I’ve seen well-meaning Christians thinking they were honoring God by trying to build a business on biblical principles when all they were doing was making their employees uncomfortable and turning them away from the Lord.
This is most often the result of building a business based on misconceptions. Sometimes its the result of not understanding foundational concepts about the kingdom of God and the purpose of business in the context of the Kingdom.
What follows is a thirty-thousand foot view of how to build a business on biblical principles, a drive-by shooting of do’s and don’ts, sprinkled with a few real life stores from my experience as a business owner, former pastor, and legal advisor to employees and businesses.
The misconceptions
Before you can build a new foundation, you need break up the old one. Exposing misconceptions is the cognitive equivalent of breaking up a faulty foundation. There are a number of common misconceptions when it comes to trying to build a business on biblical principles.
That your employees are a “family”
This is perhaps the most common misconception I hear from Christian business owners. It comes from a good impulse, but the idea your employees are “family” is misguided, and suggesting to your employees they are “a family” is misleading.
It’s misguided because while there is such a thing as a biological family and spiritual family, the Bible does not characterize the relationship of employer/employee as a family. In short, it’s not Biblical.
It’s also misleading to your employees. You don’t terminate family members because they don’t live up to your expectations, but that is entirely proper in running a business. How do you think an employee you were trying to lead to the Lord and told was family will feel about Christianity after you terminate her?
That you can work when you want
Ask anyone who has owned their own business about this misconception, and you will draw a laugh every time. If you want the freedom to work when you want, don’t go into business for yourself. You will fail.
Owning your own business is for only the hardest workers. Running a business successfully takes more time than working for someone else, and it requires more self-discipline. The irony is that free spirits are the type who want to own their own businesses but they are the worst equipped to do so.
That your business is a ministry
Your business is not a ministry. It does not exist so you can require Bible-studies or manager-led prayer of your employees. While the impulse is honorable, it is misguided and based on a misunderstanding of how the kingdom of God works.
Your business exists in the kingdom of God to offer the product or service it does as a business. My law firm’s purpose in the kingdom of God was to be an instrument of justice and provide good employment law counsel to our clients. We honored God by doing what we were called to do as a business.
When the world functions as God intends, businesses provide excellent products and services to its customers, meeting needs those businesses were created to meet.
I’ve prayed with clients who wanted to be born-again, and I’ve counseled and prayed for employees who have come to me for advice, but that is because I am a Christian not because my business was a ministry.
The principles
Stewardship
Biblical stewardship is the concept that everything we have belongs to God and that we are managers or stewards of those things. See Psalm 24:1 (“The earth is the Lord’s, an all it contains, the world and those who dwell in it.”). This means we must answer to God for how we manage our business.
As stewards of people, places, and things which ultimately belong to HIm, He expects us to be competent and diligent so we can show a return on what He has entrusted to us. See Matthew 25:14-30. Laziness is unacceptable. Matthew 25:26.
Excellence
Excellence is a non-negotiable for any Christian business. If we are ambassadors for Christ, we must properly represent who He is to the world. And When Jesus taught, people said of Him, “No one has ever spoken like Him . . .” John 7:46.When Jesus changed water into wine, He made excellent wine. John 2:1-11. People said of Jesus, “Behold, He does all things well.” Mark 7:37. We are to proclaim the excellencies of our God (I Peter 2:9) through the work product of our business.
Excellence is also a non-negotiable because of the role of Christian business in the context of the Kingdom. The purpose of the kingdom of God is to reconcile all creation to the Creator. See Ephesians 1:9-10. For the earth, this means bringing earthly territory under the reign of King Jesus so that it functions the way God intended it to function. That happens when businesses provide excellent products and services to meet needs the business was created to meet.
Integrity
“A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is His delight.” Proverbs 11:1. This Scripture is primarily applicable to commercial transactions. It speaks against a lack of integrity in dealing with one’s customers, but would apply equally to dealing with one’s competitors, and regulators.
Few things demonstrate a trust in the Lord more than integrity. Refusing expedient short cuts, sharp practices, and legally dubious conduct says to the world that one’s trust is in God, not in the strength of their own arm. The former brings a blessing, while the latter brings a curse. See Jeremiah 17:5. Dishonesty, deceit, and fraud in the running of a business is tantamount to treason in the kingdom of God because it is conduct in obedience to the enemy of the Kingdom and in rebellion to the King. Enough said.
Thrift
I like the word thrift because it captures so much of what is biblical when it comes to handling money, and much of running a business is about handling money. Thrift includes saving rather than spending excessively (Proverbs 21:20), avoiding waste (John 6:12), living within one’s means (Luke 4:11-13), and making prudent, value-conscious choices (Proverbs 6:6-8; Luke 14:28).
But here’s the trade-off: your business may grow slower than those not based on Christian principles. See Proverbs 13:11. Businesses built on debt pop up quickly but they are more susceptible to changing economic conditions over which no one business owner has control.
Slow and steady growth is a common characteristic of things built by God. The kingdom of God is Exhibit A. Psalm 1 paints an instructive picture of this kind of growth: a tree firmly planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season. See Psalm 1. Deep roots take time but a tree firmly planted is much less susceptible to being uprooted by the wind and rain.
Generosity
While the Bible does not teach that your employees are family, it does say something about how you should treat your employees. Leviticus 19:13 says that the wages of a hired man should not remain with you overnight.
As a result, I question modern American pay practices which require employees to sometimes work as much as a month before being paid. To avoid this, when I had my own law firm, for years I paid my salaried employees a week in advance, and I paid my hourly employees weekly, which is about as frequently as one can pay given tax withholding and other obligations.
I also tried to set generous goals for how much I wanted my employees to earn annually, and I would bonus them at the end of the year to get them to those amounts. I wanted to be generous because I had hired them onto Kingdom territory, and they were nesting in the branches of the Kingdom. See Matthew 13:31-32. Even if they were not Christians, I wanted them to experience the blessings of the kingdom of God.
So, there you have it: an overview of biblical principles on which to build a business. I hope you have found it helpful. GS
