Video Transcript: "Examples of Disciple Making Companies"

In the previous video, I talked about what is a disciple making company, and I  talked about it from a philosophical, theological perspective. But in this video, I  want to share some specific examples of companies who are doing it, who are  

demonstrating what it is to be a disciple making company. And again, that's a  company whose culture results in discipling, the individuals within the company  who then the culture results in discipling, the industry in which the company  operates, and then it disciples the community around the company. So it's  impacting all of the stakeholders. It's revealing the glory of God. It's going back  to back in chapter two. It's spreading the awareness of the glory of God to all of  the stakeholders in the business, from the board members to the customers, the employees, the community that are impacted by the business. It's all of the  stakeholders are coming in contact with the character and the will of God  through this disciple making company. So let's start with discipling, the people,  the individuals within the company, the employees, not only the employees, but  the board members, the people that are operating in the company on a on a day to day basis. And one of the examples that I like to go to for this one is a  company called the Polydeck Screen Corporation, and their CEO is Peter  Freissle. And he does a lot of speaking on the subject of how to serve God  through your business. And a lot of that is expressed in the book the business  card, which there's the reference there at the bottom of this slide, recommend  going to get a hold of it, because that's where you can learn a lot of the things  that I'm sharing right here on this slide, and but you get it in much more detail  and much more eloquently, eloquently that I could put it here in this course, but,  but they actually are very intentional about sharing the love and message of  Jesus through their company and and so one of the ways that they express this  aspect of discipling the people within the company is that they help their  Employees who accept Christ, and they don't, you know, beat people over the  head with a Bible, or make it mandatory that you be a Christian to work here, or  that if you don't accept Christ, we're going to fire you, and all of that kind of stuff, which is illegal, by the way, but for those employees that do accept Christ,  because they're Not afraid from the leaders to the other employees that do that  are the brothers and sisters in Christ. They're not ashamed to share their faith  within the company, and so for those who do accept Christ as employees within  the company, they're then provided with an orientation about the Christian faith.  They're given a Bible, and they actually have corporate chaplains who serve in  this role of providing those orientations, being the one to provide that Bible and  kind of provide that introduction, that Christianity, 101, to these new believers,  even within the company, and then they'll help them, then get connected with  the local church, which is pretty awesome. So it's not about event, just about  evangelism when it comes to discipling, because again, you know, you can get  that from an evangelistic meeting, you can go to church, and there's, I hope  there's, an altar call on a regular basis where people can receive an invitation to 

accept Christ as their personal Savior, maybe for the very first time. But the  powerful thing about the business world is it's day in, day out. It's relational, it's  discipleship. They're seeing the lifestyle of Christians in their workplace, and so  that's where it comes in, observing and modeling the Christ like attitudes and  behaviors demonstrated by their coworkers. This is such a powerful component  of how they're able to reveal the character of Jesus to the people that work  within this company. And then they have a program called the I caught you  caring program, where the employees are given the opportunity to nominate, to  recognize other people in the company who, during a set period of time, they  saw their employees caring. They saw their In other words, they saw them living  out the values and the virtues that have been so clearly communicated by the  leaders and at all levels of the organization, which are all based on Christian,  Christ centered principles, and they actually have t shirts that they give out to  the people who win that I Caught you caring Award, which, again, it's a Peer,  peer given award. And so Polydeck employees also grow as disciples of Jesus  by discovering and using their God given talents daily in their workplaces. And  that's the other powerful thing about discipleship in the workplace is that you're  you're able to actually discover how your work matters to God, that your work  matters to God. And you have people in this company that have this  understanding that look to serve God. That doesn't mean you need to just go to  seminary or go start a church or something like that, but that you have gifts and  abilities that God has given to you to use right here in your workplace to make  an impact for the kingdom of God. And again, you can learn much, much more  about the programs that they have going on, and the way that they are  representing Jesus and spreading the message of Jesus throughout the  company, and now they're discipling other companies to show them how they  can implement some of the things that you want to like the I Caught you caring  program. They have an amazing benevolence program, where the employees  will when they see financial needs within among the employees in the in the  company, that they will then take up collections, whether it's to help repair a  broken down vehicle, or it's to they've got, they just, they just had a death in the  family, and so now they need help with the funeral expenses, and that's just a  way that the employees at Polydeck screen Corporation care for each other  because of the Christ centered values that have been instilled in the culture of  the company. And now I'll share an example of what it is to disciple an entire  industry. So again we go. The calling is to make disciples of entire nations. And  in order, in order to disciple an entire nation, you have to make disciples of every level of organization in between within that nation, and one of those levels of  organization is the industry in which your company operates. And I've already  shared just a little bit about John Wanamaker and in the previous segment about spiritual gifts and how John Wanamaker used his spiritual gift of hospitality to  transform the marketplace. But just some of this is going to be review, but I want

to also put it in the context of how he discipled his entire industry. He's known as the father of modern advertising, and he invented the department store as we  know it today. And so his store was called Wanamaker's in Philadelphia,  Pennsylvania. And again, flowing from his spiritual gift of hospitality, he wanted  to create a store that was so complete and welcoming and inviting that people  just would not want to leave, because in those days, the thought of a store, you  didn't go to a store to hang out and relax and kick your feet up and and, you  know, it was kind of coming in transaction, let's, let's get it done. You know,  maybe you have a conversation with the clerk, but you're pretty much on your  way. But what Wanamaker did that was so remarkable was that this is, if you've  ever been to the Macy's in New York City, this is probably the closest thing that  I've seen to anything like what I've read about this. This there still is crystal tea  room that it was something like eight floors. There was, there was a train that  would go around the kids floor, where the kids could just enjoy watching that  train go round and round. They had just this beautiful ballroom called the crystal  tea room. You can go even today, and they have weddings and receptions and  so on. And they're just this beautiful room. They had doctors offices. The world's  largest playable pipe organ was in the department store. And so it really was a  tourist attraction. And and, and people would come in and, and John  Wanamaker would would just kind of walk around with the customers and just  kind of talk about life. Maybe he'd give them a snack, and they just kind of walk  and talk together. But, but it was this just a totally unconventional. When,  certainly not all department stores are like that that are considered department  stores or just sort of big box maybe have this reputation of being impersonal, but that certainly was not the case with John Wanamaker store. Wanamaker's and  and so he invented the department store, which was a revolution in the retail  industry in and of itself. And then he invented the price tag, because he didn't in  those days, people would just come in and they would have to haggle with the  with the clerk and try to the court the store would try to get as much money out  of that person as they could for whatever the product was or the service was,  and he didn't want people to have to worry about whether or not they were  getting a good deal when they came into the store. So he just put the put the  price tag right there on the product. And this just was a incredible innovation for  the retail economy, the retail industry. And now, of course, it's quite  commonplace for for stores to put price tags. You know, I know that's not the  case in every part of the world, but at least here in the US, we pretty much have  price tags on everything, and customers are very well informed. If you don't  know how much something ought to cost, then you can just go on to the internet and find that out. I think you can pretty much do that anywhere where there's  where there's the internet connection, but, but this was very new at the time, and certainly did have a disciple making standard setting effect. Again, we're using  disciple making and standard setting interchangeably here throughout the court 

the rest of the course. You know, what does the Bible have to say about this?  Well, the Bible says the false weight is an abomination to the Lord, and we'll get  into this later, but to suffice it to say that God isn't is not interested, and he really  gets upset when people try to take advantage of people by withholding  information so that they can make more money off of those people. He wants  people to be informed. He wants there to be fairness and equity in the in the  situation. And so John Wanamaker, the father of modern advertising, he was the one who said famously that half of my advertising budget is wasted. I just don't  know which half, because he was experimenting with a lot of different types of if  you've heard the term guerrilla marketing, he was doing some of the earliest  forms of guerrilla marketing. He was the first to take out a full page ad in a  newspaper, the first to take out a half page ad in a newspaper. And you really  get a sense for his his explicit passion for the Lord, when, when you, when you  read about his evangelistic fervor, how he would write notes to everyone in his  Sunday school class and just share his passion and his zeal and the sense of  urgency that Christians ought to have for sharing the gospel with their loved  ones and and another example that we see is when the evangelist DL Moody  came to town there in Philadelphia and wanted to have an evangelistic Meeting  in in the city, John Wanamaker said, Well, you can come and have it in my store. In fact, I will give you 300 ushers from my own paid staff to help out with the  event to make it a success. So John Wanamaker is just really one of those  heroes of the Christian faith that we don't often hear about typically, when we  hear about the heroes of the Christian faith, we might hear about the Mother  Teresa's, the Billy Grahams, the DL Moodys. Oftentimes, these are people that  are in pulpit ministry, but we don't typically think of the business people who  have been the the stalwarts of the of the Christian faith, and we really need to  hold up more of those examples so that especially our young people can have  examples to aspire to of how we can honor God in the business world. Because  I think you're getting a sense for my passion, and specifically we talked about in  a previous unit about how we're going to transform the culture and truly disciple  nations. The marketplace is the key battleground for that to happen. And the  third. Example here, and so we've talked about how, in just a quick review, a  disciple making company, the culture of that company, will result in discipling the people within the company, as we saw with Polydeck, it'll result in discipling the  industry, as we saw with John Wanamaker's retail store, Wanamaker's, and then discipling an entire community. And so one that I wanna share is a company  called Cohen woodworking. This Phil Cohen, the founder of this company, is a  friend of mine. He's a client of mine, but he was the SBA Entrepreneur of the  Year. If you're not familiar with SBA, that's a Small Business Administration here  in the United States. And he won that award the top Entrepreneur of the Year for the state of Missouri, and was recognized at the White House and so on. But  Inc, 5000 fastest growing company. One of the remarkable things about Cohen 

woodworking, and the way in which they make these incredible and and what he says, their passion is to build palaces for their customers with that heart of  Solomon, that that heart of excellence, to build something truly remarkable and  beautiful and with excellence. That's what they're after, and that's why he won  this award. That's why they've been one of the fastest growing cabinet  manufacturers. I believe in 2012 they were the fastest growing cabinet  manufacturer in the United States, but 60% of Cohen woodworking's employees are ex convicts and or drug addicts. And I've been to this factory, it's a  remarkable thing to meet the employees there whose lives have been restored.  And like they say, we're not just here to build cabinets, we're here to build lives  and and build the families of these employees. Because, you know, the the  employees, their families, they'll come up and just tell Phil that we basically, we  have a new daddy in our house. We have a new husband in our house, because their lives have been transformed the result of being discipled within the  company and and, and it's to the point where, where, where journalists and  reporters and TV producers will contact Phil and say, Hey, we want to do a story  there at your place. We want you to tell us about your program. And and they  think that this is sort of like a non profit, just do gooder organization where  they're not interested in making money, they're just trying to, you know, give  second chance employment and so on. They are certainly doing that second  chance employment, in some cases, third, fourth, fifth chance employment, but  that's they're a legitimate business again. Inc, 500 Inc, 5000 companies.  Company. You know, these are the fastest growing companies and and so he  says, there's no program here. We're just building we're building lives. We're not just building cabinets and and it is fascinating. Go and watch this video where  you can go inside the company with Phil there the there's been a number of  news stories that have been done about the company, but, but why do I say  they're discipling an entire community? Because there have been instances  where the judge will lower the sentence for a criminal because the judge knows  that the employee is employed at Cohen woodworking. That is the level of  impact and the level of credibility that Cohen Woodworking is having on their  community there in St James, Missouri, when they the law enforcement has  such a high regard for the the impact, and they are very intentional about how  they're serving these employees, and how they're helping to transform their  lives, and how they're not only learning a trade, in many cases, they already had the trade, they just kind of Got into some a lot of problems in their lives, and just  kind of threw things away. But they're getting their lives restored, but they're also learning leadership, and in some of the I mean, when you got 60% of the  employees who are ex convicts former drug, drug addicts, I'm not just talking  about the ones out in the factory for I'm talking about the leaders of the  company, and that's Phil himself, was a former drug addict, and that's pretty  much at all levels of the organization. It's just an incredible story, and it's a 

testament to how a company can transform. Them, not only individual lives, but  their families and the communities around them, to where the law enforcement  and the judges will say, if we could only get more people to come and work at  your company, how much better would our community be? So it's again, it's  about discipling individuals, industries and entire communities, see in the next  session