The Business of Loving Your Neighbor
The Business of Loving Your Neighbor
Business gets a bad rap, and it usually hacks me off.
If you’ve been around The Stone Table at all, you’re well aware of my disdain for the distorted caricature of the business world so often pushed and embraced by our culture.
I mean, the villain in the Lego Movie was Lord Business. Hardly subtle.
At its core, business is a God-made mechanism for solving problems, adding value, providing jobs, and pursuing human flourishing. In God’s design, business brings two people together with less and both of them leave with more.
The marketplace in all its fits and forms is meant to be a platform for worshipping God and loving and serving our fellow man. Yes, the Great Commandment is meant to be an outflow of the business world!
A Broken Counterfeit
But we live in a fallen world. And even though business itself is not a product of sin, like all of Creation, it is certainly impacted by it. We live in the “thorns and thistles” of Genesis 3 where even God’s good design is cursed with toil and struggle. We were designed for Eden, but we live in Babylon.
So even my impassioned defense of the marketplace has to admit there are businesspeople and business models that completely live down to every ugly caricature. There are many ways mankind can distort God’s intent in the business world. Here’s one example:
Somewhere along the way, we figured out how to monetize human attention. And once attention became the product, our fallen human instincts began a race to the bottom.
Money flows toward attention.
Conflict captures attention.
Conflict feeds on fear and anger.
So division turns a profit.
The Great Commandment asks, How can I worship God and love and serve my neighbor?
This broken business model asks, How can I draw attention to myself at the expense of my neighbor?
A Different Question Worth Asking
So if that’s the counterfeit, what’s the real thing supposed to look like? How are we stewarding the work God has given us?
Most of us will spend the majority of our waking hours at work, surrounded by people we would probably never encounter otherwise. Customers. Coworkers. Employees. Vendors. Competitors. People with real problems we can help solve and needs we can help meet.
These aren’t secular distractions from our “real” ministry. They are our neighbors.
That makes the marketplace, the business world, the perfect opportunity for us to live out the Great Commandment in our everyday lives—through our work.
Our culture is building an entire economy around getting people to distrust their neighbor and “look at us.” Through Christ, we can redeem that distortion.
What if followers of Jesus built businesses, pursued careers, and engaged their everyday work as a way to love their neighbors and point to Him?
That sounds like a pretty good business model to me.
Erik Cooper
Erik began his career in the business world before spending twelve years in full-time ministry, serving on staff at a large suburban church and later as a church planter in downtown Indianapolis. Today, he serves as the President of a family of business-oriented nonprofit organizations that work together to mobilize the marketplace to make Jesus known in the world. He leads The Stone Table, which equips marketplace believers and invests in global mission initiatives, and Community Reinvestment Foundation, a nonprofit real estate company providing high-quality affordable housing in Indiana and directing its profits to missions through The Stone Table.
