40 minute read
Soul enterprise
Pastors as CEOs, CEOs as pastors
Should a pastor act like a CEO? For that matter, should a CEO act like a pastor?
When it comes to pastors acting like CEOs, for some the answer is no. A church is different from a business, they argue, pointing out that while a business hires a CEO, a church calls a pastor. Plus, the bottom lines are different; for a church, it’s the quality of the ministry provided to the members and the community, while for a business it’s all about finances — profit and loss.
But there are similarities. Like a CEO, a pastor will want to make sure that a church is run in an efficient manner.
Like a CEO, a pastor has to also be mindful of the bottom line — if revenues (offerings) decline, programs or staffing have to be cut.
Like a CEO, a pastor has to be sure that the “products” a church creates — its worship style, sermons and programs — are meeting the need of the “marketplace” (the members).
Like a CEO, a pastor will want a church to set goals. It may be to increase attendance or giving, or add more programs or give more money to missions. Each year-end the church can then compare its progress against previous years to see how much better, or worse, it is doing.
And, like a CEO, a pastor can be fired. We may think that being a pastor is a calling, but when they are let go they feel fired, just like anyone else.
But what about CEOs? Should they act like pastors?
You could say that the best of them already do. Like a pastor, the best CEOs are servant leaders. They get things done by serving others and empowering them. They don’t need to use force to bring out the best in people.
Like a pastor, a CEO sets the moral tone for the corporation. No matter how many mission statements or codes of conduct a company may have, it is top leadership that sets the example. No one believes a code of ethics if the people at the top don’t model it first.
Like a pastor, CEOs have to do a lot of handholding. Sometimes the biggest headaches facing CEOs are not sales, budgets or product development, but trying to keep two employees from tearing each other apart over a personality clash or some other disagreement.
Like pastors, CEOs get to hear a lot of woes, not to mention bickering.
Like a pastor, a CEO shares leadership with others. If they have any sense, good CEOs will delegate and share responsibility rather than do it all themselves. They know that a big ego will burn out quickly. They are like a good pastor who grasps that the real work of the church is done by the members.
And, finally, like a pastor, Christian CEOs should also see themselves as being called to ministry — the ministry of the marketplace.
Maybe one day pastors will be comfortable thinking of themselves as being like a CEO, and CEOs will be able to say without blushing that they are called to their work. — John Longhurst
Table graces
O God, you are the source of all our comforts and to you we give thanks for this food. But we also remember in gratitude the many men and women whose labor was necessary to produce it, and who gathered it from the land and from the sea for our sustenance. May they too enjoy the fruit of their labor without want, and may they also be joined with us in communion of thankful hearts. — Rev. Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918) quoted in Initiatives
Upside-down banker
Few Christian businessfolk better personified Soul Enterprise than Pittsburgh banker Robert R. Lavelle, who died this summer at the age of 94.
Readers with long memories may recall articles on him in this magazine, including a cover feature in 1995.
Owner of a real estate company, he had a hearty vision to boost home ownership among fellow AfricanAmericans in a derelict area of Pittsburgh. One day he visited a local bank to intervene on behalf of a couple needing a loan. The bank officer denied the loan, but added, “Would you be interested in buying our bank?”
That odd encounter led to the establishment of Lavelle’s Dwelling House Savings & Loan, which for more than 50 years has been taking the boulders out of the way of low-income people who want to buy homes. The performance indicators are impressive. When he started Dwelling House, home ownership in the neighborhood was 12 percent. Today it is more than 40 percent.
It was Lavelle’s way of carrying out community development. People who own their homes have more of a say in civic affairs, he told us. They get better schools, better city services, better garbage collection, better police services, and more jobs.
One of his keys to success was a simple model that MEDA and other microfinance agencies have utilized in developing countries — personal relationship. When a family fell behind in its payments, it would get a pastoral call from Lavelle along with some seasoned counsel on financial budgeting, and perhaps a time of prayer, too. “We have a policy of not giving up on them until they give up,” he said.
The visits often provided openings to talk about spiritual matters. “When people ask us why we do what we do, we tell them about Jesus Christ,” he said.
Over the years Dwelling House managed to get close to 2,000 families into their own homes.
By last year the bank had a loan portfolio of $20 million, but it suffered a painful fate at the hands of electronic embezzlers.
Lavelle told us he saw himself as modeling “capitalism with a heart.” Many of Pittsburgh’s red-lined poor are glad he did.
Robert R. Lavelle
“We make decisions in boardrooms, we flip hamburgers at McDonald’s, we clean houses, we drive buses — and by doing that, we work with God and God works through us. No greater dignity could be assigned to our work.” — Yale professor Miroslav Volf
Overheard:
“We all drink from wells we didn’t dig.”
Ukraine update “We love our land”
MEDA board sees small farmers creating successful ventures on former collectivized farms
Photos by Marlin Hershey, Howard Good, Laura Stephenson and David David
Last year this magazine reported on MEDA’s efforts to rejuvenate food production in needy areas of Ukraine once populated by Mennonites. This summer MEDA’s board of directors held its regular mid-year meeting in the area and toured the $10 million Ukraine Horticulture Development Project (UHDP), a five-year program supported by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). The location gave directors a chance to conduct board business in the historic Black Sea resort of Yalta. But the real highlight was to meet some of the hundreds of clients who are beginning to taste not only the fruits of their labors, but also the fruits of new hope for a brighter future.
Where it began
Helping smallholder farmers is central to the MEDA brand, but this venture adds a different twist. It is helping farmers who occupy land that was collectivized after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, when thousands of Mennonite farmers were driven away by the sweep of communism and fled empty-handed to Canada. For many Canadian Mennonites, the Crimea and other parts of present-day Ukraine are reverently remembered as an ancestral Eden where forbears transformed barren steppes into thriving farms.
With the dismantling of the communist regime in the 1990s, Mennonite tourists were eager to explore their roots. Some began programs to relieve the poverty that continues to dog their former homeland, and have been lauded locally as agents of forgiveness and reconciliation.
Two years ago MEDA launched a program to help 5,000 farmers improve production and marketing of highvalue table grapes, berries and greenhouse vegetables such as tomatoes and cucumbers. The project, one of MEDA’s biggest, works in two oblasts (large regional jurisdictions) — Crimea and Zaporizhzhia, both areas once tilled by Mennonites. Now early into its third year, UHDP has 1,600 clients in the regions and is adding a hundred new ones every month.
The regions have no shortage of farmers and “kitchen gardens,” but most have come to the trade recently and lack the depth of tradition. Many farmers have makeshift greenhouses — using low-grade plastic that must be replaced annually — to give them a jump on planting. None have facilities for the other end of the cycle when everyone’s crops ripen at the same time.
There’s no shortage of local markets at which to sell produce in small quantities but that isn’t enough to lure commercial customers who want large shipments. Everyone recognizes the value of refrigeration so produce doesn’t have to be sold from the field. Good storage facilities enable small farmers to combine their harvests to meet large orders, and to market jointly rather than selling separately and competing in price.
But of course this requires considerable investment and credit, both of which are in short supply in today’s Ukraine. (See adjoining ACM article.)
MEDA vice-chair Debbie Sauder David and her husband, David, enjoy a pause at Crimea’s scenic white cliffs.
How it works
MEDA’s project is supplying farmers with the information, training and technology they need to become as pro-
ductive as possible and move toward restoring the former glory of this historical breadbasket of Europe.
UHDP banks heavily on a “lead farmer” strategy. It selects model farmers, gives them additional training and resources, and lets them serve as community mentors to help others on their way up. UHDP helps each lead farmer to mobilize neighboring farmers into an informal marketing alliance based on agreement to consolidate their output, introduces these to a major buyer and helps them set up a supply deal and monitors the initial sales to ensure all goes well. Everyone wins. Large buyers serving high-value markets get an assured supply of uniform product from a single source (a major headache for them otherwise). The small farmers involved know that what they grow is essentially pre-sold, will earn a premium price and that their time saved from sitting at a local market selling can be put to more productive use. UHDP is also beginning to link up multiple groups of such farmers with the same buyers.
“This is just good business,” says Waterloo-based project director Nigel Motts. “It is essentially the same consolidated output supply scheme as practiced by greenhouse horticulture farmers in Leamington to supply major food retail chains in Ontario, as MEDA learned when it presented the UHDP project to the MEDA Leamington Chapter recently.”
This is supplemented with an extensive communications stream that includes training seminars, a website, a monthly newsletter conveying “how-to” information, a mobile phone-based advice hotline and referral service and access to experts on specific topics. Public “field days” at model farms offer on-site opportunities to learn and also attract new farmers to become involved. One recent field day attracted 230 people.
There also are plans to test short-message technology and to serialize information in local newspapers.
The pace has been brisk. Some 1,600 farmers have already signed up as clients, and that number could double in the next year. “Things are booming,” says Motts. “So much so, in fact, that staff capacity is being strained. One of our challenges is that we need more feet on the ground.”
Skeptical at first
Vera Morozova farms strawberries and onions on 42 acres of rented land near Melitopol. She was in the civil service when the USSR broke up so she did not receive a tract of land like those who were working on collective farms at the time of Ukraine’s independence.
She was at first leery when a MEDA project agronomist approached her, but her skepticism gradually melted and now she is happy to have access to expert knowledge
Vera Morozova and her daughter Oksana (right photo) present a sample of this year’s strawberry crop for MEDA board members to enjoy. “I am providing employment to 30 seasonal workers,” says Vera, whose market stall is shown at left.
and credit, and to be part of a system of clusters of farmers tapping into economies of scale, modern production technologies and larger, more lucrative markets.
She’s also happy to be creating jobs for others. “I am providing employment to 30 seasonal workers,” she says proudly.
Vera is one of 10 farmers working as a group and learning from each other. She also consolidates the group’s produce for sale.
She maintains constant contact with project staff and
Heart of Mennonite country
Ivan Zakharenko is a respected veteran among farmers in the Zaporizhzhia region, not far from the former Mennonite center of Molochansk. He acquired land as early as 1986 and began growing flowers, later moving to vineyards. With his reputation, he was a logical choice as one of UHDP’s first lead farmers, and had no trouble attracting 60 smaller producers to work with him. He supplies them with seedlings and other products and serves as a conduit of information. A number have also acquired products from ACM.
His family has followed him into horticulture. His daughter has her own flower business, and his son is studying viticulture in Yalta.
He and his UHDP group members plan to ramp up their production of table grapes next year using ACM support.
“The possibilities for growth are really unlimited,” he says. “At the present time all production goes only to the local market, but the larger Russian market would be fairly easy to access with proper storage capacity.”
He already has plans in place to purchase a cold storage that will help make this possible. ◆
Ivan Zakharenko, one of UHDP’s first lead farmers.
devours the printed materials and seminars.
Cold storage is Vera’s biggest problem at the moment. Trucks from the city come and want to purchase a full load at a time. Better storage capability would make it easier to amalgamate loads and provide a steady, reliable source for larger customers. Also she could wait for better prices if she could store her production.
Her dream is to expand coverage, use better varieties of plants and begin using vertical gardens. However, for the latter she will need a longer-term lease on the land.
Vera fed her North American guests a sample of her strawberries, which drew rave comments.
One visitor asked, “What makes your strawberries so tasty and luscious?” She responded that she had used good seed (an American variety purchased from Europe) and had learned proper techniques.
The visitor persisted, “But why are your berries so
tupid people grow weeds; smart people grow harvests,” says Nadezhda Kompaniets, head of the Ukrainian Women Farmers “S Council Association.
“And,” she adds, “wise people grow land!”
Developing a productive land base is one of the long-term goals of this 10-year-old association, which promotes leadership development and community projects and serves as a public voice to government. In the Zaporizhzhia region, where the organization is affiliated with MEDA’s project, there are 18 core members who are each responsible for a number of smaller producers, for a total of 200 women Nadezhda Kompaniets being served. She hopes to boost this number to 500 young women farmers in five years.
One of those core members is Maria Semenova. She has been farming for 15 years and cultivates some 25 acres, mostly cereals with a bit more than an acre of table grapes. She also has some livestock.
She highly values the technical advice she and other women receive from MEDA’s project, and credits the association with strengthening women’s participation in community work and individual responsibility.
“The women’s organization is really our life,” she says. “It gives us close association with friends; we have many concerns in common.” ◆
exceptional?”
“Because,” she said, “I love my land.”
Kim Pityn, MEDA’s chief operations officer, visited the Ukraine project shortly after it started. Now on her return trip she was impressed by the progress — not only numerical but also the bench strength among the staff.
“They have a really good team in place,” she says.
MEDA vice-chair Debbie Sauder David and her husband David were also impressed by the vitality and commitment of staff, most of whom are young, educated and multilingual.
“We wondered about the staff,” says David. “They
Clients have access to an information stream of seminars, a website, a monthly newsletter and a phone hotline for advice and referrals.
are the type of people who could go anywhere. We asked them, ‘What keeps you here?’”
One young woman answered: “This is our country. We love our country. We want to make sure it succeeds.”
Others echoed similar sentiments. They wanted to build a country that would be vital for
their children.
Another plus: Having grown up in a culture of suspicion where people didn’t trust each other, much less their own government, they were now working in a venture whose hallmark was cooperation with others.
Some of them had wondered at first — Could they trust MEDA? Would MEDA stick with it? “Then they saw that we were going to follow through,” says Debbie David. “They could trust MEDA, even though they couldn’t trust their own government. They really appreciated MEDA’s corporate culture.”
She adds, “It seemed meaningful to them that the whole MEDA board had come out to see the project firsthand.” ◆
A new family enterprise
Lead farmer Yuriy Rodin (right) received many distinguished visitors during the MEDA board tour, including Daniel Caron (left), Canada’s ambassador to Ukraine. Caron, a strong supporter of MEDA’s project, accompanied a bus tour to UHDP clients and joined the board for lunch at the Mennonite Centre in Molochansk.
Yuriy Rodin is methodically developing a grape business on land in the Zaporizhzhia region that produced sunflowers, potatoes and wheat during the days of the collective farms. He planted his vineyard 10 years ago and began harvesting three years later. He has ambitions to expand beyond the wholesale table grape market he currently serves. He has also bartered grape seedlings for strawberry plants. He has a long-term lease on his land, but hopes to eventually be able to purchase it outright. His extended family works with him. At 38, with children 12 and 14, he envisions many years of productive enterprise ahead.
Yuriy heard about MEDA’s project nearly two years ago from Ivan Zakharenko. He called the telephone number and began attending seminars. As a relative newcomer to agriculture, he found the training seminars very beneficial. Now he is a UHDP lead farmer with five smaller farmers in his group, and they enjoy the process of learning from one another. ◆
From seedlings to greenhouses
New company provides access to the technology farmers need to get on their way
Working in tandem with UHDP is a Ukrainian company MEDA created to help farmers gain access to the technologies they need to grow and sell more profitable crops. Called Agro Capital Management (ACM), it supplies agriculture input packages such as roto-tillers, drip irrigation, table grape vineyard and berry production packages, greenhouses and cold storage components under sales contracts on deferred payment terms that link repayment with future cash flows.
Initially, MEDA had anticipated that local financial institutions would furnish credit to needy farmers, but that hope was dashed as the country was hit especially hard by the global financial crisis in late 2008 just after UHDP was launched. ACM is filling the gap left when Ukraine’s financial institutions froze new lending into the agricultural sector. ACM products are sold directly and through appointed sales representatives. “It managed to break even in its first seven months of operation and is expected to turn a profit this year,” says ACM chair Serge LeVert Chiasson. ACM has 406 clients, nearly all of whom are smallholder farmers participating in UHDP. ACM’s clients fall into two general target groups: smallholder farmers who till less than 15 acres, and medium-sized farmers of 15 to 250 acres.
The small farmers typically purchase grape seedlings to get started, and later add trellis posts and drip irrigation systems. Many purchase equipment, like roto-tillers and greenhouse kits. Some larger farmers have purchased refrigeration components or complete cold storage units.
ACM recently added a new strawberry package and is exploring the potential for an apple orchard package
ACM broke even in the first seven months and expects to be profitable this year.
using seedlings and technology from the Netherlands.
An example of its medium-sized farmer clients is Seythalilova Dilyavera, whose old greenhouse required new plastic covering every year. ACM provided financing to pay for seven new high-quality greenhouses using a Hungarian plastic film that lasts five times as long. The
Seythalilova Dilyavera used to replace his greenhouse fabric every year. Now, with help from ACM, his greenhouses last five times as long.
new greenhouses cover 3,000 square metres, allowing him to grow cucumbers, peppers and tomatoes.
Dilyavera also used ACM to finance the installation of two cold storage units that can hold up to 300 tons of produce. The investment has been highly profitable. Last year he bought 50 tons of carrots from local farmers, stored them over winter and was able to sell them when prices were peak, generating considerable income and creating winter employment for others. ◆
A cool way to store
If Ukraine is going to get on the map, agriculturally, it will take more innovators like Mikhail Dzhurkashuili. Aided, of course, by the services of ACM.
A former welder, Mikhail tiptoed into horticulture a decade ago with 2½ acres of strawberries grown on someone else’s property. Today he farms 1,350 acres, much of which is consolidated from land shares (small parcels of land distributed to people after the break-up of collective farms). He employs some 50 people, many of whom own the land shares he farms. Employees who own land shares receive the crop produced on their parcel and pay him for the use of equipment. Non-landowning employees are paid a salary.
Mikhail’s business, with its refrigerated storage purchased from ACM, has become a center for cooperative planting, grading and marketing of products like potatoes, carrots and onions. By working together with the smaller producers, and providing a place to store crops, they are able to achieve optimum prices.
“Large buyers are attracted to a consolidation location like this,” he says. “They can get full loads much more quickly.”
Also a lead farmer in UHDP, his long-term goal is to consolidate production from 500 smaller producers. ◆
Interior of Mikhail Dzhurkashuili’s new storage.
They died for their faith
The Martyrs Mirror, which this year marks its 350th anniversary, documented the execution of thousands of Anabaptists. Among them were business and tradespeople who lost their lives because of their religious beliefs.
by Rich Preheim
All across Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries, in the wake of the Reformation, the prevailing religious, political and social structures were under attack. One of the undermining forces was a nascent but growing movement contemptuously called Anabaptism.
Christian Gasteyger was one who had joined the illegal fellowship, and in 1583 he was arrested and imprisoned in the Bavarian city of Ingolstadt. Because of his opposition to infant baptism, the means by which one joined not just the church but also the state, Gasteyger was deemed a threat to the civil order.
For months authorities repeatedly attempted and failed to convince him to renounce his Anabaptist beliefs. Gasteyger was eventually transferred to Munich, Bavaria’s capital, where he was beheaded. By this time Gasteyger’s steadfastness had so incensed his Jesuit persecutors that they spat on him as he was taken from the prison to the execution site. “Though there were a thousand of you here, and multiplied thousands, you should not be able to seduce me,” he told the Jesuits before the sword fell.
The account of Gasteyger’s execution is one of more than 4,000 in the Martyrs Mirror, the vital volume on faithfulness for Anabaptism’s spiritual descendants and which in 2010 is marking the 350th anniversary of its first publication. But its pages hold more than just accounts of the men, women and youth who gave their lives for their religious beliefs. The Martyrs Mirror also offers insight into who those people were. Knowing what the early Anabaptists did to make a living helps identify them as rather ordinary people, albeit ones with extraordinary faith.
Of the thousands of people
in the Martyrs Mirror, most are not identified with any livelihood. Others are described as ministers. But a quick perusal of the book reveals at least 70 martyred men who were involved in more than 30 businesses or trades. As the contemporary Mennonite church is filled with members engaged in a wide range of professions, so was the church more than 400 years ago. Gasteyger is one of two blacksmiths recorded in the book. The most popular occupations were tailor (14) and shoemaker (11 plus one cobbler). Other jobs ranged from those still well-known today — such as baker, carpenter and potter — to the more obscure, such as corn porter and fuller (a job in the textile industry).
The workaday occupations of some Anabaptists helped make them targets for persecution. “We have studied at universities, and spent our money for this purpose,” Dutch martyr Jan Gerrits quotes the movement’s critics in the Martyrs Mirror. “Now, should these asses come and teach us? One is nothing but a cobbler; another, a weaver or furrier, and these want to quote Scripture. Let them remain at their trades; that [quoting Scripture] is our province; nor will we tolerate it; it must be opposed with fire, water, and the sword.”
But Gerrits, whose occupation isn’t given, urges the faithful to pay no heed to such attacks: “Nevertheless,
do not let us fear or be intimidated, however much the dogs bark, and the lions roar; for God, who is with us, is a strong God.” For some Anabaptists, simply going to work cost them their lives. In 1574, during hostilities between Spain and Holland, Dutch seaman Hendrick Pruyt was at work, sailing off the coast of Friesland, when he was apprehended by the Spaniards. When they discovered that Pruyt was “a brother of the Mennistic persuasion … they dealt with him so cruelly and tyrannically,” recorded the Martyrs Mirror. His captors slathered him in tar, bound him in a boat also covered in tar, lit it and set Pruyt adrift. About 20 years earlier, another convert, known only as Simon the shopkeeper, was selling his wares in the marketplace of the Dutch city of Bergen op Zoom when “the priests passed him with their idol,” according to the Martyrs Mirror. Simon refused to “give divine honor to this idol made by human hands” and was arrested “by the maintainers of the Roman antichrist.” Refus-
ing to recant, Simon was burned at the stake. Sometimes joining the Anabaptist movement resulted in occupational changes. For example, Melchior Platser was an apothecary until he joined the Hutterian Brethren and became a missionary in Austria until he was beheaded in 1583. But many converts apparently remained in the same line of work — at least as long as the authorities allowed it. Fleeing or being banished from their homes no doubt affected the Anabaptists’ ability to work, and they were eventually barred from some professions in some locations as a way to keep them separated as much as possible from the rest of society. Separation was the reason Seventeenth century engraver Jan Luyken illustrated many martyr executions. Dutch Mennonite Thieleman van Here is his rendering of the burning of Dutch seaman Hendrick Pruyt. Braght compiled what became the Martyrs Mirror in the mid-17th century. He was a second-generation cloth merchant but distinguished himself as elder of his home congregation in Dordrecht, a position he assumed at the age of 23. Growing increasingly concerned at his fellow church members’ acculturation and lukewarm faith, he gathered existing martyrologies and added to them to emphasize the distinction between heavenly and earthly values. The first edition, published in 1660, totaled 1,329 pages. Van Braght addressed his tome to people of all ages: “[A]ll shall be led to true godliness by the living examples of those who went before them. The young people who live after their lusts.... The middle-aged, who, like the Simply going to firmly-rooted oaks of Bashan, are so deeply engrossed in, and joined to, earthly affairs and household cares, that work could be it is next to an impossibility to detach themselves from because of their inseparable desire for the good of this world.... The aged, who have neglected their youth and dangerous for middle life, and are now come to the eleventh hour, and yet are still not working the Lord’s vineyard.” some Anabaptists, The well-known illustrations of engraver Jan Luyken appeared in the book’s second edition, published in 1685. whose workaday The first edition produced in America came off the press in 1745. Eastern Pennsylvania Mennonites had underoccupations taken the project as England and France were preparing for war against each other. Having been denied military helped make exemption and fearing the loss of their nonresistance, the Mennonites had the Martyrs Mirror translated from Dutch them targets for ◆ to German to reinforce their beliefs. The first Englishguage edition came out in 1837 in Lancaster, Pa. lanpersecution. Rich Preheim is director of the Mennonite Church USA Historical Committee in Goshen, Ind.
The Golden Rule
Can it work in business?
by Stan Lebenstein
After nearly half a century of life, two-thirds of it as a Christian pilgrim, and even some seminary studies along the way, I have rediscovered something very simple I learned in Sunday school.
The Golden Rule.
“Do to others as you would have them do to you” (Luke 6:31). It’s from Jesus, who put it out there when someone asked about the core of Christian behavior.
You’ve heard it a zillion times. Like me, you may have sometimes wondered if it is realistic. Can it really work in the nitty gritty of daily life?
Like in city traffic, for example?
While driving a teenager on an errand, I was
providing, at no extra charge, an avuncular lesson in elementary Christian behavior, namely the Golden Rule. When some bozo rudely cut me off I let loose with a blast from the horn.
“So how does the Golden Rule apply here?” the teenager asked with pseudo innocence.
I blushed.
“You mean,” I said, “how would I want to be treated if I had cut him off?”
I thought about it for a moment.
“Would I want the other driver to just let it pass?” I said finally. “No, not if I take a long-term view. I need the reminder that I’ve done something dumb. (But a friendly tap on the horn is better than a blast.) Just letting it go with no response doesn’t help me become a better traffic citizen.”
The teenager seemed satisfied with that, and — in time — so was I.
How do we want to be treated in all the situations life throws at us? Does the Golden Rule work when put to the test? What do I want a co-worker to say if I have bad breath, or if I float a really dumb idea in a meeting? Where does politeness end and true compassion kick in?
How do I treat the panhandler on the downtown street? If our roles were reversed, would I want passersby to put a dollar in my cup, or would I want them instead to donate to an inner-city agency that works for lasting solutions? Clearly, a good answer requires a more seasoned look, beyond the urgency of the moment.
How do I want to be treated by others? With kid gloves? With acquiescence? Not really. Being treated with dignity and respect is not to be continually coddled. I need ongoing discipline to keep me in line. On the job, I need regular performance evaluations. In business, I need the continual reality check of the market (measured partly, but not only, by profit). The best thing for me is to know how I am really doing.
My employees need the same. Deep down, most of them don’t want a free ride. Besides a good wage, benefits, a wholesome work environment and a place to grow, they want to be able to feel useful, productive and needed.
How can we use our earliest Sunday school lesson in the daily cut-and-thrust of business?
I spoke to a friend who owns a manufacturing company that has struggled during the recession and whose employees must know their jobs are in danger. Layoffs are a possibility, but he doesn’t want to spook anyone into looking for work elsewhere. I asked him, “So how do you answer an employee who asks how things are going? Do you lay the cards on the table and say you might have some shrinkage coming, or do you pretend everything is fine?” He was quick to answer. “I don’t signal trouble. The more worried my employees get, the less productive they’ll be, and the less likely we’ll be to weather this thing. It’s my job to bear this burden, not theirs.”
And how, I went on, would you feel if the roles were reversed? “Would you, as an employee, want to have a clear picture of this company’s financial situation?”
He smiled thinly and shrugged.
I ran across a different kind of response in the
book Our Souls at Work, edited by Mark Russell. In it, a CEO of a manufacturing company describes what happened when he got into deep financial trouble and his line of credit was called in. He owed 230 people money and the bank wanted him to go into bankruptcy.
“In thinking through what to do,” he writes, “the clarity that I discovered was unbelievable. How would I
want to be treated if I were owed money? The answer was that I would want the truth, the whole truth. So I wrote a letter spelling out all the ugly details of where we were financially. Over the next two years, I communicated with our creditors through a series of letters and personally took the accounts payable calls. I didn’t want any of our employees to receive abuse from people to whom we owed money. After two years, we were able to work through it and pay them all back. We received incredible feedback from those people we had owed money to. There was only one company out of 230 that moved against us and tried to sue us to force collection. The rest were gracious and thanked me for being straightforward with them.”
Employers most often get tarred with an unChristian brush when they let someone go. Sometimes they deserve it, especially if they are unfeeling and callused in how they do it. But sometimes they get a bum rap. There seems to be an expectation out there that a Christian employer will never lay off or terminate employees. But sometimes employees have to be set free to work elsewhere if the fit isn’t good. Christians may balk at this, but being a Golden Ruler doesn’t mean you’ll never take this drastic step.
I’ve been fortunate not to have it happen often. It’s no fun. My experience in this regard has usually been with employees who had clearly shown they completely lacked motivation and didn’t really care to be part of our team. That has prompted me to develop solid hiring practices, followed up with good orientation (and training, where necessary) to help ensure we don’t take on the wrong employees in the first place. That has been part of my Golden Rule — I wouldn’t want to be hired for a job I couldn’t or wouldn’t be able to do.
But even that doesn’t guarantee success in every case. I think of Jack, a nice guy who seemed to be a good candidate. But his start was slow, and he never got beyond mediocrity. Jack knew he wasn’t meeting expectations. He wasn’t meeting targets. He felt miserable.
As it turned out, when the time came for his evaluation (another important part of being a Golden Ruler) he wasn’t surprised that a change seemed inevitable. We explored other options together. Could Jack improve with more time and training? Were there other jobs in the company that would suit him better? The answers seemed to be no, and we had no alternative but to part ways. Though he was disappointed, Jack admitted later that he was relieved.
Still, there were people who said, “How can you do that? You’re supposed to be a Christian!” They seemed to think that Christians need to “be nice,” and letting someone go isn’t nice.
Well, nice to whom?
Nice to the employee? Nice to the other employees? Nice to the company itself? The Golden Rule applies to all of them, too. “Nice” isn’t really nice if it is covering up the real truth about a bad fit. It’s not nice to the employee, who may need a nudge to find another job where he or she can be happy and grow. The late management expert Peter Drucker wrote, “I have never seen anyone in a job for which s/he was inadequate who was not slowly being destroyed by the pressure and the strains, and who did not secretly pray for deliverance.”
It’s not nice to other employees, who could easily be dragged down by working alongside someone who isn’t suited to the task. “Those who are doing their job well do not want to be in the company of those who are incompetent or unproductive,” writes Kurt Senske in Executive Values: A Christian Approach to Organizational Leadership. “From their perspective, firing a worker who is not doing his job is a matter of justice and equity.”
And it’s not nice to the company as a whole, because one poorly performing link can compromise the whole chain and, in the end, threaten the health and future viability of everyone who depends on the company for a livelihood.
There are many other parts of my behavior where I need to ask, “Is this how I would want to be treated if the tables were turned?” So far I have found that it works well, even in business. The Golden Rule really does measure up.
Do you have a Golden Rule story to share? Contact the editor at wkroeker@meda.org
Bidden fruit
A tart, crunchy tale of work and sustenance
by Larry Peabody
How can we evaluate our ordinary work itself? Consider the apple. You pull a Honeycrisp from your lunch bag and bite into its crunchy, tart sweetness. Simple, isn’t it? Or is it? There’s a story behind your seemingly effortless snack. And that story provides a micro-illustration of how God uses people in ordinary workplaces to sustain life on space-ship earth.
The Honeycrisp apple traces its ancestry to an Agricultural Experiment Station in Minnesota’s Twin Cities. Researchers there crossbred the Keepsake apple with another variety, officially releasing the offspring, Honeycrisp, in 1991. From that beginning, that apple in your lunch bag may have arrived there via any number of routes. Let’s imagine it happened this way.
An entrepreneurial couple in Wisconsin invests
in land for a tree nursery. Seeing the market potential for such a long-lasting, taste-tempting apple, they gear up to propagate Honeycrisp trees for sale. They employ nursery workers who plant, fertilize, water and nurture the shoots to marketable size. Meanwhile, an ad writer in the nursery office prepares a catalog and website promoting the infant Honeycrisp trees.
In the Methow Valley of Eastern Washington, a farm family purchases 85 acres, with plans to turn it into an orchard. After reading the website on Honeycrisp, they order 1,000 plants. Then with a large tractor and trained crew, they plant their little “apple factories.” From their county extension agent, they
Getting that apple into your lunch bag took the work of many hands, from entrepreneurs to checkout clerks. All were part of God’s grand chain of delivery.
learn how to fight bugs, diseases and weather.
Four or five years later they begin to reap the fruit of their investment and hard work. The apple that will eventually reach your lunch bag hangs on a tree in the north part of the orchard. A migrant farm worker pulls your apple off the branch and drops it in a box. A trucker hauls your apple to a warehouse, where technicians carefully control the temperature. Another truck driver transports your apple to a grocery store — the investment of another entrepreneur. A stocker puts your apple on display in the produce department. After selecting the apple, you take it to the counter, where a checkout clerk rings it up and bags it with your other groceries.
And after all those people put all that work into your apple, you’re still able to buy it for right around a dollar! Through the everyday work of those people (and more too numerous to mention here), God has sustained you with fresh fruit for your lunch.
Now think of all the workers in everyday jobs
who make it possible for you to wear shoes. To drive a car. To invest your money. To learn accounting. To stay warm in February. To drink pure water. To read a newspaper. To have a broken bone set. And on and on.
This world will one day give way to a transformed earth, but in the meantime, God has an agenda for the here and now. He has purposes to carry out on the earth as it currently exists. And he has enlisted human beings as his crew to serve him by maintaining life on this planet — human life, animal life and plant life. He has gifted this one and that one with special talents and interests to carry out their diverse assignments.
Of all people, we who declare that Jesus is Lord should know that he is Lord not just of the religious but of all life and activity on planet earth. So we offer not just our witnessing on the job but our work itself as a service, a valuable “ministry,” to him. ◆
Larry Peabody has worked as a state bureaucrat, business owner, pastor and church planter. He is author of the books, Serving Christ in the Workplace, and Job-Shadowing Daniel: Walking the Talk at Work, both available through Amazon.com
Fleeting fame and fickle fortune
How a California grandmother narrowly missed becoming an ice cream legend
by Wilfred Martens
Many persons can recall an experience when they’ve had a near brush with fame and fortune. Such an experience may begin as a trivial incident, but as it is recounted over the years it can grow into a fantasy or myth of immense significance.
Imagine that you’re in a supermarket in Reykjavik, Iceland, searching through the freezer which displays pints of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, and among the Chunky Monkey, Fossil Fuel, Berried Treasure, and other assorted flavors, there it is — Erma’s Chocolate Revel Bar!
Ben and Jerry’s is well-known for its numerous and zany flavors available around the world in unusual places. Many flavors have a story behind the name. So what’s the story behind Erma’s Chocolate Revel Bar?
Erma is a California grandmother who loves
to create and bake goodies for her grandchildren, neighbors, and friends. Years ago, on one of her recipe hunts, she came across a scrap of paper, a tattered, stained, barely legible recipe, torn from some magazine, then tossed aside. With a few tweaks and personal touches it turned out to be one of her more notable creations, a dessert baked to delectable perfection, the Chocolate Revel Bar. The CRB is a cross between a brownie and fudge candy; its three layers consist of a soft dark chocolate filling sandwiched between layers of a mildly crunchy oatmeal-flour-nuts crust.
In the 70s, while Erma was practicing her culinary art on her husband and two children, across the country in Burlington, Vermont, two men who were lifelong friends, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, opened an ice cream shop in a dilapidated gas station with a $12,000 investment. And who doesn’t know about how this humble beginning mushroomed into a multimillion dollar business with product and shops around the world. But what’s the connection between a California grandmother who bakes CRBs and the famous duo from Vermont who make and sell ice cream?
In 1988 Ben and Jerry ordered brownies from a local bakery which led to one of their most popular flavors: chocolate fudge brownie. The implications were clear: chocolate was a hot item, and variations on the chocolate theme were in.
Grace, one of Erma’s friends, became part of the CRB mythology when she moved from the west coast to Connecticut. She explains the connection: “When my youngest son Jed was at Oberlin College I would send him care packages at midterm and finals. I would always include a batch of chocolate revel bars, his favorite dessert. He consumed most of them immediately but always kept a few to barter with.
“Later Jed moved to Vermont where he met and married Laura, who at the time was working for Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s. The B&J group was quite informal and enjoyed gatherings, barbeques, picnics, and dinners at both Ben’s and Jerry’s homes. At one potluck Jed brought along a platter of his favorite treats, chocolate revel bars. Jerry sampled one and was hooked. He couldn’t stop eating them or talking about them and finally exclaimed, ‘You know, this would make a great new ice cream flavor’.”
So close, but yet so far: chocolatier Erma Martens
If only the time were right, if only the stars
were in the correct position, if only. . . , then such a comment by Ben or Jerry would hold enormous potential for fame and fortune. But alas, the time was not right. About the time that Jerry made his statement, the successful
