Kingdom Culture, Part Six
There’s a famous scene in the 1987 film Wall Street, in which Gordon Gecko, a ruthless and unscrupulous stock trader, stands before a meeting of shareholders and says:
Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right; greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, [for] knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.
I remember sitting in an economics class at an evangelical Christian college and being told that Gordon Gecko was essentially right. The professor quibbled with the word greed. He preferred self-interest, but he conceded the character’s central point. Capitalism works like a machine, and the fuel is self-interest. He added, “by the grace of God.”
On the one hand, I agree, there is something of God’s grace in a system that uses a person’s own self-interest to provide for the many. A businessman trying to get rich starts a company and employs several hundred people in the process. An entrepreneur invents a new product to make money, and the device sparks further innovation and entrepreneurship, making the lives of millions easier. There are millions of variations on this same theme. People working to line their own pockets end up doing a lot of good in the world, even though they may not have set out to help anyone but themselves. That’s a wonderful thing—and it sure does sound like the grace of God.
But it’s also a cheap imitation of something better. You see, in the kingdom, human flourishing is not a happy side effect; it’s the end product. In fact, it turns things upside-down. Instead of a person fighting for himself and helping others by accident along the way, a person thinks of others first, and in the process helps himself.
Jesus said, “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35). Some people that simply means that by giving to others, you’ll feel really, really good about yourself. Sure, that’s true. But there’s more to it than that. Because we’re all connected, when we think of others first, we end up helping ourselves in every way.
This is why, through the prophet Jeremiah, God instructed the Jewish exiles in Babylon, “Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper” (Jeremiah 29:7). God wanted His people to bless the very people who had marched them out of Judah and made them little more than slaves in a foreign land. Why? Because such was the road that would lead to their own prosperity. If we care only for ourselves, we fail. But if we seek the good of everyone, we too will be lifted up.
We were created for connection. We were never meant to live in isolation or to be cordoned off by cubicle walls or by position—to be alone. We were made for interconnection, to be a part of a community. That is why, in the very beginning, before sin ever darkened our world, God looked at Adam and said, “It is not good for the man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18).
Why, then, even when surrounded by lots of other people at the office or in the factory do so many of us feel alone? It’s because we have been conditioned to enter our workspaces not as human beings but as “employees.” The very term is dehumanizing. When I fix the plumbing under the sink, I “employ” a wrench. When I write a blog post, I “employ” my MacBook to get the job done. People, however, are not tools.
Have you ever sat in a performance review and had a supervisor go line by line down the job description for your position and judge you against it? I have. It’s exhausting and humiliating. That’s because a job description describes a tool, not a person. It’s a complicated way of saying “I need a five-sixteenths wrench,” But a human being is so much more than their skill set. That’s why, years ago, when I was serving in a senior management role at a Christian business, I flipped the script on all of it.
Rather than holding the members of my team up to their job descriptions, I asked each one to go through their job description, line by line, highlighting what they loved about their job and what they hated, what they thought they were especially good at and what they struggled with. I also had them tell me what things were not on their job description but probably should be.
Then we met, one on one, and had conversation about this exercise. And do you know what I found? There were plenty of responsibilities we could shift from one person to another so that the majority of everyone’s days were filled with tasks they loved and thrived in. I also discovered that, as an organization, we were not tapping into all the skills and experiences of my team. So, I changed that.
It was a simple flex. Instead of seeing people as tools to serve a need; I looked at them as people who have lots to offer. I tried to see how I could bless them (by asking them), and the whole organization was blessed as a result, myself included.
Our very design tells us that we need one another. The apostle Paul expressed this idea when discussing the use of spiritual gifts in the church, comparing believers to various parts of the human body. He wrote:
Now if the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body.
The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it. (1 Corinthians 12:15–26)
While businesses and non-profit ministries are not churches, and skills, experience, and natural talents are not spiritual gifts, the principle Paul presents in this passage still applies. Every person has something to offer everyone else. Their presence is designed to be a blessing to the community or organization. No one is to be used and then cast off or treated like a cog in a machine. And yet, following the model of the world, we have essentially made some people eyes and heads and allowed them to say to the hands and the feet, “I don’t need you!”
Hear me clearly here. What I’m not suggesting is that we rid our businesses and ministries of all hierarchy, nor am I saying that key positions within an organization should have no real authority. What I am saying is that the culture of our workplaces should reflect the inherent value of every person. No one should be “lording it over” anyone else. In a place of business or ministry, our roles may be different, but we should all come to the table as equals, with everyone there to bless everyone else. And for that, a massive shift in perspective and quite a bit of ego tamping is required.
And to that topic we head next…
Check out my latest books:
The Unlikely Intrusion of Adams Klein (The TimeFall Trilogy, Part 1)
And if you’ve missed any of the previous posts in this series, you can check them out here:
“Who’s the Boss? (Kingdom Culture, Part One“
“The Price of Worldly Power (Kingdom Culture, Part Two)”
“When Your Boss Is a Slave Driver (Kingdom Culture, Part Three)”
Pages of Joy // John Greco 
Leave a reply to How Meetings Should Go – Pages of Joy // John Greco Cancel reply