Episode 180 - Eternal Treasures - Investing In What Lasts with Richard Garnett
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In this episode of the Faith Driven Investor Podcast, join Justin Forman as he honors the life and legacy of Richard Garnett, a faith-driven entrepreneur and actor who recently passed away after a courageous decade-long battle with cancer.
This poignant episode features a powerful teaching from Richard himself, focusing on investing in what truly matters. As we reflect on Richard's recent passing, his message takes on new depth and urgency. Tune in for an inspiring exploration of intentional living, generosity, and the art of cherishing each moment.
All opinions expressed on this podcast, including the team and guests, are solely their opinions. Host 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.
Episode Transcript
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.
Justin Forman Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur and Faith Driven Investor podcast. It is a gift to be with you guys today. There are some days more than others that we just look around and appreciate and have perspective of making the most out of every moment and not taking for granted anything that we have in front of us. And this is one of those days. About a week ago, a friend forwarded a story of Richard Garnett, and it was a talk that he had given some time ago. But we got a chance to watch it and listen to how is it a professional actor of 15 years and TV and film and theater? He went on to be a feature of an entrepreneur and a faith driven investor and thinking intentionally about how to be generous with his time, how to be generous with the things that he was stewarding. And man, there are times when you can hear theory, you can hear idea. And then there's times when you hear people's story. And when you hear people's story in light of the moment and what they're battling and battling health and sickness and the journey that Richard was on, that somehow those pictures become that much more real and that much more vivid. And last week, Richard went home to be with Jesus after battling cancer for the past ten years. And there are a few messages that I think I've heard in the last year or the last ten years that are as powerful as this. So we wanted to share this with you. We're grateful for our friends, McClellan Foundation and others that captured this and wanted to share this with the movement so that it might be an inspiration and encouragement and a challenge to us all. Let's listen.
Richard Garnett I'm Richard, and I'm dying. And I thought I'd tell you my story. I work in financial services, and one of my favorite clients, their headquarters is in Brussels. And if you go into the men's toilets in their offices in Brussels, in front of each men's urinal is a sheet of A4. It's laminated for obvious reasons, and it has on it what's called their lessons from the Loo. It's basically all the deals that went south where they've lost 20, 30, 40, 50 million and the lessons that they've learned. So what I'd love to share with you is my lessons from the loo of life when it comes to money. I became a Christian when I was 16. For the first half of my life, first 20 years, God called me to be a professional actor. That didn't involve making a lot of money. You'll be surprised to know. I was taught to give the first 10% to the church and the other 90%. You can do with what you want. Actually, we couldn't afford orange juice. We couldn't afford biscuits. Didn't amount to much. And then in the late 90s, I was in Japan doing some Shakespeare. I've been away from home for five months and our third daughter was born. And I cried out to God for a way to earn a living that didn't involve living out of a suitcase.
And he very graciously answered my prayer. I was a long story cut short by the chairman of one of the largest companies in the world that I never heard of to kind of help him do his speeches and do his communication. And that started the journey of what we and my team do for the last 25 years. Basically, we help people persuade other people to give them hundreds of millions of pounds. And the challenge of that is I will find myself earning in half a day or a day what I had been earning in a week, two weeks, a month as an actor. What did I do with that? Well, 10% went to the local church. The rest of it, I'd been told, was mine to do with what I wanted. So what did I do? I looked around my church. I looked around my town where I live. I without even thinking about it, I inflated my lifestyle. What had been holidays in the UK became holidays abroad. What was wool became cashmere. The kids went to private school. We moved out every five years because we could open up and up the property ladder. And after a while, I felt a deep disquiet that that was the right thing to do.
And. You know, Jesus tells the story about the farmer who has excess at the end of the year and builds barns. Can you remember the word that Jesus uses to describe that farmer The fool? I was that fool. I came to the conclusion that I was a living embodiment of foolishness. Now, Jesus had some advice, actually, kind of at the back end of that story, he says, Be rich towards God. But what did that actually look like? So I started to do some research. And what I found staggered me. If you take evangelical Christians in the world, 20% of them reside in the West. Let's call it North America, Europe, the UK, and 80% reside in the rest of the world. So you've got the wealthy church and the poor church, the wealthy church, evangelical Christians in the in the West. Guess every year what proportion of our income we give away. 2.5%. I came to the somewhat shocking conclusion that I was one of the greediest generations of evangelical Christians ever to inhabit planet Earth. We give out 2.5% to our local churches. On the whole, they spend roughly statistically 50% on buildings, 25% on the staff team, 10% on missions. Some of that goes abroad. Net what does that mean? That means for every hundred pounds that God gives to evangelical Christians in the West, 25 PE goes outside the West. One quarter of 1%. And this didn't strike me as fair. So what was my responsibility to that? I didn't consider myself wealthy. I basically drove a Ford Mondeo estate. I had clients who earned 100 million a year. They were wealthy. I wasn't. And I did the research.
Guess how much you have to earn to be in the top 1% of the wealthiest people on the planet. 30,000 pounds a year. I was earning more than 30,000 pounds a year. I was at the top of God's financial pyramid. If God wanted to fund His work around the world, I'd be the first person that he came to. So what did I do? I opened a stewardship account. We upped our giving percentage. And then the question was, Well, who do we give to? So at the time, my local church was raising 4 million for a building refurbishment program. And I can remember saying to my vicar, I'm not sure if God had 4 million spare. He'd invested in that. Now, leaving aside the extraordinary hypocrisy of me saying that having moved from a perfectly fine four bedroom house to the five bedroom house, that was my do wrapper. Leaving aside that hypocrisy, I still thought that was the right thing to say. So we did support our local church, but also we determined that most of it would go overseas because that's where the huge opportunity for the gospel is and that's where the massive needs are. So where? So my clients are very smart investors and one of their principles are invest in great people doing great things. So that's what I prayed for. Great people doing great things. There was a girl in our church. She'd just come back from a gap year. She was 18 years old. She went to Romania and in her gap year she found five and seven year olds sleeping off the streets. So she started an orphanage in her gap year. She wanted money. There was money in our pot and our stewardship pot. We supported her. Then my business partner took me to Uganda to an orphanage. I didn't want to go to Africa, frankly. The idea horrified me. But he dragged me there. He bribed me to go there. And what I found astonished me. I found couples had moved into the African bush at the height of the Aids crisis. Christian couples and they built a house and the house had three rooms. In the first room they put seven beds for the seven orphaned girls they adopted. In the second room, they put another seven beds for the seven orphaned boys they adopted. In the third room is where they lived. And I suddenly had this epiphany. I'm not part of some irrelevant subculture of Christians in the UK. Believe in weird stuff. I'm part of a global network of inspirational, extraordinary people doing amazing things, and they could do with my help. And I had enough money in the pot to help them. I can remember taking my daughter there and we went on holiday to one of Uganda's national parks. It's beautiful. And when I was on holiday, I suddenly thought, I wonder if these kids have been on holiday in their own country. And I said to Sam, how much would it cost to actually take these 80 kids in their parents community of 150 people on holiday, Probably the only holiday of their life to one of their own national parks. And he gave me the number. Do you know what the number was? It was less than we would spend on a bog standard two week holiday in Europe for a family. There was money in the pot. Jesus said something really interesting about money. He says where your treasure is, then will your heart be? When I invested in that holiday, it gave me such joy. Such joy, and it still does to this day. And the more I invested in this kingdom, the more joy I got. More than the joy of a new house, a foreign holiday, whatever it might be. And then somebody said, Why don't you meet a man called Eric in Paris? We'll meet at the bistro. Never a hard thing to do to have a meeting in a Parisian bistro. I went there and I said, Eric, what are you doing? He said, This was the beginning of the 2000s. I want to use the Internet to convert the French. Good luck with that. How are you doing that? This was the beginning of the Internet, by the way. So my corporate clients were using the Internet, but I hadn't met a Christian who was doing it. He said, I'm converting the gospel into like a seven minute YouTube video called The Father's Love Letter. And then strategically using Google AdWords to draw people to watch it. And when they watch it, they can click on a link if they want to become a Christian. I went, That's smart. So what are you finding in terms of conversion rates? He said for every 100 people who watch it, four people say they want to become a Christian. I went, That's extraordinary. And what's your vision? He said, Well, I want to translate it into the other major languages. There are 30 of them English, Spanish, Farsi, Japanese, Chinese, etc., etc. But how much would that cost? He gave me a number. There was money in my pocket for it. And I'll tell you, I came out of that meeting and I'll tell you how I felt. Imagine it's about 20, 30 years ago. You're in Harvard. Next door to you is a strange man called Mark Zuckerberg. And he wanders in one day and he said, I'm going to start this thing. I've got a weird name for it, Facebook, but I need some cash. And if you give me some cash, I'll give you shares in the business. If you knew then what you know now, what would you sell in order to get shares? Be the first investor in Facebook. I would sell everything and wander around in underpants for a year. I'd persuade my parents to sell their home to cash in their chips. That's what I felt like. My my mindspace moved from. What's the minimum percentage I can get away with before God? And what is the most I can get for a turtle treasure? Here's what I think God pays us. And this is chocolate money. Can you see this? It's what you consume at Christmas. All the money we have this side of happiness. Chocolate money. We can consume it all when we invest it globally in what he's doing locally, regionally, nationally. Internationally. It becomes eternal treasure. And suddenly I was thinking, why should I spend 20 grand on a car when I can buy a bill banger for five and invest 15 for eternity? Long story short, I'll take you to 2005. Our marriage collapsed. I was feeling awful. What was my first response to that? I'll buy myself a holiday home that will make me feel better. I like to say I like golf. I get somewhere there. And then a friend rang me up and said, Don't be stupid, Richard. You're self-medicating your pain. There are better things to do with the money and the work. There's a devotional I love called God Calling two Old Ladies by 100 years ago, Anonymous. When they prayed, Jesus spoke to them. And they write down. They wrote down what he said. And every January the 5th, I'd read this is what Jesus said to them about money. Don't be afraid of poverty. Let money flow freely. I will let it flow in. But you must let it flow out. I never send money to stagnate only to those who pass it on. Keep nothing for yourself. Hoard nothing. Only have what you need and use. This is my law of discipleship. I wanted to be brave. I wanted to be brave. I wanted to be like that. I wanted to live without a safety net. So I stopped paying into my pension fund and I set my lifestyle. And then I determined to give whatever the excess was away to invest it in the kingdom. I wanted to do that, but it was terrifying. Every January, I'd feel the enemy say to me, Richard, because I'm self-employed, at the beginning of the year, my diary is empty. Every genre, I'd feel the enemy say to me, you know, this is the year you get found out. You know, there's the year that nobody's going to ring you. And I felt Jesus saying to me, Will you give me until Christmas, Richard? If you're on a park bench at Christmas, we can have a conversation. For 15 years. I was filling that park bench and I've got 15 of these paper diaries in my bedroom to prove that you cannot give God that God meets your needs in every conceivable way. And that for me was really, really exciting to be part of that journey. And then I'll take you to 2014. Christmas Eve. I'm in a hospital in Watford and a young man who looks like he's about 16 is actually a doctor, comes and kneels down and looks up into my eyes. That's never a good sign, is it? And he says, You've got cancer. We think you got cancer. On January the 5th, I was with an oncologist and they confirmed it. My cancer was mesothelioma. It comes from asbestos. They reckon it comes from asbestos in old theaters, actually, and it's incurable. And they said you've got about a year, 18 months to live. At that point, my son, who was in the meeting, had his laptop over and he said, Dad, I found it. I said, What have you found? He said, I found him. He said, Tell him a joke. The oncologist was somewhat surprised. I said, okay, what's the joke? You said? How do you treat a patient with me so clearly? Omar? As best as you can anyway. Memorable moments. Since then, I've had chemotherapy. Two big operations, 60 rounds of immunotherapy, 60 rounds of radiotherapy. Couple of months ago, they said the cancer's move from the right lung to the left lung. It's stopped working. So we're going back to chemo. So I'm in the middle of chemo, so my brains are fog and I have to sit down and. Here's my thought. The closer I get to death, the more grateful I am. Because I'll tell you this. If somebody has got a servant, I've got the opposite. I've been awful at talking about my faith to other people. I've been dreadful at inviting people to Alpha or Christianity explored whatever it might be. But the fact that Jesus gave me an opportunity to invest some of the money that He's given me in the first place. I mean, don't you find it fairly hysterical that a rather stupid unemployed actor is is employed to advise people, to persuade other people to give them hundreds of millions of pounds? I find that ludicrous. But the chance to make a difference. We have a cancer club at church. It's not the most popular club, to be fair. I like it. We've lost a few. We've gained a few over the years. One of my friends, Sandra, is dying at the moment and she said the closer I get to death, everything drops away. Apart from two things. Love the love that God has for me, the love that I have for others and making a difference every day. Can I make a difference? She coaches from her bed. Six people. She's an extraordinary woman and I can resonate with that. The chance to make a difference is so important to me. A young man called Ed phoned me up a couple of years ago, said We found a people group in India that has no gospel presence at all, and we found 15 Indian evangelists who want to go full time to invest their time in reaching the gospel with them. I went, Ed, how much would that cost? He went, all in all, 15 full time evangelists, unreached people group. 12,000 pounds a year. 12,000 pounds a year to change the lives of an entire people group. That really excited me. It still does. Let me end with three things I'd love to say to you. Do you know if Western evangelicals gave not 2.5%, but 10%, do you know how much more money would flood into the kingdom every year? I'll tell you, 100 billion pounds. That's 100,000 million pounds. That's the same that Putin is pouring into the war in Ukraine. Imagine that as a power for good across the West, across the world. But I'm not asking you to be more generous of that reason. It's for purely selfish reasons. This side of heaven. I've known very few things that give more joy than being a part of what God is doing financially and in eternity. Actually, we get this treasure. What is this treasure? John Lennox, who many of you know is a mass professor at at Oxford, a lovely Christian man, and he's written a book on what to do when we invest our time and treasure and talent. And he uses the story that Jesus tells of the dodgy steward. He used money to buy friends. And he says, when we invest our time and our treasure in what God is doing, we. We make friends. We make friends. I have friends all over the world. By God's grace. And I'm so looking forward to getting to Harvard because we can sit down and I'm going to hear their stories. And the fact that I've been able to play some tiny, tiny, tiny, minuscule part in their stories thrills me now. And I know Will through me then I hope that's part of my treasure. One of my great heroes in life is a man called George Miller. For those of you who don't know, George Miller was a Victorian German gentleman who got called to move to Bristol, and God called to look after orphans. And in the course of his life, he looked after 10,000 orphans. And he's one of the founding fathers of orphan care in the UK. George Miller's life as to extraordinary elements to it. Number one, he never asked anybody for money. And looking after 10,000 orphans costs a lot of money. The only person he asked was God. Every day he asked God and God gave him. 210 million pounds at today's prices. Now, why could God trust him so much? I think the second thing that makes Muller extraordinary is of the 210 million pounds that God gave him, he gave away to other ministries all across the world. 70 million. One third he gave away. Do you know what Miller's legacy is? Because at some time he supported 200 missionaries in China. Well, his legacy isn't just what he's achieved in the UK. It's the growth of the Chinese church. Muller's legacy, 150 years later, is 120 million Christians in China who are there because partly of what he funded. So my question to you is, are you not just serving your local communities and your churches, but are you serving the global church? Because Western money can make a huge difference. Let's take the 4 million that we spent on our refurbishing our church. If you invested 1 million and you gave it to my friend Ed and the charity called 500 K in India. India, you know, has 500,000 villages with no Christian presence at all. 1 million. There would support 500 full time evangelists for three years and lead to the planting of between 1000 and 1500 churches. If you put 1 million to work in Africa, where so many families live on less than a dollar a day, and you gave it to a Christian charity called Five Talents, you'd actually support 10,000 women. The poorest of the poor. To be able to read and write and count and save and earn their way out of poverty. If you invested 1 million in Bible translation because we know without the Bible, you can't evangelize. And still 2 billion people on the planet with no translation of scripture in their heart language. If you invest in just 1 million, you be able to translate the Bible for a people group of 20 million. And make God's story accessible to them. And then if you were really strategic and you decided to use the Internet to access the 12 least rich countries in the world, you know what 1 million would achieve if you gave it to Jesus dot net, who are very smart at this stuff. You'd basically, in those 12 countries, enable the gospel to be seen 100 million times, which would lead to 200,000 people indicating that they wanted to come to Christ and to be followed up on line. Think of the difference that 4 million can make around the world. The last thing I want to say is this. Thank you. Thank you. And bless you in everything you have done for his kingdom and everything you are doing and in everything you will do. Bless you.
Justin Forman After listening to that message, there might not be a lot of words that need to be said. I can't think of many, but I hope that you're inspired. I hope that you're challenged. I hope that you're encouraged. I hope that if you're listening on this on the drive home, that it gives you just a whole booster shot of energy when you run into the things of your family. If you're running into the workplace, would it leave all of us with this idea that it's worth the trade, it's worth the trade of living a life that's fully alive, living a life that is staring into the headwinds of what society and what culture might say, but saying we are living for something so much bigger than this world. Many of you guys might have a chance to join that conversation even this week. The Faith Driven Entrepreneur Conference. I pray along that journey that you might find friends, that you might find community, that you might find people and fellow travelers that you can lock arms with and live that intentional life, that surrendered life that Richard just shared with us. God, I pray blessings on each and every entrepreneur as they're listening to this. I'm so grateful for the words that you have given that you gave Richard and that you shared with us today. May we? We've challenged and inspired to live fully a life fully devoted to you. And it's in your name we pray. Amen.