Business: Robin Hood Ethics

For a decade before working with TSCF my job was software development. At points it was a full time job, at other times it fitted around other things in life - especially student work and theological study. Unfortunately, no one in my family went into the business world and my undergrad degree in Science didn’t help me much either.

You’d be right in guessing that my understanding of business processes was sketchy at best! I had a phone line put into my parents’ house and those business cards you could print on perforated card and an inkjet printer. It was a pretty shaky operation. The whole IT industry was growing at a massive rate, but many people in it were like me - figuring it out along the way.

Not only was I unprepared by my training, I was also unprepared by my church. No one had taken me aside and talked me through how my faith and the business world would relate. When I think of it, very few people in my church were involved in starting businesses. They tended to work for others and couldn’t really relate to the whole entrepreneurial business mindset. What’s more, what we did between Sundays seemed to be something that church didn’t talk much about.

As I think about it now, my thinking was shaped more by Robin Hood than the Christian Scriptures. I basically thought that the business world was an opportunity to take from the rich and give to the poor. Other people went to work to take from the rich and give to themselves. The Christian equivalent, the theory went, was to take from the rich and give to the church and to those in need. I thought I could even find Bible backing for my thinking:

“Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labour, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need.” (Ephesians 4:28)

At least it was a good first step -  to use my labours to share with others. Yet what I went on to realise was that it was treating the workplace as a place to take from others – to take there in order to give somewhere else.

Eventually I was challenged by a theologian to think of that verse in a new way. The Christian is not to take in one context in order to give in another. The Christian is called to give in every context and hence called to enter the marketplace in order to serve.

I was convinced that I was to work in order to serve the community God had placed me in. For me that meant serving the clients I worked for, the employees I managed and the families we supported. It meant sometimes losing money on a job, rather than making the client pay for my mistake. It meant rethinking my whole engagement with the marketplace – to not see work as a fund raising venue for other ventures, but as an opportunity for discipleship training – ‘for the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve’ (Mark 10:45)

Wouldn’t it be great if a new generation of TSCF graduates saw their workplace as a spiritual gym? – a context to work out God’s command to love their neighbour.

Imagine the variety of ways that they could be doing that... In the context of global recession and falling business confidence, wouldn’t it be great if graduates worked, not out of self-interest and self-protection, but out of service to their neighbour and a confidence that a person is not the sum of their possessions? Wouldn’t that give the world something to think about?