claim they’re not going to watch the show anymore. And that decision took place on the front end. That’s where the prayer comes in. That’s where the consulting with our Bible experts and my pastor and, you know, our cultural and historical experts and biblical experts to go. Are we because we’re doing something that’s not in scripture, which is most of the show, really, if you think about it, if you just do the math. Ninety five percent of the show is probably not directly from scripture, because every time we show someone saying hello, it’s not from scripture, because scripture didn’t have anyone saying hello. So we’re always walking a fine line. We’re always having to be really cautious in making sure that we never violate the intentions or character of Jesus or the Gospels. So it is a lot of work on the front end to make sure that we’re staying within certain boundaries and making sure we’re not violating the character intentions. But then once we do it, I mean, there’s really no turning back. So the criticism is kind of what we expect anyway. We know it’s going to happen at some point from somebody. I’m sure even you as a fan of the show, if you haven’t already, you will have moments where you go. I would have done it that way or that doesn’t feel like the Jesus or the Peter or the Mary or whatever that I’ve read in the Gospels. I’m sure that’s going to happen, but hopefully. We just look at this as a this is a show that is attempting to be plausible, but it’s not a documentary he doesn’t claim to be scripture where is doing the best we can to portray plausibly an authentic version of what would have happened in these people’s lives during this time. So, yeah, it is a great weight and responsibility, but it’s also really fun, to be honest with you.

William Norvell: Am I allowed to go to the close now? Let me think about it. Yeah, I’m just going to close. I’m just waiting. I’m just waiting. You know, we’re we’re still in more Dallas this time, and that’s Crowd-Funding time. You know, he’s got things to do. Dallas will

Henry Kaestner: make it up to him then and make sure that you alluded the fact that he’s still doing crowd funding for season three, making it while

William Norvell: he is I, you know, and you can buy hats, you can buy shirts. I’ve got the hat on now you can buy DVDs or you can just give money and not profit off of it like I did, and I’m sure that that would probably go further. That’s probably his preference. But we are so grateful for your time. The number one thing we like to do at the end is try to bridge our audience and our guest and through the word of God. And so we love to ask at the end, you know, if you wouldn’t mind sharing something that God has taken you through, you’ve told us so much. But just maybe it could be something you came out today could be something you’ve been meditating on for a while. Just just where does God have you in his word today?

Dallas Jenkins: Yeah. I’ve already shared, I think, quite a lot of what God has shown me through this project, and I think that number one thing is the whole story of the feeding of the 5000. I want to read a verse that has become my life verse over the last five or six years, and it’s Psalm. Thirty four five. And it says those who look to him are radiant and their faces shall never be ashamed. And I think that’s just so much in that verse. Those who look to him are radiant and their faces shall never be ashamed. I can think of all the time that I’ve been ashamed in my life, and it’s never been what I’ve been looking at. God. It’s always been because I’ve been looking at myself. I’ve been inward focused. I’ve been lusting. I’ve been seeking fleshly desires. But when I look to God. And of course, now being in the presence of God can shame you in the sense that you feel human and you feel sinful. But when you’re really looking to God for your guidance, when you’re looking to him for your fulfillment, when you’re looking to him for your identity. And that’s the path that you are taking. Those who look to him are radiant and their faces shall not be ashamed. That’s where we need to be on a day to day basis are looking to him. That’s where we’re going to find radiance. And that’s what we’re going to find that lack of shame because shame comes from being alone and doing things that you wouldn’t be doing if you were looking to him. So that’s been, I think, a life first for me for a while now.

William Norvell: I met a man, well, I don’t think we cannot thank you enough for joining us here today and sharing the story and for just all the work you do and how faithfully you go about it and just grateful for your team and everybody tune in if you haven’t.

Henry Kaestner: That was. Thank you.

Dallas Jenkins: Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.

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David Platt serves as Lead Pastor at McLean Bible Church in Washington, D.C. He is the founder of Radical and author of books like Radical… Something Needs To Change and Counter Culture. Today David joins us to talk about what it means to be radically generous and how the world might look if faith driven investors and entrepreneurs stepped into this great opportunity.

Episode Transcript

Some listeners have found it helpful to have a transcription of the podcast. Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it. The FDI movement is a volunteer-led movement, and if you’d like to contribute by editing future transcripts, please email us.

David Platt: Seeing people, I just read a story of somebody coming to Christ in a unreached part of the world like to have the opportunity to be a part of that is awesome and to have the opportunity to be a part of making the glory of Christ known and experiencing a joy that’s deeper than anything this world has. Yeah, may we all like jump into this?

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur and even Faith Driven Investor podcast, we’re going to combine these two audiences into a really special episode with a great and very special guest who’s going to talk about a subject is very, very dear to me. And then also dear to my guest co-host Daryl Heald. Daryl, welcome to the program.

Daryl Heald: Yeah, thanks anyway. Super excited to be here, and I always love bringing someone like David Platt into the conversation.

Henry Kaestner: It’s a big deal. So here’s why we’re talking to David this morning. If you listen to this podcast long enough, you’ve come to understand that I have had to kind of born again moments at age twenty eight after short career in Wall Street in New York City. I came to faith at age 28 and it changed everything moved in North Carolina, and to set my life on this new trajectory started bandwidth, you know, is a beautiful thing. At age 38, after having had some success at bandwidth and starting to give more money away. I got on the radar of this guy named Darrell Heald, actually a friend of ours, mutual friend of ours said. And you get to meet this guy. Darrell Hill and I met Darrell, and at the time, Kim and I were trying to give more money away, and I got a chance to tell Darrell about some of the ministry projects. We were excited about some of the ones we were starting in Durham, North Carolina, and some of the other things. And Darrell listened very, very patiently to me and just the really super one, some guy that may or may not come across if you don’t see the video of this. But now he’s got a great voice, too. He asked me this question, though, that really sent me really in a bit. He said, You know, Henry, I think I get all of these things, but tell me, why do you give? And then I mumbled through something that was probably theologically seamless, I might have even said something like, I don’t know, I want to pay it forward or something like that, and that’s not awful, but it’s not really maybe the best answer. And Darrell didn’t grade my answer. Like, say, the guys do that was awful, although maybe he was thinking it. But in the next six months is I open up God’s word. One of the things that when I had come to faith, I had been told that, you know, spend time in God’s word. So I had been doing that faithfully. But over the course the next six months, it seemed that everything I read in the Bible had something to do with money, even when ostensibly didn’t like, you know, the passage of God taking five loaves and two fish and feeding 5000. For me, it was like, Oh my goodness, God doesn’t need my money. He can take something out of nothing. And so six months or a year later, I came back to Darrell with my answer, a real answer, which is, you know, I give because I’m grateful for the gift given me. And I credit Darrell and God using Darrell and then God using his word for what I call my born again again moment. And why are we dedicating an episode to Henry’s Born Again Again moment? While we’re doing that because money had and has and continues to have a pretty big grasp on me. And it’s because I’m an entrepreneur and you, as you listen to this as an entrepreneur, as an investor, likely know what I’m talking about. And maybe you don’t struggle with it to the same degree that I have had. But my hope is that by listening to this in here in just a little bit of my story and then having this unpacked first by Darrell and then David that you’ll become closer to God too, because I realized that at the time when Kim and I were given 20 percent away, we thought there’s probably a special place in heaven for the double tither. You know, you get Fox, it’s the Angels games. There’s something, something in it for you. But we also realized after the six month process that God probably only had about 20 percent of our hearts and he wanted 100 percent. And so as an entrepreneur, money is our scorecard. It’s how we know we’re advancing. It’s the unit that we pay other people, we recruit other people. It’s the one that we negotiate in each and every day, and it’s got a larger than life. Hold on us and we need to talk about it. We need to talk about it openly and candidly and can’t think of two better people to do it. So. Darrell, the guy who 13 years ago, I credit with my born again again experience. Thank you for being my guest co-host today.

Daryl Heald: Yeah, I’m excited about it. Thanks for those words, and it is exciting to see you. When we think about this, I think one of the things that we we can get into this with David as well. But you know, money’s an isolating thing too. And so unfortunately, most of us are having this conversation in our own head. And so the ability for us to be able to do this together just like the way you and I have over the last 13 years been like a constant conversation, right? So we had this one kind of similar one. But then it’s just we’ve continued to kind of work that out together. And I think that’s really what God intended, right in community, right in the family. We can talk about it. But this is one of the subjects that we don’t talk about a lot. We don’t talk about our giving. Even with some of our best friends and a lot of times that even with our spouse, if we’re married. So I think the whole thing about where we can put this into a context to where you are in the right relationships, in the right context, we should be talking about it just like we talked about all the other aspects of, you know, who we are in Christ Amen.

Henry Kaestner: Indeed. OK, so we couldn’t think of a better guess, of course, to help us to get in this. And of course, we should expect from David that I’ll talk about just little baby steps just gradually getting in. No, just kidding. Quite the opposite. I don’t know anybody who’s challenged me more in the way that I think about giving than David. And so, David, we’re going to talk about all, about all, about that. But as we do with any guests, it comes on the program. We’re trying to get a little bit of an autobiographical sketch. You know, who are you? Where do you come from? What brings you up through to being hired as a pastor, the senior pastor at Church of Brook Hill. So tell us about who you are and where you come from, please, and thank you for joining and thank you for spending the time.

David Platt: Man, it’s so good to be with you guys. I’ve been looking forward to this. I’m just thankful and even listening to you guys right now have been in our previous interactions. Just thankful for God’s grace and you all. And even as you’re sharing Henry, just praying that maybe even the next few minutes, God might do some of that born again kind of work in a fresh way in somebody’s heart. So anyway, yeah, a little background on me. So right now I’m pastor of McLean Bible Church in Metro Washington, DC. I’ve been here for about three years shepherding this church that has over 100 nations represented in it, trying to make disciples the nations here and send people from here to make disciples the nations all around the world. You mentioned I started pastoring at Church of Burkle’s in Birmingham. Alabama was there for a. While for about eight years thought maybe the Lord is leading me overseas at that point. But he ended up leaving me to the International Mission Board. International Missions Organization sports 4000 thousand or so brother and sister serving among underage people around the world, and so did that for a few years before stepping back into the role of pastoring. I love walking with God’s word through life and all that it entails on the front lines of mission in the world. As a pastor, so that’s a bit as far as ministry wise. My wife and I have four kids at our home right now, and then we’re in the process of adopting potentially five or six. So we’re just,

Henry Kaestner: I’m sorry what? You said you’re in the process of adopting five or six of number

David Platt: five or number six. Oh, OK, good. Not an additional five or six kids. Now that the dust from know, OK. That puts it in perspective. We thought maybe we were a little crazy for you on four or five or six. So now it doesn’t feel near as much if we’re talking actually five or six more

Henry Kaestner: so far, be it for me to challenge you the way that you’ve challenged me now. So you’re twenty six years old, you were hired to pasture, really a megachurch. So for those of us like me who are parents and raising up kids, I’m fascinated to know just a little bit before it. I want to talk about secret church. We obviously want to talk about generosity. But what is your life growing up? Did you grow up in a Christian home? I mean, what does it look like to, you know, to be in a spot where at age 26 people see you’re anointing? And just like this is the person to lead and lead an organization at scale? So what were the first 25 years like, man?

David Platt: Just pure grace. Henry Yes. I grew up in a home where mom and dad taught me the gospel since the day I was born. I’ll just say the obvious I had nothing to do with where I was born. That’s the pure mercy of God. I don’t know why I was born into a family like that instead of in your village where they still haven’t even heard the name of Jesus. So, yeah, so I grew up and had a great local church that raised me. I was just talking with somebody from that local church last week, and I just overwhelmed in a fresh way by God’s grace toward me and the men and women who poured their life into me from children’s ministry type thing. I think about a student ministry. He gave me my first opportunity to preach when I was in eighth grade, which I don’t think was probably the wisest thing for him to do. But he did anyway, and it was like a youth service is like 100 people and I can preach on any text. And I chose Revelation three, like the church that lay out to see a God saying I was spewing out of my mouth and I remember starting the sermon. I walk up there with a bottle of water, and before I said anything, I took a sip and spit it out in the front row. I was like, That’s what God thinks you’re going to start, man anyway. So but all I had to say to have a church to like, walk through with me alongside that and like, maybe that could be helpful or unhelpful in different ways. But I’m just I am so indebted to God’s Grace Church. And so anyway,

Daryl Heald: and that is one of the best start stories I’ve ever heard. Yeah, yeah.

David Platt: So, yeah, thank you for sharing. As long as you weren’t on the front row, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Henry Kaestner: Baptism. So, OK. We’re going to talk about your bus. We’re going to spend a lot of time talking about generosity, of course, before we do that. Secret church. Super cool title. Super cool subject. Tell us about Secret Church, what it is and how it got started.

David Platt: Yeah. So my first trip to East Asia. So I’m in this country where the church gathers underground and I had taken a group there just to share the gospel in some unique ways and a place where it’s legal to share the gospel. But it was about four weeks I was there and about two weeks in. I met this couple who led an underground house church network there. They found out that I had a Ph.D. and taught at seminary. And they said, Hey, would you be willing to spend some time with our church leaders? So I said, sure, I would love to. And so they said, Well, maybe tomorrow will gather them together and we’ll have a Bible study. So I was like, OK, so we gather in the secret place like they sneak me in. They all come at different times and this secret location where we gather, I thought we were going to do a Bible study for, you know, an hour, maybe two or eight hours later, we were still going strong. And they’re just eating up the word and they’re like, Can we do this again tomorrow? I was like, Yeah, sure. What time there? Let’s go early in the morning. So I said, like a Mr. Morning Bible, say this. I know we’ll go till very late at night. And so I basically got together with him the next morning and for the next 12 days, for eight to 12 hours a day, just gathering these secret locations with these brothers and sisters to study the word. And there were so hungry like they love God’s word, and after I risked their lives to know it and study it, and they were just so. After spending that kind of time with them, I came back and I like, why don’t we hunger for the word like this? And so we decided to start something we said. I don’t know if anybody will show up, but we’re going to do Friday night. We’ll just go six hours like six to midnight and we’ll have intensive study in the word and prayer for our persecutor brothers and sisters around the world. So just have a unique event where we just bring people together like that and then we’ll record that and translate it into. So the whole idea was translate the content into different languages, specifically the language of these brothers and sisters that I was now connected with in order to provide them with more training. And so that first time about a thousand people showed up and it was a powerful night of praying for the persecuted church and just intends to stay in the world. And then since then, we’ve now done twenty one of them and it’s now sound ’cause we just did it a couple weeks ago, had 50000 or so people around the world are involved every year. We do this and just praying for the persecuted church intensive study in the world. So yeah, that sacred church. I love

Daryl Heald: it. Thanks, David. It’s really exciting, you know? And actually, Henry and I have been able to travel quite a bit together, and it really is amazing when we think about what you think about church and we’re sitting here, you know, here in the US and kind of how church is, you know, in a Western culture to be able to experience, you know, the church in a global context, whether that’s in the south or the east or the middle. It’s just it’s been so encouraging and I’m with you and Andreas, too with that so

David Platt: well, I’ll just mention like I think about not even just all day training and weren’t just a worship gathering where it was like late at night. I tell people, just imagine putting on, you know, jacket with a hood on over your head and then snuck in to this village and you get out of the car and your head down and they lead you down this little path. Little flashlight around the corner into this small room and there’s like 60 believers just crammed into a light bulb hanging in the middle. And these brothers and sisters are gathered together in the middle of the night and the rest of their lives to stop and study the word. And I always say, and I mean, there is, and we’re about to talk about like ways to help giving at the same time. Like sometimes we think, well, how can we help them get a lot more resources than this or that? And somewhere along the way, they’ve gotten the idea of the word of God and the spirit of God to be the church and spread the gospel, the place and the right. And so, yeah, there are definitely ways like I said, I know we’re going to talk about where we can come alongside, but there are trust in God’s word and spirit in a way that’s not dependent on so much of the stuff that we surround ourselves with today.

Daryl Heald: Yeah, that’s that’s a great word. I mean, the simplicity of it and we know this, that the God’s intentions never go unfunded right in his time into his glory. So, you know, no matter where it is. But I think we sometimes we try to think, well, they need this right. And in a lot of times, I think what you’re saying is, we need this, we need that, we need that. So. So David, one of the questions that we love for you to, you know, Henry gave us a C-minus. We’re expecting A-plus answer from you on on this. You know, when you think about it, because obviously you’re working in a church leading a church, you’ve looked at this, you know, in a global national level. But what do you see when we think about generosity and the church? What do you see or, you know, like some of the highlights? And then what are some things you feel like we could definitely work on that were missing side highlights?

David Platt: When I think about generosity, I would say where my heart is most encouraged as a pastor is when I see generosity as the overflow of someone’s intimacy with Jesus. And why start there in my mind is because I really do think generosity is a discipleship issue. I mean, what did you just say where your treasure is there? Your heart will be. Also, our treasure is a reflection of our hearts. And so our heart that is enthralled with Jesus and with his purpose in the world is going to be clear and the way we use our treasure. So I think that can be frightening in the sense that a lack of generosity is indicating there’s something missing when it comes to intimacy with Jesus and to start there and not to think so. That’s where whenever we talk about generosity is going to be very careful not to start to go on immediately to here’s all these needs. You have so much. So yes, there’s that picture, there’s that picture. But it’s even deeper than that. It’s just the overflow of the love of Jesus in us. And so I love it. I love it when I see someone growing and I think about a guy I was having lunch with last week. He is super successful in business, and he came to know Jesus a few years ago, and it has totally transformed his life. The way he uses his resources, even the way he puts it this. Hope like he’s excelling in business, but his hope is clearly not in his achievements in business and the money he’s making, and it’s all he sees at all is a bigger picture. How can I make the love of Christ known in the world like so that’s what causes my heart to rejoice, to see somebody in love with Jesus. He’s sitting there with his Bible at the table when I get there. He’s so in a Psalm 63 way. That’s where I was in my time with the Lord this morning. Just so in love with thirsting for God and then longing for his life to be used for the glory of God in the world. I’m using the overflow of his work that he started entrepreneurially toward that end. It’s I love that. And so what concerns me as a pastor is when I see people either just not being generous and I just see that as a reflection of, OK, there’s something wrong, something missing that born-again kind of moment in their heart, or maybe some giving, but it’s almost obligatory or feel like I just want to appease my conscience or check off a box when that’s nowhere close to all. Now, God will still use that first sleep, but it’s nowhere close to all that God has for that person and for fruit that he wants that person to be a part of. Bearing in the world?

Daryl Heald: Yeah. Love it. Fantastic. Thank you, David.

Henry Kaestner: Yeah, I love that too. And one of the reasons I love it is because it took me a long time to be able to reconcile the selfish ambition that I have felt and part of that and just really looking for joy and of course, also pithy and cliché. But, you know, in working on Wall Street and being a part of my entrepreneurial journey, looking for satisfaction and joy in all the things that I thought the world had to offer. But one of the things that fueled my generosity story has been a selfish ambition of experiencing joy and finding that an intimacy with God in a taste of it and wanting more. And so I had wrestled with that kind of selfish ambition for a while and thinking, I’ve got to die to self and I’ve got to be a sacrificial giver. And I think that there’s elements in scripture that I think informs some of that, but that when I was able to reconcile the fact that I just really wanted to know God and to be with him. And then this kind of reinforcing loop that as I get to know him and how much he loved me, more and more it made me feel more and more generous. I felt more and more joy. And I’m like, Well, I’m an investor. I invest in pattern recognition. As I get closer to God, I feel more joy, I feel more generous. And that reinforces this whole thing, and I get more and more joy when I reflect back to my prior life, which was 20 percent joy, I think, back that day. And that’s what I want for entrepreneurs, too. When you’re working, you talked about this one entrepreneur that got that. You must also see lots of rich young rulers that don’t get it. And Leave always said, Could you riff on that a little bit about what you see as the obstacles of people really understanding this intimacy with Christ, particularly among the business owners and the entrepreneurs that you’ve minister to?

David Platt: I’m so glad you mentioned that in my mind was just immediately going enriching ruler and specifically when it comes to joy and and there’s another person that’s going to my mind. So, yes, rich young ruler. I mean, that’s what I love about what Jesus says to him. Go sell all you have give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come follow me. Like, just to think about that. That’s not a call. Ultimately, it’s not a call to sacrifice. I do have treasure in heaven is not a sacrifice to be smart. He’s basically saying it’s realism is dumb. You don’t want to bank your life on that, which won’t last like banker life on that, which is going to last. Like, I’m calling you so much better treasure and not just treasure in heaven as far as fruit, but come follow me like Jesus is the ultimate treasure. It’s like the Matthew thirteen forty four, right? The man who’s walking in a field stumbles upon a treasure that he realizes is worth more than everything else he has put together. And nobody else knows it’s there. So it kind of covers it up and he goes and he sells everything he has, the tech says with gladness, like with joy that he has. And I can just imagine people saying, you’re nuts, like, why are you buying that field over there with joy and selling everything you have? And he’s like, Huh, I got a hunch. And he smiles inside because he knows he’s found something that is worth losing everything for. And that’s that’s what Rapture like. Let’s see, like Jesus is, is this good? His purpose is in the world are going to last for the next 10 trillion years and beyond. So what greater joy can there be than to follow him wholeheartedly? Not reserve? Not kind of in the world, kind of for Jesus, like wholeheartedly. You’ve got my all. And to be a part of what he is doing in the world for his glory. Like yes, sign. Like why would anyone who is smart like now want to sign up for that? Anybody who is a wise investor, which I’m assuming most everybody listening to this knows some things about wise investing, but I guess that’s the question. Do we know things about wise investing based on? What the world defines as wisdom or what God defines as wisdom. And to really say, like wise investing is treasure in heaven. Wise investing is following Jesus in my heart. And so the other person that immediately comes to my mind, I think about this. And this is a perfect example of born again, like, really born again. So he has spent decades in the church as a successful businessman. I mean, he’s the kind of guy who was asked to be on every church committee, especially when it comes to finance or stewardship stuff or building stuff because he was going to lead the way financially in that. And so he gave. But he ended up coming to our church and he came to a point where he realized he’s just been playing on the surface like he didn’t really know Jesus. He didn’t have a love for Jesus, a relationship with Jesus, for his walk on Jesus. So he came to Christ. I mean, he was baptized after decades in the church. And so literally born again. And everything that flows from that. So he is now one of the most generous people I know who is serving in all kinds of different ways. And he and his wife are both. I mean, they’re making disciples in their life. They’re making disciples through their giving. And I mean, they’re like, there’s nothing better than this. Their only regret is they didn’t realize this decade sooner. And so I just have seen that right now. I’m thinking another couple in our church family, like they were just living the dream, doing all kinds of vacations everywhere. And then God got a hold of their hearts. They had that kind of moment and they began to realize, OK, there’s something more important to live for. And now, originally from Ethiopia, the way they’re living for the spread of the gospel in the Horn of Africa right now is so awesome. And I was doing an interview with him the other day and just the fruit of their life. I could tell you all kinds of stories, but I said, Do you miss you, miss your former life? And and she said, no way. Like, there is nothing greater than what we’re doing around like we have so much. There’s a deeper, greater joy and this is the life God’s given us the opportunity to live. So anyway, that’s a little riff on what you just said there. It’s angular.

Daryl Heald: It’s a great riff. It’s a great honor. And you know, we think about that when you ask them, Hey, do you miss that other life? You know, I go to, you know, first Timothy, six, 19, you know, he said this lane of treasure in heaven for the company so that you can take hold of life, that is truly life, right? In one sense, we’re we’re being sold this simple thing, right? And that’s why it is in our joy when we make that trade, when we understand that investment in internal context. You do it all day long and you do it every day, right? And then of course, you don’t want that. So, David, I love how you riffed on that. So specifically, you know, you and your family. What are y’all investing in? What are you excited about as you’ve got a huge exposure out? There are lots of opportunities and all. But what are some? What are you like your top three things? All are really. You know, you just feel like God’s given you something to just go deeper in from the kingdom investments that y’all are financially giving to.

David Platt: Sure. As kind of a lead into that, I would just mentioned, even on a personal level, the Lord’s done this and we keep using the term like born again kind of moment certainly did this in my own heart, just to go back to complete the circle. When Henry, you mentioned pastor in this large church, in a young age down in Birmingham, and just immediately I was thrust into the megachurch world and I was living the dream church world version of the dream. And after a year or two and that started, I think I’m missing the point like I. I’m living it up in this world in a way that I wasn’t before I was in this megachurch. And I think I’m missing it. And so we started to make some changes in our lives and just downsizing some different things from where we were. And it was interesting. So I wrote a book during that time, not radical. That was just the overflow of those convictions. But then radical. That book ended up making a lot of money. Like a lot of people, which I didn’t like, I thought maybe my mom and tip of the church would buy this. And thankfully, God, by his grace, protected me. I hope I would have still said this, but at the time I was thinking, No, I was going to read this. And so I put in the front. All the royalties from this book will go toward the spread of God’s story among the nations. Well, thankfully, God, again, I would like to have thought out to put that in there if I knew a million people had read it, but it sure helped. I couldn’t touch all those resources, and so now I found myself with more money to give away than I had imagined. And so to now all that to say God did a work in my art. Yeah, this is not just for entrepreneurs or the successful business for pastors. It’s for everybody. Every follower of Jesus, we’ve got to ask with what we’ve been given. And so, yeah, so how my wife and I, how our family are. We steward the resources God has given us. I’m really jealous after spending years, not just as a pastor, but even leading a missions organization and kind of in the broader missions world we’ve kind of honed in. I want to be a part of supporting the spread of the gospel on the front lines of what I kind of put in my mind and often talk about as the most urgent spiritual and physical needs in the world and so urgent spiritual needs. I want to be a part of getting the gospel to where the the gospel is not yet gone. The fact that three billion plus people have little to no knowledge of the gospel right now that is not tolerable. And I just this is actually the subject of our secret church recently what we call the great imbalance, because the reality is you look at the stats. Around ninety nine percent of emissions resources from the church actually go to places in the world where the gospel is already gone and that you could argue maybe that’s a little bit a percentage point here or there are different, but like the fact that very little of our resources are going to places where the gospel is not yet gone. I want to be a part of changing that. And so most urgent spiritual need and physical needs, so where those collide, where there’s extreme poverty or extreme trafficking or whatever it might be alongside, they’ve never even heard the name of Jesus like, I want to be there and I want to be a part of work there where the gospel is being clearly proclaimed, where the church is being built, according to the Bible. So these are the filters that I’m thinking through and that I want to help other people get out. So that actually led all that long story to say let us as radical as a ministry to start something called urgent, which is where we are identifying indigenous brothers and sisters on the front lines of urgent spiritual and physical need, and saying What are wise ways that we can give to be a part of the spread of the gospel in those places? And that’s what we’re doing.

Daryl Heald: One quick question, though so is that something that other people can participate in, like if they were fired up about what you just talked about and want to co-invest with you? Is that is that something that’s open or is that?

David Platt: Yes, it’s it’s like it’s a new over the last year, we’ve been kind of long past, even the last few months. So, yeah, I mean, I don’t want to go out this podcast to point people to that. But I I would. I’m asking radical dot net and you go to urgent on that site. And what we’ve done is we’ve tried to create a picture where people could give small amounts or large amounts. That’s all going to go toward the front lines of urgent spiritual and physical need in the world. Indigenous brothers, sisters that we’re vetting to make sure because there is a lot in missions world that I think is unfortunately gospel less, or it’s not focused on building up the church in the ways that the Bible talks about the church. So we’re trying to identify where is the tip of the spear really strong gospel church work amidst urgent spiritual physical need and get behind those brothers and sisters and make connections with them through urgent. So, yeah, radical that being tested?

Henry Kaestner: Thank you. So this is awesome because this is we’re talking about giving here. And yet we’ve got an audience, mostly of entrepreneurs and investors, and I love your focus on going to where the gospel hasn’t gone and where the physical needs are the greatest. Is there something that you might lend as an encouragement to entrepreneurs that have their gifting is in business. It’s an innovation creation, it’s in solving problems, it’s in hiring people, it’s in bringing products and services to market. Do you see a role for the entrepreneur and the investor in investing in the marketplaces of places like that? Or is it just, you know, these are secret places? There’s just too hard. And just really the answer is, you know, we just need your financial resources. Is there something bigger there or am I just artificially controlling that?

David Platt: No, there’s something bigger there, I think. Yes, financial resources part. But. No question in my mind, like radical, we’re actually in the process of putting together. I’m not sure what we would call it, but one of the names we have in years is Innovation Summit, but basically to try to get leaders along these lines in the same room from different domains thinking through how can we? Because yeah, how can we use God’s grace in our lives and professionally the gifts he’s given and the opportunities he’s opened up in a globalized marketplace to be a part of the spread of the gospel in those places and all kinds of different ways? So yes, like I think about these global cities where there are so much opportunity to be part of work there and to do that with the gospel in our hearts and lives of people who are involved in that work. And global cities around the world where unreached people are. And so it’s just I feel like for far too long, we’ve looked at of three billion people who have little to no knowledge of the gospel that doesn’t just need a select group of missionaries who over here who are thinking about how to get the gospel to them that needs the whole body of Christ thinking through how do we use Marshall all of our resources, gifts, experiences, opportunities to be a part of the spread of the gospel in those places, too? Yes. Invest to work, to create business, to do that, and all kinds of different places around the world in ways they’re going to open doors for the seeds of the gospel to spread. Yes. Yes, yes. And so that’s what I’m really passionate about is why we’re want to do this innovation seminar or whatever we call it, because I just think, yeah, the whole body of Christ got to be part of this. And I would say even more so, like traditional missionaries not invited into a lot of these places, but successful entrepreneurs are totally invited. The doors are open there. I’m not going into a lot of these places with my credentials from seminary, but people are listening to this can get into all kinds of places that I can’t get in the world. And so what happens when that whole force is unleashed? In a sense? Yeah, I think about the audience for this. Like, if people who are listening to this right now will get that the global purpose of God is spread of his gospel and glory among the nations is not a compartmentalized program in the church for a couple of people who are like, called it that. But it’s actually the purpose for which we have breath and the reason why we have been given these gifts. That’s what I want to be a part of fueling. Like Lord, use me to pour gasoline on that kind of movement.

Henry Kaestner: That’s awesome. All right, now, I’m all fired up, so I actually now am coming back to the first comment that you mentioned about 20 minutes ago or so that I didn’t latch on to then. But now I really am going back to some of those 60 people that are sitting there for eight to 12 hours and wondering how many of them are business owners. They leave that event you’ve done and they’re out there and they’re running a business. They’re hiring people, they’re living on partners, vendors, customers, employees, and they’ve just been completely immersed into the word of God. You know, as an investor, you spend a lot of time and diligence, you know, the reason why we do what we do a Faith Driven Investor thing is we believe that when we can find the right men and women of peace, you come alongside them and you let them do what they do best in the markets. They know where the customers they know best. And I wonder what it looks like in some of those places to just be able to be an encouragement to that. Maybe it’s 15 of the 60 are business owners. Maybe it’s only eight. What do we know about them? We know that they have a incredible thirst for the gospel. They didn’t come expecting and looking for investment capital. They’re not Christians, right? They’re looking for God’s word. Oh my goodness. How do we come alongside those men and women and just resource them to do what God’s put them in a position to do?

David Platt: I love it. I’m thinking right now about one of the countries we’re working through. Urgent where? Yeah, I mean, just a very close country by all accounts that we might think of. But the indigenous brother we’re working with there runs a factory, and he’s been very successful in a country where it’s really, really hard to be successful. And he’s using that to fuel a basically an underground house church movement. And so to come alongside that brother and not just with financial resources, but again with skills, even partnership, all the kind of things that they’re going through your mind right now that I don’t even know to think of because I’m just like a pastor and I know this or that biblically theologically, but just like a pastor. Well, but I mean, that’s the beauty, though, right of the body of Christ. Like, you guys have gifts I don’t have. I mean, I think about people listening to this right now and the storehouse of grace that they have in their minds and experiences and education that I definitely don’t have, like every one of us playing different parts, but all focused on the same goal and using the grace God’s given us toward that end. Yes, this is what we’re suppose. This is a church is what we get to be a part of in this world. It’s going to matter forever. Like, yes, again, like, sign up for this.

Daryl Heald: Yeah, David, it’s a really love. I mean, I think hopefully everyone listening here that is thinking, you know, so OK, I get it. Maybe the only thing is just seems sometimes sometimes the whole generosity thing seems one dimensional. I’ve got money and there’s a need there and I’m giving it and what I’m just hearing here that Henry and David y’all are talking about is generosity is holistic. In one sense, like, I’ve got networks, I’ve got experience, I’ve got knowledge, I’ve got, you know, capital. I mean, all these other things that, yeah, so I might not be the, you know, call to be there long term, but there are ways that I can be really strategic in this, and I think I’m really fascinated with your innovation summit idea that really brings the whole body to this thing because you think about a problem to be solved with three billion people, you’re right. It’s going to take marshaling everything we have. And so to bring that together instead of the bifurcation of it, we’re in business to make a lot of money and we give it to the church and expect the church to do that. I think we need to see this no bifurcation right altogether is like, Hey, this is our problem to be solved, right? This is what in our time today, given everything we have well done, good and faithful right, we need to the intentionality.

David Platt: So I love the way you just put that there. I would just say if I could put an exclamation on that phrase, is this our problem to be solved? Because I remember talking with one prominent pastor definitely won’t mention his name, but who just we were talking about? Three billion people know where the gospel is. Like, when is somebody else going to figure out how to get the gospel to them? And it was like, when is the mission community going to figure that out and solve that problem? It’s like. Rather, this is a bizarre problem in Salt Lake, as pastors, we’re supposed to shepherd the church toward this end. But to your point there? Yeah. This is our problem like a church. This is for us to have the gospel again going back to where we started, like even my own story, at least even Henry, you’re talking about how you came to Christ, like the fact that we have security for eternity. We have the gospel of Jesus Christ inside of us, like we have eternal life with him, like life that is truly life. To use your words derived from first, some of these sex like we have this right now and we get to be a part of sharing it in the world. And there’s three billion people who’ve never even heard they don’t even have access to the good news of how to have this life like that can’t be. And we have in an esther like way for such a time as this, we have more opportunity with the ease of travel, with technology, with wealth, with the globalization of the marketplace more opportunity than ever before in history. To make this good news, no one in the world like, let’s step fully into this. All of us step fully into this. Why would we want to live for anything else to get a little bit of time here? Let’s make it count toward the end and end the process. Realize, like we’ve talked about, it’s not sacrifice. This is joy. This is pure joy. Seeing people, I just read a story of somebody coming to Christ in a unreached part of the world like to have the opportunity be a part of that. This is awesome. And to have the opportunity to be a part of making the glory of Christ known and experiencing a joy that’s deeper than anything this world has. Yeah, may we all like jumped into this with the unique parts each of us has to play toward that end? Amen, Amen, Amen,

Henry Kaestner: Amen and a man. David, we like to close out every one of our podcast episodes with something that our guest is hearing from God’s Word, and it doesn’t necessarily need to be this morning, though it must surely could be. But we believe that this book is alive in the words of Mark Green, who is on our podcast a couple of weeks ago, something that really impacts me. And so is there something that you think that God is speaking to you? That’s really you’re discovering God’s love for you. I knew or his challenge, his encouragement, something I knew

David Platt: immediately that comes my mind. It was a part of my time with the Lord this morning in Psalm, 62. But it’s been a bigger part of our journey over the last year. So Psalm, 62, this morning. It’s not about waiting on God and finding refuge in him. That’s probably the book that’s had the biggest influence on me this last year of a little book called Waiting on God by Andrew Murray. And part of the reason for that theme is I mentioned our adoption journey. We were three days away last January from getting on a plane to go pick up our fifth son from another country when that country shut down due to COVID. So we’ve been in a 15 month waiting process to get to him and just praying every single day that God would make a way for us to go to him. And so but to see the repeated use of that word waiting in God’s word and again, I saw it this morning. And one of the best definitions I’ve come across for waiting on God is resting trust fully in him. So for us, amidst the heartbreak of wanting to get to our son to Rusty trust in God, I’m guessing there’s a variety of other people listening right now or experiencing some sort of waiting in their life, but rest trust fully and have them. It’s the waiting. And what I love about Andrew Murray’s book on Waiting on God is he kind of talks about how this is really the Christian life like we are constantly. We wake up in the morning. We’re waiting on God for the strength, for the wisdom, for the comfort, for the guidance that only he can provide, like the Christian life is a life resting trust fully in God at every moment. And so that’s been the big takeaway in a way that I just think Isaiah, 40, those who wait in the Lord or renew their strength and just know this has been an exhausting year for so many people in so many ways. But how do you renew strength and soar on wings like eagles and run and not be weary and walk and not think you wait? It rests trusting God. That’s the key to a strength that is supernatural and a trust that can get you through days when you don’t understand why certain things are happening.

Henry Kaestner: Great word, David. Thank you very, very much for spending time with us and with our audience of tomorrow’s investors and givers. You’ve challenged me yet again and just given me a renewed sense of being intentional about getting out into the marketplaces where there is real physical need and real spiritual need. And I thank you for that.

David Platt: And this is pure joy. I really am thankful for God’s grace and you guys and what he’s doing. Even through the people who are listening to this podcast and the fact that I get to be a part of a conversation like this with you guys like I deserve to be in hell right now and here I am talking with you guys about joy and following Jesus and being part of what he’s doing the world. So thank you guys all that to say pure joy, to be a part of this.

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Episode Transcript

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Matt Jennings: Most people want to do something they want to do-have-be instead of be-do-have, so I’ll explain that. So most people want to do something, so then they’ll have something and then they think they’ll be something, right? So in other words, they’re going to work hard. They’re going to make a lot of money and they’re going to be a successful person that really just makes no sense. The more you think about it. And what we’ve been called to do is to be something and then we’ll do something and then we’ll have something, right? And the key is the being.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor and even Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast Luke is with me. Look, I think we’ve got an opportunity to do this. Take this conversation with our friend Matt Jennings. A lot of different ways. It’s great to be in the studio with you.

Luke Roush: Yeah. The two four FDE and FDI on one

Henry Kaestner: the big day. And we’re going and it’s taking us to a state that you love. Why do you love the state of Kentucky?

Luke Roush: Wonderful state of Kentucky is where my parents have lived for the last twenty four years. And it’s a wonderful place. I’m the Kentucky Derby, among many other things, home of many large white tailed deer. As Matt Jennings has repeatedly reminded me of, they are voracious text thread. Thank you, Matt.

Henry Kaestner: That makes it sounds like there are probably fewer white tailed deer because of of Matt Jennings being in that state.

Matt Jennings: Now there’s actually probably a whole lot more. I spend a great amount of money and time feeding and taking care of the herd in Kentucky.

Henry Kaestner: That’s awesome. All right. Good. Good. Good. All right. So we’ve never had an episode where we’ve gone into the theology of hunting, and this is probably not going to be the first one. Let’s go ahead. Let’s talk about your entrepreneurial journey. Let’s talk about what you do with structuring of IRAs. You’re a custodian. You’ve been involved in crypto. So many different things. But what we do with every one of our podcasts, of course, is we try to understand the story of our guest and you and I got a chance to hang out together at the Christian Economic Forum, where Luke was two, of course. And then Luke put together this great junket where we got a chance to go on a road trip to visit a number of the sovereign’s portfolio companies in you. And I got a chance to sit next to each other for a couple of hours going through northern Alabama. And I heard just an absolutely awesome story, and it was just such a no brainer to make sure that you got on. And can you give us a fly over? Who is Matt Jennings and what makes you tick?

Matt Jennings: Oh wow. So born and raised in here in Murray, Kentucky, a little town in western Kentucky, great parents growing up went into my dad’s business, started working there. He owned a meat wholesale meat distributor ship. Well, actually, I started out as a boat mechanic. Believe it or not, and then was part fitter for a period of time at a chemical plant in my early twenties. Didn’t go to college, barely made it through high school. I knew I wasn’t probably cut out for college, so I did the boat mechanic. The pipefitter ended up working in my dad’s meat business till about twenty four and always had a very entrepreneurial mind. Spirit did a lot of things on the side. Through that time, but really made the big step out in 2004 and quit working for the family business kind of left the comfort zone and stepped out. I actually took a job for way less money in the real estate business as a real estate appraiser learned that trade ended up buying the company that I worked for in about six months after I went to work there and began real estate investing really at that time, and God really blessed that saw just really quickly when I grew my appraisal company to the largest one in this area of Kentucky and then began to buy and sell. Ironically, a lot of hunting farms in Kentucky, recreational farms, and that was where I saw my first true, you know, I guess you’d say, like, really true financial success, but I had a burden and a heart and I wanted to do more. And that’s when I started a founded, a company called SPG, which is the Saved by Grace Company, and we formed that company to have both a real estate company. And this crazy idea we had of starting a trust company here in Kentucky so that people could buy real estate and other alternative investments in their tax free tax deferred retirement accounts. And so we we did that in two thousand and nine. I put that together. We actually got it going in 2010, and that’s when Kingdom Trust was born and that was built to be a faith driven company with Chuck and Randy. A couple of buddy of mine started that.

Henry Kaestner: So you end up being. Now, fast forward didn’t go to college. A pipe fitter, a bunch of different types of things. You end up getting real estate investing. Maybe we’ll touch on that. But now one of the largest custodians of digital assets and currencies in the United States, and there’s a faith story in there and you talk about being saved by grace is being one of the the titles of the company. Did you grow up as a Christian? Tell us a bit about your faith.

Matt Jennings: It is. So I grew up. I actually went to a Christian school. My mom and dad are great Christian people. I went to a pretty strict Christian environment when I was in grade school, started in kindergarten. Into the private Christian school, very small school, and I’m very much had rebellion in my teenage years against that. You know, when I say it was a strict environment, it was a very strict environment. And so I really rebelled against that and actually leaving my end of my sophomore year going into my junior year, I was asked to leave the Christian school. That’s a nice way of saying I got kicked out. And so I went to the local public school here, my junior and senior year of high school, and it kind of went a little bit crazy, did some things I shouldn’t do and ended up kind of on the on the wrong side of where I should have been in. But to go back when I was 12 years old, walk the aisle and said the prayer and got dunked under the water. And I clearly remember that I did it through a sense of guilt, and I think I was kind of in some trouble and that was a good way to smooth some things over at home. But I would say between the ages of 12 and thirty four thirty five in two thousand four, which ironically I just mentioned, is another year the same year that I quit my family business and went out on my own. Also, the same year that I truly came to faith and it’s all tied together. But I would say I’d probably ask God to save me hundreds, if not thousands of times, and finally got to the point never felt anything and finally got to the point in life where I really would just say that I just almost forgot about God. I didn’t know if I really believed or didn’t. I was having trouble seeing him in my life. Got married to Kelly, a wonderful wife. When I was twenty one, she was 16 at the time. My goodness. Neither one of us had a job. So our first job I made two hundred dollars a week and she made fifty four dollars a week bagging groceries at Kroger. You know, we just kind of went from there. But fast forward, when we were in our thirties, we had two kids worked in my dad’s family business. I had really gotten off base, had some addictions and things that, you know, not being fruitful in my life. I wasn’t being a good husband. And she saw that and confronted me with that, and we split up for a matter of just a few days. But during that few days, it was a moment I set out on a porch on my farm and just told God. I said, You know, first time I talked to you in years, God. But I don’t know if I believe in you or not, but if if you’re really there, you know, prove it to me. And long story short, over the next couple of days, some really cool things and a guy named Ricky came into my life who was my parents’ pastor at the time, and I went and talked to him and through that ended up realizing that God did love me and that he’d been after me for a long time, and that a whole lot of the reason I was in the situation I was in was because I was running from that calling. So, yeah, so I made a pact to change my life. And that was the moment when I gave my heart to Christ and my wife and I work things out. A couple of months later, she gave her heart to Christ, and I quit my job because I felt like my entrepreneurial calling was one of the big things. That was a problem between me and my wife because she was a security person and I wanted to branch out and go do all kinds of crazy things like entrepreneurs do. And after that moment, she completely devoted to backing me and trusting me, and that allowed me to go and try out some of those crazy things and with her by my side. And so we did.

Luke Roush: How did you invite her into that entrepreneurial journey? I think this is actually a really interesting topic that we have not explored fully on the podcast previously. But you know, many times, whoever the trailing spouse is, if their spouse is an entrepreneur, that person’s generally kind of outrunning, creating, seeing the future, trying to create that, trying to respond to what they feel like is God’s call in their life. How did you invite Kelly into that alongside you after her being really on the outside in the early years of your marriage?

Matt Jennings: Yeah. So I felt like I had invited her in before and got a negative obviously response which to her was just she was a person who, you know, a mom. She was a young mom. We had kids that were, I think, two and four at the time. And for her, it was a big deal for me to quit my job and go start a business or whatever. And so once we came together on that, it was really. Boy, I don’t know how to say it any way other than I let her know that that was really hurting me and how that made me feel, where I hadn’t really let her know that before, and she let me know some things that I was doing that really made her feel. If you’ve ever read the book, Love and Respect read, so I really felt disrespected that she didn’t trust me to go out and make a living on my own. She felt really kind of unloved. Some of the ways that I was treating her and what we figured out was we’d been in this cycle of she’d been saying things or doing things that made me feel disrespected. I had been in return saying things that made her feel unloved. They call it the crazy cycle, I think, in that book. And we just had grown apart. And really, it all started with just something small. And what we did that day would just come back together and decide that we were going to love and respect each other. And so she had to make that sacrifice or surrender or whatever you want to say to say, you know, what is the man he has? He has these dreams. He has this name. I love him. So I’m going to support him even if it scares me to death. And so I really just have to give all that credit to her for reaching that point of saying yes, I’m going to back him, even if it scares me to death.

Henry Kaestner: I guess that’s been a great investment with an incredible ROI.

Matt Jennings: Yeah, yeah, it’s been really good.

Henry Kaestner: So talk to us through a bit of your speaking impact investments. Tell us a bit about how you’ve thought about real estate investing.

Matt Jennings: I love you. I, of course, I became an appraiser by trade, a real estate appraiser. So I’m big on numbers and big on data I’m big on. I believe that you make at least 50 percent, if not more, of your money when you buy at the moment, you buy it. So I’m a bargain investor. I’m big on cash flow using the proper amount of leverage not to get overleveraged, but in real estate. The goal is to take something that makes six or eight percent net return leverage to make, you know, 15 or 20 percent return and do it in a manner where you have insurance. If it burns, you know, pretty low risk where your only real risk is, you know, not being able to find a tenant to rent it. I’ve been really blessed the town I’m in the last 10 years of average ninety nine point two percent occupancy rates in all my rental buildings. So I do a lot of multifamily, I do a few other things as well. But you know, we build a lot. The last five years, I’ve started a building company, so we build most of our own multifamily properties. I had a management company who are sold to a young man that trained under me. I sold him that business and he manages all my properties, and I’ve found that managing properties yourself. Once you get to a particular point, I think it’s great in the beginning. As you learn, once you get to a particular point, you end up hating them. Sometimes if you manage them as opposed to looking at them as a set of numbers, you get to emotionally connected to both the tenants and the experience. Sometimes we try to be faith based. It’s a faith based company that manages my apartment, so we try to treat. Our tenants will look a little bit about

Luke Roush: what that looks like. If you wouldn’t mind Matt about the here, just

Matt Jennings: how your faith, you know, impacts, he does all the managing. So I’m really pretty hands off in that business. My daughter actually just went to work for him with the ambitions of probably her one day managing all my stuff. So he knows he’s kind of probably training his future competition, but he’s doing that as a favor to me. But, you know, I think it’s just love on them for us. You know, we try to be fair to them and we try to love on them. We try to be to show them grace and mercy and understand when they’re in situations. If we know something’s going on in their personal life, you know, with a death or something that you know, something that’s creating sorrow in their life, we try to reach out. And just with a note of, you know, hey, we’re thinking about you and just, you know, just try to go above and beyond, and we’re always open to talk to them to, especially for new people that have moved in because we get it, we do. A lot of college students were in a college town here, with Murray State homogeneous Morant, Memphis Grizzlies now. So we get a lot of kids moving in, so we’re open. Always ask them if they’re looking for a church locally. We’re happy to point them in a few different directions there. We’re not stuck on any one, but we kind of know the ones that we feel like we’ll take them in and love on them. And, you know, treat them like we should treat our brothers and sisters. So that’s how we look at that.

Luke Roush: So maybe a little bit more to just the tension that you feel. So I’m going to come back and pick on something you said a second ago just because I think it’s in. Christine, I think it’s something that a lot of investors feel as you get closer to your investments and as you get closer to portfolio companies, CEOs and kind of all that, you start to really identify and empathize kind of with the situation that they’re in. And yet at the same time, you know, particularly in real estate, right? There’s an obligation to kind of look after the property. How do you hold those things in tension? How do you know when to give grace and when to kind of hold the line and just love to have you speak into how God’s spoken to your heart on that topic?

Matt Jennings: Boy, that’s one that I honestly, I would do my best to to say how I do that, but it’s a hard thing. There’s a great book, actually. I think about that. It’s called Love Works by Joel. Maybe you guys have read that that I’ve had look back to several times when I find myself in situations about how do I deal with this in a loving way, but in a way that is in the best interest of everyone involved? Right. So one thing I learned a long time ago is to avoid I’m a non conflict part. I don’t like conflict, and that hurt me a lot in my early days and I’ve learned to kind of walk up and open the door of the lion’s cage and walk in is always a better scenario and confront it. And, you know, based on how the person on the other side takes that confrontation criticism, then that’s when you have to make a decision of what’s best for everyone involved. Because any time it has to do with an organization, it’s not just you and them involved. There’s a lot of other people, employees, investors and things as well. So I just always try to think about what’s in the best interest overall when I make those decisions.

Luke Roush: Yeah, that’s good.

Matt Jennings: It’s hard.

Henry Kaestner: Before we get back into the investing side and go over and talk about what you’re doing with crypto now, because crypto is all the rage and your business is just absolutely exploded. I want to touch on something that’s more consistent with your entrepreneurial journey and that you’ve developed a drive to serving other entrepreneurs in a way that will ultimately point them to knowing God. Can you tell us a little bit about that framework that you’re in the process of developing? I just found it really encouraging. Walk us through that.

Matt Jennings: Yeah, I found myself in a really low point in March for New Journey Back several years ago. And I mean, when I say low point, I was at a really, really low point and it was a mixture. I think of personal, entrepreneurial, just a lot of stuff, you know, midlife for me, I don’t know, but and I began to search. I started in first, started in the Bible, sought out counsel from Christian friends, all of which was somewhat helpful. But I ended up joining a kind of a secular group for businessmen, CEOs, presidents, things like that and learned a whole lot through that. But it really gave me an idea through that is what I tell you that story. So once I, I just had this light bulb moment and I discovered so many things about myself through that process. And so when I got through that, I began to write things down and I decided I just wanted to share it with other entrepreneurs because I felt many times lonely. I know you guys say it’s a lonely journey. I felt so lonely at that point in my career, I felt almost like I was on an island by myself, and there was no one I could talk to. And I just have a passion for men who find themselves in that situation, and I felt so alone. I want to be there for those guys. So I started putting this together of ran a few groups through it. It’s still unfinished. I pretty well do it on the fly, but it’s really a self exploration. I don’t. When I’ve done it, I just put it on Facebook and say, Hey, do you feel lonely? You know, these struggles sometimes. Do you feel empty? And you know, each time I’ve had eight or 10 guys sign up and it’s really just like a coaching program, but we ask them a lot of questions because what I’ve found is that guys like me and you, Henry, we’re not necessarily really easy to teach things sometimes, but we’re really easy to challenge, right? We don’t necessarily listen if somebody says what you need to do this. I like to figure out myself what I’m going to do. I’ve no idea.

Luke Roush: We’re not talking about Matt at all.

Matt Jennings: That’s kind of an entrepreneur. So I kind of go at it from that angle and I call it the juice because I don’t know if you guys have ever been fishing and stuff like that, but it’s like, you know, the secret sauce. You know, it’s the juice. I got the juice, you know, so I start out by telling the guys that, Hey, you know, I know I’ve got this secret sauce. I got the juice that can set you free from how you’re feeling right now. And I tell them that are going to learn what that is through this about eight week process as we go through now and we start out with some basic questions. And I mean, I’d love to share a few of the questions with you and let you guys ponder on them if you’d like to hear just officially. Yes. OK, so so we start out by asking, who are you? Then we finish that question. With something that’s very profound, we say, really, really, who are you? Very few of them know who they really are. Now start trying to tell you what they do, right? And if you tell them that’s not it, they’ll start going into what they do at home, right? How many kids they have husband, father, whatever. No, no, no, no, no. Who are you, really? So that’s how we start out. And the very next question we ask them is where you’re at in your life right now. Would you say that you are being told through life by passion or push through life, by fear? Mm.

Henry Kaestner: That’s good. What’s the percentage response either way?

Matt Jennings: Ninety five percent have said, pushed by fear of only actually only had one out of about 20 guys that said passion. And two days later, he decided his might be fear. But yeah, so we just we go through a lot of that kind of stuff. We asked them this question to as entrepreneurs, as guys, right? We’re providers and what have you. We’re always trying to get somewhere or get something right. You feel like you wake up every day trying to get some more or get something. So we asked him this question What good is it going to do to you to get somewhere or get something if you sacrifice everything in the process?

Henry Kaestner: I like that. Get somewhere or get something. You know, Luke and I have got a great friend named Tim Oakley, who says We’re always selling something to somebody. And just there is this concept of just trying to make it happen. So you’re trying to get something or get somewhere? Yeah.

Matt Jennings: And what good is it going to do to you to get there if you sacrifice everything in the process? And that leads into some principles around that. The journey is the destination in my life. I don’t know if you guys have ever felt this, but I went through a period where I was like climbing this ladder. I was climbing this ladder, climbing and climbing and climbing it every day, and all I wanted to do is get to the top right. That was the destination was to get to the top of the ladder and climbing this wall on this ladder. I want to get to the top of the ball and get to the other side because that was like the Promised Land, I thought. And so I’ve climbed this ladder climbing it. And then finally, I get to the top and I look over and there’s nothing on the other side. And I think what so many men where we mess up men and women is the journey is the destination. There is no destination in life here on Earth. The journey here on Earth is the reward, it is the destination. And we should live it one day at a time, as Jesus taught one day at a time, not looking backward, not looking forward, living in today and making the best of each and every day. Stop trying to get somewhere and get something. Frantically, you know, the Bible says, Why do you rise early and go to bed late? Eating the bread of anxious toil God provides for those he loves as they sleep. There’s just so much wisdom in that verse, and so then we go in to talking about doing and being, you know, most people want to do something they want to do have be instead of Baidu have. So I’ll explain that. So most people want to do something, so then they’ll have something and then they think they’ll be something, right? So in other words, they’re going to work hard. They’re going to make a lot of money and they’re going to be a successful person that really just makes no sense. The more you think about it. And what we’ve been called to do is to be something and then we’ll do something and then we’ll have something. And the key is the being so there’s there’s never been a human doing. There’s never been a spiritual doing. There’s human beings and spiritual beings. Which leads me to another question. We asked our guys is would you consider yourself a human being having a spiritual experience or a spiritual being having a human experience?

Henry Kaestner: Mm-Hmm. So this is as you lead them into faith because I know that there’s a good number of these folks, unlike the Faith Driven Entrepreneur, of course, that we have, which is primarily focused on Christ virus because it starts off with call to create an identity crisis. We’re right up there. Was curious through this framework. When you start introducing your faith into it, whether it’s on the being side. Talk to us a little bit more about that. Does it ever conversation, ever turn back around to you and somebody says, Well, what about you? What about you, man? Who are you being?

Matt Jennings: So the first several weeks of it, I don’t mention God. Obviously, we talk about spirituality, but I never go into who God is. We just talk through these principles and we start going through all kinds of principles. We talk about learning your yes, is in your nose, and we talk about how I believe that we’ve all been created to win but programed to fail, right? Or created for success, but program for failure. And so we talk about all those things, and in the end, about week eight, we kind of say, Hey, just so you know, all of these things I just taught you came from one guy. Would you like to know who that guy is? Because I’d love to share with you who the guy is if you’re interested. And that’s what we’re going to do next week. If you want to come back for the final week, I’m going to tell you who the guy is and and that’s when we start out in Matthew five, because most of these principles comes right out of the Beatitudes. In the sermon on the Mount, the Jesus taught about getting your head and your heart aligned. You know, Jesus said blessed is he whose head and heart is aligned because then he’ll be able to see God in the outside world. Blessed is he who’s at the end of the rope because there he’ll find less of himself and more of God. And a lot of what we’re talk about in the group is about getting your head aligned with your heart. And so in the end, we go through and we show them where this came from. And the overwhelming response I’ve gotten to this point has been that’s not the Jesus I was taught about. That doesn’t even like I never even caught a hint that that would have been something from the Bible or that Jesus would have taught. Right? And so that gives me an opportunity to then share that, you know, the Bible is not a rule book. It’s a love story. And so many people, particularly in my area where I live in what they call the Bible Belt, or at the time of the Southern Bible Belt Country. And so, so many people have what I call this wrong impression of God and Jesus, and that gives me a chance to I’ve already had eight weeks to show them that love before they turn around and try to run from it. That makes sense. It does. So yeah, what

Henry Kaestner: you’ve done is you systematically shown them their need for a savior in their something’s, not altogether right, and that the framework that they had their belief system has been letting them down. They’re feeling driven by something, and they realize that it’s not going to the place where they want. They know their priorities are out of whack and it’s not revealing their type of fulfillment. So you’ve helped them walk through that framework to get there and then you’re showing them a better way.

Luke Roush: Yeah. Just to interject. How do you go from, you know, real estate and hunting farms? We talked a little bit about the gravel mine that we started, which I’m pumped to go see myself at some point. But how do you transition from that into a trust company and what we now know to be a pretty meaningful platform for cryptocurrency? So maybe just talk a little bit about that pivot or what God did through that and then maybe also speak to why cryptocurrency is something that believers should be interested in understanding more about and what the redemptive potential is for that instrument.

Matt Jennings: So Kingdom came about from my love of real estate, and I wanted to put it in my retirement account. I found that process very difficult. At first, I was told it was impossible, then it became difficult, and I found out it’s not impossible or difficult. So I thought, Hey, somebody needs to start a company to do this. So that was the original kind of idea behind Kingdom Trust. Once we started it, we had to become a regulated trust company, just like a bank. We’re chartered in South Dakota. We had to do all that to started and few years into it, I was not the CEO early on and I was just a founder and I think I was executive vice president or something. But I was running a real estate business kind of separate from that and a few years into it. Things weren’t going so well, and in 2014 I got asked by my partners in the board to become the CEO, which was one of the hardest times in my life. I really did not desire to lead a large group of people. I never felt like that was my calling. That’s the reason I didn’t choose to be the CEO. In the beginning, when I founded the company, so I sat at my desk one night and there was two books laying on my desk. I had my head down. I was praying. I was just honestly kind of lost. It was after I’d been asked to take it over. It was broke in a very bad situation and I looked up and there was a dictionary and a Bible. I felt like I just felt like something, said the answer to your problems is in this. I ran the numbers every way there was and there was no way to manage out of this problem. We had to grow out of it because we just weren’t big enough. We had at the time, we had about 900 million in assets under custody. I think we were maybe a thousand or two thousand customers. And I opened the dictionary and I looked at growth and I wrote the definition of a down. And I took G R, O W, T h, and I started looking through my Bible and thinking and I wrote down on G. I put goals. And the definition in the dictionary was an object of a person’s ambition, effort or a desired result. So I put down this is a note to myself. Have I still have this same original paper in my desk? I read it every day. Have a clear vision and an open mind. Think big and always stay focused on the goal. And I put four r. I put reward in. The definition of that in the dictionary was something given in recognition of one service, effort or achievement. And I said always inspire, motivate, appreciate, recognize and reward others that help you achieve your goals. And I put O Orchestrate a range or direct for a desired effect or performance. And I wrote a note to myself Orchestrate a team that is talented individuals at each play their part in the overall performance and reach the goals and always reward them. You got to remember, this is a guy, it’s taken over a company without an education, don’t know how to run it. It’s kind of a Wall Street company. And I’m a part fitter and a boat mechanic. So, so, so then I got the W and I said, Wow, and I look that up and it said to impress or stop someone greatly. And I said, Always strive to wow your customers, friends, employees and family by going above and beyond to meet their needs and and exceed their expectations. I got to tell you, I put trust and this was been the big one for me. I think because I was, as I said, was a little bit. I had a fear of being a leader. So on trust, I looked it up and it said firm belief in the reality, truth and ability or strength of someone or something. And I wrote, always be honest and ethical with high integrity. Be a servant leader at home and at work that people will follow toward the goal, not because it’s required of them, but because they trust you. And then I got to H, and the first word that came to me was humble, which I looked up in the dictionary and it said, not proud or arrogant, modest to be humble, although successful. And the note I wrote to myself was always Remember where you came from and who put you there? Keep faith and family as your top priority. Always keep your trust in God and others. Lead with love and never look down on anyone. Make tough decisions decisively with care and compassion for others, but always in the overall best interest of everyone involved. Give help those in need knowing that the ultimate goal is to see the one in which you have put your trust and what he is orchestrated on your behalf. Wow, what a humbling moment and a magnificent reward. And then I put a verse on there Matthew twenty three twelve who ever exalts himself, will be humbled and who ever humbled themself will be exalted. And I honestly, I wrote down below that because I didn’t have a plan. Didn’t really know what kind of plan to have. I put focus on the principles and the performance will take care of itself. And I wrote that that night and I will never forget it. I met with my who was my personal account, and at the time he did no work for the business at all. And I asked him to help me figure out a growth plan for the business, and I told him how many accounts I thought we could grow. And we wrote all this stuff out and did a five year plan. And it looked really great on paper, but I had no idea what I was really talking about and he didn’t either. It’s kind of ironic. I forgot all about that plan, and about a year ago, I actually ended up hiring him about two or three years ago. He’s now my CFO, and about a year or two ago, he came running in my office and he said, Man, I was going through some old paperwork and I found that he said, You remember that, not that you came to my office and we built this growth plan for Kingdom. I said, Yeah, I remember that night. It’s the same night I wrote this growth thing here. He said, I want you to see something. And he laid down that growth plan and he laid down Kingdom’s financials for that five years and they were within point two, five percent of each other every year, year after year, for five years. At that moment, I thought, Oh, wow, how amazing, because we neither one of us had any clue that not we sat down and did that. So that’s kind of my faith story there and how God came back five years later to say I was there that night.

Henry Kaestner: See, as you go through your growth framework, I didn’t write them all down and I haven’t seen it before. But the humility which you ended with shows itself in all of the different letters. The other thing that showed up was an interest in others. A couple of different times you talked about rewarding others along the way and being thoughtful about others that came through at least three times, if not more. And talk a little bit about the culture at Kingdom Trust we’re going to bridge into. For those of us who are listening, wondering about crypto and in your take on crypto, we’re going to get there. But I think that these lessons along the way, because how many? What do you have now? Under custodian assets, more than 10 billion write

Matt Jennings: about 20 billion, 20 billion at one hundred and hundred, and forty thousand customers are thinking about around 20 billion.

Henry Kaestner: OK, so how do you get there? Is it a brilliant technology algorithm? Is it some sort of massive arbitrage or is it the ability to lead a team well toward an end goal and get them fired up about achieving it? And my sense is that rather than some sort of major financial. Well, engineering deal, though, I think know when you get to 20 billion dollars of assets, you surely have to have a competency when you scale 140000 customers. You got to have a nail down shop. You’ve got to have great process and procedure and you’ve got to take away a lot of friction. But along the way, you got to lead people talk about the culture that’s come about since you sat down with that growth framework and what it looks like their work at Kingdom Trust.

Matt Jennings: Yeah, leading those people was the biggest fear of my life. I’m just being honest. It’s something that I have. Public speaking and leading people were the two things I never thought I would ever do in my life. So and I do a lot of both now and in have learned to enjoy it. But so I just started empowering people at the time that I wrote that we had about 20 employees. We got down to about maybe four that we kept through that we had a lot of people in the wrong bus, we had a lot of people in the wrong seats on the bus. When I came in and we had a lot of people that didn’t buy into the change that I was making because I we changed everything about the company after that and it was one of the more difficult times in my life. But over about a four or five month period, we maneuvered everybody around and went from 20 employees to about twenty five, but only kept four of the original 20 and. The four that we kept are three of them are still there today. Amen, they’re my posse. We’ve been in the trenches together and they have been and will be greatly rewarded, particularly when we choose one day to exit. And I’ve tried to reward them, but we also had a light that came in in that original 20, something that I hired back. Most of those are all still there. We’ve got about one hundred and twenty, I think now one hundred and fifty somewhere in there. So man, I just always try to love and we have we had Friday morning meetings and always try to share something with them in that meeting. That’s totally nothing to do with work and be vulnerable and open and transparent as I possibly can and be someone, as I said in the T. Someone that they will follow because they trust me. Not because they think I’m right. Not because they think they have to or or else, you know, they’ll get fired or whatever. Someone that they will get behind me and follow me into this crazy market that we went into that pretty much nobody in Murray, Kentucky, understands or knows about until they come in to work for us. We’re the only company in that type of industry here. So they all learn in-house, but they come in and they they will follow because they trust me. And now it’s not only just me, it was me then. Now it’s because they trust the other people. And since then, I’ve moved to chairman. About a year ago, we hired a young guy, a very successful guy named Ron. Brad Laffey started a company called CoinShares over in Europe. It’s now a publicly traded company, kind of similar to what we do. But over in Europe, he’s now the CEO and I step back from that CEO, and now he leads the charge. Very faith driven, very driven guy. And now he’s the guy that they really follow on a day to day basis, and they trust him and they believe in him in what we do. And so we made the switch into crypto in 2015. We actually started cursing crypto. In 2016, we became the first regulated financial institution in America to custody bitcoin and crypto. Some people say we were the first regulated financial institution in the world. I’ve never done the data research on the world. I know for positive. We were the very first one in the United States. And with that has come a lot of blessings and a lot of challenges. In the early days, we definitely had a bull’s eye on our back when we chose to step out on that limb.

Luke Roush: I’d love to just maybe have you wrap. We always try to kind of wrap with how God is speaking to you now, Matt, and what you believe he’d have you share with the audience that you haven’t already shared. You’re a winsome guy who’s had a lot of wonderful experiences and a lot of success, and in many ways, an unlikely road moving into trust crypto, just as you talked through. But what has God put on your heart recently? And what would you leave our listeners with?

Matt Jennings: Well, we’re talking to entrepreneurs, so I think the first thing would just be encouragement that I look back through my entrepreneurial experiences and there’s been ups, there’s been downs, there’s been some really high highs and some really low lows. And what I’ve figured out was there is many times that I felt like God wasn’t speaking to me and looking back, I know now it’s because I was doing all the talking and listen, be still and know that I am God. You know, I would say when you’re in the tough spot, listen to God and the people who are unbiased and love you all around you. That would be number one. And the other one would be a question that I ask my guys kind of goes along with questions that were asked and earlier is what does wealth really mean to you? And really, really sit down and think about really what this will mean to you. You know, and I’ll tell you what it means to me. Yeah, to me, wealth means all my needs are met physically, emotionally, relationally, everything right, like all my needs are met and they’re met abundantly. That’s what wealth means to me. But I would challenge each person thinking about what does well mean to you. I hope it’s so much more than money to the guys and gals that are listening to this. And once you kind of think about what is wealth to you, then are you really pursuing and chasing true wealth? Are you chasing something else? Right? So that would be kind of my challenge to everybody.

Henry Kaestner: That’s very good word, ma’am. May I thank you for your friendship, your encouragement. Thank you for getting out there and miss all the different things you’ve got going on. Actually, point in the eyes of these 20 men because I know how much you’ve grown, how much you scaled. Most people in your position would say, I just don’t have the time. And yet you’ve done that. You’ve been really intentional about getting folks involved. And and that’s encouragement to me as encouragement to Luke, and we’re grateful to partner with you in the ministry.

Matt Jennings: I’d just like to say to you before I get off your guys, that for years I ran a faith driven company and I did not know a single other Faith Driven Entrepreneur other than myself and my two buddies. And I think that’s one reason that my journey seems so lonely at times. And I found you guys just six months ago, whatever it’s been now. And I honestly just wake up every day more encouraged through that, and, you know, I’ve signed up for one of your classes with, you know, I don’t even remember who I signed up with the leader. I just kind of did any MIT mo. But I’m super excited about doing that. But I’m so pumped and excited to see Henry that God gave you the vision to go out and reach guys like me. And I have the same vision in many ways, but honestly, I did not know how to move that vision forward, and it’s so cool. The first time that I honestly, the first time I went to your website, I got tears in my eyes and was just like, Why haven’t I seen this before? You know, because what you guys are putting together there is amazing. So kudos to you guys for what you’re putting together. It’s great

Luke Roush: encouragement. It’s a great and charisma.

Henry Kaestner: That’s that’s awesome. So we’re going to put you in a cohort with a bunch of other guys did all this. We try to keep it above those that have above $20 billion in custodial assets. And so you’re going to love this group of people. It’ll be you and yourself. We got a great group, we got great cohorts there, and I think we’ve got a five or six hundred people going through FDE groups. If you’re listening to this right now and and you’re interested in joining a group to process how God is working through you and your entrepreneurial life or your investing life, along with people like Matt, please check out the website. Matt, thank you for blessing our audience. Thank you for blessing Luke and I and a new friendship and looking forward to more road trips with your brother.

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Today we’re joined by Mary Naber of Sage Stone Wealth. Mary has spent her entire career in the financial services industry including serving as an SVP and Advisor at Merrill Lynch. Mary’s expertise in the field of ethical investing is highlighted in over half a dozen books and multiple magazines. She joins us today to share her story of finding faith driven investing at Harvard and discuss the value proposition of faith driven investing. Tune in! 

Episode Transcript

Some listeners have found it helpful to have a transcription of the podcast. Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it. The FDI movement is a volunteer-led movement, and if you’d like to contribute by editing future transcripts, please email us.

Mary Naber: It is said to be “Pareto Efficient” when at least at least one person is better off and nobody is worse off. So, in the very last paragraph of my Journal of Investing article: “Individuals and institutions can make a Pareto Efficient move by investing with Catholic or other religious and ethical principles from the comparable return and the added utility and social benefit of a clean conscience.” So, here’s the value proposition with Faith Driven Investing. It’s that at no cost to you, to me or Luke, or anyone listening—at no cost, material or financial, when you choose to integrate your faith and your investments, you gain something amazing in your life today.

Narrator: Welcome to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. If you’re a fund manager, investor or financial advisor driven by your faith, or want to be driven by your faith, then you’re in the right place. The best way to stay connected in the Faith Driven Investor community is to sign up for our newsletter at faithdriveninvestor.org. This podcast doesn’t exist without you, our community. One of the things we’ve heard the community ask us for is help in finding great deals to invest in, and so we’ve launched Marketplace. It’s a new platform of funds and direct deals. Everything from private equity and real estate funds to ETFs. From philanthropic to market rate deals spanning the U.S. and emerging markets. Check it out at faithdriveninvestor.org/marketplace. While you’re there, please send us any thoughts you have about how this podcast might better serve you or any questions you have about being a faith driven investor. 

DISCLOSURE: All opinions expressed on this podcast, including the team and guests, are solely their opinions. Hosts and guests may maintain positions in the companies and securities discussed. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as specific investment advice for any individual or organization.

Narrator: Welcome back everyone to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. Our guest today is a trailblazer and also fascinating. Prior to founding Sage Stone, Mary King served as a Senior Vice President Investments and Wealth Management Advisor at Merrill Lynch in Beverly Hills. She is the author of “Catholic Investing – The Financial Effect of Screens” published in the Journal of Investing, the first published empirical research documenting the financial impact of socially conservative screens. Her article, “Christ’s Returns” was featured in Christianity Today twenty years ago and was a precursor to the movement among faith driven investors.

Mary’s expertise in the field of ethical investing is highlighted in over a half a dozen books and multiple magazines. She is the first undergraduate in the history of Harvard University to receive a double major in Economics and Religion, and she did it with honors. She joins us today to revisit the ideas in her article, Christ’s Returns, and reveal how what was a defensible strategy twenty years ago is still defensible today. Let’s listen in.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. I’m here with my great friend, business partner, lifelong friend Luke Roush. Missing him, he’s moved to Tennessee. We’re just—as we’re talking with Mary, who lives in California—talking about the fact that we used to be able to go down to Capitola and go surfing and stand up paddleboarding at Santa Cruz Harbor and different things like that. So Luke, you are missed.

Luke Roush: Hey, I miss—I miss watching you struggle down there on that surf.

Henry Kaestner: That’s right… Struggling with one of my boys who decided that he was strong enough to not need a wetsuit,

Luke Roush: And that was special. In January. That was very impressive. I am just going to go ahead and go on record.

Henry Kaestner: Yeah, that was maybe a little foolhardy too. He has thawed out, he’s back and I am also back. We had two Faith Driven Investor conferences last week, which were super cool. We had one in Nairobi and we had one in Cape Town, actually right outside of Cape Town in a place got Stellenbosch. And I’ll tell you that God is on—Aslan is on the move. As our friend David Wills likes to say, Aslan is on the move. We had a Faith Driven Investor gathering in Nairobi the February before COVID, so just a couple of years ago, not even two years ago. And seven people came and they were a great seven people. We had a great breakfast, but I thought we might get more. And this time we had one hundred and forty. We had the CEO of Telkom Kenya Mugo Commodities become a friend. He led one of our panels. We had the chairman of the largest insurance company. We had the Senate Majority Leader, everybody getting together and talking about “What can a Kenyan Christian community do to lead the way, putting their own skin in the game, making faith driven investments in Kenya, East Africa and the broader African continent?”. And then the same thing happened a couple of days later in Stellenbosch, an incredible setting and one hundred leading Christian investors that are really serious about their faith and are at the helms of some of the largest investment banks, trading companies and funds in South Africa. Getting together, worshiping together, praying together, it was just, it was super cool. So I’m back now. We are doing the podcast and I’m just really encouraged because there is a movement here and lots of different people are getting it. Pastors are getting it. Individuals are getting it. Again it is a good chance to just, as we get ready to introduce our guest, it’s a great chance to really introduce what is really at the cornerstone of the movement is that it’s really not meant to be prescriptive or presumptuous at all. It’s about us getting down on her knees with our spouses and asking God how we might steward the assets that He’s entrusted us with. And for some, that might be investing in solar farms in the Nevada desert. For others, it might be investing with our Christian brothers and sisters in Nairobi, and some of them it may be taking a new look at the way they manage their public equities. And so for all of that, we have this great honor and this podcast of being able to talk to leaders who’ve been doing this and wrestling with this for a long time. And very few have wrestled with this longer than Mary. And Mary, I’m just I’m really grateful that you’re on with us, and I want to mention one thing that you and I have. And I don’t know if you know this about me, but you and I have the common experience of having worked at Merrill Lynch, Mother Merrill, and I had some formative experiences. My introduction to the financial markets was at Merrill Lynch in Manhattan, downtown in the World Financial Center, where I was actually there for the first World Trade Center bombing, which was a crazy experience. And I learned so much about financial markets and the special privilege that it is to be invited into a family’s life to contemplate some real important decisions around financial planning. There’s an intimacy there that I hadn’t expected in that job, and it was one of the most rewarding parts of it. And so you’ve made a career in doing that. So but I’d like to hear about what your financial experience was. Tell us about it. First of all, welcome to the program. Thanks for joining.

Mary Naber: Thank you, it’s great to be here.

Henry Kaestner: So tell us about it growing up as a kid. What drew you to the financial world? I think that you probably started earlier and maybe were less mercenary about it at the beginning, as I was. I like to think I matured in my thoughts of the financial markets with time. But for me, at the beginning, it was just a job, but you were thoughtful earlier. Tell us about your story growing up. What brought you into it? And yeah, just who are you, where do you come from?

Mary Naber: Thanks. Well, I’m Mary and I’m originally from Salinas, California. I had the tremendous blessing of growing up at the First Presbyterian Church in Salinas. And it was at this small church, where as a young five or six-year-old, I still remember sitting in one of those little wooden chairs during Sunday school and the Sunday school teacher explaining that there is a simple exchange we could make. If we simply ask Jesus to come live in our hearts you could have a best friend forever. And for a little child, the idea of a best friend forever, I mean, it just doesn’t get better. I could exchange something small, my heart, for the unconditional love of the Creator, forgiveness from all sin, redemption, restoration, passion, purpose and a best friend forever. Yes! I’d say that it was also a little lesson in the economics of God: that He is always our best investment. Anything small we give Him, He is faithful to multiply and return. I think about offering five loaves and two fishes, He feeds the 5,000. We plant a mustard seed, He grows it into the largest of garden plants. We give Him our investment portfolio, imagine really the ways that He can multiply that gift for today in eternity. I’ll note that it was also at the First Presbyterian Church where I was enthralled by 80’s worship music, enjoyed the sermons of our pastor, Dr. Ladra…

Henry Kaestner: Who’s your favorite band? 80s worship music. For those of us who remember things like, I don’t know, Jars of Clay, etc.. Amy Grant, who’s your favorite?

Mary Naber: Oh, I really love Jars of Clay as well. Caedmon’s Call, if anyone remembers. I got to host and produce their first concert at Sanders Theater in Harvard. 

Henry Kaestner: Oh wow! 

Mary Naber: Sold out a thousand-seat theater. So that was a fun little investment in college of our Campus Crusade group.

Henry Kaestner: A thousand Harvard students showing up to Caedmon’s Call concert?

Mary Naber: Well, we actually marketed the concert throughout Boston colleges. 

Henry Kaestner: Still, that’s great. Yeah.

Luke Roush: That’s a big win. A big win in Boston.

Mary Naber: Yeah, it’s exciting, it’s great music… But that was the 90’s. But yeah, I was 16, and I set up an appointment to meet with my pastor. I explained to him that I loved every aspect of business, but I love Jesus too. So maybe I should consider going into the ministry. This is 1992, and he said, “Mary, Christians are needed in the business world too.” And it was an absolute paradigm shift for me.

So, when I was about 18 in the fall of 1994, I flew across the country to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to attend Harvard as an undergrad. At the time, I still saw the two fields, my interest in business and love for Jesus, in two separate compartments. I wanted to pursue a double major in econ and religion, and God ended up using one of the most secular universities in the country to challenge me to integrate both fields. Now I set the case at Harvard: at the time, in order to graduate with a double major, a senior was required to write one thesis that combines both fields and would be accepted by both departments as academically rigorous. Well, the Harvard Econ Department also viewed econ and religion in two different spheres. They refused to approve my double major with Religion. They told me the two fields had nothing to do with one another, that the double major had never been done before and that it would be impossible to combine the two. Of course, the econ administrator didn’t know of Jesus’ promise in Matthew 19, Mark 10 and Luke 18, that with God, all things are possible.

And so I accepted the challenge, of course, in the hope and faith that I would find a senior research thesis that worked and maxed out my courses in the Religion department. And I savored seeking out areas where the two fields overlapped. In Professor Diane Eck’s World Religion Course, I wrote my term paper on “Islamic Banking: A Topic of No Interest”. In my sophomore tutorial course, I wrote my research paper on the game theory methods used by three major religious traditions in the recruitment and retainment of attendees, in which I introduced one of the most famous game theory examples, that of Pascal’s Wager—the brilliant argument that it’s always best to bet that God exists. Now in this process, I discovered something quite surprising. I found that economics on its own—the bland macroeconomic problem sets were dry and uninteresting. But economics from a perspective of faith, viewed from an eternal and spiritual perspective, was profoundly more meaningful, joy-filled, fascinating and way more fun.

So at a secular university frequently hostile to the Christian faith, God led me to a passionate commitment to integrating my love for Jesus into economics, business and work and I simply wanted nothing less. So it was actually spring of my junior year where I first became exposed to the practice that was traditionally known as Socially Responsible Investing. For that spring semester, I took a small seminar course at Harvard Divinity School. It was titled “Money Media and Morality: Investing in the Civic Good”, taught at the time by, HDS, Harvard Divinity School’s Director of Corporate Ethics. Yes, HDS was way ahead of the curve in appointing such a director in the mid-90’s. It was in this course that I was first exposed to Socially Responsible Investing, the thoughtful consideration of ethics and values in investment decisions. And for anyone new here at the program, just to cover it, in that course I learned about portfolio screening – that’s the avoidance of sin stocks like tobacco, gambling from one’s portfolio of publicly traded securities. I learned about shareholder action to engage corporate boards for cultural change. And in that course, I learned about creative impact investments that generate both a financial return and social good. I was absolutely fascinated. In all my financial and capital markets courses at Harvard from ‘94 to ’98, I had never once been exposed to the practice of social investing. Again, these classes lacked purpose or meaning. With SRI, which we now call faith driven investing, finance suddenly became imbued with deep significance because I began to see how the allocation of capital impacts the lives of the neighbors we’re called to love. With faith driven investing, I began to see how finance could be an avenue to fulfilling God’s great commandments to love Him by honoring Him with the stewardship of His talents and loving others, by taking care not to profit at their expense.

Luke Roush: Maybe just to pause there for a comment. Actually, so that concept that you just articulated is not a new idea today, but back in, you know, late summer of 2001, that was kind of a novel idea. Maybe just speak a little bit about the relationship that you have with one professor who kind of helped you get focused on this and helped you to contextualize some of the research that you did. I’d love to just have you pause for a moment and actually just speak about that discovery process, where your research led you in terms of conclusions, and how all those things tied together.

Mary Naber: Okay. So, the professor—the Director of Corporate Ethics at Harvard Divinity School—her name is Dr. Marcy Murninghan. And she was just a great inspiration and was the one to suggest to me when I was looking for a senior research thesis that I go to a think tank I really admire and respect and see what research they needed done. I wouldn’t say that apart from the academic guidance, that we got deep into the spiritual imperative, that came maybe a couple of years later. But she provided just that tremendous piece of advice for any senior looking to do a thesis or graduate student doing a dissertation to go out and find what research needs to be done. It turns out I had been interning—I interned that summer before my senior year—at a company called KLD. KLD – acronym for Kinder, Lydenberg and Domini. They were the leading research firm providing the social research database—it’s called the Socrates database—to institutional investors, tracking which companies were in industries of concern. And they were absolutely the leaders. They were located in Harvard Square, just a bike ride from Lowell House where I lived. That was a fantastic benefit. And speaking of Merrill, this was now ‘96/‘97. Merrill had hired KLD to monitor one of their first ethical funds, and one of my roles was doing a deep dive in the due diligence of those underlying holdings to ensure that nothing had changed at those companies to bring any of those holdings into question. So, thinking through my thesis, my senior year…

Luke Roush: Sorry, who were the clients that you were representing as you were kind of asking these questions? Like, who cared? Like, who are you ultimately working for here?

Mary Naber: Oh, when I was working at KLD?

Luke Roush: Well like yeah, trying to assess whether there were problematic things or not in different companies. Who cared about that?

Mary Naber: Right. So well Merrill Lynch had established this fund and they had designed the parameters. And, if my recollection is correct, I am pretty confident they were the traditional socially responsible screens: tobacco, gambling, alcohol, military and nuclear power. And so this fund had those specific securities that did, in fact, meet those screens—they were not restricted due to those screens. And yet, because companies can always merge or buy new subsidiaries, it’s always good to stay on top of, you know, the research related to what’s going on in those individual companies. And that’s what I got to do. And that relationship was amazing. I had an opportunity in my senior year to speak with the Director of Research at KLD, Dr. Steve Lydenberg, and I said, “Well, what research do you need done?” And he said, “Well, we have a lot of Catholic clientele. We could use some research on what issues are of concern to them.” And so that was really the genesis of my senior research thesis, which was developing a methodology and profile of the Catholic investor. And of course, then doing the research to see how investing with Catholic principles would impact returns. 

And in the late nineties Catholics were a great case study. Their “sin stock” concerns bridged the traditional social screens of tobacco and gambling, with the emerging social conservative pro-life concerns of abortion and pornography. Plus, at the time, and still, I’d say Catholics had a very rich history of social faith driven investing, especially at the institutional level. 

Nuns, of course, were very active in shareholder engagement, and screening was utilized at Catholic hospitals, universities and other institutions.

In 1991, Pope John Paul II wrote in his encyclical letter: “The decision to invest in one place rather than another, in one productive sector rather than another, is always a moral and cultural choice.” 

Also in the early 1990s, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops had released the NCCB/USC Socially Responsible Investment Guidelines that served as a guide for Catholic investors, and my research, which I supplemented through extensive interviews with U.S. bishops and other Catholic finance leaders and a group of Jesuits in Harvard. I invited myself to their place for dinner. But 90 percent of my work…

Henry Kaestner: That’s awesome. I love that. So, I had a Jesuit high school. I love the Jesuits and I love the fact that a co-ed at Harvard decided “I’m going to go ahead and crash the Jesuits’ dinner party.”

Mary Naber: Yes, it’s one of my highlights, and I have many.

Henry Kaestner: How do they tell you so you go ahead, you’ve got a—you’ve got a head of steam about how you’re thinking about all this. The Pope is coming out with an encyclical, and a bunch of guys are sitting around just trying to meditate and pray, and then you challenge them with this. How did they respond?

Mary Naber: I found them to be very receptive, very kind. I really enjoyed so deeply those connections I was able to make in the context of interviews. I got to interview some incredible Bishops who had written some incredible encyclical letters, one called “Economic Justice For All”. And what I found actually and discovered in the context of that research— was that these guidelines that were written in the early 90s, didn’t include a screen for adult entertainment or pornography. It was, again, something corporations/publicly traded companies were getting more and more involved in. And I made a recommendation in my thesis, which I sent along to the framers of those Guidelines, that they needed to update their Guidelines. And a couple of years later, in fact, the NCCB/USCC Socially Responsible Investment Guidelines now includes adult entertainment/pornography as a screen for avoidance investing. So but again, it’s…

Henry Kaestner: It’s important work.

Mary Naber: Just my time with the Jesuits, all of those wonderful faithful Catholics that I got to interview, I’m just so thankful. I’ll throw in one other quick story about a Catholic who had great input, and that was my senior thesis advisor. So it was suggested to me when I was looking for a thesis advisor that I go over to Harvard Business School. There was an associate professor who was also known to be a practicing Catholic. His name was Professor Peter Tufano. And I was just so happy that he would be willing to take me on. One of the greatest honors at the end of my research, at the end of my senior year, he said, “You know, Mary, I think I learned more from this research project than you.” Of course, I’m sure he was just humoring me, but it was really a great honor. He went on to become Dean of HBS and Dean of Saïd Business School at Oxford and is now even today researching ESG adoption in corporate environments. So it’s fun to have just had the blessing of those relationships in some of the early days, and I am thankful to God for that.

Henry Kaestner: What was your main discovery?

Mary Naber: Oh, sure! It was incredible. This is just some of the best news. Investing with ethical, religious, Christian, Catholic principles will not result in an adverse impact on financial performance. 

Henry Kaestner: That’s pretty important.

Mary Naber: I mean, it was just super exciting. I basically, after developing that methodology, built portfolios based on different levels of stringency from the Catholic principles, and none of those portfolios showed a statistically significant difference. That is, that the difference could not be explained otherwise by chance. The same results came about based on a multivariable regression analysis. And you know, what was very interesting about the thesis itself is that I had to, of course, for those who do senior theses, I had to do a multi-page literature review. It’s required that the student go look at all the research that’s ever been done so as not to replicate previous research. So, super blessed, I’m at KLD, the Director of Research had those old places where we used to keep files, file cabinets, and just pages and pages and pages of papers and papers and papers. And I supplemented that with research at HBS and really found conclusively, as I said before, that 95 percent of the empirical studies conclusively demonstrate even back then in the late nineties and still today, no adverse impact on financial performance. So that was the empirical research that my research validated. And I mean, what was neat is that my research was published in the Journal of Investing in Winter of 2001. It was the first published academic paper to integrate investing and faith. And it was the first to look at how the exclusion of social conservative concerns of abortion and pornography would impact returns. All the other papers had previously only looked at those traditional social concerns. So we knew and could discover, empirically, no cost. Historically, we had over a decade of SRI funds and indices like the DSI, Domini Social Index, demonstrating not a statistically significant difference in performance. I have an argument that theoretically even—the theory—economic theory supports the idea that we will not lose unnecessarily in our financial return. So I had another professor who was heading up kind of our little senior thesis tutorial class. He refused to sign off on my thesis. He refused to sign off on the topic. He would not approve it. And the reason, he said, “Is we don’—this isn’t a question. Ethical investing portfolio screening will not adversely impact your returns, and we know that.” He was relying on the efficient market hypothesis, which basically says that all known information, including SRI or ESG traits of a company are already priced in the stock. Hence, you know, no excess return or loss. Basically, he just said, “No, we know this isn’t a question. It won’t impact your returns.” The only way I got him to sign off on my thesis topic was by demonstrating to him back in the late 90’s, Wall Street Journal articles basically raising the question and asserting that SRI would adversely impact performance. That was the going belief back then, that was the belief that even some Christian investors had back then. But really, what my research showed is, you know, the other empirical research, the historical evidence, and the theoretical argument. Okay, one more—logic! With thousands of publicly traded companies to choose from… We can afford to be a little exclusive. 

So to me, if I may just jump, the exciting news related to the fact that there is no cost when it comes to portfolio screening—faith driven investing—in your public securities. And again, let’s not go overboard—like if you’re saying, “I’m only going to invest in this little segment of the market” yeah, maybe there will be an impact. We’re just speaking broadly. We can afford to avoid companies profiting from abortion, pornography, tobacco, gambling, casinos. There are enough companies to select from and be fully diversified. So the reason this is so exciting to me is we forget this… 

Sorry, one other point. We don’t really think of this anymore. I feel like it’s kind of taken for granted, and this is a good thing. Just this idea that it won’t impact your returns—or maybe some people out there who still think so… But the research really shows conclusively, I think the general public understanding is… No cost. 

So you think about generous giving, right? The offer, the offer is you’re giving up your worldly material wealth for future gain, for eternal reward. 

You know that could be crowns, right, we don’t even know what those true riches look like. I think when we gift to charity, we may, in fact—that eternal reward will probably be people who are saved, who have eternal life because of our giving. So the gift that God has before us, it’s a tradeoff, it’s a lovely tradeoff. We give up, you know, cash in our account. We give, you know, if you’re wisely using a National Christian Foundation donor advised fund, you can actually wisely give shares of your company, shares of your stock. The bottom line is when we give, we’re giving worldly wealth. It goes to eternal kingdom purposes. So here is the proposition and faith driven investing, and it’s mind blowing to me. 

Henry Kaestner: Yes.

Mary Naber: That is, number one, at no financial cost, at no cost to your worldly wealth, you gain today. You get a free gain today. I put this in the Journal of Investing article back in 2001. It’s my very last paragraph. I don’t know how many people here know the phrase, “Pareto efficiency”.

Henry Kaestner: I don’t. I don’t and I bet many of our audience doesn’t.

Luke Roush: I do. And I’m really proud, it’s maybe the only phrase that I remember and I’m really glad to be able to say that I know something that Henry doesn’t, which doesn’t happen very often.

Henry Kaestner: Oh, it happens a lot. It happens a lot. What is the phrase? So, somebody is going to have to explain, if this following paragraph is predicated on you knowing the Pareto principle, if that’s indeed how you pronounce it. And maybe we’ll put Luke on the spot. What is it? What’s the Pareto principle?

Luke Roush: Why would I describe it, not when we have an expert on the thing and…

 Henry Kaestner: Haha, well played. 

Luke Roush: that would be…that would be…

Henry Kaestner: Yeah, that’s right. Who are we interviewing here? Mary, tell us before you tell about the last paragraph. What is the Pareto principle?

Mary Naber: Sure, it means an economic theory, an alteration in the allocation of resources is said to be Pareto efficient when it leaves at least one person better off and nobody worse off. 

Henry Kaestner: Oh, I like that. 

Mary Naber: So, in the very last paragraph of my Journal of Investing article, um, “Individuals and institutions can make a Pareto efficient move by investing with Catholic or other religious and ethical principles from the comparable return and the added utility and social benefit of a clean conscience.” So here’s the value proposition of faith driven investing: it’s that at no cost you, Henry or Luke, or anyone listening… At no cost, material or financial. When you choose to integrate your faith in your investments, you gain something amazing in your life today. And let’s go through the list: the joy and happiness and blessing that comes from seeking to honor God in all that we do; the benefits of a clean conscience; sleeping well at night; conversation at a cocktail party. How about a chance to hang out with these very fun gentlemen at FDI conferences, and get to know the rest of the FDI community? Like… 

Henry Kaestner: What a deal!

Mary Naber: I mean, and that’s what we would call a Pareto efficient move.

Henry Kaestner: I love it. So, OK, I want to I want to throw that on its head just slightly. And also the ability to get to know more Jesuit priests and to break bread with them. So this is fascinating. 

So a lot of times we talk about standing on the shoulders of people who’ve gone before us, and you will talk about Count Sivendorph and the Moravians, we’ll talk about the Guinness family. There are a bunch of different great examples, but your academic research on this is a big deal. It’s a big deal. It was early on. I don’t think that people I know know there’s an article in Christianity Today, there’s the Journal of Investing, and I don’t think that enough people really appreciate, on one hand, the simplicity of what you just mentioned in that last paragraph, but also the complexity of a lot of rigorous academic research that went behind finding this simple conclusion. And it makes it that much more credible. 

But one of the things that undergirds this is this kind of portfolio diversification theory that if you’ve got twenty thousand different issues to be able to pull from, if you just exclude eight, is that really going to impact your returns or if you’re going to exclude eight hundred, even—is that going to really impact your returns? Flip that on its head a little bit. And one of the premises that we have, and taking your work and trying to build on it a bit, is that there are some amount of companies that instead of just matching the market return, there’s some amount of companies that, because they employ biblical values, will succeed, not at the expense of them, but because of them that they may even do better. And I think it would be hard for us on this podcast to presume that the Holy Spirit advantage is worth one hundred twenty five basis points or two hundred and fifty or something like that. But if we go ahead and we actually come up with a more of a narrow lens and say through some of our research, we found two hundred—two hundred and twenty five or so—Christian led, faith driven CEOs of publicly traded companies. And that includes big companies like Cisco with Pat Gelsinger and Intel with Chuck Robbins and in smaller companies as well. Do you know of any researcher? What are your thoughts there? You’re deeply thoughtful about what we don’t have to give anything up, so therefore it’d be a great deal. But what if we take that logic the next step and say, “Well, if we have a faith driven founder who, when Fortune or Forbes interviews them, might be able to point to their Christian faith as being material to how they lead? Do you expect that you’ll find a fall-off in return? How do you even process that?

Mary Naber: Oh, absolutely. So, you know what’s so interesting that was discovered in my research and Dr. Lloyd Kurtz, he has the website, sristudies.org, hundreds and hundreds of papers and empirical papers. And so on the number one point: as long as you’re diversified, your returns shouldn’t sacrifice in financial performance. I talked about the theoretical argument. Well, the practical realities is that there can be—if you are focused in the market, you can find features. In my research, it was investing in employee relations and investing in community development—that actually resulted in an abnormal excess return. Okay. And Lloyd Kurtz said he found this as well. He was working with some investment firms to exploit this, and I think the general idea is it may now be completely exploited through ESG. But absolutely, I completely concur that there’s no reason why if you’re not… I mean, if we just look at how God has blessed so many of those in the FDI community doing this work, it’s abnormal outperformance… But I’m always careful, right, past performance is no indication of future success. And you know, a number two, you want to avoid kind of the prosperity gospel stuff. 

But at the end of the day, I do believe, and I have seen, even in my own client portfolios, that that faithfulness…? God is amazing and He does things that just kind of defy anything we could be talking about in economic theory. And so I just, I have seen that, I give God the glory for it. So I absolutely agree that excess abnormal return and opportunities to exploit those still exist in parts of the market, and also God’s provision. So, yeah.

Henry Kaestner: So I like that. You know that past performance is no indication of—say it again. Past performance is no indication of future performance, right? Or past results…. And yet scripture does tell us some things about financial return, laying up treasures in heaven. 

Mary Naber: Oh, yes.

Henry Kaestner: We know that when you talked about it before, about the Parable of the Mustard Seed. There’s some great biblical examples of being faithful and how that actually does deliver great investment returns. 

And maybe, as we believe, we believe that you may find some alpha in financial markets in a way that the secular world can look at it. But we know undisputedly that when we are able to think differently, we may even get a return this 30, 60 or 100 times fold if we’re not primarily focused on the worries of the world and the deceitfulness of riches, right?

Mary Naber: Absolutely, yes. And that was the other benefit to the whole Pareto efficient proposal here that at no cost, and perhaps as you’ve suggested, perhaps abnormal outperformance and excess alpha, giving that exchange of worldly wealth, we get benefit today. Wait, hang on! Benefit tomorrow in God’s Kingdom. In Luke 16:11, If you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches? And so, it’s so exciting—faith driven investing—assists us in being trustworthy in handling worldly wealth so that by His grace, our God may someday trust us with true riches. Now what is that great responsibility? Crowns? Treasures in heaven? He promises true riches and treasures in heaven and just to think, I mean, we start with that 10 percent and we’re encouraged to go 20-40-60% giving. Why would we leave resources that God has entrusted to us off the table when we can be investing those into eternal Kingdom purposes, to be honoring Him with all that He’s entrusted to us? And I mean, in addition to loving Him, loving our neighbor by avoiding investment in companies that hurt or harm or again prey on their addictions and weaknesses. Wait, it’s also an act of evangelism. Because if we as Christians invest no differently than the world, how then is Jesus so enticing? And so even in our day to day, I believe that we are taking action that may perk the interest. I mean, certainly, I have quite a number of clients who aren’t followers of Jesus. But you know, like you were saying earlier—those kinds of conversations, those type of relationships that this type of work allows, there are opportunities to share Jesus’ love, and share the story of His means of salvation. So to me again, this whole message of faith driven investing, that you’re getting all these extra benefits at no cost is, I think, one of those stories that not a lot of people are thinking about, or even as you suggest and I concur, the possibility of that excess alpha. And that, by the way, I will celebrate our Lord Jesus who has brought that about. I think we see that when we look at the performance of the different managers involved in this movement.

Luke Roush: One of the things we always like to ask, folks, is what God has been teaching them lately and it doesn’t need to be like this morning or last night, but more just how has God been speaking to you lately, Mary, in terms of your work or, you know, things in your community all to just get what’s on your heart.

Mary Naber: Just another thought I had when I was thinking through this, this particular podcast—you’re talking about that 10-20 percent to give. Let’s not leave 40 or 50 that we invest or save or spend on the table. And I also believe if we can through when we pay our taxes, do we say a prayer that God would use those resources and do something to redeem them? Right. So we can pray over all aspects and consider God in all aspects of everything He has entrusted us.

But another kind of thought I’ve been reflecting on is this idea that I think—consistently through Scripture and during the FDI talk, I had this opportunity to kind of share John Wesley’s sermon, “The Use of Money: Gain All You Can”, and that would always be quoted to me “gain all you can” as though as long as you’re gaining all you can, it doesn’t matter that we care—so far as how the money is made—as long as you get all you can, right? No, no, no, no, absolutely. We absolutely have to think about the source of our wealth. And John Wesley goes on to say that, and Scripture goes on to say that. And I think my point here is that, I think scripture consistently suggests that if we have not taken consideration as to the source of our wealth, that even our generous giving may be in vain. 

Okay, that 10, 20 percent, you know, don’t be the believer who drops that off at church and then leave, because one of the Scriptures that moved me so deeply is that of Isaiah, in Isaiah 1, where he is prophesizing “Stop bringing meaningless offerings, your incense is an abomination; though you make many prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are covered in blood.”

Why would it make sense to us that God would ever want us to put before Him on the throne gifts made through ill-gotten gains? I wouldn’t be that interested either. And so why would we take the risk that that which we’re giving may be considered meaningless if we haven’t considered the source of our wealth?

Henry Kaestner: That’s a really important concept. That’s a really important concept because, you know, the traditional framework for a Christian, for many Christians, including myself to some extent, has been “I want to make as much money as I possibly can over here with my left hand, and then to the extent I understand the biblical message of generosity, I want to give away as much as I can over here. And what we’ve been talking about at faith driven investing of course, is that the very process of making the investments over here might accomplish the same ministry and missions goals we have over here. And you’re saying yes, but also that original framework we had may not have been as effective as even we thought at the time, which is “make as much money as we can, regardless of how we get those results, and therefore that giving, that generosity and that’s what really matters”. And you’re suggesting no, no, no, no. In the event that we get investment returns and investing in things that were Corbyn or just, you know, just difficult and messy,… I’m not a theologian, so I should know the Corbyn reference better. But if they’re invested through ill-gotten gain or things that were not holy in and of themselves, then that giving actually doesn’t glorify God in the way that maybe we had thought.

Mary Naber: Yes, you said it perfectly. Thank you. I completely concur. 

Henry Kaestner: You’re welcome. So the passage is from Isaiah?

Mary Naber: Isaiah 1:15, yes…

Henry Kaestner: Mary, this has been awesome.

Mary Naber: Oh, thank you. I’ve had so much fun. Thank you this opportunity.

Henry Kaestner: It’s infrequent that we find, you know, I think that we are all, including these podcast hosts, are starting to really think about it much more deeply and that God has done a work in all of our hearts. It’s clear that you’ve been thinking about this for a very long time, and I’m grateful for your work and I’m grateful that our listeners get a chance to hear how you put together these just awesome arguments that starts off with some of the basic things from game theory and Pascal’s Wager and just extend it through to what you do as a job in the financial markets and you bless us and thank you.

Luke Roush: And we got into Pareto efficiency, which is a first on the Faith Driven Investor podcast. A big win.

Henry Kaestner: Thank you for bailing Luke out.

Luke Roush: Hey, one last thing to wrap. So talk to us. Just one thing that God’s told you recently about your walk.

Mary Naber: So I would say I am a single working mom of three, and I have those days where I don’t get to spend time in the morning with the Lord. So I obviously think in a stewardship financial mindset, we always think first fruits in terms of our giving, and I just feel like He’s really imparting on me the importance of the first fruits of my time in my day. And I was deep i- the vision that He struck me with was not building the house on sand or rock, but me trying to walk on shifting sand. On those days, I haven’t built my day, my time, my meditation and prayer on Him that I’m literally like living in a little state of semi-anxiety. Not really. I’m not super anxious, but I mean, just off-kilter and on shifting sand. And yet those days when I get to spend that time with the Lord and get up a little early and it’s always suggested you grab your coffee—haha, just to wake up. To enjoy those times and start that day on the rock is like a night and day different experience, and I thank God for that. I thank God for how He shows up when we, not always, but you know, He will be there saying we might not always feel it, but He is there and that is something He continues to teach me.

Luke Roush: Grateful for that. Mary, appreciate you. Appreciate your groundbreaking research many, many years ago in an arena that has become, I think, more in vogue and more interesting and larger and yet you’re one of the first movers. So we’re grateful for your work in that regard and grateful for your friendship.

Henry Kaestner: Indeed.

Mary Naber: Oh, thank you. So all take care.