How Christians Should Think About Economics
Dr. Brian Baugus joins Michael to discuss God’s view of our money and how Christians should approach politics in light of economics.
“It is an interesting perspective to grow up with. My dad was a carpenter and a worship pastor, so we were very much in working-class America. Growing up working class in America with a global perspective is unusual. I think that’s unique to church communities. As a young kid, I loved reading missionary biographies and always dreamt of ways I could serve God globally.
I thought that most of the trajectories for that were through traditional missions in the church. But, it had a huge impact on me as I realized all the different vocational opportunities and the unique skills and gifts that can give us opportunities to serve God all over the world.”
“I finished undergrad with a political economics and Mandarin degree and thought I would work in Asia. However, God had other plans for my life. Through the military’ I had the opportunity to get my MBA, and that was the first time I realized the impact of business on global development. It allowed me to travel and serve people, not just show up and build within the church community. It was also being able to show up and build job and life opportunities for people.
With manufacturing moving to China, there were many opportunities to be a Chinese-speaking business person. I worked in buying, and the interesting thing about working in the global supply chain is that they were growing with the adoption of the internet and technology advancements. Working in global supply chain management is an area where there are constantly things that can go wrong. It was fun and exciting, but I wanted time to think strategically about the impact of our buying in the U.S. while moving manufacturing to other places. So I asked, ‘What’s the impact of that on the lives of the people in those nations? How do our buying decisions and consumption choices impact people worldwide?’ I realized then that there are only two ways to get paid for thinking. One is 20 years of experience, and the other is a Ph.D.”
“Studying Proverbs 31 has been a joyous decade-long journey that included masters in Bible study. One thing I realized early in reading that scripture was that the protagonist is a woman, and that’s fine. But it does seem like a lot is going on in this scripture that should be very liberating for all of us in the church that we’re missing.
So that started a 10-year journey with this passage in digging in and saying, ‘Culturally, what does it mean for wisdom to be a woman? And why is wisdom in the marketplace making linen clothing and selling it? Why is wisdom not a priest or a king or any of the roles that David and Solomon would’ve set up for us in that time to understand the height of righteousness.’ So Proverbs is a juxtaposition between a life lived well and a life lived foolishly.
For Christians exploring Proverbs 31, we need to see that Solomon is highlighting wisdom, who always shows up as a woman in the marketplace, doing entrepreneurial work in a way that honors all the people in her life.
That includes her husband and children, but it also includes the poor and needy and her employees. So it shifts it from being focused on just the women in the church to being a passage that can be a framework and a guide to a life lived well for all believers. Scripture is for all of us. All the stories are for everyone.”
“The Hebrew term in this passage translates directly to a valiant woman. And I love the work of a theologian, Dr. Walters, on this passage. He talks about this 21-verse passage as an epic war hymn.
I think we mitigate or minimize the impact of this passage or the impact it can have in terms of how we compete. Business is about competing. It’s about gaining market share. It’s about having access to resources. Business is the modern-day way of growing an economy that, in ancient times, would’ve been grown through war.
Today’s global economy shows that the largest companies are bigger than the smallest nations. So we’ve shifted in a way that we see resources gained globally from a nation kind of mindset to a corporate and business mindset. And that’s where global impact and culture and economies are being built. Of course, nations play a role in it, but businesses are shaping our world.”
“Solomon does have that juxtaposition of the fools and the wise. Lady wisdom herself is out in the streets calling people. The book has many practical examples of what is foolish and who is a fool. There’s a lot in Proverbs 20 that talks about pricing, not cheating people, and how you weigh your scales. So there are a lot more don’ts than do’s.
And then we get to Proverbs 31:10-31, which is a standalone chapter. Again, lady wisdom shows up, and I love the part of her work ethic that’s exemplified; it doesn’t juxtapose it to the fool anymore. She rises when it’s still dark to prepare tasks for her servant.
She’s a servant leader in ensuring her employees understand their jobs. They come to work and have tasks cut out for them for the day. We see it in how her product is both excellent and profitable. It’s not that she’s not feminine; it’s that she’s valiant and feminine.”
“My favorite way of thinking about a work ethic is going back to Deuteronomy. We know the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your mind. A lot of times, we translate it as love God with all your heart, with all your mind, and with all your strength. That is a way of translating the Hebrew word meod. But meod means resources. In a modern-day world, when we think about strength as being more like skill sets and spiritual gifts, how do you love God with those?
Well, this is where our work ethic is. Pauline texts call us to this as well. We are to do everything with excellence as if we’re working unto the Lord. This ties back to what Jesus is calling us to. If we’re thinking about loving God with all of our resources, we love God with our work. The excellence of our work becomes an expression of love. And not only do we get to love God through our work, but we are to love our neighbor as He’s loved us.
Our biggest opportunity to love people is when we show up at work. So if we’re thinking about a work ethic, I think we have to ask ourselves when we show up at work, is it excellent? And are people feeling an expression of God’s love because we showed up there? So as Christians, we should ask that about our work every day.”
“Coming up through the army, you learn a different leadership model. They do teach servant leadership in the military. I spent my entire military career enlisted, but I went through ROTC, trained to be an officer, and shifted gears.
When you come through that, it’s a very different system. There is an understanding of authority. I had a humbling experience in the last five years of coming into team leadership where I wasn’t just working with PhDs; I was working with people at different levels and skill sets.
I realized for the first time that you need to learn leadership techniques. It’s important to understand how to lead different people well. This was one of the things I explored in one of the chapters of my book. The book of Isaiah starts off talking about the king, the Messiah, who’s coming. Then, around chapter 40, it shifts from a king language to servant language. A lot of my perspective in understanding the scripture is knowing that scripture is true. Then there are revelations of scripture that play out in the world around us.
So I want to dig into the truth of scripture, which says, Jesus came not to be served but to serve. And what evidence do we see of this in God’s creation? In the book, I tried to find evidence in business and the world for the truth God states.”
“I know servant leadership is a secular idea. It didn’t come from a faith perspective but demonstrates evidence of what Jesus was teaching. Are you helping your employees and your coworkers to be healed? Healing is an important part of servant leadership. Broken people are never going to perform well without having a journey of healing.
We’ll never be perfectly unbroken, but being healthy is important. So, I was convicted of neglecting my study of leadership. We are responsible for leading people because it’s another area in which God gives us stewardship. He gives us stewardship of people. So, if we have stewardship of people, we will probably have to give an account of how we led those people. And I think it’s foolish not to want to know how we are doing.
Through the center at Wheaton, we’ve worked with six companies and done in-depth studies. Servant leadership is one of the first things we measure within an organization. We measure it at the management level but also survey all employees and how they feel they’re being led. The interesting thing here is managers always desire to be servant leaders, and they tend to think they’re better servant leaders than their employees think they are.”
“The most important question you should be asking yourself is simple. Do you put other people before yourself? Does your manager put you first? Or do they seem like they’re out for themselves?
There’s this great line that my dad always said to me, ‘If you have a ministry, career, or anything in your life and you think you’re doing it for God, but you aren’t willing to lay it down if a better idea comes along, then maybe you aren’t doing it for God. Maybe you’re doing it for yourself.’ I think there are a lot of challenges in that because the world tells us to live in the space of FOMO. The fear is that if somebody else is more anointed or gifted, it somehow will reduce our opportunity to serve God or for meaning or purpose.
As Christians, we have to let go of the scarcity mindset. We have to realize that our God is the God of all creation. And if we have a hoarding mindset, we rob the kingdom of multiplication and growth. So you have to be willing to let go, invest, and lay things down to see God’s kingdom grow. That is a big challenge in our culture because we tend to have an individual property rights mindset. But that’s not how Jesus calls us to love our neighbor.”
“Supply chain management has four components to it. The first is planning: what are you making? Second is how you source it: where will it come from? Third is how you are going to deliver it. The final loop that companies sometimes forget to think about strategically is how do you manage it.
So supply chain management is pretty simple. It just means having the plan to balance supply and demand. And when you put that in a global context, the easiest supply chain is the shortest and the most local. The hardest supply chain to manage is global because you have so many more players along the way that find opportunities to get a bigger cut.
So what you see when you have an unplanned disruption is everybody throughout the supply chain reacting. If they aren’t collaborative, it creates these spikes throughout the supply chain that get incrementally worse as you get further away from the market. Everybody reacts to what they think is going on in the market without talking to each other. That’s what we’ve seen a lot over the last few years. This shows up in Proverbs 31. We see the whole score model.”
“We should laugh confidently at the future and be like the ant prepared for anything. Wisdom also calls us to have an eternal mindset. If we get caught up in a short-term mindset, we can lose sight of the eternal story that we’re a part of. From an economic standpoint, we have a business cycle-based perspective. It’s easy to get caught up in short-term output, short-term data, and short-term numbers that can keep us up at night. Proverbs 31 also mentions that no one in her household fears the seasons. They’re not afraid of the winter.
In the same context, we have seasons in business as well. We have economic seasons, and we need to be prepared. Of course, we need to have the margin to be profitable, but it’s important to realize there will be seasons of harvest, famine, and plenty. We don’t have to be afraid of them because God’s hand and provision are still there.”
“We have seen over the last several decades that the opportunities of globalization have helped more and more people come out of poverty than ever before. So there is something really powerful about a business globalizing and creating opportunities for employment. When a manufacturing plant opens in the U.S., it’s not just a job; it creates an ecosystem of jobs around it. When a company has a global strategy and branches out into an emerging economy, it can provide dignity in work. It is really exciting to me that we are in a world today where we have so much opportunity for positive impact.
When I think globally, the impact opportunities go beyond national borders. They require Christians to think about how our decisions impact others while also stewarding what we have here. There are some challenges in terms of how we work globally regarding trade tensions. It’s going to be more difficult to navigate in the next ten years than it has been in the last 20. It gets me really excited when we think about economic development and creating opportunities for people to come out of poverty and for their families to be educated. There is just so much opportunity to see growth globally if we do everything with a stewardship mindset.”
Hannah Stolze is an academic in the field of global supply chain management and a recent Fulbright scholar to Indonesia. In a previous life, before becoming an academic, mom, and wife, she was a soldier with occupational specialties in psychological operations, ordnance, and broadcast journalism. She is the daughter of missionaries who buried their first child in the mission field and moved home during a civil war. Hannah grew up in a paradox of blue-collar America with a global worldview. This inspired in her an insatiable work ethic and desire for wisdom and to have impact in the world.
Why is Wisdom a Woman in Proverbs? Ask Dr. E
Proverbs 31 Isn’t About a Woman?! Ask Dr. E
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Dr. Brian Baugus joins Michael to discuss God’s view of our money and how Christians should approach politics in light of economics.
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