God’s plan for business is much more than making a profit so that donations can be made to churches and missions to help them carry on the work of the Gospel. That was the central point made by both Bill Pollard, chairman emeritus of the ServiceMaster Company, and Jeff Van Duzer, Dean of the School of Business and Economics at Seattle Pacific University, as they spoke at the Open for Business Track at Urbana 06, InterVarsity’s Student Missions Convention. “For some of us, the world of business has become our call,” said Pollard. “It’s where the lost and needy are spending most of their waking hours.”
Van Duzer added that God’s business plan goes beyond evangelizing co-workers or using a business model to gain access to societies that are closed to Christian missionaries, two common models in the Christian world. He suggested that if God were to write a business plan for each business, it would go beyond increasing the wealth of the owners or shareholders. He suggested that scripture shows businesses have two God-ordained purposes:
- Produce goods and services that will enable the community to flourish.
- Create jobs that enable individuals to express their God-given identity through meaningful and creative work.
The way a business is operated is a concern to God. “When we excel at what we do, whatever that may be, we can live and share our faith in a way that cannot be ignored or contained,” said Pollard. “However, when we proclaim our faith and do not live it, we sow seeds of cynicism and rejection.”
Profit is important for any kind of business. But Van Duzer said that in God’s economy “profit is the means you need to attract the capital to enable the business to do what it’s meant to do, which is to serve.” Thus not-for-profits and profitmaking organizations have the same goal of service but different means to that goal. In recent years a growing number of corporations have come to the realization that there’s more to business than the bottom line. “The great companies never focus on their profit, they focus on their mission,” he concluded.
Audio of presentations by Bill Pollard, Jeff Van Duzer, and others, can be found on the Open for Business track at the Urbana 06 website. Bill Pollard’s talk is this week’s InterVarsity podcast. More information on the podcast can be found on InterVarsity’s audio resources page. Additional business-related resources can be found on InterVarsity’s Ministry in Daily Life webpage.
