Toward a Christian Economy 

Introduction

In a world of poverty and injustice, how can we as Christ followers respond?

After praying over the people and issues, and convicted toward loving actions, we may deliberately devote toward the cause with our time, energy and resources of various levels.

When we genuinely care for the suffering people, we will want to optimize the use of our limited resources, so that our time, energy, money and materials will serve as many people as possible, with as much personal attention as possible, and create lasting impact that would sustain as long as possible.  (Best illustrated in the ending scene in Schindler’s list: “I could have save a few more person …”)

However, when we give each person more attention we may serve fewer; and when we aim for long term goals we may sacrifice more immediate needs.  If we do not carefully plan out our execution by giving sufficient thought to these issues, the people we aimed to serve will lose out, even as we are blinded from our errors because we do not see the better scenarios that did not happen.

Balancing the trade-off between efficiency, focus, and sustainability, to make wise decisions in allocating resources, is intrinsically a problem of economics.

The challenge for Christians is that, in addition to being well-versed in the normal theories of economics, we need to understand its limitations, and be able to extend it properly to account for love, grace, caring, and sharing.  We need a framework for a Christian Economy.

In this article we will start the conversation with two central issues, the nature of funding, and how best to implement and achieve our goals, then end with a challenge to the current global economic system.

The nature of funding Christian Activity

We usually segment our life into (not necessarily disjoint) professional, family/personal, social, and faith-based activities, with our professional work dominating most of our waking time, in order to fund and sustain our other activities.

As Christians, we definitely want to enable more Christian activities occurring in the world, whether they be explicit preaching, and evangelism, church planting and oversea missions, or implicit ministries that focus on family and godly values; and whether they be direct Christian aid to earthquake or famine victims, or indirect humanitarian efforts to establish schools, hospitals and orphanages.

The standard way that we fund all these Christian activities as a whole is the tithing mechanism, where we contribute a fraction of our income from work for godly goals. Given this coupling between our work and the amount of funding to Christian activities, we now consider the nature and social impact of our work.

Let us roughly divide all economic activities by the spiritual value that an organization espouses, as explicitly Christian, implicitly Christian, value-neutral, implicitly godless, and explicitly anti-Christian. Examples of each of the five categories are, respectively: Christian university, a business or job that support Christian activities, toothpaste factory, gambling website, and a publisher for Atheist writings. (This classification does not imply spiritual superiority.)

Most likely we work for a firm in the value-neutral category, and spend most of our income in the same value-neutral realm.  In this central category we find healthcare and financial services that care for our loved ones, schools that educate our children, courts that uphold justice, and everyday products and services that makes life comfortable, and thus indirectly create a pleasant environment that is indispensible for us to pursuit our godly aims. Grudem has defended the spiritual value of everyday work in this fashion. Thus, working in the value-neutral industries is in no way spiritually inferior to working in the more explicit Christian organizations.  

Since the explicitly Christian category can have a positive impact and contribution to the amount of Christian activities, and an explicitly anti-Christian firm can have a negative impact on the overall amount of Christian activities, if our professional work is in the positive Christian spectrum, we are able to kill 2 birds with 1 stone, as our work is not simply a means to an end (of providing tithing fund), but it in itself is part of the Christian activity that we aim to increase. On the flip side, if we were to work for a legal firm whose primary activity is to defend abortion doctors or sue churches for defending family values, then every one of our tithing dollar would be generated from ten times the amount of damage done to godly values.  (This scenario would be like that of a recent study on the Gates Foundation in Africa, where their millions of dollars in aid to widows and orphans are generated by investments in companies that ignore the community and environment, and caused many more Africans to be widows and orphans.)

As the main stream culture in America is drifting more to the anti-Christian spectrum, it will not be surprising for more of the companies that we work for start to fund or support godless or anti-Christian values.  At that point, when a large portion of the value that we create at work goes to fund activities that are against our deepest held faith, we need to step back and rethink the nature of our job, rather than continue to be smug because we have done our tithing.  In similar lines of thought, we may want to boycott products of companies that destroy community values, or as Alcorn encourages Christians, not to donate to colleges whose primary aim is to undermine the Christian values and promote godless conducts.

Implementations

Toward a proactive perspective in the integration of our work and faith, we can purposefully steering our professional efforts to align with our faith values, in various dimensions and to varying degrees:

A job in an implicitly Christian business, whether a Christian conference center that serve the needs of local churches, or a Christian own business (e.g. publisher, gift shop) that will not create pressure against Christian employees who openly celebrate their faith, will help our siblings in the faith to conduct their calling or to practice their faith more easily in an environment that may prove hostile to our faith.

A profession in an explicitly Christian organization, whether being a professor in a Christian college, a Christian marriage counselor, a leader in a para-church organization such as the Navigators, a Christian music distributor, etc, where the product or services that we provide will directly promote the Christian values.

In addition to products and services that offer immediate values, we can imagine organizations that provide longer term strategic goals, including Alliance Seminary or Focus on the Family, grant or funding agencies to promote faith values (e.g. Templeton Foundation), legal alliance for the protection of religious freedom, or ventures that promote godly values (JVI).

Whether short- or long-term missions, e.g. medical, housing, language teaching, professional training, that will offer concrete economic help in addition to spiritual care to local people; while long-term commitments can create relationships and lasting bonds, short-term opportunities are investments that may introduce the participant to the unique experience who may become a long-term supporter or missionary. Turning our personal vacations into short-term missions is a cost effective way of experiencing God’s calling as well.  Furthermore, missions does not have to be overseas, as the Body of Christ may have direct needs in the poverty stricken inner cities, or indirect professional service needs in Christian institutions and organizations (i.e. serving the  IT needs in Wycliff Translator head-quarters).

For people who feels that there are not enough Christian related professional opportunities, innovation and entrepreneurship that creates new solutions and new jobs is the answer.

Along these lines, Ken Eldred’s “God at work” provides an inspiring story for his accepting the calling to start a God honoring business, which led to the vision for a Kingdom business network, as a strategy for modern mission, since local people now need the entrepreneur’s expertise to deliver them out of poverty more than a traditional missionary’s spiritual lessons. He offers encouraging examples of Christian micro-credit business, SME venture models, and Christian Oversea Private Equity funds that are meeting the triple bottom line: (1) Profitability and sustainability, (2) local job and wealth creation, and (3) advancing the local church and building spiritual capital. Similarly, the title “On Kingdom Business” collects from many contributors the theory and practice of this new calling in the modern mission field.

Finally, while we will not address the specific implementation details for a missions effort to fight poverty, as the optimum solution would depend on the specific context and thus best left to the ingenuity of the people involved, the relatively academic title “The Samaritan’s Dilemma” points out the common fallacies often found in developmental aid situations. Beyond the usual debate of whether to give aid as a direct grant, a conditional grant, a loan, or to let people struggle out of their poverty cocoon, this work analyzes the challenges found in foreign aid, due to poorly structured plans in the implementation, in the policy process, in the aid system, or the donor system. When not carefully planned out, the aid program may backfire due to misalignment of incentives on various levels.

Challenging the system

Society has witnessed capitalism thrive and communism fall at the end of the Cold War. Christians have essentially equated free market capitalism as the biblical economic system. In fact we see such elaboration and defense of capitalism from our readings by Eldred and Grudem.

Yet the wonderful scenarios we have in mind when thinking of a free market capitalism is under the assumption that all (or most) participants are virtuous and moral, upholding the common good and putting the system under scrutiny less it deviates, as Adam Smith originally presupposes. In fact Eldred’s defense of capitalism includes a long section of how the system can be enhanced by moral and spiritual capital.

Yet a free market will not prevent participants who use whatever evil means for selfish gains. For example, free market has no prevention of a monopoly power to bully local stores by lowering prices first, and then raise it several fold after pushing the local stores to bankruptcy. (The only defense depends on the local consumers having sufficient long-term collaborative community interest and intelligent foresight.) Similarly, free market has no solution when employers have unfair power over workers, and take advantage of their desperate situations.  The only theoretical hope is that this cannot persist in the long run.  (Yet Keynes have succinctly argued, in the long run we are all dead.) The recent financial storms leave us fresh experiences of sinister plots such as pyramid schemes a la Madoff who employs illusory gains to create temporary bubbles.

Main stream economists can only brush these embarrassments and other limitations of capitalism under various labels, creating the illusion that they are only a small part of the economy that can be neglected.  The only defense to these socially corrupting forces is social disapproval. Yet this defense has no power against anonymity. Thus, the rise of corporations (as a proxy to provide anonymity) allows the detachment of personal responsibility to social welfare from the profit motive, and its growing power starts to undermine the validity of free market capitalism. David Korten’s life work has been to expose the cancerous effects and the dark sides of corporatism. He insightfully listed the limitation of capitalism and the many cases of corporate strategies in dominating our lives in the title “When corporations rule the world”. Rushkoff’s title focuses on the historical aspect of similar observation.

Alternatives

How do we deal with this flawed economic system? Let us consider first the perspectives from secular scholars.

Although most people are aware of only the state or the market economy, and may thus despair at the imperfection of either, Ostrom (of this year’s Nobel fame) has pointed out that these two are end-points of a spectrum of viable systems, with many community-based solutions to the famous social dilemma Tragedy of the Commons lying in between these two extremes.  What form would these alternatives look?

David Korten provided a blueprint of his other longer works in “Agenda for a New Economy”, that summarizes the limits of capitalism, points out the dangers of corporatism and current financial framework, and calls for a re-invention of the local community.

In “Natural capitalism”, Hawken extends the current theory of capitalism to include the value of ecological communities (environment) and people  (human capitalism), and shows that companies focusing on the broader consideration will do better economically in the long run. A fine example is the transformation of Curitiba, Brazil into a community with a balanced design and people-centric way of life.

The most comprehensive work that ties these ideas all together is found in Eisler’s “The Real Wealth of Nations”, which calls for a ‘caring economics’ that values all life activities as economically relevant, placing people and lives at the center of economic focus.

All these solutions call for collective action toward a new vision of people-centered economics, which aligns much better with the biblical view of how life should be.

Christian perspective

Why is there still so much injustice and poverty in the world? Rather than the simplistic blame on human evil, fallen world, selfishness, lack of resource, laziness, etc, we need to be aware of systemic evils that trap even a group of well-meaning individuals.

In illustrating systemic evil, Keller in Mercy Ministries discussed the deeper systemic evils that embed within the social and cultural fabric, which give rise to racism or the holocaust, even as every single participating individual is going along doing their own small thing and not particularly displaying intense evil. He reminded us that in Nazi Germany, most of the population was composed of good citizens, individually not great evil beings, and they are just doing what seems honorable in a typical society: doing their job, caring for their family, yet agreeing to and implicitly fueling an evil regime.

What if we suddenly learn that much of our current way of life is degenerating to something akin to such evil? What if such a supposition were true? We all participate and dependent on the current global economy, much as the Matrix scenario. So much so that we are incapable of stepping back to think about its influence and grip on our lives. It is this systemic evil that offers the perfect platform for individual evils to cause so much of world poverty, economic inequality, leading to social and political injustice.

Tim Keller calls for Christian and ministries to challenge these systemic evils, particularly through institutional approaches, via structuring a coordinated attack on the problem and enhancing the synergy among individual ministries.

We have seen the form of solutions offered by secular thinkers.  Their vision essentially rediscovers most of the biblical instructions for community life. Yet their means of attaining such a vision will rely on gathering a following from among those deeply rooted in and heavily dependent on the current economic system.

We as Christians have long been shaping such a people-centric vision as a way of life. We are called to live in but not of the world.  We have been training and practicing to help others through missions and outreach.  We are empowered by the Holy Spirit against all set-back and despair. We are readily mobilized in unity as the Body of Christ. We as Christians are the best prepared for actually challenging the flawed economic system, transforming society in the issues of poverty and injustice, and achieving what the world can only dream.

Summary

I have consistently found after the fact that all my spiritual musings have been presupposed by Eugene Peterson, particularly in his Spiritual Theology series (volume 5 was just released). In the past, my emphasis on the role of the Christian laity has found its way in “Eat this Book”, in which Peterson emphasized God’s down-to-earth spirituality through the language of the scriptures.  More recently, my ideas for integrating different aspects of our life with our faith found their full expression in “Christ plays in ten-thousand places”, a unique illustration for life with the Spirit.  Consequently, I am not entirely surprised when parts of the foundations of this article find themselves emerging from “The Jesus Way”.

When we aim to impact believers’ lives (physically and spiritually), a good starting point would be to view how people live life by the way they spend their precious resources: time, energy, and money. The fact that most of these are spent at work, on family (raising children), or entertainment, means that we need to have proper Christian teaching to integrate our faith with these areas first and foremost to make the biggest impact. While it is important to stress our "personal" relationship with Christ, left alone this singular emphasis will only impact the fleeting minutes of our "quiet times” in the week. Instead, our Christian maturity would be bolstered by developing our integrated "personal" relationship with Christ at work, in our family, and in our entertainment. If we ask: what defines personhood? Trimming it down from the dimensions of our everyday life would leave little, (and Tony Campolo would go further to claim that there is nothing left!). Consequently we need to engage our faith in all the layers of our contextual lives. Similarly, to impact the lives of those we aim to help or to reach, we do well to make a difference in all their contextual lives.

In this respect, this article looked at how we can integrate our professional work with our faith, both in the general support for and the involvement in Christian activities, and the strategic Kingdom business model in missions, so as to touch people in their work and faith. We have also considered the bolder vision of challenging the current flawed economic framework in order to better arrive at the biblical vision of economics.  If this can give you an orientation of the different related issues, and encourage you to study these topics further, it has not been written in vain.

References

Here we list titles in the order of appearance mentioned in the article, and a few more recommended readings related to the topic.

Ronald Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger

Ken Eldred, God is at Work: Transforming People and Nations through Business

Tetsunao Yamamori, Kenneth A. Eldred, Wayne Grudem, and Randolph Case, On Kingdom Business: Transforming Missions Through Entrepreneurial Strategies

Clark Gibson, et al. The Samaritan’s Dilemma

David Korton, Agenda for a New Economy

David Korton, When Corporations Rule the World

Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back

Paul Hawken, Natural Capitalism

Riane Eisler, The Real wealth of Nations

Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons

Tim Keller, Mercy Ministries

Eugene Peterson, Christ plays in ten-thousand places

Eugene Peterson, Eat this book

Eugene Peterson, The Jesus Way

Kathryn Tanner, Economy of Grace

Randy Alcorn, Mone, Possessions, and Eternity

Michael Slaughter, Change the World