Calling for a Missionary Encounter with Modern Capitalism

It was 2014, two years into my Master of Divinity and I was studying Matthew’s parable of the talents. I heard gentle, fatherly words cut through my mind, “Take responsibility for the ‘talents’ I’ve given you, or you’re burying my talents.” Surprised, I knew God meant the business and wealth of my dad. But I was pursuing a higher, “spiritual” calling. Reflecting on this juxtaposition, I became convinced this word was from the Lord. So, I wrote in my prayer journal, “Yes Lord. But how? Show me.” Tucking the encounter away, I returned to my looming exegesis paper. I could not have imagined a decade later I would be stewarding the weight of my family’s capital.

After seminary, I was ordained in an American Presbyterian denomination and served as a missions’ pastor for a large multi-congregation church. I packaged the highest spiritual endeavour, missions, into religious goods and services for church people – trips, service projects, missionary partners. At best, we provided training wheels for missional discipleship while supporting “professionals” in missions with the margins of church people’s time and money. At worst, we reinforced that God’s mission is a department – the church literally branded the trips and department as “missio Dei.” I was disturbed when people returned from a one-week trip believing that was God’s mission for their lives. Now only 51 more weeks until you join God again on mission … but the church considered this a win.

Growing up and leading in the church, I struggled to name my church angst and wrestled with church. I prayed and reflected on my personal encounter with Jesus at age 13, the years of leadership in youth ministry among my church-exiting millennials, my internship in a Bolivian Christian orphanage in college, my five years in academia pursuing a physics degree, and the evangelistic tutoring ministry I started for Hispanic immigrant youths in a trailer park. My spiritual intuition, reading of Scripture, and insider role told me the Western church was just … off.

Then God’s Word broke through with resounding clarity. I experienced what happens when a people’s cultural story is redeemed (not erased) and reframed under the one true story of Christ. At age 28 and thoroughly churched, I experienced what Lesslie Newbigin calls a “missionary encounter with the gospel.” Have you ever noticed the smell of your own home when you return from a trip? What Newbigin smelled when he returned to the West after forty-plus years as a missionary in India was a Western culture – conservative, liberal and secular – all rooted in the same underlying modern enlightenment story. He named our distortions of the true Christ story. With these key insights, I reread Scripture and discovered an all-encompassing unfolding story of the world with Jesus and his mission at the centre. It reframed my entire view of history and my (Western) life story.

This gospel couldn’t be reconciled with the Western evangelical gospel – a syncretized way to get you and your tribe to heaven, enable materialism, maintain the image of a moralistic high ground and captivate a political voting bloc. Tensions mounted in me. When I was offered the opportunity to church plant, I didn’t trust the Western evangelical complex. Its leaders, metanarrative, institutions, and practices were not designed for what I now wanted to see – God’s people in a genuine missionary encounter with our culture.

I was mowing the lawn listening to my favourite (Christian) rap artists (Lecrae, Flame, Trip Lee, Andy Mineo), and God spoke again, “It’s time.” I went to a God-provisioned mentor in my life. At the same time, a Spirit-prompted, black pastor who didn’t know me approached me and urged me to fast and pray. During those months of prayer, I vividly remembered my encounter with Matthew’s parable four years prior. My entire life story converged on a completely unforeseen calling. I left the church staff to join my dad’s work.

First, I worked in our small family foundation. But a missionary encounter was beginning to happen inside my own family business. With a renewed biblical worldview, I no longer viewed “secular” business as merely instrumental to a higher, “sacred” work. Though I was much more comfortable in the philanthropic and missions space, I began to see how the enlightenment’s secular/sacred, public/private dualism mapped onto business/non-profit, investing/giving and how this divorced capitalism from God’s fuller purposes. But I was initially ambivalent to bring my leadership into the business. I felt intimidated and young. God led me to pray like Solomon, who felt like a child wielding authority (1 Kings 3:7). In the first three very trying years, I reluctantly gained influence within my dad’s business and authority over our capital.

I still had questions about a Christian’s relationship to power. Newbigin challenges the notion that Christians should refuse power gained rightly under God’s providence. He asks if, when the Roman Empire was crumbling and turned to the church for societal leadership, should they have refused?¹ Jesus warns us against a specific demonic entity, a principality ruling over the domain of money until Christ returns – Mammon. I was intimidated by Mammon’s stronghold over the land of capitalism. But I believed, like Tolkien’s rings of power, that wealth was created by God for good and distorted by sin. In Christ we are redeemed, sin defeated, the evil ring powerless – do not be afraid. The good news of Christ’s kingdom must be authenticated in all of culture, and I saw an opportunity. God spoke again with his charge to Joshua, “Be strong and courageous, for you shall cause this people to inherit the land [of capitalism].”

So, I took up my capital authority and the quest to become a steward after the image of Christ. I wanted to develop a redemptive vision for my family’s capital. But wealth is like Frodo’s ring; all feel its corruptive temptation. I experienced what many Christian stewards do – Mammon’s whispers and its agents. Western Christians swim in the West’s cultural story, many unaware of its currents. I meet other stewards who long to find God’s way, but we are often divorced from spiritual community, or ours is captive to the currents. We feel battered by the church’s condemnation of wealth, until they want it, and then we feel used; we feel abandoned by the evangelical retreat from the public domain and/or embarrassed by its Christendom-like advance; or we feel all these at the same time. Or some of us are just not willing to surrender storable, liquid autonomy. All this manifests as privatized, individualistic, autonomous, lonely, authority gathered from the free market and emptied of loving devotion to spiritual community, biblical-apostolic authority and to God’s redemptive purposes in history. Eventually, we may come to believe everyone is after the money, even our own family, and that leaves us in our own little hell.

Jesus is King, but in the Western church, Mammon is often getting its way.

I’ve felt crushed by the pressures at times. But I have trusted a few communities with my story, questions and tensions. I am encouraged to meet others who sincerely desire to live in Christ’s Word, Spirit and love. Over the last few years, the Kirby Laing Centre has formed a small community of capital stewards and scholars. We hope to serve each other and practise capital stewardship in Christ for our times.

At the end of his life, Newbigin claimed that the most urgent task facing the global church is a missionary encounter with Western culture. He saw Western culture as the most powerful global force, with more influence in society than any other; the most pervasive, spreading into all cultures and all of society; the most dangerous foe the church has ever faced, creating a “doctrine for public life” that drives “religion” into an increasingly irrelevant cultural ghetto; the most resistant to the gospel, because it developed defences in its long relationship with Christianity; and finally, he saw the Western church, those best positioned to understand and redeem it, living in an advanced state of syncretism with it, content to live in a “cozy domestication” under it.²