In a world awash with insidious messages about money, can Christians think about it differently? Woven through the Old and New Testaments is the instruction for God’s people to tithe, setting aside a portion of our income to give back to God’s mission. In honest moments, however, many of us find our minds confused about how to live this out, and our hearts naturally more grudging than generous.

Bill and Dana Wichterman ask: what could our world look like if we started thinking of our money not as ours, but as a blessing that is our responsibility to steward? In their new book, Stewards Not Owners, they encourage thinking of stewardship not as merely giving away 10 percent of one’s income, but activating 100 percent of one’s wealth for kingdom goals. And through real-life examples, they show how this can be done with creativity – and even joy.

We thank our sponsors, David Campaigne with Blue Trust and David and Chris Wills on behalf of The National Christian Foundation, for their support of this event!

• Reflection: What aspect of the Wichtermans’ remarks or the conversation was most compelling to you and why?
• What are some basic principles of stewardship that make sense for any of us, whatever our personal circumstances?
• Most of us have been trained not to talk with anyone outside our families about our money. Why do the Wichtermans argue that that’s not wise, and what do you think?
• What is your reaction to their comments on living below our means, on leaving legacies to our kids, and on retirement?
• What did you learn from the discussion that might make stewardship a matter of joy for you?

Please note that the transcript may contain inaccuracies and should not be used as an authoritative source.

Tom Walsh: Welcome, everyone to today’s conversation with Bill and Dana Wichterman. We are delighted that so many of you are joining us. We have around a thousand registrants, which is great given we have such an important topic. I understand that nearly a hundred of you are with us for the first time, and that you are in places ranging from Ireland to Ethiopia to New Zealand. So whatever time of day or night it is where you are, please know you are very welcome. If you are one of those first time guests, let me briefly address: what is the Trinity Forum all about? Well, we are a community of people who are engaged in a common effort to keep the Christian intellectual tradition alive in the face of the challenges facing it, which are many, to nurture new growth in that tradition, and to make it available to everyone. So we hope you’ll be a part of this work by joining our Trinity Forum Society, and to those of you who are already members, thank you. Let me add special thanks to today’s sponsors David Campaigne with Blue Trust and David and Chris Wills on behalf of the National Christian Foundation. We are grateful. What we try to do in these conversations is provide a hospitable place to engage the big questions of life in the context of faith, and ultimately to come to better know the author of the answers.

Tom Walsh: One of the big questions all of us need spiritual formation around is our handling of money. And so today, we have the privilege of time with Bill and Dana Wichterman, the coauthors of a brand new book, Stewards Not Owners: The Joy of Aligning Your Finances With Your Faith. Dana currently works at Impact Foundation, helping Christians deploy their charitable capital for impact investing. She spent much of her career as an international economic development professional at USAID, the US Agency for International Development. And she is the co-founder of the Faith Driven Entrepreneur and Investor Network here in Washington, DC. Bill has spent his career in law and politics, including his special assistant to the president in the White House. Bill wrote the book Dying to Live: Finding Joy in Giving Yourself to God, and an influential essay, “The Culture Upstream from Politics.” Bill is the co-founder of the Wedgwood Circle and is the board president of Faith and Law. The Wichtermans are dear friends to many in our Trinity Forum community, and we are thrilled that even more of us can get to know them today. Knowing them as I do and having enjoyed their book as I did, and I strongly recommend it. I think it’s possible to have a chat about money that will be interesting and even fun. Let’s find out. Bill and Dana, welcome.

Bill Wichterman: Thanks, Tom.

Dana Wichterman: Thank you so much.

Tom Walsh: Okay, well, in talking about money, we are going to be talking about something that is personal for every one of us. And you, in your book, discuss quite a few other folks and their stories, and I’ll ask about them in a moment. But for starters, maybe you can just tell us a bit about what’s formed you on this topic of money, both as individuals, because you’re very different individuals, I think, from each other, and together as a couple.

Dana Wichterman: Sure. Well I’ll start. I’m a very private person, so thinking about talking publicly like this, about personal finances always gives me a pause. But we’ll tell you why we think it’s important to shine a light on our relationship with our resources because of this idea of that we’re stewards, not owners. When you think about anything you manage, your home, your possessions, your career, you’re managing those things on behalf of God. He’s given you those gifts and there’s many reasons that he’s given you those gifts. One is for your own enjoyment and for your own growth and well-being, but also for God’s glory, but also for the good of others. And so, the thing that Bill and I have always been about is what is our impact in the world? And my first levers of change, if you would call them that, were working in the government and really saw trying to impact the world for good through government, then God moved me into the nonprofit sector and I saw lots of good happening there, but also problematic in terms of both government and nonprofit. When they enter into spaces that they’re not equipped to address, that’s when you get into some areas that are problematic. And so the third area that I’ve really leaned into now is business as an agent for change. And that, again, business isn’t equipped to address all of our social ills or, it is one of the primary ways I think God uses for human flourishing. So with our relationship to our own personal money, our giving and our work and our investments. We talk about all of this in the book, and it’s been a growth process for me and eye opening. So I’ll let Bill share his side.

Bill Wichterman: So I think for me, money was, for a time, it was kind of incidental in my life. It was just a utility, you know, it was something you didn’t have to think much about. It was a way to pay the bills, pay for the pizza when you’re in college or whatever it was. I think it was when we really got married and we had just read a book together, which we did during our pre engagement counseling. We read a book by Larry Burkett, and that really set us on the course of seeing money as an integral expression of our faith. I think it’s Jesus who said, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” And I think very often money is a truer indication of where we are with God than necessarily just our creeds and our hopes and our aspirations. And so I think if you could look at your money, your checking account, your debit card, your visa, wherever your money is going and say, does this really reflect who I am in Christ and who I want to be? So that started us early in our marriage when we had nothing, right. We had no car, when we got married, we lived in an apartment that was fine as long as you didn’t mind cockroaches. And, you know, we started with negative net worth from school loans. And it was for us, I think, beginning to see this as a love letter to God. And so that money is something that’s deeply important, not just it is to us, but we think it should be to all Christians. All Christians.

Tom Walsh: Well as I mentioned you really chose in writing this to put the stories of quite a few Christians at the center of the book. I think it was over 20 of them and you go into some detail about their stories, thinking of them globally. What are some of the themes that link these different people and what are some of those themes that you think could help the people watching this?

Dana Wichterman: Yeah. So the one thing that went throughout all 24 stories was a sense of abundance mindset. Even if it may look like they have, you know, live in some scarcity, but an abundance mindset, a feeling of greater intimacy with God, more meaning and purpose and feeling of significance, of stepping into what kingdom goals, what God is doing. So kind of instead of saying, what are my interests and getting involved in those—what is God doing? And I’m going to jump on that agenda, that train. And then less fear and anxiety around money, which I think is huge because our whole society teaches us to be fearful. The news says the markets are going down. Be fearful. You know, so I think that and then just this overwhelming joy that we saw throughout and I would say it’s not whether you’re rich or poor. This is for generosity. And stepping into kingdom work is for everyone. And it can be done by the least of these all the way to kings and queens, we each have a role. We’ve each been given a task by the Lord to help run to those broken places, fix those areas that need innovation and redemption and reconciliation. 

Bill Wichterman: Let me add a little bit to that. And by the way, here’s our book and towards the end of the book, page 241, we actually said, what are some of those consistent themes that we heard from people as we interviewed these 24 people? Humility. That we heard again, time and time again, there was no sense that, look at me. I’m so great. There was a sense of, this is God’s money and it belongs to him. And the deep humility, a focus on others that people were so focused on how they could change the world and help others. They all found their stewardship, which we think are modern day saints. They all saw it as a light and easy yoke. They didn’t feel like, oh my gosh, this is so heavy and so hard to do. They all had a deep sense of gratitude. They were all overwhelmed with what they had rather than what they didn’t have. Joy. As Dana mentioned, joy was pervasive, which is why I put it in the title of our book, The Joy of Aligning Your Money with Your Faith. Agency. People recognize they’re part of God’s grand design in the world, and that money wasn’t just a big player in that none of them were dour ascetics. You know, one of them, Jeff Rutt at Keystone Homes in Pennsylvania. It’s true, he drives a car with 300,000 miles on it. That’s, I don’t know, 20 years old or something. But he has other things in his life that he really, you know, enjoys spending money on. There was no sense of just deep self-denial that drove out any sense of fun or joy. And then the last thing is, we heard time and again that everybody wants to hear the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” We kept hearing that from people, which, by the way, comes from the parable of the talents, which is very apt.

Tom Walsh: Thanks, thank you both. I should note for our viewers, the book, you cite the Bible quite a bit in the book. It’s really throughout and clearly a big influence on your thinking. I’d like to zoom in on the word Joy that you mentioned there and called attention to. And I think the reality is, many of us are not accustomed to thinking of financial stewardship as a matter of joy, and some may even doubt that it’s possible. So what have you learned that brings one to that point where it becomes joyful?

Dana Wichterman: Well, everyone’s experience is different with kind of leaning into generosity and leaning into thinking about managing your resources more intentionally. Mine was more started out of duty. It’s the right thing to do, it’s the way to have a more harmonious marriage because usually people fight. And one of the key areas of divorce is around money. And so I was driven by duty and the right thing to do. So we started out trying to be harmonized about how we were going to manage our money, what we were going to give, what other lifestyle caps we would put on our life so that we could give and I would say over time, it went from just duty and maybe even sometimes a burden to, oh, that’s just simple, that’s our life now, this is a habit it doesn’t even feel. It felt like a normal life. And then it becomes joyful when you start seeing some of the impact, and you almost feel like, for people who are kind of story minded, I feel like I’m on a quest to do God’s will in this world while I’m here. What does he want me to do? And one of the things is to use my resources to help others. And when you see the impact of your generosity, that’s when the joy comes. And also knowing that God has transformed me, someone who was more of a scarcity mindset, more legalistic and and frankly, even fearful and maybe greedy around money, he’s transformed me into someone who’s been able to let loose and hold things lightly in his presence. And that’s all the Holy Spirit’s work in transforming me, for sure.

Tom Walsh: Bill, anything you’d add about your joy?

Bill Wichterman: I’d say the joy increased over time for me. I didn’t, I think I’ve leaned into both stewardship and generosity. And it, let me tell you, early in our marriage, we began as tithers. Right from the start, I was always a tither. My parents were tithers and we thought that was hugely important. But we’re also planners and we were very, very budgeted as we still are. And we found that our budgeting and our discipline in budgeting was a constraint on our generosity, because there was a disincentive to, like, spring for somebody else’s coffee or their meal because you’re like, where is that? We don’t have a budget for that, you know? And so early in our marriage, we added an 11%. So we did our tithe at 10% of gross. And then we added 1%. And it was not for ministries officially, not for church, not for necessarily the needy. It was for friends. It was for you, you’re going out to eat. Let me pick up that tab for you. That became perhaps the most fun part of our budget. That 1%. We called it Generosity Fund, and we would roll that over if we didn’t spend it all in one month, so we could get bigger and bigger and was like, you found yourself on the lookout for where can you pick up and kind of bless somebody else with money who wasn’t necessarily in need? So I think that was the germinating thing for us in generosity.

Bill Wichterman: And then over time, we were encouraged by hearing other people’s stories about seeing the tithe as a floor, not a ceiling. And we kept hearing about people like Letourneau, this very successful businessman, who kept increasing by 1% every year the amount that he was giving. And I think at the end of his life, he was giving like 99% of his income away. And that was just such an inspiring thing. So then we started to lean into, can we do this again this year? Can we do this again this year? And just increasing and it became more and more fun as we had more resources available to be giving. So the joy has come with it, and I think it’s like any virtue. It needs practice and it’s something to lean into, but it’s not an optional virtue. Right. God is generous with us. We are reflecting his generosity. And if we want to be like God, we need to be generous.

Tom Walsh: Let me just take a moment here to remind our audience that we welcome questions. We’ll turn to them after the top of the hour. So I think already you’ve probably heard a lot that’s raising questions in your mind. Please put them in that Q&A box and we will be getting to them. Well, I think we’ll come back to some of these broad principles we’ve been talking about. But I want to be sure we hone in a bit on something that’s very distinctive about this book, a distinctive emphasis. I’ll just start by saying a word that many people consider dirty, which is profit. Profit with an F, not with a PH. I guess a lot of people don’t like the kind with the PH either. Anyway, profit, not a dirty word. You don’t think we should see it that way? And you also say that God loves multiplication, not just addition. And I think these are new ideas for many of us. So could you just unpack what you mean?

Dana Wichterman: I’ll let Bill start with that one.

Bill Wichterman: So yeah, profit is you know, we think about non-profits as being somehow holier and better than for-profit. Because for-profit connotes greed. Non-profit says, well we’re just doing it out of mission. And we think this is a wrong understanding. Obviously there can be greedy exploitative profits and really virtuous non-profits. But the opposite can happen as well. And so we look at the creation mandate, and we believe that profit and multiplication are built into creation before the fall. So we were told to cultivate. We were told to flourish. It didn’t mean just having babies and multiplying. We weren’t told to plant a seed so we could harvest a seed. You plant a seed so you can harvest much more than a seed. Think of the parable of the talents as well. And the servant who was praised was the one who brought forth the multiplication. So profit is actually the way the Lord set up the world. And it’s a beautiful thing. Non-profits will not exist without for-profits. But people often think, well, that’s really what for-profits are for is to empower non-profits, right? Like business, it’s just an enabling ministry for missionaries and pastors and things. And we think that that’s fundamentally an unbiblical way of looking at this, because there’s, in the words of Abraham Kuyper, there’s not one square inch in all of creation over which Christ, who is Lord over all, does not cry “mine.” He wants to own the for-profit sector. He cares about the business not just as a means of generating income for the non-profit, but he cares about it in itself. Shakespeare said, “The play’s the thing.” We want to say, the business is the thing. God cares about that business. And it’s a beautiful thing when it’s not exploitative and it brings flourishing to the world, and it does it on a for-profit basis.

Dana Wichterman: Well, and I’d like to add that we talk about businesses creating goods and services. Well, it’s supposed to be good for the world and it’s supposed to be of service to the world. And if businesses operate that way, that they are created to make a profit, but they’re also to have good leadership, treat their employees and their suppliers well. They’re supposed to care for creation and not pollute and all those kinds of things. There’s this whole area now in the faith and work movement of saying work itself is redemptive. It is part of what we do to bring flourishing to our communities. So we kind of want to shake up that secular, sacred divide that people think they’re second class citizens if they’re a computer analyst. No, people need computer analysts to flourish. So we really try to talk about that in the book. That work has dignity  and then we also talk about, actually, we should probably get into the whole idea of with- profit. When you generate that and you have investments, what do you do?

Tom Walsh: Okay, we will get into that. So. Well, Bill, as you say, a lot of us I think, can think of examples of companies that cause negative change in our world. But with your emphasis on business as an agent of positive change and the argument that the church, broadly speaking, has neglected the opportunity to invest in that. Maybe you could give us a couple of examples of the kind of redemptive investment that you’re talking about.

Bill Wichterman: Yeah. So here’s one that has like so many multiple bottom lines to it. Guy named John Porter was planning to go work for nonprofits in Haiti, and the Lord had given him this incredible experience while he was waiting for an interview in his car, where the Lord’s presence filled up the car and the Lord called him through that time to go into business. And we always think about people being called to the mission field. He was called from non-profit work to the for-profit realm. He moved to Rwanda. He started a business of Masaka Farms, which is super important because it produces protein, which helps children not be malnourished. It’s a for-profit business. 60% of their workforce is deaf. In Rwanda, the deaf are considered worthless. Here, they’re given worth, they’re able to work. They’re able to come into a community and learn sign language and they’re excellent workers, and they have a for-profit business to do it. Like that’s a beautiful thing. Now, not every business might have that incredibly stark, dramatic story of the multiple bottom lines. But even a business that’s creating widgets, if it’s run well and creates really good widgets that honor and please the Lord, we need widgets, right? That’s part of what human flourishing is. Live without a widget. What is a widget, anyway? You know what I mean? Try living without ball bearings and see how your life goes for a day, it’s going to be a different life. God loves every part of creation and coming to see all of business except that which is specifically proscribed. You can’t be a pimp to the glory of God. Sorry, that’s right out. But there’s not many other things which are right out and coming to see the work that you’re doing as honoring and pleasing to the Lord. We think it’s life giving for everybody and then also seeing the jobs that are created, and treating your employees really well, these are all beautiful things that God loves.

Tom Walsh: Well, having made the case there for investing in businesses and the good that they can do, I think some of us might find it daunting compared with simply giving charitable contributions as which we may be accustomed to doing so on a practical level. How does faith aligned investment work, and how can people assess whether it’s a good fit for them? Some of the ways to test it out, what are the options?

Dana Wichterman: Well, let me start with something that most people aren’t aware of, that you can use your charitable capital towards investing, not just nonprofits. So a donor advised fund, if you’re not familiar with it, it’s like a charitable checking account. Let’s say you get a big bonus or you’ve sold your business, or you get a large chunk of money and you want to tithe on that, and you want to get a tax deduction that year, but you’re not ready to give it all out yet. You can put it in a donor advised fund. We use the National Christian Foundation and think it’s a phenomenal group, and then you can grow that in investments. It’s like having a mini endowment of your own. It’s in the charitable realm forever. You can grow it until you’re ready to designate where it goes. And most people use a donor advised fund to donate to a nonprofit or to their church, etc. but there are now donor advised funds. The one I work for, Impact Foundation, where you can then invest in these companies. You can get equity or debt, and if that company pays back, it comes back into your endowment, into your fund. And then you can use it as a flywheel for increased impact in giving. Over time, it’ll again never come back to your personal financial account, but it’ll increase your capacity for giving. And we’ve seen people that have used their donor advised fund and been able to give maybe double what they would have if they hadn’t invested over time and stewarded that endowment over time. We tell a story about April and Craig Chapman, who were able to do that in our book and several others. So that’s one way with your charitable capital to invest in companies that are doing good in the world. And then I’ll let Bill talk about faith driven portfolios.

Bill Wichterman: So when we first started thinking about going beyond just philanthropy, just our giving, just leaning into our giving, and we started to get this vision for, wait, how can we align all of our investments with our faith? I think Dana found it kind of overwhelming. She thought, do I need to become a stock analyst now? Am I going to have to, like, study up on every stock that we have? And what does that mean? And that was just too much. The great news is, there are so many awesome organizations that can help facilitate your alignment of your investing with your faith. There are 250 Christian funds in the country, in the United States alone, where you can put money in, that’s a private investing route, or now there are also public equity groups like stocks. Sovereign’s capital has an ETF and a mutual fund, where they are looking for businesses that are run according to Christian principles and these are public businesses. You can go into a group like Eventide is another one, in which they have public equities available. So this isn’t just for rich people. This is for anybody who has any savings beyond that which you put in your bank account. By the way, if you have an IRA, you can do it from your IRA as well. Now 401Ks are a little bit different because very often your employer will constrain what can be in where and how much latitude you have in your investing with your 401K. So I have a 401K at my law firm, and I don’t have a lot of latitude with that. As soon as I can, though, I move that money over to our IRA, where I have a lot more latitude to do that so you can think expansively about what funds you have.

Bill Wichterman: We even changed our bank from one bank to a Christian credit union. We’re not saying this is prescriptive and then you have to do all these things. But our point was we tried to look at every one of our dollars and say, is this aligned with our faith? And to the extent that we’re able to reach that, we’ve been just moving over things. In some ways it meant narrowing the stocks that we had in our investment portfolio. So we had those which were more faith aligned. But rather than seeing this as an overwhelming task, think of this as one step at a time. How do you eat an elephant? It’s one bite at a time. Just begin somewhere and start thinking, where is my money going? Because you might be surprised if you did an analysis of if you’ve got a stockbroker and he or she has asked you what your risk tolerance is and they’ve got, these forms they send to you and you can see what’s in your portfolio and you’re kind of paying partial attention. If you actually looked into that, you might find out that you’re investing in strip clubs and pornography and some other things that you do not believe in. But the stockbroker, unless he or she was given a different directive, they’re just investing for return. And Dana likes to say “We don’t want any ill-gotten gains.” We don’t care how profitable or lucrative strip clubs are, we’re not investing in them.

Tom Walsh: Let me ask you about some of the things in your book that I think people might find countercultural in our American context. Even if these are challenging, this is a safe space, we’re all friends here, at least so far. A few things that I’d just like you to expand on. One of your pieces of counsel is to live below our means. Why would one do that? Another is to not retire early and to really kind of interrogate what we mean by retirement in the first place. And a third is to re-examine the ideas we have about the financial legacies we leave to our kids. So maybe you could just talk us through these things and challenge us? I should say something you mentioned, Bill makes me realize it’s not a very, not a highly prescriptive book. You really are laying out a lot of principles and ideas and examples, but challenging us all to be reflective in the situations we’re in. So on these particular topics, could you fire away, either of you?

Dana Wichterman: Yeah. Well one thing I’d say is this is not an area to approach it legalistically because what one person’s home might look like a mansion and another, people can be jealous and say, “Well, they must not be living according to God’s principles.” So it’s really between them and God. I think in general we can look at our culture and say that people are living beyond their means. So one of our superpowers, when we were first married, was living below our means, just that radical commitment. Because we always tried to save 10%, give 10% and also be careful about our lifestyle choices, particularly things that would lock you into long term, something like what home you would buy or what car you would buy. So, and because we gave up certain things back then, we were able to then tap into what I think is one of the great miracles that God has put into the universe, which is compounding interest. And when you live below your means, you can actually start to grow huge cushions for yourself so that you can be ready for emergencies, but also be ready for generosity and compounding interest goes the opposite way. If you live beyond your means and people know they start getting underwater, they stress, they’re yelling at each other, how did we get into this debt? So I think that’s one of the principles that has really helped us, and we see it as a main way for people to be more active in kingdom work, if they’re not stressing about their finances.

Bill Wichterman: I’d say I’d add a couple others to that, the other is firstfruits. The tithe, we think that should be the first thing and even when we were really struggling financially early on in our marriage, we always tithe because we think that that’s just a biblical idea. And it goes even before anything goes to the government, it goes to the Lord. So I think that’s another one. Keeping an account and keeping track of your expenses, we think, is hugely important. That’s now easier than ever to do, thanks to various programs out there, we use Quicken. You can download your credit card, your debit card right into that. You just give it a category for an hour a month you can probably keep up with exactly where you’re going, and you might be surprised and chagrined to see where your money is going. And so we think the unexamined life is not worth living, is what Socrates says. And we think that accounts for money. I mean, it’s really hard to evaluate where you are when you don’t even know where your money’s going. So those are a few superpowers that we think change everything. And then other things are immersed in Scripture about money. The Bible talks about money so much. I have memorized some key verses on money that when Dana and I sit down to do our monthly come together to talk about our budget and see how we did last month on our budgeted amount versus our actual amount? We often recite these verses to keep them in mind and keep them in perspective.

Bill Wichterman: So we’re doing well or we’re not doing so well. Like we want to keep those biblical principles ever before us praying about it. As Dana said, not everybody has the same remit from the Lord. One person can drive a luxury car, the other person can only drive that old car like Jeff Rutt Keystone, that’s got 300,000 miles on it. The Lord gives different permissions to us at different times in our lives as well. But you have to pray about it. And lastly, be in community. Money is one of those things you’re just not supposed to talk about. It’s just considered rude. And we think you need to find somebody in your life, if you’re married, another couple, if you’re not, get somebody in your life to whom you can open up your books. So here’s my net worth, here’s where my investments are, here’s what I’m spending on vacations, I’d love to hear your thoughts right and to share with one another. And that’s why we put 24 stories in our book. Not made up stories, real stories, because it gave us ideas on how to live differently and they’re going to give you ideas as well.

Tom Walsh: And would you like to say anything about retirement or about legacies we leave the next generation?

Bill Wichterman: Yeah so we’re not against retirement, but we are against becoming a giant stomach and that people can think that they’ve been working their whole life so that they can finally stop working and be self-indulgent and just think about their hobbies and how they can please themselves. This is contrary to Scripture. You’re always supposed to work, albeit six days a week, not seven. Whether you work for pay is a different question, right? But for many people, when they retire at their peak of their earning potential. So we encourage people to think about saying, okay, when you’ve hit your finish line, that point where you say, okay, we’ve got enough to retire. Why not work one more year and give away everything on a net basis that you make that year and see how fun that is. When you write some huge checks to your favorite charities or your church and then say, I think I can go another year and another year and another year, right? Find the joy in changing the world. So I’ve got a place where I think about every day I work, how much money do we get to give away? So I’m having a bad day at work and having difficult situations, they think, yes, but I’m empowering somebody else to have a flourishing life because of it.

Tom Walsh: Well, we’re getting lots of great questions because you’re sharing a lot of great ideas. Let me just start offering some of them up. Here’s one from an anonymous attendee. You mentioned that the world preaches a scarcity mindset which works against generosity, how would you advise those listening to be mindful of this? Or more importantly, how do you combat the voice of fear in the world today?

Dana Wichterman: Well, that’s a great question. I actually try to discipline myself to not watch markets all the time, or not even listen to them. Yes, you have to be informed, but you don’t have to know the ups and downs every day and I think you can also remember that when you’ve got an opportunity to be generous and you’ve chosen to do that ahead of time, if you budgeted ahead of time, you don’t then have to listen to the voices of something coming in and, oh, we don’t have enough. We’ve already budgeted for that. So planning your giving is, I think, really freeing and then prayer. Just saying, “Lord, you know, I may be trusting in chariots right now or worldly things. Help me to trust you,” and I think just kind of resetting our mindset. I think one area where Christians can not be worldly is in their finances, and we tend to look just like the rest of the world. Another area I would recommend people is to get a Christian financial advisor. They can save you money in the long run. Help you over time. So there are many Christian Kingdom-certified advisors out there that are really helpful in this matter.

Bill Wichterman: That’s an actual thing, they’re called Kingdom Advisors, and you find a certified Kingdom Advisor. You could just Google it. And that was hugely impactful for us because they’re not going to just think about what’s your risk tolerance, but they’re going to think about where you’re giving, what are you going to be living for your kids? What’s the right amount? Do you want to bequeath them generosity or a pile of money, etc.? Like there’s all kinds of questions to think through. By the way, Hebrews 13:5 says, keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, never will I leave you. Never will I forsake you. So we say with confidence, the Lord is my helper. I will not be afraid. What can man do to me? It’s one of those verses, along with 1 Timothy 6 or some great verses and money in there that I think is great to commit to memory.

Tom Walsh: Another question from an anonymous attendee is when there are so many needs and so many opportunities, how have you made choices about where to put your money? And we could perhaps expand the question to how the other folks that you’ve gotten to know through writing this book. What guides these actual decisions?

Dana Wichterman: I think first, it’s your relationship with the Lord and knowing where your individual calling is, what makes your heart beat faster if you could help? What problems in the world do you want to be part of solving that God has given you talent and insight and excitement for? Then, what breaks God’s heart? So where God’s heart breaks and where our passions align, it’s kind of where he wants you to be working. That’s your calling. So get clear on some of the calling areas so that you know what to say yes to and what to say no to. We are not the saviors of the world. That’s Jesus’s job. We are only to be working and laboring in the areas of brokenness that he calls us to.

Bill Wichterman: But to that question, to Tom of where do you give? I mean, we wish we had a lot more money because there’s so many more things we’d want to give to. And the more you lean into stewardship and generosity and giving, the more you’re going to be beleaguered, even by people who are going to come to you. And you know what, that’s hard, but it’s a blessed hardship. And so, when somebody comes to me and says, look, I’d really love to have you help support my ministry. I want to make them feel not bad as I say no, because I’m like, that’s a great ministry. That is so awesome. I wish that was something we could give to you, but that’s not part of our calling. And so saying no, I think is an essential part of all of this. So we can say yes to things. And by the way, let me go, just one word about the rich. Probably just about everybody watching today is rich. And you might think, I don’t feel rich, I’m a school teacher, I’m a nurse, I don’t think so. When you look at yourself in the world, relative to the world, if you earn the median household income, which is, I think $74,000, you are among the richest people in the world. So I think keeping a perspective of how much we have and remembering all of the world’s needs, we took our kids to a developing world pretty early in their lives. I mean, we went right into slums because we wanted them to see what so much of the world looks like, not voyeuristically, but so that we could create in them a moral imagination for how we could transform the rest of the world.

Tom Walsh: And if I could just follow up on that bill, one of the other areas where we had a countercultural thought was on leaving things to our kids, to the next generation. So maybe this is just a point at which to offer your thoughts on that.

Dana Wichterman: Yeah. So we want our kids to have character because that’s all you can take with you to heaven, right? You can’t take your possessions to heaven. You can take your character and who God is, transform you into eternity. And so we would hope that not only have we stewarded our parenting well, that our kids would also be generous and hard workers and productive citizens. That does not mean we didn’t provide some, maybe some inheritance in our will, but we’re not giving everything to them because we don’t think that would be good for them. And we don’t think they need that. We’ve equipped them to make their way in the world. So I think that’s another thing, is just to make sure you codify whatever it is you do want to do for your legacy, your financial legacy, to make sure you codify it in your will, make it easy for your kids and your will so that they’re not having to go to court. And all this. That’s another way to love your kids when you’ve left this earth.

Tom Walsh: There’s an interesting question from John Chapman. How should we think about time is money, and money is time, i.e. might we be giving money when we should be giving time or time when it should be money, I guess, or neither, in some cases. What do you think about that tension?

Dana Wichterman: Oh, that’s an awesome one. And one of your regular speakers, Os Guinness has a great book on time and philosophy of time. Time is something that everyone has 24 hours in a day. Not everyone has the capacity to be active 24 hours or a certain amount of days. Some people are handicapped or that, but everyone has time. And it’s one of those resources that we don’t think enough about. And we try to do a once a year inventory on how we are managing our time as well. Are we donating some of our discretionary time towards kingdom activities, towards our local church? Are we spending too much time on leisure and entertainment or on our hobbies now? Hobbies are awesome and leisure and friendships are all part of a good world and we need to engage in those, but what’s the proportion of our time? And that’s what we try to look at. So yes, I love that question, that time is something that you can always give.

Bill Wichterman: It’s part of what we steward, right? We steward all of this time treasure, talents, tithes. I mean, this all belongs to God. And this notion that somehow there’s some time that belongs just to us is just wrong. That doesn’t mean, though you can’t have really great times stewarding it, that we work all the time. There are some people on this call who are workaholics and they need to remember the Sabbath, and they need to remember the importance of rest and recharging. But even that is in itself service.

Tom Walsh: Here’s a question from Shepherd Smith. As people who understand government and the private sector, and I’d add, each of you are involved with the nonprofit sector, really. So each of you have been involved in all of them. Do you feel the government and businesses have a role to play in helping the poor, both here and abroad? Or maybe I could add, what do you think about the relationships of these different sectors?

Dana Wichterman: I think of Abraham Kuyper again, a sphere of sovereignty that God has created each sphere with certain incentives and ways and tasks that if they stay in their lane, those things go better. It doesn’t mean they’re always perfect. So I think the government mostly should stay in lanes of protection and helping. It doesn’t mean that governments can’t have a role in helping the poor, but I think the church and the broader community is more designed to help those who are less who are needy. I would say that the role in government is also to set up just laws so that your legal framework is fair for everyone. So, I guess I’d say all sectors have their role, but the one that we’ve not paid attention to is the business and commercial sector and how it can be a force for good.

Bill Wichterman: If I can add to the role of for-profit and businesses and jobs also, for instance, in something that we feel near and dear to us is poverty alleviation. For Dana and me, Dana was at USAID for her career. We both have real care for the poor. That’s super important to us, and we think that the poor are near and dear to the Lord’s heart. There’s this one story I love, there’s this baby that’s drowning in a river. And this guy jumps in and saves the baby and then there’s another baby and another baby. And suddenly a crowd of people are all jumping in and getting these babies out of the water. And there’s one guy who’s walking away from it all and they’re like, “Where are you going? We have babies to save.” And he said, “I’m going upstream to stop whoever’s throwing babies in the water!” And we think that business is very often about poverty prevention, poverty alleviation. It has a role. There’s times when you just need to give somebody a fish. But we’re way more excited as our particular calling of going upstream and saying, how can we actually set up for profit businesses in the developing world that provide jobs with dignity, that are not just providing arts and crafts that are actually for profitable, legit, non sympathy driven businesses, right, that are doing something good? Such that the kids of those employees don’t even know what poverty is, because they grew up knowing that their parents had a stable job and they had food and they had clothing and they had school, and they could see a doctor, that is a blessing. And that comes, we think, from primarily from for-profit business.

Tom Walsh: We have a question from another anonymous attendee. I have a hard time finding faith-driven impact funds that focus on good jobs and meaningful work. Could you share your favorite funds? I should preface that by saying in your book, you certainly have a lot of resources. You certainly direct people or suggest people check out a lot of things. Could you address that?

Bill Wichterman: Starting with Talenten? Dana is on the board of Talenten and Talenten is this awesome fund that essentially invests in small and medium sized businesses in Africa, East Africa primarily. And David Sims is the guy who leads that up. And just fantastic to see this fund. Now they are aiming for like 8% IRR. So, you know, interest you earn 8% on your money annually is their goal. There’s others though like Scott Friesen at Verdant where he’s looking at double digit and big big potential returns on your money and he provides housing for diplomatic housing, but they provide thousands of jobs in Africa from it. They have orchards and they have tech companies. And he often likes to say, this is Scott Friesen in Austin, Texas, and he says, I want to have such great returns that I attract the Wall Street bros, so that they actually start investing their money in Africa. This is a guy who, by the way, he had three exits from successful businesses that he was able to start and sell, and didn’t need to work anymore by the age he was 40. And the Lord told him to work so that others might live. We love that story. Here’s a guy who could have retired to the golf course, and instead he’s attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in investment in for-profit businesses in Africa. By the way, you can tell Africa is near and dear to our heart. Asia might be or next door might be for you, we all have different callings. We’re not trying to say that it has to be Africa, but that’s just our particular calling.

Dana Wichterman: Well, I would encourage people to go to faithdriveninvestors.org. All kinds of resources of funds and anything from real estate to agriculture to industry, where you can look for faith driven funds, and both in the United States and around the world.

Bill Wichterman: And one more sorry, our website, which if somebody could put in the chat stewardsnotowners.com, stewardsnotowners.com, has a bunch of the resources. So even if you don’t buy our book, you can get all those resources from our website for free.

Tom Walsh: But they should buy your book, or they should join the Trinity Forum society today and get a signed copy! But we’ll get to that. A question with a couple of interesting elements here from Randy Heinig, who says I first learned of the word stewardship from Dennis and Eileen Barkey. Dennis outlined the theology of work in his book Joy at work. And I think you might have something to say about that. But his question: can you talk about avoiding or challenging self-deception in the world of Christians in business, particularly in the sense of I’m a good Christian and this God has blessed me in all that I do at the end of introspection, perhaps, or self-reflection.

Dana Wichterman: Well, first of all, the batches were our first teachers in this area. We attended with Tom Walsh, the same church downtown, and they were our Sunday school teachers for finances. Sso we’ve learned that whole stewardship concept from them and written a story about them in the book. But one of the things, you don’t want to say just because someone’s a Christian, they’re going to be a good pilot. I have to have a Christian pilot. No, no, you want a good pilot whether they’re Christian or not. But I think what you want to look for in investing in businesses is people who are using biblical principles. Again, like we said, treating their employees well, fair wages, quality products, not trying to cut corners, that kind of thing. So you don’t want just to take someone who says I’m a Christian, therefore, and I have a business, therefore it’s a Christian business, there’s a lot more to it than that and we’re all sinners.

Bill Wichterman: So we often call this in our circles the church parking lot deals. You know what could go wrong? A lot could go wrong. So, yeah, you need to have good business people.

Tom Walsh: Here’s a question from another anonymous attendee. What are your views on returns? How do we make sure high returns are not exploitive? How are we different from Wall Street? In thinking about this? I think there’s both a reason, a why. But also just how exactly do we go about it?

Bill Wichterman: Well, my goodness, there’s so much to say about that. That’s a great question. Can’t be exploitative, but high returns are not necessarily an indication of exploitation. Sometimes you just hit the market right and you get these awesome returns. And by the way, you have great business people with great ideas who go bankrupt. I mean, this is the vagaries of the market. This requires risk and risk, by the way, as Andy Crouch says in his book, I think it’s Strong and Weak. He talks about the relationship between human flourishing and risk taking. So there is that relationship, but there’s no one prescriptive amount. Sometimes you’re going to beat the market and sometimes the market’s going to beat you. But the question is, are you exploiting people? Are you taking advantage of them? And that’s wrong. James five talks about what’s wrong with the rich where he’s inveighing against the rich. It’s because they were exploitative and they were hoarding. Exploitation and hoarding are two things that God hates. But it also says in 1 Timothy 6, Paul writes about how he has given everything for our enjoyment. Referring to money and there’s plenty of feasting in the Bible and in heaven. So we have to hold intention and really just think biblically with other people. We’re supposed to be savers, we’re not supposed to be hoarders. We’re supposed to be people who aim for profit in our for-profit business, but we’re not supposed to be exploitative.

Tom Walsh: Somebody has asked a question about what is the biblical view of work? And then she goes on to explain she’s been a stay-at-home wife and mom and some of her circumstances. But it is something you get into in the book. So just a biblical view of work and how we should think about it as 21st century people here in America or elsewhere in the West.

Dana Wichterman: Well, first of all, I wouldn’t say that it has to be paid work to be valuable work. You know, parenting is hugely valuable and all the volunteering that I did when I took time off from my career and was volunteering and running a lot of Trinity Forum book clubs, which I just loved. We can’t equate what the world would say was how much money you make is how much your value is, that is completely off. I mean, we couldn’t survive without people picking up our trash or that kind of thing. They are hugely valuable, yet their pay may not reflect that. Same with teachers and others. So I think we need to look at what are the things that God values in the world? And then, are we aligning ourselves with tasks that promote those things that help those things to grow and prosper? So that’s the part of the work that we would see, not necessarily whether it’s paid work or not.

Bill Wichterman: But just to add to that, Tom, work is part of the creation mandate. It came before the fall and we’re going to be working in heaven. Work is a good thing for us. It’s good for us. It’s good for others. If it’s good enough for God, it’s good enough for us, so we need to be working.

Tom Walsh: Well, I’m afraid we’re running out of time for questions. We’re near the bottom of the hour, so thank you both. In a moment, we’ll give Dana and Bill the last word. Before that, I just want to say a few things. Immediately after we conclude on your screen, you’ll see an online feedback form. And we really appreciate your thoughts on how we can make these conversations even more valuable to you. As a small token of our appreciation for your input, you’ll be gifted a free digital copy of the Trinity Forum Reading of your choice. Some of them that you might be interested in that relate to today’s topic are How Much Land Does a Man Need By Leo Tolstoy. And Why Work? by Dorothy Sayers. There’s plenty of other good ones as well. And then to build on today’s discussion tomorrow, we’ll send all of you an email with the link to this video of this conversation, some discussion questions, and some links to register for our upcoming events and recommendations for some of the Trinity Forum readings I’ve mentioned. So we hope you’ll share that video via email and resources with others for whom this topic is relevant, which I think is pretty much literally everyone. We also hope you will consider joining us in the community of the Trinity Forum Society, which you can join today on our website. And we have a link there in the chat you can use to access that. And as a special incentive, we’re offering to join now is a free and signed copy of Stewards Not Owners, signed by not one, but two Wichtermans.

Tom Walsh: You’ll get this if you join the society at any level. I should add that your membership helps us keep these conversations free. Free for everyone which we want them to be. So together, let’s keep the Christian intellectual tradition alive. Let’s nurture new growth, and let’s make it available to everyone. This is what we’re about here. A word about our upcoming events, which you can also register through through the links in the chat. Two weeks from today, on March 28th, Lanta Davis will be the guest to talk about spiritual formation through our imaginations and the moderator of that one will be our Trinity Forum Senior Fellow, Jessica Hooten Wilson. Then in early April, we’ll have a very timely conversation featuring insights from Christians involved in US foreign aid. And then on April 18th, we’ll have a Good Friday event that will be something new for us. It’s going to be a presentation on the Saint Matthew’s Passion by Bach, and it’ll be led by our Senior Fellow, Mia Chung, who is herself a renowned concert pianist. This is also a good time to subscribe to our podcasts. We are currently doing a special Lenten series with speakers like N.T. Wright and Ruth Haley Barton, and some of the other recent guests we’ve had here have included the historian Tom Holland and Curt Thompson and Warren Kinghorn on faith and mental health. So it’s called the Trinity Forum Conversations Podcast. Look it up wherever you find your podcasts. With that, let me go over to you, Bill and Dana, for the last word.

Dana Wichterman: Well, I would say add one more favorite Trinity Forum Reading if people want to get one, it’s by Tolkien, short story “Leaf by Niggle.” And it’s a story that kind of helps you think through what you’re calling and your task that the Lord has you in the world is, so I think that’s a terrific short story.

Bill Wichterman: And I would just say, Tom, in closing, that surrender is really what our book is about, because ultimately it’s what the Lord wants of us. And of these 24 people that we interview in our book. That was an abiding theme. These are people who have surrendered everything to the Lord, and with it came such joy and such fulfillment. And somebody read our early draft of our book and said, your book is really about surrender. We said, yes, that’s what it’s about.

Tom Walsh: Well, thank you, Bill and Dana, and thanks to all of you for joining us today. Have a great weekend.

Bill Wichterman: Thanks, Tom.

Dana Wichterman: Thank you.