Business and the Gospel of Enough

JoAnn Flett decided at a young age that she loved both spreadsheets and Jesus. After more than 20 years of senior accounting and management experience, she now directs the masters in business administration program at Eastern University, a theologically informed curriculum with a strong sense of social justice that equips students with business acumen to serve God and society through business. She sat with Sojourners senior associate editor Julie Polter in June to tell her story.—The Editors

WHEN WE THINK of the church and business, we tend to think of them at opposite ends of a spectrum. We often think of businesspeople as a certain kind of person, one that doesn’t conjure up the best images of humanity.

I was privileged, early on, to have friends who were very successful business leaders. What drew me to them was that they were people whose faith mattered to them; they led their organizations without making a big fanfare about this, but they were leading from a faith perspective.

I admired that they ran successful companies that transformed their employees, their business partners, and their local communities. But nobody seemed to celebrate them in their local churches. It’s easy to think of teachers and nurses, people in the “helping professions,” as doing God’s work. Yet there are people of faith who lead powerful and influential organizations. These people go to work and make critical decisions, and their faith has all kinds of implications about how they live in the world, but their work is not being affirmed on Sunday.

I liked business and accounting. I felt and followed God’s call into that space. And yet I also wanted to do ministry. When I was younger this seemed to be two separate things. So first I had to redefine ministry as neither sacred nor secular. Rather I had to learn that ministry is any activity that draws people into relationship with God. This redefinition was the start of understanding that business is a medium of relationships. I began to wonder: Could business be seen in a new paradigm of service and ministry that is based on relationships?

A reformation of business

For myself, that new paradigm is embodied through the Eastern University MBA program. The program weaves expert business acumen with theological, sociological, and political knowledge. Incidentally, on some level I want to ask theological institutions to train pastors to see CEOs, CFOs, COOs, and other business leaders in their congregations as people who do more than write big checks or can tell you how to better organize a megachurch efficiently. Pastors need to affirm these leaders in their role and challenge and encourage them to embody the gospel. Who do they think Jesus is and what bearing does that have for us?

I find that Christian businesspeople have thought about this question in innovative and creative ways. But we (faith-based institutions) have not provided a place for them to speak their truth. Such truth would inform a practical theology that goes into the work of better equipping pastors and ministers in churches and create, if you will, a virtuous circle. They will hear what’s happening in their congregants’ lives. And together pastor and congregant will be able to respond in thoughtful ways of interpreting and enacting scripture.

I know that there’s bad business. There’s no question that a certain orientation of business can be bad for the world. But business oriented to embody positive relationships—a reformation of business—is good for the world. You can use it as a force for good to empower people, to recognize their creativity and innovation, and to lift up the entrepreneurs and business leaders in our midst.

I am suggesting that the narrative of business as being about establishing relationships is critically important. God as represented by a trinity of persons is relational. We are created in God’s image and thus created to be relational people. Business is a medium that can uphold the rightness of relationships, and in so doing can create value, not just wealth.

From stockholders to stakeholders

A triple-bottom-line business judges success in terms of people, the planet, and profit, and is a corrective for the single bottom line. Single-bottom-line, profit-maximization thinking was encouraged by economist Milton Friedman. He understood that if people bought stock in a company, they were the owners of that company, and the managers were to be agents of these owners, managing these companies for the owners’ rights and privileges. That was a good enough theory for a lot of people in business schools. They started to prioritize the stockholder, and thus stockholder-wealth maximization became convention.

Freidman’s idea was introduced in the 1970s. In the 1980s, business ethicist R. Edward Freeman wrote that instead of stockholders, we should have stakeholders. Importantly, Freeman doesn’t separate ethics from economics. Stakeholder philosophy says, I must pay attention to all the people that a business impacts or might impact—I must pay attention to all the relationships. A stakeholder is anyone who has a stake. An employee has a stake. The customer has a stake. The supplier has a stake. The local community has a stake. The government has a stake. And yes, the stockholder has a stake.

The idea of moving from stockholder to stakeholder capitalism is what the B Corps are doing (see “Better Business for a Better World,” page 29). They’re recognizing that profit is only one element of success. You don’t maximize profit at the expense of your customers, employees, or the people and resources in your supply chain. You must manage all those things well.

Moreover, countless business organizations, from UPS to Starbucks to Herman Miller to Patagonia to Greyston Bakery, understand that prioritizing stakeholders over stockholders actually creates value, not just for the stockholders but for all. The organization gets value. The employees get value. Customers get value. Society benefits.

A tool for restoration

MBA students are the ones most likely to end up in corporate leadership roles. These students might take one course in business ethics, which may or may not actually challenge the very strategy by which they do business. Only one course in an entire MBA program, at most—some programs don’t offer ethics courses at all.

What if the very idea of how you do business is demonstrated by values infused throughout the curriculum? What if the paradigm for how to do business is to restore shalom—to restore flourishing? By shalom, I use philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff’s description. Wolterstorff says that shalom involves rightness of relationship with God, with others, with self, and with creation. That’s a pretty comprehensive idea of shalom. And we know that God’s work in the world is to restore shalom.

This idea of shalom and human flourishing is deeply embedded in the curriculum of the Eastern MBA in economic development. The program was envisioned by Tony Campolo, who had a sociological vision for how to conduct business, together with Ron Sider, who had a politically engaged and social justice orientation, and Samuel Escobar, who called for a theological vision for business. These founders saw a global marketplace without a distinctly Christian narrative for business and desired to challenge the prevailing paradigm. Notably, if we only prioritize wealth for one group of people, that’s a very bad idea of what business is and ought to be. The future becomes very much about individuals and short-termism: What’s mine now?

My perspective is that we read Adam Smith poorly if we detachThe Wealth of Nations from his The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith was a moral philosopher before being given the title of economist. He revised The Theory of Moral Sentiments six times throughout his life, as his magnum opus. It is believed he didn’t revise The Wealth of Nations once.

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith writes that the marketplace is a place of empathy. This is very different from his concept of an “invisible hand” that is detached from any other kind of relationship. The lack of relational thinking in the latter concept has impacted interpretations of The Wealth of Nations and helps to promote business as an impersonal force. This kind of thinking has dominated the mainstream academic business sphere.

But a marketplace as a place of empathy is more in line with a theological view of business. More compatible with the idea that business can serve as a tool for the restoration of the world. Nonprofits and NGOs are waking up to that realization. If we want to alleviate poverty, we have to recognize that dignity is more important than wealth. We’re going to have to support people who can innovate, create, and lift themselves and their families out of poverty, who know how to achieve their own solutions but lack resources to achieve this aim. God gave them that innate problem-solving ability; we just need to infuse resources and then they can create their own solutions.

Market and mission can inform each other. The separation of the sacred and secular have not helped us in a world that needs each dimension to collaborate and come together to access resources in the biggest money sector—business. We have corporations that have created massive amounts of wealth, and yet some of us in the church don’t want to engage with the business world to challenge the prevailing notion of profit maximization. Perhaps part of being a prophetic voice is to challenge corporations on the core aspects of their strategy—how are they building value for everyone, for all stakeholders? This doesn’t sacrifice profit, but rather changes the paradigm from maximizing profit for stockholders to maximizing the benefit for all people and the planet. In some ways it’s enacting the gospel of enough, which is a pretty radical idea.

‘You don’t need to hoard’

I am part of a faith community at Broad Street Ministry that works with vulnerable Philadelphians as we seek to offer radical hospitality. All are welcomed at the Eucharist, and we ask of those partaking in communion to take as much bread as they want. And then to take a little bit more than they were going to take—because this bread represents the body of Christ and is a sign of God’s grace to each one of us, and there is enough grace for all.

What is so powerful about that image is that the invitation is offered to people who are physically, financially, emotionally, and spiritually hungry. The word “enough”—that’s not in their vocabulary. They’re traumatized by not ever having enough. Perhaps the gospel to a world spinning on a wheel of greed and scarcity is to say we have a gospel of enough. It is a narrative that speaks to God’s work in the world.

Some think that having business managers operate under a paradigm of enough is a problematic idea, because they think that will stall some people—they will assume they don’t need to expand or innovate.

But I’m suggesting the opposite. I am suggesting you don’t need to hoard. You don’t need to hoard the cash on your balance sheet, or your personal wealth. You can deploy some of those resources to make sure that you’re addressing social costs such as pollution, poverty, inequality, and unemployment that are now being externalized to society. A Christian vision of business suggests that it is a force that can be oriented toward God, and as such can create value by prioritizing and honoring relationships.

I love Jesus and spreadsheets, but I also love people. My teaching, research, and scholarship has been driven by a deep desire to craft a theological vision for business—one that illuminates how the relational elements of the gospel, business, and people are inextricably linked. This has implications for how business is talked about in our churches, how it is taught in our seminaries and Christian universities, and its engagement in our parachurch organizations.