What is Christian Business?
Interview with John TerrillJohn Terrill is Director for Professional School Ministries and Co-Director of the Open for Business track at Urbana 06. Urbana.org’s Paul Grant sat down with him to talk business, ethics and the spiritual challenges of business school
What is Christian Business?
That’s a good question. Many business leaders and active businesspeople in the church would readily talk about Christian business, and often it is reduced to issues of personal piety or evangelism in the marketplace. Certainly as Christians we are called to that; those are foundational pieces of what it means to be a person of Christian character and a person who takes seriously the claims of Christ in all of life, including business, but it’s much more than that.
Christian business is about seeing opportunities in the world to bring healing, redemption and transformation. There are lots of institutions that are broken and Christians in business have the opportunity to enter into those institutions and reflect on how those institutions and businesses might better reflect the character of God. That’s part of it.
But there’s another significant component—creation. In some respects business really mirrors the creational aspects of God’s character. When you think about other disciplines like healthcare—many of those disciplines emphasize more on the redemption piece, like healing what is broken. But there is a component of business, and particular entrepreneurial business that is creational in its orientation. We don’t create ex nihilo, like God does, but we do create, and business is one of those venues that really allows for that.
There are elements of business that really allow us to create, and to do it in a way that thinks holistically about people and systems. We don’t just think about economic progress. We think about bringing social and spiritual impact as well.
Christian business in its broadest sense is transformational. It looks at sociological and economic issues. It’s right and good for businesses to think about economic viability and profit, but Christian businesses ought to go beyond that. They ought to think about social and spiritual components as well.
How does Business as Mission (BAM) redefine efficiency?
A few years ago I slugged through a 600 or 700-page biography of Frederick Winslow Taylor, who was the father of scientific management, which was really the precursor to the assembly line and the whole efficiency movement.
Today work in many aspects is organized according to principles of scientific management. When you walk into a McDonald’s, everything is systematized. It ensures quality, but it can in many settings—and I’m not saying this is true at McDonald’s—reduce work to discrete little tasks that don’t really empower or draw on the creativity of the workers.
Thinking about Frederick Winslow Taylor back at the turn of the 20th century, when he was at his full stride, and you think about the reduction of work to tasks that didn’t require much creative thought or input from workers. There are remnants of that in the way work is organized today. It’s really counter to the way Christians ought to think about efficiency, particularly in the BAM space. As a Christian in business, it’s ok to think about efficiency. Efficiency can be a great reflection of stewardship. There are all kinds of opportunities for quality and cost-saving which come out of the efficiency movement. But it can be carried to an extreme, where we begin to devalue people and work tasks begin to limit their creativity and freedom in their work. One important element of the efficiency movement that we have to consider is the impact on the worker. How does the way we’re organizing work actually influence the way the worker experiences work. Businesspeople have a significant opportunity to steward their employees and their jobs they are responsible for.
The whole outsourcing question is interesting here. A lot of outsourcing is motivated on cost efficiency. We can often do it just as well domestically—maybe better—but that’s often not the case. There is significant economic benefit to outsourcing jobs, which is a decision that is motivated at least in large part by efficiency. But we have to be careful: that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It can mean we’re shifting opportunities to other cultures and people groups.
It also means we’re challenging ourselves internally to step up and begin to find new creative ways to organize and create jobs in our own economy. It’s a way to create internal pressure and internal accountability to be sure that we’re continuing to educate and create skills for the folks who are here domestically. So there is this competitive component that outsourcing drives that keeps us sharp, and keeps us moving forward as well.
What spiritual challenges face North American business students?
There are many spiritual elements to this whole efficiency. When we become more efficient, it often doesn’t allow us time for reflection. For example, say we’re creating a product or service here in Madison, Wisconsin. We work on it all day long, and then we shift it to India, and they work all night, and then we pick up on their work the next morning. There’s not a lot of built-in opportunity for reflection and review.
There are these components here, as business processes speed up, and as we shift work around the world, that are organizational concerns, but also personal concerns. There’s never any down-time.
Business students are often activists. They’re highly pragmatic, action-oriented individuals—by self-selection. Business schools attract these kinds of individuals. There are wonderful gifts that come with that. But it’s really important to build in this element of spiritual reflection that isn’t necessarily part of the typical business curriculum—and I don’t think is part of the typical business paradigm once they’re out working in the business community.
Let me give an example. Last week I was in a meeting with a bunch of CEOs. We were talking about the Business as Mission movement, and there was some conversation about what an opportunity we have in this movement, to tap into secular dollars to propel the BAM movement. There were a lot of nods in the room. I was up presenting at the time, and this was a question that came from the floor. I have some real concerns about tapping into secular humanitarian programs—donor dollars and government programs. I certainly think there are opportunities, but it doesn’t feel to me to be a slam dunk.
I thought about a passage where Jesus rebukes some people. He basically says that it’s not what goes into you that defiles you, but what comes out. As far as secular dollars are concerned, I don’t think there’s anything necessarily evil about it if those dollars, if the purposes behind them are congruent with the mission we are trying to achieve. But so often there is this blurring of vision in mission that can happen in a situation like that. You can get off-task, or begin to leave off the spiritual transformation that we would love to see through Business as Mission.
It is a question that requires a lot of theological reflection. But oftentimes, because the business community moves so fast, and is measured on a daily, weekly, quarterly basis, it’s hard to build in that time for reflection. Businesspeople and business students are vulnerable to that. It’s something I would like to see deepen in the business community. Quite honestly, I’m a part of that community. That’s my background, and I have the same vulnerabilities.
Then there is the whole issue of community. Again, businesspeople tend to be activists. I have a question, particularly in this Business as Mission space: how do we move out in community? How do we link up with modality- and sodality movements, or church- and para-church movements? There is a privatism that drives toward results, but I would love to see this community linked together in meaningful ways.
Does Business as Mission require a theoretical approach to business, different from the theoretical approach taught in an average MBA program?
Business as Mission is about excellence in business. Business schools certainly emphasize that. So at the Open For Business track at Urbana 06 we have a number of seminars focused on some of the subdisciplines within business. So: how does God think about finance and accounting systems? How does God think about human resources systems? Now we can never fully know the mind of God, but we know the scriptures, and we can know his character. How does his character, how do the scriptures inform the way we approach these disciplines?
Often the end result of that analysis and theological reflection is in parity with some of the best practices taught in secular business programs. There is a real alignment that often takes place in these disciplines.
I think where it’s different is around the ultimate goals and orientation for business. Some people define business primarily around returning wealth to shareholders. I think that business rightly motivated thinks about a broader set of audiences. It thinks employees. It thinks about customers. It thinks about suppliers. It thinks about shareholders and community participants. Profit is not a bad thing. It’s a good thing; it’s like blood: it allows you to exist. But it’s not the reason you exist. Don Flow, who owns a successful chain of car dealerships across the Southeast US, makes this point: as Christians in business, we have to have a much broader sense of the audiences we seek to serve, and the reasons we exist. That would be a differentiating point that would separate Christians in business from some of the thought leaders in the secular business community and academy.
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
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