There is reason to think that business could have a significant role in contributing to the kingdom of God in the economic sphere and beyond. Businesses create jobs and account for the economic resources that governments, non-profits, the education system, civic institutions and countless other societal spheres rely on. Business leaders can create changes in their companies that affect their employees, provide benefits to their customers and clients and positively influence the communities in which they operate. A Christian view of the business sector may consider the ways that a given business might operate as a “faithful presence,” demonstrating in small and focused ways what God’s intentions for the larger economy might be.

James Davison Hunter describes faithful presence as using the resources at your disposal, including those in the marketplace, for the good of those around you:

The practice of faithful presence … generates relationships and institutions that are fundamentally covenantal in character, the ends of which are the fostering of meaning, purpose, truth, beauty, belonging, and fairness – not just for Christians but for everyone.¹

He argues that such a paradigm for engaging with the world is both more in line with traditional Christian practice and more likely to be deeply transformational than either more overt (and often political) attempts to change society, or the separatist attempt to withdraw from the structures of the world.

This model of faithful presence may provide a way to understand the call of God on business endeavours. Just as Christians might engage in faithful presence in their personal lives, the business of a Christian entrepreneur or manager could function as a faithful presence in its own sphere of influence. In the following sections I outline three areas in which entrepreneurial businesses are making a difference in their respective communities due to their owners’ Christian convictions, illustrating what faithful presence, as an expression of faithfulness to God’s calling, might mean in the context of business.

Employees as God’s Image Bearers

Scripture tells us that human beings were made in the image of God. What an extraordinary conferral of dignity and worth! How would it look to see employees in this light? For one, God’s image bearers deserve the dignity of a fair wage. Some argue that, at a minimum, dignified work must yield a living wage. If a job uses all of a worker’s productive capacity, it must pay the worker enough to meet his or her family’s basic needs. A living wage typically incorporates the cost of a family’s likely minimum food, childcare, health insurance, housing, transportation and other basic needs. To pay less than this threatens the worker’s self-sufficiency and renders the work undignified. Fair and sustainable pay is one aspect of respecting the dignity of image-bearing employees.

One business that recognizes the importance of living wage for entry-level employees is Activate Workforce Solutions. AWS is a Denver placement firm that was founded by Helen Hayes and designed to unlock the hidden talents of overlooked and undervalued workers trapped in the cycle of poverty.² AWS coaches clients coming out of substance abuse recovery, homelessness, refugee resettlement, and prison re-entry programmes in Denver, and places them into full-time, full-benefit, living-wage jobs that offer long-term career opportunities. According to Hayes, “We are looking to target living wage as a minimum for our placements … We avoid minimum wage positions because frankly, our placements can’t survive on minimum wages.” Hayes works to educate employers where AWS places employees to let them know about the costs of turnover associated with low wages. “We gave feedback to one employer in particular whose wages we were not able to recruit into … [they] increased their wages and suddenly their [staff] turnover problem disappeared.”³

Another way of recognizing the image-bearing nature of humans is to respect the dignity of each person engaged in work, independently of what each person contributes to the work. Jobs that value people only for what they do, that treat people as exchangeable parts in a larger system rather than humans made in God’s image, are not providing good work. These kinds of jobs discount the worker’s dignity because they discount the importance of who the person is outside of the workplace. Ultimately such reductionistic jobs interfere with and compromise other spheres in which each employee may have obligations including the church, family and larger community outside of work. Pope Benedict framed it this way:

What is meant by the word “decent” in regard to work? It means work that expresses the essential dignity of every man and woman in the context of their particular society … [including] work that leaves enough room for rediscovering one’s roots at a personal, familial and spiritual level.⁴

Edgerton Gear is a great example of a small business that emphasizes the dignity of each person doing the work. Edgerton Gear is a precision machine shop in Edgerton, Wisconsin. The hands-on blue-collar work requires employees to create highly specified gears, that are themselves used in virtually every kind of manufacturing imaginable, from aluminium cans for food, to cardboard boxes, to aeroplane and car parts. But the work of the trades is often overlooked and undervalued in our information age. Many of Edgerton’s employees come to the company after being told that they are not “college material.”

In response to the need in his community, Edgerton’s owner, Dave Hataj, has created a programme for high school students, “Craftsman with Character,” designed to develop the skills and values needed for the next generation of machinists. The focus of the programme is on mentoring young men and women with an emphasis on character and relationship. Students are paired with a mentor in the business, and given the opportunity to explore their life goals as well as their unique gifts and talents. Along the way they learn some of the particular skills necessary to become a machinist. But the primary purpose of the programme is to help these students who have often been discounted in their educational experience to recognize their own self-worth. As Hataj puts it:

We need to know we matter. We need to know that in spite of all of our screw-ups and our failures that we’re still valuable as people. That we can be part of a loving community … What more would we want in life than to know that we matter? And that we are serving the greater good and serving God by just making gears or fixing a leaky toilet or whatever. That is powerful stuff. That is the kingdom of God.⁵

In some cases the very character of the work itself can render a job unfit for God’s image bearers. Obvious examples include the sex industry or drug trafficking. But less obvious cases abound. Many workers experience drudgery and toil in their work, and too often little is done to ameliorate difficult, dangerous or simply boring working conditions. As noted above, all businesses are called to provide employees with opportunities to engage in meaningful and creative work. While work inevitably includes some routine drudgery, it is a rare job that with concerted effort could not be modified to provide a greater sense of meaning and opportunities for more creativity.

Jancoa is a janitorial services company in the Cincinnati region that attends to the importance of meaningful work in an industry that is often thought of as the epitome of drudgery, and where workers are often viewed as extensions of the mop rather than humans with dignity and worth.⁶ Perhaps not surprisingly, the janitorial services industry has an average turnover rate of 400%. In this context, Jancoa’s owners, Tony and Mary Miller, decided to care for their transitional workforce by paying attention to the challenges, dreams and desires of their workers. They created the “Dream Manager” programme with a focus on listening to and understanding the goals of their employees in order to help them work toward accomplishing their hopes and dreams for as long as they were working at Jancoa. The immediate dreams of many of the janitors included learning English, buying a car or a house and getting out of debt. Jancoa has worked with their employees to create a path toward achieving these dreams. Along the way many employees have developed the skills to become managers within the company, and others have found employment beyond it. Jancoa’s turnover rate is now only a quarter of the industry average, and the company is well known for the way it creates opportunity for its workforce. Tony Miller puts it this way: “We were interested in them as human beings, not just people who went into work … I get to be part of a company that gets to make a difference in other people’s life [sic].”⁷

Customers as Neighbours

A second way that entrepreneurial businesses can engage their particular calling is by treating their customers as neighbours. Jesus told the Pharisees that the greatest commandment was to love God, and the second greatest was to love one’s neighbour as oneself. He was questioned on this second point by an expert in the law who asked who should be considered a neighbour. Jesus replied by telling the parable of the good Samaritan, concluding that the one who treated the beaten man kindly was the one who acted as a neighbour (Matt 22:37–40). What might it look like for businesses to be neighbours to their customers? Of course this will be different for various kinds of businesses, and in various settings. But in each case, recognizing the customer as neighbour will lead to a different interaction than one that is simply transactional, premised only on an exchange of money for goods or services.

Don Flow owns and operates Flow Automotive Companies, which consists of 45 franchised auto dealerships located in the Southeastern United States. Flow has been very explicit that he wants his company to view each of the company’s customers “like a neighbour or like a guest in my home.”⁸ Car dealerships may not be the first business that comes to mind when one thinks of an entrepreneurial calling, yet Flow Automotive is unusual. The company’s orientation to customers is premised on the question, “If we have a covenant relationship with this customer, if we are to treat them like a valued friend, what would every interaction look like?”⁹

This question underlies every aspect of practice in the business from how cars are serviced to how they are priced and sold. For example, Flow Automotive will only give one estimate for a car repair. If the repair ends up costing more than the estimate, or if the same problem needs to be fixed a second time, the dealer eats the difference. Prices for new and used vehicles are not subject to negotiation. Flow found that negotiations are most advantageous to customers who are most knowledgeable about cars, and those same customers tend to be more educated and wealthier than less knowledgeable customers. In order to treat all customers as neighbours, prices are established by the dealership and posted on each car or truck. According to Flow, “Your ability to negotiate should not determine the price you pay. It should be the same offer everybody else gets.”¹⁰