Episode 134 - Investing in Light of the Gospel with Finny Kuruvilla
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Jesus preached that his gospel message was good news to the poor. Yet investing seems to be mostly good news for the rich. In this talk from the 2022 Faith Driven Investor Conference, Dr. Kuruvilla proposes that investing, when done strategically, can partly fulfill the call to serve the global poor, using real-life case studies to highlight the redemptive potential of money that is deployed collaboratively and biblically.
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Episode Transcript
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Finny Kuruvilla: How do we connect the huge problem of global poverty with the practice of investing? A lot of people cynically believe that investing is simply about helping the rich build bigger barns. But Faith Driven Investor have a higher calling. We believe that we should responsibly and biblically manage our money by, yes, wisely allocating our resources. But by doing that in a way where we're promoting human flourishing, including perhaps especially championing the interests of the poor, the widow and the orphan. I'm going to give you four points today about how to practically connect our our world to the problem of global poverty.
Finny Kuruvilla: Number one, we need to respond to poverty with a Christian worldview. Jesus's first sermon that he gave in Nazareth, he opened with this line, The spirit of the Lord is upon me because He is anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and to set at liberty those who are oppressed. Now, when we hear Jesus talking about the Gospel being good news for the poor, some people react and think, Wait a minute, what about dependency and handouts? And how does all this work? The Bible is a very wise document. And to illustrate this in first Timothy five, it talks about how younger widows, those who are less than 60 years old, aren't supposed to be financially supported by the church. And Paul tells us why. He says that those very women would become idle and given over to gossip. And so this is a great example of where we are told not to simply commit mindless giving, but to think holistically about the person's welfare. This should give us some kind of idea that, in fact, the Bible is more sophisticated and how it thinks about poverty. This kind of sophistication is badly needed in the world today, where we have changing and tragic dynamics about global poverty. Consider this today obesity has far overtaken starvation as a cause of death in the world. Addiction of all sorts food, alcohol, drugs, sex, technology, those kinds of addictions are more bound up with poverty than ever before. And you compound that with violence in the community in many parts of Latin America. Homicide is on the rise, particularly ending the lives tragically of many young men. All of this leads to vastly different outcomes. For example, men in Iceland live on average to 80 years old. But in Haiti, men live to 33. What a tragedy. How do we deal with this? Your beliefs about poverty are going to determine your approach. So if you believe the cause of poverty is a lack of material resources, well, then your approach is going to be to give money. If you believe the cause of poverty is a lack of knowledge, then you're going to try to educate the poor. If you believe the cause of poverty is oppression by powerful people, then you will try to work for social justice. Instead, I'm going to call us to move past exclusively secular models of poverty, of poverty. Brian Myers has said it so well. He says the secular approaches share a common perspective, which is the modern worldview. All are materialistic, often technocratic, and reflect a firm belief in human reason, technology and money as the keys to solving the problem of poverty. Their biggest common gap lies in the absence of religion and things spiritual, in their explanation of why people are poor and what can be done to help them. So how do we think about this from a Christian perspective? Myers and others have made the case that poverty is primarily at its root cause about disordered and sin damaged relationships. We all live in a web of relationships. We're relating to our communities. We're relating to the environment. We're relating to God. We're relating to ourselves. And when those relationships become damaged by sin, it makes us vulnerable to poverty. Think, for example, about the person who wants to start a business but has to go to the local loan shark who might charge two, 300, 400% interest on that loan. Think about someone who is wanting to appease a God and has to give away precious resources in the form of an animal to sacrifice. Or communities where theft and lying are commonplace. Or someone who doesn't believe that they have dominion over creation and the creative capacities to start new, productive and flourishing businesses. All of these kinds of problems abound in the world of poverty. So what do we do? Healing these kinds of sin, damage, relationships and defective worldviews. This is very challenging work. This is not glamorous. It's long and it's slow. But this is where the role of the church is essential to heal relationships and worldviews requires people not just writing check. This calls forth the necessity of visitation. I am so struck by the verse, a very famous verse, James 1:27 that says religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father is this to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, not to write a check to orphans and widows in their affliction, but to visit orphans and widows and their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.
Finny Kuruvilla: Number two live simply give generously and intelligently. Now we all know this, but we still don't do very well at it. When John the Baptist begins his ministry, he says that we're to bear fruits in keeping with repentance. And he says whoever has two tunics is to share with him who has none. We need to go to our closets and ask how many tunics do we have? And to repent of of hoarding and not putting into practice the basics of what love your neighbor is. Jesus tells us in Luke 12 to sell our possessions and give to the needy and to thus procure for ourselves money bags that don't grow old that that will be enduring. I love the quote from Mahatma Gandhi who says live simply that others may simply live. He also says, the world has enough for everyone's need, but not for everyone's greed.
Finny Kuruvilla: Number three, we should avoid investments that snare the poor into addiction and slavery. I mentioned earlier that addiction is so bound up with poverty, and I think most of us know this at a head level, but I want us to know it at a heart level. The power of business to snare and to propagate poverty, whether it be through alcohol addiction, through gambling, through through cigarets, through pornography. And the whole realm of sex trafficking. Through a lot of the idleness and addictions that have happened with with our phones and social media, etc.. It is it is absolutely extraordinary how our dollars expressed in business can affect the world for good or for bad. We have described in the past an example that is particularly poignant for me. Many of the cigaret companies have figured out, well, in the united states you can't sell to minors. There's pretty strict laws against that. But abroad there's there's much less restriction and much less control over that. In Indonesia, as an example, the average age to begin smoking has fallen from 19 to 7 years old. And we did some research where the largest beneficiaries, the largest shareholders of these very companies are college 5 to 9 savings plans, meaning American mothers and fathers who are saving for their children are in fact doing that by benefiting from putting into addiction minors on the other side of the globe. How tragic that is. We should obviously avoid these kinds of behaviors as faith driven investors, as Christians who want to be faithful.
Finny Kuruvilla: Number four, we should embrace investments that lift the vulnerable out of poverty. I want us to think for a moment about the biblical principle of gleaning. What is gleaning? Gleaning is where if you're a farmer and you have a field, you're supposed to leave the edges of your field unharvested so that the poor can come and glean on their own and thus provide food for their households. This is a very important principle. I want us to think about gleaning in the context of who the stakeholders are of a business today. We have talked about at Eventide how there are six stakeholders, customers, employees, the supply chain, host communities, the environment, and then broader society embedded within society and in host communities are the poor, whether they're locally or globally present. What does it mean for a business and what does it mean for us as investors to follow this principle of gleaning today in our world? We at Eventide have made the decision to pursue what we call the 1% initiative. It's just taking 1% of our capital, a modest percentage of our capital, and say we're going to devote this to this problem of alleviating global poverty. How do we do this? We do this by primarily by harnessing the positive power of business, by taking that 1% of the capital and giving it to businesses that are in the developing world that are employing the global poor to pull them out of poverty with dignity. Last year, we announced a partnership with World Vision and its affiliate, the Vision Fund, which we think is one of the best, if not the best example of a company that's out there in the developing world employing the global poor. And here, this $37 million is capital that we get back. It's a modest return on our investment. But we, again, think this is so important to follow this biblical principle of gleaning. So I want to leave you with a challenge here. Will you commit 1% of your investment capital for gleaning by the global poor?
Finny Kuruvilla: In conclusion, I've given you four ways that we can address this problem of global poverty. Number one, respond to poverty with a Christian worldview. Number two, live simply, give generously and intelligently. Number three, avoid investments that sneer the poor into addiction and slavery. And number four, embrace investments that lift the vulnerable out of poverty. Let's honor our Lord. Let's honor Jesus by making the gospel. Good news again for the poor.