CHRISTIAN VIEWPOINT: Triple bottom-line seen in way world does business?
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Geoff described two men sitting at dinner during a business conference in Mexico. One, a millionaire, the other a corner shop owner, yet they chat together as equals.
I was talking to Geoff Todd, an entrepreneur with a difference, who runs his IT business Farsight Digital Solutions from Inverness. He mentioned the Global Enterprise Network which brings together hundreds of Christians who run businesses – including the millionaire and the corner shop owner.
What these business people have in common is their commitment not to one bottom line, but to three. They aim not simply at financial sustainability, but also at having a social impact (helping the community, touching people’s lives for good) and making space for spiritual transformation (not through preaching at people, but in the openness and reality of their faith in Jesus Christ and their dependence on him both in their businesses and in their lives).
It was this shared faith in Christ, this shared business model which drew millionaire and shopkeeper together as brothers.
Geoff, who grew up in a manse family, doesn’t remember a time when he didn’t believe God existed. But reading the Narnia Chronicles by CS Lewis as an 11-year-old he found himself loving Aslan, the good and kind and wonderful lion who represents Jesus in the stories.
Later, he realised that in responding thus to Aslan, he was in fact responding to the Jesus who drew near through the symbol of the lion.
Geoff was drawn to the reality of God not just through story and symbol, but by engaging with ideas. He studied philosophy at Stirling University, rigorously and with great interest comparing his Christian tradition with other systems of thought which seek to show us how best to live. He concluded on the basis of deep reflection that ‘the Christian story is the one that feels real.’
Geoff challenges us – he suspects that some of us Christians live as though we think our faith is no more than a great story, and that in the end, the sun will burn up, the universe expand and freeze, and that this will be the end of all things.
But the Jesus story, Geoff is convinced is real. Just as Narnia was ultimately transformed into a new Narnia, recognisably the same, but so much more real, more wonderful, so at the end of time the world will be re-made, recognisably the same world, but even more amazing.
The vision Geoff shared of triple bottom-line entrepreneurs could surely be applied to the way the world does business. And wherever people are blessed, communities enhanced, wherever the reality of God’s love is seen, this world becomes a little more like the world which will be.
