"Leveraging Business for the Advance of the Kingdom of God" —Finny Kuruvilla

Welcome to Extend Roundtable, where it's our goal to inspire kingdom cafés. My name is Bryant Martin, I'm the administrator here at Extend Cafés, also the owner of Sowers Harvest Café here in State College, Pennsylvania. And it's good to have each one of you here. We have this call once a quarter, and this afternoon I'm very thankful to have Brother Finney Corvilla here from Boston.

Finney and I have been friends now for probably close to 11 years. I remember that I remember our first interaction, or at lengthy interaction, with Finney and his wife Lara. I see that Lara is on. Welcome, Lara. They came to State College here to spend the weekend with our church, and we got the privilege of hosting them. And at that point, Sowers didn't exist yet; we had just moved to State College, and we had this vision for a café. And I, Lynelle and I, through that weekend, were able to share our vision for that.

And Finney was quite interested. He loves business, which is why he's on here. And of course, he also loves the vision of using business to advance the kingdom. And so it was a very natural interest of his, and they were able to give us quite a bit of feedback and input that weekend.

And also, through the conversation ongoing, Finney actually became an investor in our café, which enabled us to get started. And so I want to— the Bible says, "Give honor to whom honor is due," and I just wanted to share that this afternoon with our cafés, that in many ways Brother Finney has really impacted us here at Sowers.

And so whenever we meet, one of the questions that Finney always asks is, "How is Sowers doing?" And of course, he's given us input throughout the years as well. So, Brother Finney, welcome here. I'm just going to share the description here for your talk here this afternoon, and it goes like this: In the last 10 years, in the last 10 to 20 years, business has come to the forefront for its potential to alleviate global poverty in a more sustainable and dignified manner compared to traditional charity. In this talk, Finney will outline some potential of using business for the advance of the church.

Finney also— I'd like to read off his bio. Finney works with Eventide Asset Management, a value-based and faith-based investing firm. He is a physician who worked at the intersection of business, investing, and healthcare. He is president and founder of Seller College, a Christian college located in downtown Boston.

He has a keen interest in biblical interpretation and church history for the purpose of fostering a strong and vibrant church today. He writes about the topic in his book, King Jesus Claims His Church. His interests also include the Anti-Nazine Christianity, Reformation, and Anabaptist history, and the Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th century.

Finney lives with his wife Lara, 6 sons and 3 daughters. Right, Brother Finney, 3 daughters? Yep, that's right. Okay, I counted your children up on your most recent picture, and I was pretty sure that baby was a daughter.

Yes, 6 sons and 3 daughters in the greater Boston area, and is part of the church followers of the way. And it's good to have you with us, Brother Finney. Before we get started, let's just bow our heads for prayer.

Let's pray. Father, thank you for this opportunity today to be together. Father, I thank you that Brother Finney can join us and do this talk, do this teaching on business. And Father, I pray you'll bless him for this sacrifice, for this investment into Extend Cafés. Bless him for how he got behind our vision 11 years ago for Sowers Harvest and enabled us to take a vision and make it reality.

Father, bless this call. May you receive the glory, and we ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. All right, Brother Finney, all yours. Thank you, Brother Bryant. Appreciate that introduction. It's very kind. So let me share my slides here.

It's great to be with all of you who are part of Extend and who, in some way, are entrepreneurs or will be soon entrepreneurs. That's a big part of my life, and I know it's very challenging. And sometimes you're at your wits' end, but it is worth it, and I hope to encourage you here.

So let me start off by first talking about how business is often portrayed as evil. And I think most of us on the call will remember this movement. It was called Occupy Wall Street. It was back from 2011, and there were all these protests that happened where this was not too long after the great financial crisis of 08/09, and there was just a lot of anger at how there was this perception that businesses were, in some way, taking advantage of people, had a privileged place of bailouts from the government, and yet weren't really serving the people well. That they were more enriching shareholders and having their CEOs make millions of dollars. And so you can see one of those marches here up on the left.

The one on the right— I'm in Boston right now, I'm right in downtown Boston, and there's a picture of some Boston protesters, also from 2011 here. And you can see things like tax the rich, where the 99% student loan debt complaints, etc.

So there is a lot of negativity out there towards business, less towards small businesses, but even there, there are people who often see business almost as a necessary evil or as something to be tightly constrained. I love to read, and so I'm going to give a couple of book recommendations on this topic that I think would be very worthwhile your reading. The first one is by this author here, Tim Keller, Every Good Endeavor. If you haven't read it, it is an excellent, excellent book that you would do well to read.

And it's one of the two favorite books of mine. I'll share the second one in a second, which gives a very robust theology of work and business. And I'm just going to share some quotes from the book. He says, "Work is as much a basic human need as food, beauty, rest, friendship, prayer, and sexuality. It is not simply medicine, but food for our soul."

And of course, one of the evidences of this is that work was a pre-fall activity. Some people think of it as post-fall, but it was a pre-fall activity before sin even entered into the world. He goes on to say, "Loss of work is deeply disturbing because we were designed for it." If you are unemployed or know people who are unemployed, there's something that feels unsettling there, even if you have the funds to manage food and shelter and things like that. There's just something that isn't right. You have a hole inside of you in some way.

And he develops this further about some of the why. Work is one of the ways we make ourselves useful to others rather than just living a life for ourselves. It's very profound, I think. All humans have this desire to want to serve others in some way, and work is the main way that we do that, at least in terms of hours of time. Also, work is also one of the ways we discover who we are, because it is through work that we come to understand our distinct abilities and gift, a major component in our identities.

I think most of us would agree that we learn so much about who we are, what are our strengths, what are our weaknesses, and it does, in very profound ways, form our identity. And then I love this thought experiment here that he gives where he says, "Imagine that everyone quits working right now. What happens? Civilized life quickly melts away. Food vanishes from the shelves. Gas dries up at the pumps. Streets are no longer patrolled, and fires burn themselves out. Communication and transport services end. Utilities go dead. Those who survive at all are soon huddled around campfires, sleeping in caves, clothed in raw animal hides. The difference between wilderness and culture is simply work."

And so based on this, I think we can make a fair point that one of the main ways that you love your neighbor is by working. We don't think about this as much, but when you are bagging groceries, repairing a car, when you are working in a coffee shop, whatever the occupation might be, you are contributing in your way towards loving one's neighbor and having a civilization, not merely chaos out there.

So this is an excellent book. There's so much in here, and if you haven't read it, I would highly, highly recommend it. He passed away a few years ago. I had the opportunity to co-author a book with Tim Keller, which is more on investing. It's called Faith-Driven Investing, and he and I both have chapters in that book. But actually, this book is better, the Every Good Endeavor. It's at least more foundational. But if you are interested in the investing side, you can look up that other book, but I'm not going to be talking about that today.

My second book that I'll recommend, which is a great theology of work and business, is this one here. It's by Jeff Manduser. He's not as well known, but nonetheless, it's an excellent book. He was the dean of a business school out in Seattle, and his book is titled Why Business Matters to God. And I'm going to summarize a little bit of his thesis here, and then we'll talk about some of the implications of it. So again, there is this perception that business is evil, that there's something that is predatory about it, and some people would say Christians shouldn't even be that involved in it. On the other extreme, there are some people who would say that capitalism and Christianity are joined at the hip, and the invisible hand of Adam Smith is the hand of God.

And if someone follows the market, they are following Jesus. And so you will find both of those extremes very commonly in society today, this very suspicious attitude and this very enthusiastic union, almost, of capitalism and Christianity. And one of the things that Manduser does really well is he challenges both of those views and sees them as both fallen and both distorted in some way.

One of the things that he points out is something that is widely known, which is, of course, what I mentioned before, that work was not a punishment. Work was assigned before the fall, and that God is portrayed as a worker in days 1 through 7.

He's portrayed as this builder. And in that context there, we have Adam and Eve who are made in God's image, who are also to be commissioned as workers. One of the things that I find to be challenging and valuable about the book is he asks the question, "What should the purpose statement be of business?" And I've done this a lot.

My co-founder at Eventide and I have given many, many talks, and when we ask people, "What's the purpose of business?" the majority of people in the audience will typically say, "To make money." And that's very unfortunate because it confuses the goal with the means. And again, I'm taking this from Manduser here.

The means of a business is profits or money, but the goal should not be money. It's the means. In other words, let's use an analogy. Manduser says, "Let's imagine you wake up in the morning and you're excited, and you say as you step out of bed, 'I am so excited to pump blood through my vasculature today.'" Well, that would be a very unusual thing to say.

Probably none of us did that. You're excited to go to work, to be with your families, to do some project, to maybe go to a church meeting. Your blood is the means by which you achieve that end. And in the same way, profits or money is how we achieve the purpose of the business.

The purpose of the business will vary, of course, depending on the business, but let's use this analogy of hospitals. So hospitals, let's say that we have a nonprofit hospital, and that hospital, its statement is something like, "To care for patients, to create healing, or to promote healing," something like that. Let's imagine that that hospital becomes a for-profit.

Should it then be our purpose is to make money? Well, no. And by the way, there are a lot of for-profit hospitals out there. For-profit or nonprofit is just the description of the capital structure of the business. It doesn't actually tell you anything about the mission of the business. Or if you go the other way, what if you had a for-profit hospital that converted to nonprofit? You would hope that the purpose would be the same. The way they raise money is going to be different. For-profit businesses, hopefully self-funding. Nonprofits might rely on donations. But nonetheless, the purpose is common between the two.

And so what has happened in the modern world is that because people have confused the two and they think that the purpose of business is to make money, then you get a lot of the problems that we see today. You have people reacting against that, advocating for, say, socialism or communism, and then you have people who embrace that, who maybe fall into a love of money and forget that there's supposed to be limits on businesses, and we're supposed to operate with integrity and ethics, not merely to be making money at all costs.

So this quote here from Manduser is one of the insights that he has where he says, "The Christian in business enables individuals to express aspects of their God-given identities by affording them the opportunity to participate in meaningful and creative work." So it's for the worker.

And then in short, the Christian in business is in the business of rendering service that will enable humanity to flourish. So we should be aiming for flourishing for all of our stakeholders, our employees, our customers, our supply chain, the environment, and whatever the means might be, whether or not for profit or for profit, that doesn't really matter.

Now, I'm going to give my own definition of business here. It's a little bit more broad, but it's organized work directed at the common good. Okay, so organized work directed at the common good. So this includes for-profit organizations. So that might be Apple or Coca-Cola.

Those would be for-profit organizations. Or nonprofit organizations, universities, schools, home schools, charities, government agencies like NASA or the EPA. There's going to be a lot of small businesses out there. Many cafes are small businesses that are going to have under 20 employees. Most businesses in the US are very small, but some, of course, can be thousands and thousands.

Now, I want to remember this definition here because it's going to be useful as we progress here. Now, there's something called the sacred-secular divide. You've probably heard this term before. If you've been around the church much, you've heard this. And so let me first define it and then talk about the implications of it. So the sacred-secular divide basically says that some things are really important to God, important to us. So it's church meetings, it's Bible studies, it's missions, it's all those things. And then everything else outside of that is, at best, neutral and might even be a distraction. So your work, school, exercise, those things have a low value in the sacred-secular divide. And the closer you can get towards, say, church meetings or Sunday school or something like that, the better off you are.

And so it's a quite common sentiment that you have, and it leads to this compartmentalization here where people can have their church lives and then they have their work lives. And so this is the sacred-secular divide. So it's a partition between the two, and there is a real sense of worth and honor that goes to these sacred activities. And then, like I said, more of a neutral viewpoint at secular activities. Now, there are a lot of pitfalls with this, and there's at least three important pitfalls, and it's really important that we cover these here.

So one of them is, and this is stating it strongly, but it's a gnostic dualism where here the stuff of earth is just it's temporary, it's all going to burn up anyway. We really need to just focus on souls. And these kinds of very earthy material activities are, as I said, might even be viewed negatively here. And of course, gnosticism is all about this negative view of the material world.

Some liturgical forms of Christianity, and certainly post-Constantine, as there became this professional class of ministers, that enhanced this view where if you were really a godly person, you're going to be living out in the desert, praying all the time, or living in a monastery, something along those lines. And that view grew and grew and grew. And it was one of the things that during the Reformation that people reacted to, especially Luther, but Calvin did as well. But they said, "You know what? We think we've privileged these monks and these nuns in a wrong way, that you can be a shoemaker and be following God, and there can be a glory in serving God as a shoemaker or as a baker."

And so what Luther and Calvin and others tried to do was they tried to dignify work again and to break that secular-sacred divide. Okay, so there's definitely some good things in that. However, what has happened now in especially more progressive and liberal settings is there's a flattening of the common and the redemptive good. Okay, so the common good would be things that serve all peoples. That would be food, water, shelter, medicine.

The redemptive good would be things like preaching the gospel. That would be things like printing Bibles, holding religious services. Those would be examples of the redemptive good. And I remember reading once somebody saying that mowing your lawn could be classified as kingdom activity. Mowing your lawn is kingdom activity.

And it's kind of the other extreme here where reacting so much to this dualism, it's like, "Well, hey, if you're mowing your lawn, that's a beautifying creation, and we should think about that as kingdom work. Or if you are, again, baking bread, that's kingdom activity that is at that same level." Okay, so I think that both of those are wrong. And I'm going to try to give a different paradigm here.

And the way I'm going to do this is by contrasting some different phrases here that, again, a lot of these you probably have heard before. So one of them is business and mission. And business and mission is basically saying there's business over here and then there's mission over here. So that would be that strong secular-sacred divide.

Then there's business for mission. I meet a lot of people who say, "I want to make as much as I can so I can just donate as much as I can." They want to be donors to a church or a missions organization, something along those lines. That's business for mission. Then there's mission in business, and this would be something like workplace evangelism where people say, "Yeah, it's really great to start a business because you can share the gospel with your coworkers."

And then there's business to enable missions. And so that would be somebody who wants to go to, say, a closed country, and they go and they start some kind of a business there so that they'll have a legitimate reason to be in the country.

Okay, so these are some different paradigms. But the one that I think, and I'm not saying they're all wrong or there's no truth in these, the one that I think is stronger is something that I'll call business as foundational for mission. So this really builds on what I shared earlier where what business has the capacity to do is to shape the individual, to help the individual discover his or her gifts and talents, to provide a strong witness to the world. A great business is a profound witness to the world.

And that mission is encompassing more than just evangelism. If you know the work of Christopher Wright, he talks about this quite a bit. Certainly, it can become mission and business, something like workplace evangelism or business to enable missions going abroad. It certainly can become those things. But it has a more foundational quality wherein we discover who we are. We learn how to live out patience, diligence, loving others, bearing up under hard circumstances. There's a lot of ways in which business is an excellent space or forum to do that. And so this diagram here is trying to illustrate this. So there's the common good here. And so what I'm showing here is the common good is underneath the redemptive good.

They're both goods, but when we talk about, say, cleaning up trash in the city, okay, that's a wonderful good. I'm thankful that Boston here is a clean city and we don't have a lot of trash in the roads. And so that's common good. Having somebody get antibiotics when they're sick, that's a common good.

And all of us who work in the common good, having a coffee shop would be the common good. My own business, Eventide, I serve the common good there through developing healthcare medicines and things like that. However, this is the foundation in how we become the kind of people who are excellent and learn so much and have this platform that does all those different things. It shapes us and enables us to serve others, and it takes us to a place where we can better serve the redemptive good. If you are a school teacher and you're teaching algebra, okay, maybe you're a classroom teacher or a homeschool teacher, that's the common good.

Does it require patience? Yes. Are you serving somebody who those skills will hopefully be useful down the road as they become better thinkers? Of course. But that is not notice how they're not at the same plane. Common good or redemptive good are not equal.

But this common good does have this more foundational quality. I will go on and even say that I am very suspicious of people who want to be excellent church members and Christians, but they don't show decency and diligence in their work. Paul talks about in Thessalonians about how the believers were to admonish those who were idle and not contributing like they're supposed to do.

There's several places where he talks about, "Whatever you do, work it into the Lord, knowing that He's our ultimate Master." This is spoken of in the Bible as being this space in which we express, yes, common human virtues, but also Christian virtues should shine through here. And somebody who is, again, very sloppy or not diligent in this arena, are they really going to be excellent in the redemptive good? It's a little bit like that principle that we're supposed to be faithful in little before we can be faithful in much. We don't just jump to the redemptive good. So I think this is an incredibly powerful way to think about what we're doing here is we're developing us and ourselves and serving others in ways that are foundational for the redemptive good.

So I told you that there are three pitfalls that you'll see with this sacred-secular divide. Okay, so here's an illustration of a hiker and these three poles here. And we talked about two of them, but the third one is actually the one that I think is even more serious. So the one I said was this dualism where you sort of lift up Christian ministry and everything else is much lower than that or neutral. And then the second pitfall is having them be on the same plane where there's not really a differentiation between the comparative value of the redemptive good. We do want to affirm that with redemptive good, we are saving souls. We can do an eternal good.

If I'm, again, cleaning city streets, that's a wonderful good, but that's transient. That's not necessarily an eternal good. So we don't want to have them be on the same plane either. We want to have something more like the other diagram that I showed you. But what I want to do is I want to talk about the third pitfall because it's the one that I think gets the least attention and I think has drawn the most victims into it.

Okay, so what has happened and one of the most insidious ways that this sacred-secular divide has ruined us is the secular world often draws our very best, and it invites people to make breathtaking accomplishments. And I'll show some examples of this. And then the sacred world, paradoxically, is treated in a more casual way and almost like a club or something that you do if you have time or something along that line. And it's actually regressing. Okay, so the secular world in virtually every area, in fact, probably every area, whether it's manufacturing computer chips or developing medicines or building cars or you name it, it's almost always getting stronger and stronger. But we're actually seeing regression in the sacred world.

So let's look at some examples of how powerful the work world has been. This is a photograph here of Buzz Aldrin. Neil Armstrong was holding the camera. Amazing. Who would have thought that humans would be walking on the moon?

This is a picture of a Tesla. And of course, it's a fully electric vehicle that has remarkable acceleration. I was recently riding in a Tesla, and the safety features are just amazing. And soon we will likely be in an area, in a realm where it's mostly fully autonomous driving.

This here is from a Dutch company. This is the machine that makes most of the computer chips, in fact, almost all the computer chips that you would be using in your phone, your laptop, etc. They come off of a device like this. This is a device that does what's called lithography and etches very small grooves and patterns into silicon that are around 10 nanometers in feature size. So a nanometer is 10 to the minus 9 meters.

So take 1 meter, divide it into a million pieces, and then take one of those pieces and divide it into 1,000. That's the size of one of these features. This machine costs around $400 million, and there's many of them all over the world, and this is how we make our chips. And I mean, humanity labored at this. Thousands and thousands and thousands of people invested so much time, many billions of dollars to produce this. We almost take it for granted today with how small our chips are, how quickly they can charge, and how powerful they are. But we're standing on the backs of incredible work.

You heard of the interim physician, and definitely the breakthrough of the year has been around this protein called KRAS. It's the most common mutation in all of cancer. I used to see cancer patients when I was seeing patients many years ago.

And I am blown away at what has happened in the last 20 years. It's been known for a long time that this is the most common mutation in cancer, but it's been impossible for people to develop drugs for it. And you can see it took about 40 years. And one of the insights was somebody, his name is Kevon Chaucat, who's a professor at UCSF. He figured out that there was a small pocket. This is the three-dimensional structure at a nanometer scale of this KRAS. And he found there was a little pocket here that somebody could slide potentially a medicine into. Even with doing that, they found it was still not possible to shut it down.

And so somebody had the idea I won't get into all the details here, but somebody had the idea of making a conditional neosurface and basically creating a using a protein that's already in the cell, using that extra surface, combining it with this molecule to then shut down this KRAS here.

And then this is the data. This just came out a couple of months ago. There was a standing ovation at the American Society for Clinical Oncology. These are patients who have pancreatic cancer. So pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest cancers out there.

It's five years survival is less than 5%, meaning from the time of diagnosis, you have less than a 5% chance of being alive five years later. You can see here, even with typical chemotherapy, that patients are living half of patients will be dead. This is called a Kaplan-Meier survival curve, but they'll be dead about six months after their diagnosis.

With this therapy here, they have doubled survival. And you can see it's now the median, the 50% mark is out 12 months. Okay, so this came from the back of thousands of people who did just heroic, brilliant, amazing work to advance the realm of cancer therapeutics forward. And I think this is just incredible. So what I want to do now is I want to say, okay, we have the secular-sacred divide, and it's supposed to be the case that the redemptive good is inheriting. It's building on top of the common good, and we are not losing that excellence, those disciplines, but if anything, we're enhancing that. Okay, so what I want to do is actually, let me just switch one thing here.

I only have one more slide, but I want to hit my final concept, and then we'll do questions here. So what do we do with all this, and what does it look like to completely reconfigure how we even think about business and church? Okay, so as I told you, this here is unbelievable work. And if I were to say, is there even an equivalent in the Christian world of this kind of cooperation, investment, this kind of sustained advance over the last 40 years? I'm hard-pressed to come up with any example of that. So we have people who are doing wonderful things. We're actually investing in this company. We've been investing in it for a while.

At Eventide, so I'm not down on it at all. But my question is, what is missing, and how can we leverage the kind of excellence that we have in the secular world, in the business world, and bring that into the kingdom? And so the missing ingredient here, I'm going to use a term called imperium.

This is a term I got from Jonathan Lehman. And it's basically this is my definition, but it's something like meaningful official authority that demands an appropriate response. Okay, meaningful official authority that demands an appropriate response. Okay, so I'm going to illustrate this with some examples here.

And I would love because I'm always thinking about this, I would love some input and ideas on this. Okay, so here's some examples. So let's say somebody asks, you all work in some way in the coffee shop industry and/or going to, and if you ask an employee to do something or if your boss asks you to do something, how likely is that to get done compared to, say, if somebody asks for something from the pulpit?

What if you were to compare the attentiveness, the diligence, and the cooperation that you would observe, say, in a college or in a business or from an airline? Like the airline says, you get a text on your phone, the flight's going to be leaving at 2:30. Well, you're not going to just walk up to it at 2:40 and hope that things are going to work out for you. There's an official authority there that demands a response.

People often come late to meetings in many churches there. Think about where people sit even, say, in a concert. People will pay thousands of dollars for seating in the front of a concert hall to hear some singer. How is that a church? In general, what we have today is a very casual, a very lax atmosphere. And I'm not speaking about any one church. I'm just speaking in general. But we have a very casual, lax atmosphere where people have this kind of like, I'm going to do what I want. I'm going to get what I want. And even from people who espouse a two-kingdoms worldview, there's often not that imperium that is there. Now, I am totally convinced that this is that third pitfall that is this gaping hole that has swallowed up millions and millions of people.

Because in reality, the imperium of the church should be even higher than a business. And let's think about, again, a school or a biotech company or Tesla or whatever it is. It should be even higher, but practically, it is vastly, vastly lower. This is why I said the sacred-secular divide is so profound. Now, I have posed this as a thought experiment. This is my last bullet point, and then we can have a time of discussion here.

Imagine if churches had the intentionality on discipleship that businesses did with their goods and services. Here's the thought experiment. What if I were to tell you that every member of your congregation, every adult member of your congregation, would get tax-free a million dollars at the end of 2026 if you as a congregation could make, say, two disciples from the outside, bring in two people, have them come in, have them be baptized, and then be members of the church? Just two people. And like I said, everybody in the church would get a tax-free million dollars.

What would happen there? Well, I can tell you people would engage in a very different way. It would be like, okay, we're going to figure out how to make this happen. We're going to restructure our meetings. We're going to have this evangelist go out. We're going to do the we're going to do I mean, the whole tenor would be very different.

Businesses are motivated, for-profit businesses, and again, I'm using the term in a larger sense, by something. It might be money. Universities have accomplished great things. Some of that work that I showed you about that cancer advance, much of that happened in universities where the reward isn't even motivation as much as it is publications and the prestige of publications. Whatever the motivation is, the secular world, the common good world, is vastly, vastly, vastly, vastly stronger in imperium than is the church.

And I think this is, as I said, the greatest pitfall in this whole topic here. And so to recover this, I think, is the goal of what ought to be what we're doing. And imagine if people took all that know-how, that discipline that you all have, that you bring to bear every day in your businesses, and you brought that into the church.

We would see the world come to know Jesus within one generation, I have no doubt. Humans are capable of amazing things. We could put a man on the moon in 10 years with some focus. We could certainly do even more given how many people are in the church and the resources that we have towards even more important goals. Okay, so with that, I will stop sharing, and I would love to hear thoughts on this concept, and I would love any input that anyone might have.

Thank you, Brother Finney. That last slide there was very thought-provoking.

And an angle to that, so I wasn't quite expecting you to go where you did, but that doesn't surprise me. You care a lot about the church, and I appreciate that deep interest of yours. Maybe another angle on the imperium idea is that businesses put you into a community with a service, a product, often, some type of gained knowledge that people are willing to do an exchange for, right?

They believe there's value there, and they're willing to use your services, goods, or knowledge. And so with that comes a respect. And so could you say there's a sense of with that imperium in business, it can enable us to, in natural ways, share the gospel into people's lives? And they're like, I respect you in this area. Why not in this area when it comes to spiritual things, if you will?

Which is really it's kind of an obvious thought. I mean, that I'm sharing, it's the idea of the common good going into the redemptive good. And so that's something I've thought about too with sowers. We've been here now in September. It'll be 11 years we've been open. And I've come to realize that people trust us here. And that's quite sobering. It's exciting. It's really fun.

But it is something we can steward. We can lean into that. Could you say imperium, lean into that authority, and really use that to dig in people's lives? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, business, and that's why I like that foundational picture that I showed before, which is that you purchase a kind of social capital or a kind of respect that comes from running something with excellence that now enables you to have more authority and more credibility as one addresses the redemptive good. So no doubt about that. I mean, I think that's one of the reasons, one of the many reasons why we should be excellent in our work. Sure. Yes. Yeah. And as I think back to our conversation early on with sowers, you were very interested in seeing us develop a menu that was good for the body.

And it wasn't all just the sweets and the treats. It was substantive. And again, as we do those things, I mean, I could we could sell donuts and make a lot of money and get a lot of hype. The Americans love donuts, right, using that as an example. I'm sorry for those of you who have sold donuts.

But we often know that a diet of donuts is not going to be good for you. And so when people see that, do you actually care about them as a person, as a human, that common good that also develops that social capital, that imperium, that trust? It's not about the almighty dollar. And I was capturing some screenshots here, things you were sharing. By the way, I'll open up here shortly for any other questions, so please be ready.

You know that you're a Van Duzer. Your analogy there of what the heart does for the body is really what profits are to the business, right? A really healthy way to look at it. Sowers shouldn't just be all about the profits. It's just like your body isn't all about pumping blood. And you used that analogy years ago, Finney, and I've thought of it often.

That's where we want to put profits in our business. Yes, important, but it's not the main act. That's right. So yeah.

So yeah. All right, open it up here. Cherielle, Joe, anyone else? Feel free to ask questions or give your thoughts.

Sure. Well, thank you, Finney. I really appreciated your talk today and definitely connected with it. And I don't know if I have a question as much as just the concept of the common good being that foundational piece to the greater good or the Redemptive good. Redemptive good. Thank you.

I found that really helpful. And maybe the question is, how do we communicate to that, to our teams or to people in a way that doesn't just sound like we're trying to in a way that doesn't sound overly just theoretical or something? I think I really believe in that. It makes a lot of sense. Do you have any more thoughts on just a good way to communicate that well, to not just sound like you're trying to put together a theory?

Yeah. So one nice thing about emphasizing the common good, which is really what we're doing in our businesses, and it's fine to be doing that. We can't be spending all of our time doing Bible studies or something like that. We have to be advancing the business, and that's okay.

The nice thing about it is that I would say the vast majority of people who, even in the world, who sign up for a business, whether that's to work there or to be a customer there, are wanting that. I mean, my company, we have 80 employees here at Eventide, and people are coming to a place where they know they're going to be developed and they're going to be serving with excellence. And I think some of you have read the book Unreasonable Hospitality, which is an excellent book in this, Will Goodara.

And if you've read the book, you know that it excites people. It's not a chore. It's not something where they're like, "Oh, we have to be developed and be serving our customers. What's that about?" That's actually what people really want. And the Bible actually does speak to this. It says that, "Do you see somebody who's excellent in his craft, he will stand before kings?" That idea that there's an intrinsic beauty and a calling in that. So I don't think you'll find any pushback on that at all. It's been my experience.

Thank you.

Good question, Jerry L. Go ahead, Joe.

Yeah. Can you hear me okay, Brant? Yes. I sure can. Okay. So yeah, I appreciate the talk here this afternoon as well a lot. And yeah, I'm wondering, I think that one of the jobs that we have in business is to make God's laws and God's ways and God's kingdom look attractive, right? And but how do we inspire and motivate people that we do business with? How do we do that really well? How do we make people interested in God and in God's ways?

And this is part of what I think is kind of exciting about working in a coffee shop or in a cafe where you're serving people and you're serving the common good, but you're also, when you nourish somebody's body, you're also nourishing their soul as well. So you pray for the you pray for the that not only is their are their bodies nourished, but also their spirit and their soul is nourished. And because the verse that says that man doesn't live by bread only, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. So you're not going to have these great conversations, even speak of evangelism with every guest that comes through the door, but there's something about what you model.

And so yeah, how do we inspire people to hunger and thirst after God and after righteousness? I don't know. Yeah. So I think this is where I do think that it's helpful to have this concept. It's a very old concept of common good versus the redemptive good and the redemptive good. And I think there's something where because we are all hardwired to perceive what's right and what's wrong, the Ten Commandments, for example, you will find things like that in other cultures and other societies, even from that time period.

People know that they want to be treated well. They respect you for that. It's something that I really don't think that we have to make much of a case for. I think a lot of what leadership looks like at the common good level, and say in a cafe or an investing firm, is actually just the nuts and bolts of organizational health, of the disciplines that are required to keep people engaged and healthy, good cycles of rest, all that, that they know they want, but it's hard to do, right? I mean, it's not easy. I mean, otherwise, every coffee shop would be great. And most businesses we know are mediocre or even poor. And so I don't think the issue for most of us is that we have to kind of try to discover something new or discover something.

It's more that we have to do what we already know to be true and just do it really well and have the kinds of systems and processes that it takes to get that excellence day in and day out so that every cup of coffee or every investment decision or every patient that you see is treated well. And that's not easy to do. But I think that is exactly where leadership is grown. That's exactly where we develop the kinds of qualities that are going to be useful, not just in the common good, but in the redemptive good. And so I think that that really is the challenge. And thus, I think a lot of what we have to do is remind as much as teach because we're calling forth things that are there.

And the best teachers, the best coaches are great reminders. They're ones who, in a winsome way, can bring out those ideals that are already deep within the person.

Yes. Thank you, Finney. Okay. Any other questions for him? We're going to wrap our call up here shortly. It's already a little after 5:00, but pause for a moment. Anyone else?

Well, it's been a blessing to did someone say something? Yeah. I was just going to I was just going to make a final comment. Thanks for everybody for joining. And I do, I love, love, love the idea of us being just truly, truly excellent at our craft. And then, as I said, taking all of that and elevating it even a level further when we bring it to the church. So I hope you take away from the talk how beautiful and valuable business is, whether somebody's a school teacher, a cafe owner, an investor, a physician, a baker, that craft. And that is a very worthy and noble thing to do. And I hope that that comes through.