Video Transcript: "Disciple-Making Companies"

In the previous unit, we explored the question of what is our primary purpose  and business as marketplace Christians, and we identified that our primary  purpose is not just to make a profit. It's not just to be good people of integrity. It's to do those things for sure, but our calling is the same that's been given to all  believers, which is to go into all the world and make disciples of all nations. And  that is the great commission that Jesus gave to His followers. Whether you're  the pastor of a local church, or you're a missionary in a traditional sense, or  you're a missionary in the marketplace, we are all called to make disciples. And  the title of this course, again, is biblical standards for businesses, and  discipleship is really at the heart of what it is to set the standard in business, and that's what we're going to explore in this unit. And specifically, what does it mean to be a disciple making company. And we're going to review just a little bit from  the previous unit, because I really want to make sure that you have a good,  working understanding of this concept of discipleship. Ever you've heard it  throughout, you know, as you've gone to church over the years, or maybe you're brand new as a Christian, but you've heard this word discipleship and make  disciples. What does that actually mean? And Paul simplifies it very clearly for  us in I Corinthians 11:1, when he says, Imitate me as I imitate Christ. This is  what discipleship is all about. It's, you know, it's not even just in the Christian  faith, but if you're the disciple of someone, you are following them. You are  following you're watching their every move, and you are paying attention and  applying the things that you're learning from that person. This is the concept of  discipleship and and so Paul says, don't just imitate me, because if you're just  imitating human beings, you know, we are all flawed. We all have weaknesses.  We are all going to fail. And it's the blind leading the blind, unless you are  following Christ, and that's what Paul is getting at. He's saying, as I imitate  Christ, imitate me. Don't just imitate me, but follow me as I follow Jesus Christ.  And then again, the Great Commission is not just to go make a profit. It's not just even to go make converts. It's not even to go build churches. It's to go into all  the world and make disciples. In the previous unit, we talked about how the  Marketplace is such a great place to do that, because that's where about 85% at least in the US, that's where about 85% of the population, the working  population, spends the majority of their working hours, is in a for profit business  context. And so we are called to go and make disciples. And what is  discipleship. It's setting the standard. So it's being a Christian in business isn't  just about getting trampled on. It's not just about being a doormat or allowing  yourself to get taken advantage. Oh, that person's a Christian. So, you know, I  can kind of be shrewd and take advantage of them, because they're just going  to kind of turn the other cheek. That's not what discipleship is about. It's about  setting the standard. And again, as Paul said, Christ is the standard. So Imitate  me as I imitate Christ. And we can do that on an individual level. We are called  to disciple entire organizations, because ultimately, we are called to disciple 

entire nations. And so you have to make a disciple your company. The culture  has to be in such a way that you are revealing the glory of God in your company. Then you can do that to your industry. And then you can do that share the glory  of God, spread the awareness of the glory of God. As Habakkuk 2:14 says, For  as the waters fill the sea, the Earth, which what is the Earth? Does it include the  marketplace? Of course it does. Will be filled with an awareness of the glory of  God. So the glory of God, what is that? That's the weightiness of God. That  means God matters more than anything in business, God matters more than  business matters in business because God is the One in whom all things and  when we move, live and move and have our being, he's the one that set the  whole world, the whole marketplace, in motion, and so his Will, as we read there in Habakkuk 2:14 is that the waters that the whole earth would be filled with an  awareness of the glory of God, because God is weighty. His glory is glorious,  whether we realize it or not. But he's wanting us to make the world and starting  with. Ourselves to become aware of how much God matters in our personal  lives, in our families, in our businesses. And so what is the glory of God?  Hebrews 1:3, says, The son that's Jesus is the radiance of God's glory and the  exact representation of his being. So you can go back and translate and  interpret Habakkuk 2:14 that God is interested in the awareness of Jesus Christ  being spread throughout the marketplace. And that's what you and I are called  to do as disciple makers, not only of individuals, but of companies, of industries  and of the communities that are impacted by the businesses in which we work  and so again, discipleship is about setting the standard. Setting the standard is  and what is the standard is Jesus, it's the it's the kingdom of God. It's the will  and rule of God. Those are the standards that we are called to set through the  way we conduct ourselves and our businesses in the marketplace. So again, a  disciple making company is one in which the culture results in discipling the  people within the company, because you have to start one to one. You can't just  go to the masses first. And then once you're discipling your company, then the  effect of that is that the company begins to make an impact in the industry and  begins to set the standard in the industry. I'm going to share some examples  about each one of these. What does it look like to set to disciple people in the  company? What does it look like to disciple the people in the industry, the  companies in the industry, and then ultimately, you're able, through your  business and through the culture of disciple making that's happening in your  company and through the industry, that you can also make an impact for the  glory of God in your community. So what's your, your culture, of your company,  of your industry, of your community, is already being shaped by something. And  so let's take an assessment of the culture of your company, of your industry, and the community around your company. How are Christians viewed? Are they  viewed favorably? Are they sort of experiencing persecution, of whether it's  socially, physically? Because I know that we have people that are tuning into this

course all around the world where you are Christians literally are being  persecuted. There is a very real there's the reality is that people are imprisoned.  People are physically beaten for expressing their faith. So we're not we need to  understand that not everybody has it as easy as some of us do when it comes to the way in which we might view ourselves as being persecuted for our faith in  the marketplace. But how are Christians viewed? What are the world views of  the leaders in your company? What are the ethical norms? What gets  celebrated in your company, and how are the customers treated? Are they sort  of treated as transactions where we're just kind of try to get whatever we can get out of them, really, without regard for the whole person. How is it being  perceived by the public? How is your industry? I know I'm a part of an industry  that doesn't exactly have a great reputation with the public, because a lot of  people that have come at have a book publishing company, a lot of authors have been taken advantage of, and so my industry has sort of a stigma attached to it  that I have to overcome as I'm working with authors. And what are the dominant  beliefs concerning politics, religion and other sort of hot button issues? These  are some of the questions that can help you kind of identify what is the  prevailing culture in your company, your industry and your community, again,  your marketplace around you is being discipled by one worldview or another.  It's, it's aligning with one worldview or another. And this is taken from a great  thinker. His name is Yuval Harari. He's not as far as I know. I don't believe he's a Christian, but he wrote a book called Homo Deus of brief history of tomorrow.  And he pointed out some very, very insightful, an insightful model for our  thinking here, as we understand in the in the Western world, in particular, and  really worldwide, how there's been. A shift from theism as a as the most  prevalent worldview in the culture to in the theism is where God is the supreme  authority. So if you want to know what is the right way to conduct yourself in  business, God in the Bible, or whatever your holy book happens to be, would be the supreme authority on the matter. And then, in the from the enlightenment,  we then started to move into humanism, where man is a supreme authority. So  the prevailing worldview becomes, okay, that's nice that we have God as kind of  in the Bible as a reference tool, but really the man and the intellect is the  supreme authority for determining what is the right way to conduct ourselves in  the marketplace and what is business all about. And then what Yuval Harari  points out you probably heard the first two concepts, is that now what we're  moving into is what he refers to as dataism, where the man made algorithm is  the supreme authority. So when chances are the way you found out about this  course is by some sort of search, some sort of online search, and that algorithm, be it Google or Facebook or another social network you you came across this  course because an algorithm that some per some group of people put together  that it led you to this particular search result, and now we're having this, this  interaction here, over over the internet and and so you see this happening in the

dating the dating world, where a lot of people are getting married based on the  algorithm that matched up one spouse with another spouse, they went on some  dates, and the rest is history. And so the more and more as as we go on road  trips with our family, or even just kind of going around town, we're in a place  where we're not familiar. What do we do? We pull up TripAdvisor and we find out what is the best place to eat that fits our criteria, whether it's cheap eats or  something that we're maybe we're in the mood to splurge a little bit more. And  so the algorithm has become such a key part of our life, and that algorithm, you  can just under imagine how much we are being shaped as a culture by the way  in which the data, the big data, is, is determining our decisions. And so these are some different world views that we need to understand. I think dataism is maybe not necessarily a worldview, but the expression of and it just kind of magnifies  other worldviews, depending on whether it was a theistic perspective that went  into building that algorithm or a humanistic, Man centered perspective that went  into creating that algorithm. And so we're going to dive in a little bit more to what  humanism the impact of humanism on the marketplace. There was a article that  came out in the Harvard Business Review back in 1969 the title of that article  was, is business bluffing Ethical by a man named Albert Carr. And he basically  was suggesting that the way that you win in business is not by applying values  and Christian ethics or such as the golden rule, but it's about approaching  business the way you would approach a game of poker, where you're not trying  to help the person across the table from you, the person next to you at the table. You're not trying to help them win. The object of the game is to get all of their  chips into your chip stack. It's not to share your chips. It's not to sort of help  them along the way. It's to keep your cards close to you. Don't let anyone,  anyone else know. Don't give just information asymmetry where you've got the  advantage and that that is the way to approach business. It's very much a just  kind of self centered way to approach business. And he actually, and this is a  statement from Albert Carr. He argued that conscious misstatements  concealment of pertinent facts or exaggeration so you actually want to lie in the  game of poker. You actually want to bluff, because these are all things that are  permissible in the etiquette of poker. And so he's saying that that's the way you  want to approach business. What do you think about that? He found no fall. And  so how far does this go? So there was a CEO who allowed his company to sell  mouthwash made with cheap and possibly harmful, a harmful form of alcohol,  just because it was cheap, just because it was going to help make the company  more profitable. And the CEO testified in Washington, and this is what he said. I  think it really kind of sums up what it sounds like, what it looks like to use  humanism, a man centered, if my own desires, my own gratification, self  preservation, these things are at the center of what it is to approach business  from a humanistic perspective, he says, and he's testifying, we don't make the  laws we obey them. Then why do we have to put up with this holier than thou 

talk about ethics? It's sheer hypocrisy. We're not in business to promote ethics.  And the translation is we're here to promote our own self interest, as long as  we're not breaking the law. And as a Christian, this is not what we're called to  do. We are called to set the standard again. This is what discipleship is, to set  the standard to Jesus, because as Colossians 3:23 says, Whatever you do, do it with all of your heart as working for the Lord, not for men, and certainly not for  yourself, not for your own sort of humanistic, selfish ambition, self interest, but to work as unto the Lord. This is what we're being told in Colossians 3:23 so why is humanism bad for businesses? Well, because it just really, it's not just a matter  of, well, this is against what the Bible says. It's just bad for business. It's really  on a common sense level, which is so much of what the Bible is. Number one,  there's no trust. And we know that the only way in which a marketplace can  survive, and this is why many marketplaces around the world cannot survive,  because there is such a lack of trust, where there's bribery going on, where  there's there, you just can't really trust that the person that you're doing business with has a higher standard than just what's in it. For me, the humanist cannot be true. And I'm using humanists in a very broad sense, really, it's whenever you're  coming into business, just for yourself and not to honor God, not to live up to a  standard that's beyond yourself, that this is what it is to be a humanist in  business, the humanist cannot be trusted because his or her ultimate goal is to  glorify himself, not his creator. And as Christians, going back to Habakkuk 2, we  are called to spread the awareness of the glory of God, which is Jesus, and  we're called to do that in the business world. I mean, the marketplace cannot  survive without trust. There's no contentment, because you're always wanting to  go back to Albert Carr's poker analogy. You're always wanting to take more  chips from the other guy and put it in your own chip stack. And you're always  wanting more of what can never satisfy because in poker, I mean, you don't win  until you get everybody else's chips. So there's also no rest, because you are  always going to be trying to strive. There's there's burnout, there's family  breakdown. Because not only is my own self interest in business more important than other people. It's even more becomes more important than our own  families. It even comes in a strange way, more important than our own physical  health when we're constantly striving. Because the only thing that matters in  business is trying to make a profit, trying to get more, trying to take more from  somebody else, and ultimately, there's hopelessness, because like and this has  been attributed to many different titans of industry who said this, but it said that  Howard Hughes was asked, What does it take to make a man happy? And he  said, just a little bit more, and that is a hopeless way to live. And there's no  relationship with God in a humanistic approach to business, because when our  aim is to worship our own self interests, we know that we're alone in this effort,  and that's a very lonely journey. So now we're going to get into how do we how  do we break this down to where we can escape the rat race of bringing this 

humanist world view, the selfish self centered, using that poker analogy, where  we're trying to take everybody we're always suspicious of other companies, of  other co workers, where we can't just fully put our trust in God, how do we start  to tear down this stronghold? And I love this passage from C S Lewis. He said  we must attack the enemy's line of communication. What we want is not more  little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other  subjects with their Christianity latent. So for CS Lewis, it wasn't just about writing Christian books. He's saying that we need more more books written by  Christians with latent Christianity, which is to say we're not necessarily going  into our companies and just preaching a sermon to them the way that we've  seen it done on Sunday mornings at our churches, but that we're called to  demonstrate a higher standard of conduct in business. You can see this most  easily if you look at it the other way around, our faith is not very likely to be  shaken by any book on Hinduism. But if, whenever we read an elementary book on geology, botany, politics or astronomy, we found that its implications were  Hindu that would shake us. It is not the books written in direct defense of  materialism that make the modern man a materialist. It is the materialistic  assumptions and all the other books and and so let me just stop right there. This is something that's very dangerous about the way in which a lot of Christians are conducting business, because the way that business conduct has been  discipled for them is by other people that may claim to be Christians, but they've  never been discipled in business to understand what are the biblical standards  for business, and so they can easily fall into the trap. Like Paul says, Don't be  conformed to the pattern of this world. Because unless you're being discipled  and making disciples, it is inevitable that you're going to fall into this humanist  trap, whether it's materialism or whatever it else, whatever it else, it is in the in  the business world, continuing on here, in the same way, it is not books on  Christianity that will really trouble him, but he would be troubled if, whenever he  wanted a cheap, popular introduction to some Science, the best work, I mean,  he's talking about the highest standard on the market was always by a Christian. The first step to the reconversion of this country is a series, and he's talking  about the United Kingdom. It's a series produced by Christians who can beat  Penguin in the thinkers library on their own ground. It's Christianity would have  to be latent, not explicit. And of course, it's science, perfectly honest science,  twisted in the interest of apologetics, would be sin and folly. And that CS was  from his book, God and the dock. And so he's talking about, if you really want to  disciple nations, disciple your nation, then it's not necessarily going to be that  you're going to go into your office and preach a sermon like you've heard it on  Sunday morning, but you're going to live your life in such a way that people will,  As Peter said, ask for a reason for the hope that is within you. So always be  ready to give a reason. But in order for that to happen, in order for somebody to  ask you, you have to live your life and set the standard in such a way that 

people actually want what you have. Getting more specific into what does it  mean to be a disciple making company, and when we're talking about bringing  the Christian worldview into business, over against a humanistic, self centered,  man centered worldview, where should business. Set these Christ centered  standards, and this is going to be the remainder of this course, the one area  value making, innovation and competition. We're going to have a unit on that,  organizational, Process Management, profit making and profit management,  marketing and sales, customer care and quality control, accounting and  accountability, human resource management, business law and risk  management. And these are just some of the disciplines. These are all the  disciplines that we're going to be talking about in this course. There are more,  but this is really kind of a broader overview, because what I want you to have  walking away from this course is a working knowledge of how to talk about if  somebody was to ask you, what does the Bible say about business law? I mean, when it comes to lawsuits, is it okay as a Christian to go and sue somebody  that's taken advantage of you, or you perceive that they've taken advantage of  you in marketing and sales, one of the questions I get often is, how do you sell  as a Christian? Because there are many people that are in industries where  they're expected they've got these quotas they have to meet, and they  constantly feel like they're having to sell their soul in order to sell the products  and services at the rate that they're expected to sell them. We're going to talk  about profit and accounting and several other disciplines as well, from a  theological perspective. And so as a review here, what is a disciple making  company? And we're going to get into the specific examples of each of these,  the culture of a disciple making company will result in the discipling of the  people within the company, discipling the industry, and discipling the community  around it, because it's about filling the earth with an awareness of The glory of  God. And he, the writer of Hebrews, tells us that the glory of God is Jesus  Christ. He is the exact representation. He is the radiance of the glory of God.  And so in the next segment, we're going to talk about some specific companies  that demonstrate what it is to do each of those three points that I just mentioned, discipling, the people in the company, discipling, the industry and discipling the  community.