Welcome back to the Christianity and Business Podcast, an initiative of the R.G. W. Dunham College of Business at Houston Baptist University. I'm your host, Darren Shear, and this is the show that helps Christian business leaders to integrate biblical values into business. On this episode, we're joined by Mike Ziggorelli. Mike is a professor of leadership and strategy at Messiah College and former dean of the Regent University School of Business. That's actually my alma matter. I attended uh Divinity School there. Didn't get to experience the business uh school as much, but um I know he made a great impact while he was there. His research in the fields of management, practical theology, and sports ministry has appeared in a number of scholarly journals and magazines, and he's the author of 12 books, including one we're going to really hone in on today, called Christian Owned Companies. Another book's uh influencing like Jesus, the Messiah Method, and Management by Proverbs. And uh his work has been translated into several languages. He's also the creator of assessyourself.org, assess hyphenyourself.org. And Christianity nine to five. Uh you can go to Christianity number nine uh spillout25.org. And um and just got great resources there for a ton of video content. He's doing a great job of producing that and serves as a management consultant for churches and schools. Mike, thanks for joining us.
SPEAKER_01Well, it's wonderful to be on, Darren. Thanks for having me on.
SPEAKER_02Well, this is an incredible research project you have uh undertaken and and completed 50 companies, 50 Christian-owned companies. You know, typically when somebody asks, what's an example of a Christian-owned company? Some of the, as you said, the usual suspects like Chick-fil-A, Hobby Lobby, they uh they tend to come to the top of mind, but there are many others. And I I think as a business owner myself, and and for those listening, all of us marketplace Christians, we need these examples. We need these heroes to look up to and these examples of of how their leaders are living out their faith and really uh cultivating these Christ-centered cultures, corporate cultures. So this is a question, Mike, that you uh you love to ask your students and and are sounds like frequently uh you get kind of that deer in the headlights response when you ask it. But practically speaking, what does it look like when a follower of Christ runs a business?
SPEAKER_01Well, well, I I guess I spent 70,000 words answering that question uh in this book. So uh try to uh try to boil this down to um sound bites or at least something that is if it's on a podcast here. Let me just start by saying that the goal of the project was really less to provide inspirational examples and more just to try to understand that question from an academic and to some extent practical standpoint. There are a number of resources out there, dozens, maybe even hundreds of resources out there on faith at work and faith in leadership and business and management. But there isn't much, despite that, there doesn't seem to be much theory. I mean, what is the really the real answer to this question? How do believers run their businesses? You could find a lot of individual books on that from individual companies or CEOs, and you can find um plenty of biblical exegesis on that. But what I was after here was to just take the standard social science methodology of looking across organizations to see how people do something. And that's that's what I did. We looked at first it was gonna be 30 companies, then it went to 40, and it ultimately we landed at 50 companies, faith-based, run by Christians, intentionally running it to try to honor God. What does it mean on Monday morning when these people go to work? Uh what are they actually doing? And what we, in a very brief way, what we found were that there were essentially eight expressions of the Christian faith across these 50 companies. Some of them may be quite obvious to many of your listeners, whether it's proselytization, evangelizing, using business as a platform to introduce people to God, or using their profits in a way that uh that funds faithful causes. Their expressions with regard to their people, to their employees, uh treating them like family, what they they do with their benefits and their wages and their work environment and so on. Um their expressions with regard to uh to the environment and using businesses to honor God by being sustainable and caring for his creation, and and many others, but the the point here was to develop that theory out of what people are already doing rather than just um trying to take my exegesis and saying normatively this is how one ought to run a business from a Judeo-Christian perspective.
SPEAKER_02So out of these 50, were there any that that you really felt met all of the criteria or or what which one would would you give uh a plus uh in or how many of these would you give an A plus on their um how they meet the criteria for this definition?
SPEAKER_01Well, uh that frankly, I think that might be the wrong metaphor in a way, because I I wouldn't say that in order to uh to be pleasing God, we need to be doing all eight of the things that uh we write about in this book. In fact, if you go deeply with one or two, that may be just as God honoring as somebody who checks all of these boxes. So um, I mean it's easy to say these usual suspects of Chick-fil-A and Hobby Lobby, Interstate Battery, who across the board seem to take care of their people and their planet and uh their philanthropy and and so on. But um there are companies out there that their sole purpose is to create jobs in environments where people would not have jobs otherwise. It might be in Honduras, it might be in Africa, it might be for felons in Chicago, you know, it might be for the homeless in uh just outside of Atlanta, like some of these companies do here. And that can be as pleasing to God, I think, as uh some of these other organizations that are more multifaceted. So um I I guess I would maybe take issue with the premise that in order to be a bona fide, faithful uh Christian company or Christian-owned company is probably the better term to use here, that you have to do all of these things. Really, I I think the centerpiece is where your heart is and what your motivation is, and trying to honor God uh through how you um how you operate.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And in a lot of ways, at least in my mind, it would be like if you're expecting a company to max out in all of these categories, it would be like expecting an individual Christian to max out in all of the uh the spiritual gifts on a spiritual gifts inventory, you know, that you you've got to be perfect in your gift of administration and mercy and leadership and all of the different uh gifts that are that are indicated in the Bible. Uh but I so I I wonder how much of the um this aspect of uh spiritual gifts plays into this because it seems like uh every leader, every in every company is going to kind of emphasize uh something uh different. And and you see this all across the the faith of work movement. You know, you have some that are are very um you know HR kind of servant leadership focused, and then you have others that are really it's the um, you know, how they they they evangelize and and kind of share the gospel with their employees, and so everything it's it's not that anyone is necessarily better, but that everybody just tends to kind of emphasize something different. Have you found it?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I think that's I think that's a an excellent analogy, whether it's uh you know, all the spiritual gifts or all the parts of the body, or you know, whatever metaphor you'd want to use there. Uh what explains the variance though, I believe, in the different priorities of different Christian-owned companies is is probably the tradition that the owner comes out of, or the family, or what have you. Those who are more um evangelical in their their disposition, they're probably gonna see their business more as a platform for introducing people to God. They're gonna do many other things as well, but that's going to be high on the priority list. Whereas I found that some who come out of more of the mainline Protestant perspectives, very much of a focus on serving people and lifting people up out of poverty and social justice and so on. Um, and again, it's it's not that we ought to be elevating any one of these expressions over any other, but the the variety of traditions from which these business owners come from, I think explains the the variety of expressions of the faith.
SPEAKER_02So what are maybe two or three of your favorite examples, maybe some of the lesser-known examples of of these Christian-owned companies?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, give you a couple here. There's a company up in New Hampshire called TurboCam International, which makes uh parts, whether it's for GM or for the space station, but it's um computer aided manufacturing. They they've taken many of their resources. And then the the owner there, the founder, Marion Naranja is his name. And you know, he went over to Nepal and he found that people were in slavery there, and he's gonna take the resources from this company and buy people out of slavery. And he did it so much that he got traction among the people there, and eventually the king of Nepal said, enough is enough. We're ending slavery. I mean, he their company contributed to the end of slavery in a country half a world away. Taking your resources and your love of God and you're doing something with it that would never be done except for the fact that you created wealth through your company. That's one example. Another example out of Stanford University, a few Christians and a few others started building um solar-powered lights for people who couldn't afford any kind of lighting fans, energy in their huts around the world. And um they they built them uh high quality but very low price, so that now about a hundred million people who would not have energy around the world do just from having these inexpensive, high-quality, solar-powered uh lights and energy generators in their in their possessions. The company's called D-Light Design. You can look them up, it's uh a fascinating story, but it came out of just a love for people and a heart for serving those who just have almost nothing in this world. The companies that I wasn't real familiar with before starting this research, can can I give you one or two more, or are you want to move on? Um a company called Lehman Luther, which is um a Georgia company, uh was just a guy who's a carpenter in a truck building things, fixing, you know, doing remodels, decided to start hiring some homeless people to help them out and uh uh giving them jobs and giving them some resources and found that they're they were pretty good at what they did, continued to do it more and more. Now he's he's building high-end furniture uh and with a workforce that's almost entirely uh guys who were are homeless or formerly homeless, right? But that was that was his art, was to pull people out of poverty by giving them by giving them jobs. Companies like this just fascinate me. I just I I'm getting blown away by people who are using capitalism in a way that that genuinely serves people, lifts them out of situations that they'd never get out of by trying to rely on a government or even on an under-resourced church. Uh so what we're finding is across these Christian-owned companies that they're doing uh tremendous societal good in the United States and well beyond.
SPEAKER_02Beautiful. I love that. Uh and I I want to hear some more of those examples. I also wanted to ask you what surprised you the most in doing this research? Um, and anything that maybe you went into this kind of with a certain hypothesis or and and something just um really kind of gave you a paradigm shift in this journey.
SPEAKER_01Well, I tend to write books about things that I don't know rather than things that I do know. I mean, that may sound a little strange, but I I just come at it with a question that I want to know the answer to, and then I do some research and then I publish what I found. So it's essentially going into it with a a little bit of ignorance and just uh sort of an open mind just to, well, let's see where the data leads us. And what surprised me, I think, is that the different expressions of the faith break down pretty neatly into various categories that collectively provide a very practical framework for anybody who wants to know how do I do this? What does this mean uh if I'm trying to be a believer in business? Does it just mean I have to close on Sunday? Does it just mean that I have to tithe? Does it just mean that I have to be more honest with the IRS? I mean, what what does this actually mean? Well, now we have what I think we found here is there's a a pretty clean and clear set of uh of expressions, of approaches that believers are using. Now, I don't want to necessarily say that these are normative, because just because people do something doesn't mean that we we ought to do them, but the way that they're done looks like a set of best practices that are usable, whether it's from the business practitioner or for the student of business uh trying to understand how I can have a seamless life so that Sunday and Monday are not disconnected. So I'm not sure if it in if it surprised me, but the sort of the cleanness of the paradigm that came out of this research really did um did please me.
SPEAKER_02What were some of the other of your favorite examples from the book?
SPEAKER_01There's a um there's a company called uh Barnhart Crane and Rigging, which is down in uh the southeast. And Alan Barnhart is uh he wasn't the founder, he picked up uh the small company from his his parents. But when he started this company, he decided that, and they they saw the potential for it to be a um very lucrative business. Uh that you know, he sat down with his wife and said, we don't want wealth to get in the way of us being uh of us honoring God, and money can certainly have a way of doing that. And so they decided that they were going to uh set their maximum salary at the very beginning and say, we're gonna go this far and no farther, and so we can have sort of a middle class way of life for us and for our family. And as the company grew and became a multi-million dollar business, they didn't go any further than that. They just gave them an opportunity to give away more money. And since then, they have given away hundreds of millions of dollars for evangelistic causes around the world. And in fact, they've given away the entire company. They've they've taken all the stock, non-voting stock, to a Christian ministry so that they don't even run, they run the company, but they don't own the company anymore. They basically handed over hundreds of millions of dollars that would have been in their bank account, and they're just living on sort of a modest middle class salary for them and their six kids. I am stunned by companies that do that, by people that do that. I just stand in awe of people who are so faithful that they're willing to sacrifice like that in order to, in this case, point more people toward God. So look, you know, look it up if you're interested in such things. Barnhart, Crane, and rigging is a company like that. U.S. Plastics in uh in Ohio, Stanley Tam is the founder of that company like that, where they've essentially uh literally handed over the company to God so that more people can know him.
SPEAKER_02Where did these CEOs and uh I I don't know how how deep you went into the the actual uh owners and founders of these companies, or the CEOs that you know maybe were ha took it over a few generations later and really started to implement uh this this kind of a culture. But um where did they even get a paradigm? I mean, because books like this, as you said earlier, I mean, they they weren't really out like decades ago uh to even uh share kind of these sort of um paradigms for approaching a business in in this type of a God-honoring way. Where did they even get that kind of uh uh a sense?
SPEAKER_01Well, I it it it I guess the supernatural explanation is maybe God put something on their heart and then they they lived it out. I was maybe a little surprised as I'm reading through this, a number of CEOs and founders who just had some sort of cause in mind and they they went after it without seeing any kind of big picture or doing a whole bunch of research. You know how entrepreneurship can be. It's like, well, uh let me try this and let's see if it works out. Uh something I like to do or something I feel like I should do, and and they go, and through trial and error, they eventually uh make their way. So um I don't know that many of them actually studied some sort of uh uh sanctioned, uh well-established paradigm and said, I'm gonna follow this model. You know, it's more like true at Cathy. Let me make the best chicken sandwich I possibly can, and then you know, people will show up. I'm just gonna honor God by closing on Sunday and doing a great job the other six days. And that's um that that's generally the storyline of most of the companies that that I looked at. It's just I want to create a business and I want to honor God at the same time. Let me do the best I can with that and get some advice along the way. But I think many of them kind of stumbled into these best practices rather than starting with them and then just trying to superimpose them on their business model.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that makes sense. And uh within like the last 30 years or so, there there have been organizations starting up like uh like C12 and and Convene and some of the others that are uh discipling these these owners and CEOs of of Christian-owned companies. Did you find that that many or most of the the CEOs in these profiled companies were parts of were members of comp of organizations like that to where they could kind of get some of this inspiration and and learn some of these best practices from their peers?
SPEAKER_01Some of them are. I think more and more of them are, but of the ones that I studied, I I didn't get the sense that that was central in their life yet. Maybe second and third generation will see more of that because you know C12 is growing, CMBC, others are are growing, and this is um uh it's an essential discipline, I think, for busy business people to have that accountability and that encouragement and to get those good ideas. Um those who are not familiar with the workplace faith uh organizations out there, yeah, that this is a great time to start looking it up. And it's I C12 is actually one of the stories in the books called the C12 Group and Buck Jacobs and how they they basically built a better mousetrap, there, a better way for Christian business people to um to be trained and to be encouraged and to just um maintain their business acumen and spiritual life simultaneously.
SPEAKER_02And you have a list of 100 best practices of Christian owned companies in the back of the book. Uh, what are some of your favorite? ones as we start to wrap it up here, looking for some of those nuggets that people can take and apply, maybe even today at work.
SPEAKER_01Goodness, there's so many of them. I mean, whether it's from their integrity in operations, like uh having fair trade payments to uh suppliers, or maybe in their advertisements, their their models are more modestly dressed, or they there's certain things that they won't do in advertising that their competitors will do, or maybe it's you know their supply chain cares for forests and animals and is serious about creation care. Uh many of these companies are exceedingly generous, whether building schools or vocational training programs locally or around the world. Um someone pay their own employees to work in the local community, um giving away whether it's 10% or 20%, or in some cases uh 100% of the money that doesn't go back into the business toward uh toward philanthropic causes. It's um it's really fascinating to see just how generous some of them are. And of course, you know, some of the things like remaining closed on on Sunday or limiting hours on the weekends or in the evenings so that employees can can worship or get back to their families. Um maybe things like um sensitizing managers by to to the plight of employees by having them do the employees' jobs annually or or even quarterly. It's a fascinating way to keep employees or employers, managers sensitive to the hardships and and the needs of their employees. Or paying employees a living wage. I mean, there like I said, there are a hundred of these things in here, and that's not an exhaustive list, but that's that's what we're we're after with this book is just sort of a practical, how do they do it type look at what Christian business owners all across the country seem to be doing these days.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And that list of 100 best practices of Christian-owned companies, I mean, that's really worth the the price of the book. So uh encourage everybody to go get a copy uh on Amazon, also at Christianity925.org. That's the number nine and the number five.org. Uh Mike, anything else you want to say about what you're working on and where people can uh learn more about what you're doing well, no, I mean this is uh the this is a uh a work in progress.
SPEAKER_01And what I have put together here is a theory uh based on based on data, based on what people are actually doing. And I hope that some people find that to be helpful and find it to be useful. It's it's written in a way that is, I think, accessible to uh a number of different audiences out there. But it is just a theory, and we need to continue to strive and go forward and understand better the best possible way that we can honor God in our work lives and in our lives generally. So um I'd look forward to hearing back from people about other things that uh they think should be in this this theory, understand you know, the theology at a at a deeper level because we can all learn together and continue to strive toward that more sanctified approach to work and to living.
SPEAKER_02Yes. And again, Christianity number nine two five dot org. Uh you can go and reach out to Mike, let him know what you think, get a copy of the book, and um, and benefit from the lessons that he shares in there from these great uh and and enduring companies. Um Mike, thanks again for your time. We appreciate the the heart and the and the wisdom and expertise you poured into this research and also to this interview today. We're better for it. Well, thanks very much, Darren.
SPEAKER_00We hope you've enjoyed this episode. And if so, we would greatly appreciate it if you would leave us a quick rating and review for the Christianity in Business podcast on iTunes. You can get more information about HBU Center for Christianity and Business at Christianity and Business.com. Thanks for listening, and remember to keep integrating biblical values into your business.