1: In 2009, James Murdoch, son of News Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch, told an audience at the Edinburgh Television Festival that the “only reliable and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit,” Tim Keller writes in his book Every Good Endeavor.
Three years later, following the phone-hacking scandal at News Corp.’s UK newspaper unit, his sister Elisabeth Murdoch told the same audience her brother had “left something out,” declaring “profit without purpose is a recipe for disaster.”
She went on to say, “Personally, I believe one of the biggest lessons of the past year has been the need for any organization to discuss, affirm and institutionalize a rigorous set of values based on an explicit statement of purpose.”
As human beings, we all have a worldview. A story that gives our lives meaning. Our worldview provides us with answers to these three questions:
o How are things supposed to be?
o What is the main problem with things as they are?
o What is the solution, and how can it be realized?
One of the primary areas where “we live out the drama of our personal and social narratives is in our daily work,” Tim writes.
“Our worldview places our work in the context of a history, a cause, a quest, and a set of protagonists and antagonists, and in so doing it frames the strategy of our work at a high level,” he notes.
“At a day-to-day level, our worldview will shape our individual interactions and decisions.”
2: Christians believe the meaning of life is found in loving God and loving our neighbor.
How does this worldview impact work?
Tim asks: Should Christian businessmen and women only work for companies that make Christian-themed products and services for Christian customers?
No, he says.
“So when we say that Christians work from a gospel worldview,” he writes, “it does not mean that they are constantly speaking about Christian teaching in their work.
“Yes, some Christians in those fields would sometimes do well to do those things, but it is a mistake to think that the Christian worldview is operating only when we are doing such overtly Christian activities.”
Rather, he suggests the Christian gospel is like “a set of glasses through which we ‘look’ at everything else in the world.”
The Bible is not an all-inclusive handbook for starting and managing a business. It does, however, “speak to an enormous range of cultural, political, economic, and ethical issues that are very much part of how we all live,” Tim observes.
3: Every type of work is influenced by different worldviews and their attendant “idols”—something that is worshipped or revered as a deity or as a substitute for the one true God.
“What are some of the idols of business, for example?” Tim asks.
Answer: Money and power.
That said, our specific idols are not always “bad” things in and of themselves. Often, an idol is a “good” thing we make into an “ultimate” thing.
“Corporate profits and influence, stewarded wisely, are a healthy means to a good end,” Tim writes. “They are vital to creating new products to serve customers, giving an adequate return to investors for the use of their money, and paying employees well for their work.”
The myriad of business scandals in recent decades—including the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the Enron bankruptcy, the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme, the Wells Fargo fake accounts debacle, and the Theranos fraud—illustrate what can happen when money and power become the ultimate thing.
The gospel tells us the fall results in brokenness in nature and in people. Indeed, the whole world is fallen.
“The real ‘story’ of the gospel is the evidence of redemption and renewal,” Tim writes. “The whole world is going to be redeemed. Jesus is going to redeem spirit and body, reason and emotion, people and nature. There is no part of reality for which there is no hope.”
So, “the Christian worker or business leader who has experienced God’s grace—who knows ‘You are not your own; you were bought at a price’ (1 Corinthians 6:19–20),” Tim writes, “is free to honor God, love neighbors, and serve the common good through work.”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: What is my worldview? What is the story that gives my life meaning? How do I believe things are supposed to be? What is the main problem with things as they are? What is the solution, and how can it be realized?
Action: Journal about my answers to the questions above.
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