10/22/25 - 2117: An Opportunity to Align Strategy and Faith

Jim: You've tuned into iWork4Him, the Voice of Collaboration for the Faith and Work Movement, and I'm your host, Jim Brangenberg. Our mission is to inspire every workplace believer to recognize their workplace as their ministry place where they work with God every day. What can that look like in your workplace? Let's find out right now.

How powerful is it to be surrounded by people who want more? They want more Jesus, they want more power, they want more kingdom strategy, and they want all that for their businesses and organizations they run. Where do you go to find that room?

The room full of people who want the same thing for the same reasons, with the same humble heart for bringing the kingdom of God to earth through business. I don't know all the places because I know that if there's one in Tampa Bay, Florida, there are likely thousands around the globe. This one room is a room hosted by Todd Hopkins of the Strategic Thinking Network.

Now, Todd's name may sound familiar because he's appeared on this show a few dozen times, including hosting several of our live radio shows while we were on the air in Tampa Bay. Todd is the founder, now retired, CEO of Office Pride Commercial Cleaning Services. Todd loved investing in the hearts and minds of each of his franchisees and has taken that passion for mentoring and sharing wisdom, and has put it all together into what is now known as the Strategic Thinking Network.

Todd is joining us today to tell us about how God has been moving in their meetings and how you can get involved in 2026. Todd Hopkins, welcome back to iWork4Him.

Todd Hopkins: Thank you, Jim. It's always good to be here. Good to see you.

Jim: Todd, last year we did a show leading up to the launch of the Strategic Thinking Network. All the ideas you were thinking about doing, the way you thought it would pan out - I wanna know is what's the most remarkable spiritual thing or event that happened in your life this past year related to, or not related to, the Strategic Thinking Network?

Todd Hopkins: You're right. Last year when we talked, this was an idea. It was something that God, I felt, had put on my heart and I was taking a step of faith to pursue that. And really, I would say the biggest thing that happened to me is - 'cause I've always been one, like I want to experience immeasurably more and whether it was Office Pride or the next thing. And I remember just in the transition telling God, I said, God I still want to experience the immeasurably more. I think that's still ahead of me.

And I was asking him, how do I tap into it? And it was during my quiet time one morning that God just started like showing me things that I had seen before but hadn't related to that. And for example, like when David talked about we were knitted together in our mother's womb, and God had a plan for us even when he was creating us in our mother's womb, and Paul writes about it, that we're his handy work, his craftsmanship. And so I would say the biggest lesson I learned was, and it's like God was telling me, Hey Todd, if you want me to do a measurably more in your life, you need to quit asking me to do more with your plans and get yourself back in alignment with the ideas I had for you, the plans I had for you when I knitted you together in your mother's womb.

And so my prayer life changed. I've been a believer for a long time, but my prayer life changed to asking God, what were you thinking? What was your original intent for me? And that ended up being one of the lessons I shared early on actually with the class, but that was something that God really shared with me just this past year.

Jim: So stop asking me to bless your plans. Would you just get on board with the plans that I have for you, the plans for you to prosper?

Alright, so last year when we talked about the launch of the Strategic Thinking Network, it was an idea. Now we're finishing up the end of the first year in your Tampa Bay group. What did you see God do in that group?

Todd Hopkins: It was amazing. And it's really is kinda like this more than you can think or imagine, right? That's what the idea of Ephesians 3:20 is, and I remember just the first day with those 24 and then just how transparent they are. Everybody in the room were high achievers, so I would say the biggest thing for me was seeing this multiplication effect of impact, of kingdom impact and business impact on humble high achievers.

That's the way I describe 'em. It's like it's a room full of high achievers, but they're humble learners, and I just loved every minute of it, because I'm a learner myself. And you know how it is, Jim, when you teach something, a lot of times you're the one that learns the most.

Jim: Absolutely. Unequivocally.

Todd Hopkins: That was my experience.

Jim: Yeah. And people don't know, that's kinda like the secret, when you're teaching a small group at church or whatever it may be, or your small group at home, you're gonna get the most. The person who teaches always gets the most outta it. Hands down. Just incredible.

Todd Hopkins: Yeah. Yeah.

Jim: So how many people did you have in your Strategic Thinking Network in 2025?

Todd Hopkins: 24.

Jim: Okay. So you had 24 people. Were they all just from Tampa Bay?

Todd Hopkins: No, there were a lot from Tampa Bay area, but there was at least a third of them flew in from out of town from different parts of the country. So we have it located at a hotel next to the Tampa Airport, makes it real easy. The goal is to attract the national audience for the class.

Jim: All right, so you had 24 people. Here's what I know - is you're in a room with 24 people. They all have been created in God's image. They've all been running businesses or own their own businesses. What was the biggest thing that you learned from them this year?

Todd Hopkins: Biggest thing I learned from them, I would say that the eagerness - I love the engagement. So you know, what I learned is the more transparent we can be and the more vulnerable we can be in trying to understand what God has for us, then the greater the chance we're gonna get the answer.

And as I would see these guys sharing, 'cause they'll break into groups of three and what was so valuable to them, they'll tell you sometimes even more valuable than the teaching, would be the sharing and the information that came out of their own heads because we have tools to help 'em do that. And then as they shared with each other, so I learned, shut up, quit talking. Let the Holy Spirit do his thing while they're in their huddles. And that's where a lot of amazing things are happening.

Jim: Wow. Lesson learned by Todd Hopkins. Shut up and let the Holy Spirit do stuff. That's incredible. How often, I need to learn that lesson too 'cause I often talk way too much. I love that.

So year one was focused on learning to be a strategic thinker with God at the center of your strategy. That's what you told me it was gonna be. Did you end up going there?

Todd Hopkins: We actually went beyond strategic thinking. So the whole goal was strategic thinking and how do you apply strategic thinking to grow your business or scale your business and your kingdom impact? Then as this was unfolding, and this was in my quiet time - listen, the great thing about this, Jim, is I feel like God provided the content, he brought the people and ultimately taught the class. I was just trying to get outta the way.

But as the strategic thinking was there, and then critical thinking, can't ignore that, the importance of that, but as all this was coming together, as I may have even shared with you before, the layer, God said, wait, I'm not ready for you to get up yet. There's a third type of thinking, and that's eternal thinking. So all of a sudden, as business owners, if we will allow ourself to go beyond just strategic, we need to do that well and critical, but then tap into the eternal and start asking questions like, what's God's will in this matter? What did he have in mind when he knitted me together in my mother's womb? All these things.

Then all of a sudden we begin to expose ourself to supernatural results both in business and ministry. And that's what happened, Jim. It was amazing and I got to see it.

Jim: I was having a thought like that this morning thinking all the experiences I've gotten in my years on this planet, how does that apply to what God's gonna have me doing in the new Heaven and the new Earth? Like how does that apply? What's my job gonna be? What is my work gonna look like in the new Heaven and new Earth? And how does that tie into what he's put me through or what he's had me experience here on earth?

Okay, so year one was strategic thinking, critical thinking and learning, eternal thinking. But there's a year 2, 2026, could be year two. What are you, what's year two all about?

Todd Hopkins: So the group, wanted to keep going. So we've now made it a two year program, and year two, we're gonna get into more practicing the things that we've learned in year one, creating good habits and more on execution. We'll get into casting vision and achieving vision. So we're gonna take it all to a more practicing type of a level because it's easy to learn things and then all of a sudden business and life starts happening. And then, I think one of the CEO's greatest flaws is forgetting what they've learned.

And to execute what they already know is the right thing to do. So we're gonna get into that, but also if time allows, we'll get into branding and all kinds of good stuff. I'm pretty excited. I think year two's gonna be better than year one.

Jim: I bet it builds on each other. But you just said that one of the biggest things that CEOs struggle with is forgetting what they learned. It's also what the Israelites struggled with, forgetting what God's already done and needing to be reminded. Remember, God did this. Don't forget that because so often we get so comfortable with what's been happening and we forget, like Joshua did with the battle at Ai.

Wow, this went really good at Jericho. Let's just go, we'll go attack. And he never asked God, yeah, what's the strategy? What's the strategy? What's the eternal thinking here? And and that doesn't work good. We need to remember what God has done and constantly be remembering that.

Let's talk about how this is set up. So a lot of people that are listening today, so is this like a monthly meeting in Tampa Bay? I can't do a monthly meeting in Tampa Bay. This is different though, Todd, isn't it?

Todd Hopkins: Yeah, it's once a quarter and it's in person at airport hotel meeting room. So it's real easy for people out of town just to fly in the day before they do the meeting. It ends at four. Typically, they can fly out that evening or take their time and go out the next day, but it's in person once a quarter. The dates are scheduled out a year in advance. And they invest an annual fee to be a part of that. And it's a two year program. I'm not sure what'll happen after the end of the second year, but I have some ideas, but we've got a really solid two year plan. So basically folks would be committing to eight quarterly sessions.

Jim: Now, is there a chance you're gonna take the Strategic Thinking Network to another city outside of Tampa Bay in 2026?

Todd Hopkins: I think that could be possible. I feel God's leading me to do that. So we'll have a new class starting in Tampa. They'll be in year one in January, and then the current class will be in year two in Tampa. And then I do believe we will open up in another city. We'll see what God has for us just to make it geographically spread out a little bit.

Jim: All right, so speaking of 2026, I'm really excited about the events that are booking up for 2026. The US Christian Chamber of Commerce Spiritual World Citizens Expo in April is one of those events, online at swc2026.com. If you wanna get a discount to attend, I totally recommend you get involved in the US Christian Chamber of Commerce. That code for discount to the event in April is IWORK4HIM.

And of course the National Faith and Work Summit, which is coming up in June. Faith of Work, faithatworksummit2026.com. It's critical that we spend time together worshiping, encouraging, and challenging each other and seeing what God's doing on a national basis. If you want more on the events that we'll be attending, Martha and I'll be attending in 2026, go to iwork4him.com/events.

Todd, it's always great hearing from the founder, Hey, this is what happened. This is what God did, but you know me well enough to know: that's great, Todd, I believe you, but I wanna hear from some people that have experienced this Strategic Thinking Network. So I've asked you to invite a couple people in today to share their stories of the impact that God has had on their lives through the Strategic Thinking Network. Who do you have for us today?

Todd Hopkins: I have two really great guys joining us today. John Bergida from St. Louis. He's the president and founder of Hector Group there in St. Louis. They're like technology innovation type of company, really they do a lot of things, so, amazing young man. And then Ladell Graham from the Houston area is managing partner for Ambassador Development Group, which also just an amazing group. It's kinda like a Christian private equity. But he's involved in lots of different things. So both of those guys are gonna be joining us today.

Jim: Ladell and John, go ahead and turn on your video and join our conversation. And John, I didn't realize you were in St. Louis. Good grief. We're only three and a half hours away. We should somehow find a way to get together. We're in the same state, even though the opposite ends. But Ladell and John, welcome to iWork4Him.

Ladell Graham: Thank you. It's great to be here.

Jim: Ladell, I'm gonna start with you. Why did you choose to invest your time by attending four quarterly Strategic Thinking Network days? Why did you do it?

Ladell Graham: One of the things that I certainly know is that strategy leaks and vision fades unless you revisit it. And so it was an opportunity for me to revisit both my strategy and and my vision and particularly the framework of doing it God's way, from a kingdom perspective. And so that's why I made the decision to be a part of a Strategic Thinking Network.

Jim: When you decided to join, what did you expect to walk away with when you got to the end of the year? What did you expect to walk away with?

Ladell Graham: The amazing thing is that leadership is really draining and many times in leadership, what you're doing is solving problems. And if you don't step back to think strategically, then what happens is that you become an expert at problems rather than solutions. And so I really came expecting clarity of where I was headed and to align my daily actions with really God's purpose for our business.

Jim: So what did you actually walk away with?

Ladell Graham: The amazing thing about that is that what I saw was when faith-driven thinkers come together, something powerful happens, and that is that strategy becomes revelation. And so I walked away with a deeper sense of alignment between my faith, between my leadership, and my assignment. And so I didn't really just leave with ideas. Really, I left with the revelation and it was amazing what happened to me. And I've seen that in every facet of my life, not just in business, but every facet of my life, including family.

Jim: Ladell, one of your network mates was John Bergida out St. Louis, Missouri. Love that. All right. So, John, why did you choose to invest your time by attending four sessions in Tampa Bay? I understand the Tampa Bay draw - the food, the weather. But why did you, it's a big deal to get on a plane and fly. Why did you choose to invest your time by attending those four quarterly Strategic Thinking Network days?

John Bergida: It was really an answer to prayer. I had been praying for finding a group where I could learn how to expand my business as well as faith. And that even ties back to Hecto's name. It ties back to science and a multiplier of a hundred, like hectoliters, but also to scripture in Mark 4:8 and the parable of sowing seeds, and put on good soil yielded 30, 60, and a hundred fold.

So I had been trying to align the business between business and faith and not having those be two separate things and God really opened the door at the Christian Businessman's Connection, CBMC, their annual men's conference, or was the first time they had in a long time was in St. Louis. And that's where I met Todd and heard about the Strategic Thinking Network and I was like, oh my goodness, this is exactly what I've been praying for. And I was very excited to be in the inaugural class.

Jim: So what did you expect to walk away with, an investment of a year of time or a year in relationships. What did you expect to walk away with?

John Bergida: I don't think I had any concrete expectations of what I would come away with. It was more of this is awesome content and these are awesome people and these are the people I wanna be aligned with. And I had the chance to read Todd's book about, "stop using the B word," and I read that and did that, and that was impactful. I'm saying, okay, if we're able to get even just that level of things outta the class, it's gonna be very worthwhile.

Jim: Have you read all the rest of Todd's books? 'cause Todd's got a lot of great books out there. The B word one, it was hilarious. One day was in the headquarters at Office Pride and one of the people we were interviewing said "busy" while we were - oh my word, you thought that they were gonna die. They were just like, please don't let Todd hear me say that. (laughter)

Alright. That's what you expected, but what did you walk away with? At the end of the year, what did you walk away with?

John Bergida: I would say implementing tools. So one of the things we learned is the tool Hoshin, and now actually myself and our entire team do that every Monday when we kick off our team meetings. And Todd was talking about some of the other tools that we've learned in the class, that we have quarterly team summits and we actually use the tools at our last team summit. And the entire team was like, this is the best one we've ever done. So it's been awesome.

Jim: John, everybody listening today's going, did he just say Ocean? No, he said Hoshin. Okay, everybody listening is going, I don't know what that means.

John Bergida: Yeah, it's a way to really sift through complicated things and really make it simple to get to priorities. So on a really simple version, you have three circles and you write three different tasks in those. You compare one circle to just one other circle, you say, if I could complete one of these two things in a given timeframe - so we, for example, use it for this week, if I can complete one of these two things this week, what's the most important to advancing myself and the business toward our goal? And just draw an arrow towards the one that's most important.

And they do that one at a time for each of the different circles. And then in the end, you just count the arrows and the ones with the highest number of arrows, that's your most important thing for the week, and then your second most important. And so it's given the clarity to say no to things that are lower on that list.

And also to know once I accomplish those top things on that list, even if the rest of the week is crazy, it's been a productive and fruitful week. H-O-S-H-I-N. And Yes, I thought he said ocean too, the first time I heard it, not spelled out. (chuckling)

Jim: All right, so Ladell, you said strategy gives way to revelation, or actually what breeds revelation? What did you say? I can't read my own writing as I was writing while you're saying that, but basically that God reveals things through strategy. What did God reveal to you? What was the biggest surprise of the year coming out of your time that you invested? 'cause you invested literally a week's worth of time this year to be part of the Strategic Thinking Network. What was the biggest surprise God did in your life?

Ladell Graham: I think that the biggest surprise for me was there were some things that I'd been working on and I vested time for years and it produced almost immediately what I had been working on and spent time years working on, focusing on rather. What was interesting to me is I thought I needed more strategies, but really God showed me that I really needed was spiritual alignment.

And so Todd talks about strategic thinking. There are three types of thinking - strategic thinking, critical thinking, and eternal thinking. And I was pretty good. My background -investments, my accounting - I was really good at strategic and critical, but not as strong in eternal thinking. And so what happened is that it moved everything to a another level.

And one of the things that really stood out to me, I mean everything in every class is amazing. We walk away just a amazed. One of the things that stood out was a resource allocation maximizer. And so we've got all of these in every business, have resources, and you don't want non-performing resources. And so we all put on the whiteboard various resources. And the amazing thing I was looking, I go, wow there are some things that I have not been using and we all thought we had it figured out. We had identified everything.

And then Todd comes behind and he says that you guys didn't include my greatest resource, which is energy. And he talks about how energy is a maximizer of other resources. And so I taught that with our, we get our ADG leaders together annually, and so elements of this class, I taught that and we're actually practicing that in our ADG advances on a monthly basis. That was one of the things that really I took away that really, it says that he go beyond what you can dream. And he blew my mind.

Jim: I love that, and I love how it applied to ambassador development, but I wanna know for you personally, what was the biggest surprise in your heart? What did you see the biggest impact on your soul after attending these? Because that's what this is about. It's great to run great businesses and organizations. It's great to make money. It's great to bless our employees and their families, and our customers and our vendors, but you're making this investment to be a transformed man. What was the biggest surprise of transformation in your life, Ladell?

Ladell Graham: Yeah, I think what personally was the biggest transformation was when I talked about alignment and I began to see how things were connected that I didn't realize were connected, like dreams, relationships, opportunities that had been sitting on the table all along.

So we have a weekly family meeting and all of our children are adults. And we, in our meeting this past Sunday, one of our children said to me, dad, I've recognized that this year that there's been a significant change in how you approach life, how you approach relationships. And he talked about how effective I am and how compassionate I was and how even more God centered I was.

And you know what? To have that come from your adult children really blesses me, simply because what we want to do is we want to teach them how to get along without us. And if they can walk away with that, God centered in the decisions, the dreams, the relationships that I have, I think that this has been a really great one walk away.

Jim: That was powerful. Glad I re-asked that question. Are you gonna do year two?

Ladell Graham: Oh, absolutely. How can I not? Year one changed how I think and honestly it changed how I hear God. And so it really reminded me that strategy isn't just about planning the future, but it's about partnering with God for it. And absolutely, I'm excited about it. And the words that I say so often, I'm ready to go bear hunting with a switch.

 (laughter)

Jim: I'm not, but, okay.

Ladell Graham: Yeah. David went with his bare hands, and so that's the kinda faith I have in what God's gonna do in year two.

Jim: I think he had a sling. (laughing) David had a sling. Not a switch. A sling. All right. Thank, but Ladell, thank you for being transparent, Ladell. Because that was, that's what I was looking for because I know that a year invested, Lord, here you go. Here's four days. I'm a busy business guy. Here's four days. I don't wanna be the same guy at the end of this period of time. And that's what God did for you.

John, what was the biggest God surprise for you coming out of the year that you invested at Strategic Thinking Network?

John Bergida: I think one of the biggest surprises was one of the tools we learned was the inverted pyramid. So instead of starting from today and looking forward to the future, really centering yourself in who you are as a son or daughter of God, and then working down through that. And it was fascinating for me 'cause I had done three year planning, 10 year planning, big hairy, audacious goals. We had the vision, mission, and core values of the business, but I didn't stack them all like that.

And so actually when I came out from the second meeting, the first one I missed 'cause the birth of my now nine month old son who's a just wonderful little boy, so I attended the first one, which was the second session, and it was just so powerful coming away with that, I actually stopped at a Bread Co. for those in St. Louis, or Panera for everyone else around the country, and just cleared out a whole table and just sat down and wrote out that inverted pyramid. And it was really powerful just to see kind of things I already knew and known in prayer, but I never written them down to line them like that.

So I've since turned it into kind of a visual i'm eventually gonna get on my wall to look at when I'm doing planning or just remind myself that keep looking through this funnel and I'll be able to work productively versus getting too stuck in minutiae here and not going where God wants me to be going.

Jim: Yeah, John, Ladell shared how his son noticed a difference in him. Talk to me about what comment your wife has made for you after being involved in Strategic Thinking Network, because obviously she had a baby on the first day. And so it you didn't get to experience first day. Talk to me about what - has your wife made any comments?

John Bergida: Yeah, it's been beautiful to come back and share with her the things I've learned and we've even used some of the improvements that for how we run our family meetings. So that's really inspiring to hear you talk about, Ladell, with your adult children.

My oldest is eight, so we've got some ways to go with that. But yeah, just even some of the ways we've used it to improve how we plan and communicate as a family has been really beautiful. So she's super supportive of it. And yeah, one of these trips, I'll have to have her join me and we'll get some time in the water or sun while we're down there.

Jim: Yeah, it'd be nice. Are you doing year two then? So that makes it sound like you're gonna do year two.

John Bergida: Yes, absolutely. I was very hopeful there would be year two. So when Todd said yes, I was one of the first people to shoot my hand up and say, I'm in.

Jim: You didn't even have to ask why should I? You're like, I already know the answer why.

John Bergida: Because I already know the answer to why? I was like, there's no way I'm gonna be able to take all this in a year, absorb it, and then put it into practice. And it's like drinking from a firehose. It's like, I wanna start improving it and implement it immediately, but also like just as Todd was talking about, being able to then implement it and keep refining it, but then also to then have it so ingrained, bringing it to my coworkers and my business and family. I'm really excited for that continued growth next year.

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As we close out I want, Todd, I'll pull you back into the conversation. You said there's 24 people in your in year one. If we were to poll everybody, and we're gonna poll these two guys here in a second, if we were to poll everybody and say, I wish your group would be smaller, I wish the group would be bigger, how would you feel?

But Todd, how powerful - it wasn't just your teaching that God had given you. How powerful was that interaction of men and women in that room to the success of the Strategic Thinking Network in year one?

Todd Hopkins: It was extremely powerful. I was advised early on by a friend that who we have in that class is going to matter and so I feel like there's a huge responsibility to try to even bet in some way, who are people who are high achievers, who are already successful, who are learners and they're humble and can contribute to each other? And these guys are already strategic actually. They're already, they rank very high strategically on their strength finders profile, majority of them.

It's very important who's in the room, and that's a responsibility that I have, to try to do a good job and I just pray God sends me the right one. God sent the people, and I think everyone sensed that, but I heard that often, man, the people you have in this room are amazing and they say that about each other.

Jim: Ladell, talk to me about that impact, being in a room with 23 others plus Todd. How powerful was that interaction to the success of the learning, the success of the experience?

Ladell Graham: You know what I like about the class is that immediately when you get the revelation, you put it into practice. So there were groups, we'd break out into groups of three, four people, and then you would share what you've worked through relative to that particular session. It was powerful, because when, again, when I say that you have faith-driven thinkers, it turns strategy into revelation, and that's what kept coming to me. I started getting revelation after revelation, and then I could go back and refine my practical approach to what Todd had shared in the class.

Jim: What about for you, John? How powerful was that? You're not the only one in the room. But just, it wasn't you and Todd - you, Todd and 23 other people, how powerful was that interaction, those relationships that you're developing over the year?

John Bergida: It's incredible because you get different perspectives and things that you aren't seeing. And even when Todd was putting up like, what are your different strengths and assets you already have, just seeing like everyone compiling it, the list was incredible. And I think if any of us had tried to sit down, just write all those out ourselves, we wouldn't have come anywhere close to that.

And so yeah, it's beautiful to see like-minded individuals who are striving for excellence in their work, excellence in their personal life, and aligning that with their faith versus saying, Hey, it's a separate from that. It's also been really encouraging to see the use of AI and how we've had AI talks over lunch and kind of dessert during the lunch period and seeing where like we can use some of these tools like AI to not only just improve our businesses, but to free up more time for us to have in prayer or to have with family.

So it's, we're aligning all these kind of, again, with the whole person in mind versus saying, Hey, go and be excellent at business. And then, go donate after that. It's nope, align all these things together. So yeah, seeing similar individuals that say walk is very powerful.

Jim: And AI can be a help, but it can't do the kinda stuff that the Holy Spirit does.

So all of you - Todd Hopkins, Ladell Graham, John Bergida, thank you guys for sharing the story. Todd, thanks for bringing the strategic network to the iWork4Him listening audience. If people are listening to you, they're thinking, I wanna get involved in next year, whether it's in Tampa Bay or whether you end up starting a group in another city across the country, Todd, how do people get involved? How do they start that application process?

Todd Hopkins: Thank you. The best way is just to go to Strategic Thinking Network.com, and it's all there. There's an application, a short application, there's a way to contact me but that would be the place to start, Strategic Thinking Network.com.

Jim: And of course, you've heard the stories here, so if you are a business owner, leader, male or female, this is not just a men's group. We need to emphasize this. Today, we only had men, but there are men and women involved, so check it out. If God is asking you to go deeper, then go ahead and go deeper and check out the Strategic Thinking Network.com.

Gentlemen, thank you for being here today.

Todd Hopkins: Thank you.

Ladell Graham: Good to be here.

John Bergida: Absolutely.

Jim: You've been listening to iWork4Him with your host, Jim Brangenberg. I'm a Christ follower, my workplace, it's my mission field, but ultimately iWork4Him.

10/15/25 - 2116: The Holy Spirit at Work - Literally

Jim: You've tuned into iWork4Him, the Voice of Collaboration for the Faith and Work Movement.

Martha: And we are your hosts, Jim and Martha Brangenberg, and our mission is to inspire every workplace believer to recognize their workplace as their ministry place, where they work with God every day. What can that look like in your workplace? Let's find out right now.

Jim: Some songs say that love makes the world go round. I think that's definitely true because God keeps our world spinning, but I digress. What really makes our world function and improve is business. Everything revolves around business. Even governments depend on business for funding. They may never want to admit it, but the world is driven by business.

That's why it's so important for Jesus following business people around the world to know how to let their faith impact all of their lives and all the lives that they influence through their business. Marketplace leaders around the globe need to know how much God wants them to be aware of their mission at work for his kingdom. What are all the pieces of that mission and how do we make sure those business owners know about it?

Katherine Burnett of Global Marketplace Leaders is with us today to tell us about the opportunities around the globe and how God is moving in the hearts of Jesus following business leaders everywhere. Katherine Burnett, welcome to iWork4Him.

Katherine Burnett: Aw, thank you. It's such a privilege to be here today and I just commend what you're doing to get the word out about the Holy Spirit and what Jesus does in marketplace. So thanks so much for having me on today.

Jim: It's been a monumental undertaking, but to get face to face with you - we're super glad to have you today, Katherine. We always do, for our first time guests on the show, we always ask this question: tell us your Jesus story.

Katherine Burnett: Oh, I absolutely love my Jesus story 'cause all our stories are so personal to the encounter of the Lord in our life. And I encountered the Lord in kindergarten at a Christian school. And a lot of people would say, that's pretty mundane. The Lord was drawing me even then. So I walked with the Lord throughout a lot of my early years. But growing up in a very tumultuous home, you decide that you can do it better than what you've seen. And so that took on a life of rebellion, and it was just the goodness of God that drew me back to that place. But it was actually through business.

So I got married, we moved to an entirely different part of the country. And I realized that I could no longer lean and rely on the Jesus I knew in my childhood. Oh, a nightly prayer. Just a, oh, hope you help me out. I actually had to encounter the living God for myself every single day, if I was going to walk in business with wisdom, with discernment, to know that he was leading me and guiding me. Proverbs 3:6 says, "in all your ways acknowledge him and he will direct your path."

So I came to this place in business where I was like, Lord, I need to know you. I need to acknowledge you in everything I do, 'cause I'm trusting you to direct my path. And God was so faithful. That's really when I think my Jesus story just took off. Like I knew him - as my husband and I say, we'd shaken hands with him, but to actually encounter him, to know him, to walk with him every day, did not start till I was in my twenties starting a business.

And so God was so faithful. It became less about me succeeding and more about me building something of significance in partnership with the Holy Spirit, to bring his kingdom into every area that he had placed me. And in a nutshell, that is my Jesus story of how the Lord just encountered me because of a desperation to know his direction, his plans, and to know his goodness for me personally outside of my parents' faith or outside of what I had seen growing up in a Christian school.

Martha: Such a great example and other people probably can relate to some portion of that, and that's why it's so important for us to be able to share that with each other. So obviously, you've made the connection of the Lord in your business. How did he give you a passion for global business?

Katherine Burnett: Oh, that's a great question. So I had built several companies. I was in real estate, land development, and in construction. And so fast forward, the church had always told my husband and myself as we had helped serve in some ministries that the highest call in our life was to someday be in full-time ministry. So we laid down very successful careers. We came to Global Awakening and went through the ministry school. We learned a lot, got theology set. It was such a good time for our family, but I still had this just passion to do business, but yet I was called to ministry and I couldn't reconcile the two together.

And I was sitting with a well-known minister and they told me, they said, Katherine, you're not called to separate the two. You're called to do both business and ministry. And it was in that moment that inside of me, it went off that like my identity has been placed so much in the higher call of Ministry, but my identity in Jesus should allow me to work both in business and in ministry.

And so to bring the two, the sacred and secular, together just became a burning passion for me and it has fueled everything with Global Marketplace Leaders. Global Awakening has come behind us and said, yes, we want you to minister to people in the marketplace. Psalms 24:1 tells us, "the Earth is the Lord's and everything in it." So if that's the case, it doesn't matter if it's ministry or marketplace, we are supposed to be serving him in every sphere he places us in. And I think that realization for me really just brought a new sense of purpose in my life. It also has caused me to want to perpetuate that to other people that I meet as well.

Jim: And I think it's really important that everybody understands that there's this misnomer that there's this highest calling of full-time ministry, when really there's no tiers in the kingdom of God. That the call is where God has you and you're to do ministry in that call. And because so many people go to churches where they're told you should quit your jobs and go into full-time ministry, and that's a disaster.

That's why the world looks the way it looks, like they way too many neat believers in the marketplace have quit their jobs to go into full-time ministry instead of taking that mindset shift and going to full-time ministry in their job, in their business, in their organization, whatever that organization may be.

Katherine Burnett: And one of the things too is, in business, that is 97% of the general population gets their full-time living from the marketplace. So that's our biggest mission field that we can possibly go into is the marketplace. And for a long time, the church hasn't realized that. And so it is a privilege to be able to equip people to send out into the mission field of the marketplace.

Martha: And just a little side note. If you have a job that you get paid for, you are technically a fully funded missionary in that work. So no fundraising efforts necessary. Now, some people may say I'm not funded enough, in whatever their job might be. But the truth of the matter is, you get paid to be who God has called you to be in every aspect, every minute, every second of your day at your work. We're very passionate about this very story. So Katherine, I'm just so glad that God has allowed you to live it out as a part of your life and getting to share that with our listeners.

Jim: So when you travel the world, when you deal world with business leaders around the globe, what is your main observation about Jesus following marketplace leaders around the world? Is there a commonality in how they think and how they act?

Katherine Burnett: The amount of times that we travel, we were just somewhere in the States last week. Two weeks ago we were overseas in South Africa. We were in Brazil right before that. And so we travel and get to see people in the marketplace and it really, it boils down to the fact that marketplace people do not realize that they have a call, just like you said, Martha, a paid missionary. And so we see them trying to honor God by maybe praying before they go to work or trying to honor God by being a person of integrity, which is awesome, but they haven't fully realized that they are sent, that they're commissioned, and that they're equipped to bring transformation of kingdom where God placed them.

It's not an afterthought, where they are working. It's actually a divine appointment. And so when they realize, Hey, this is a divine appointment. This is a set up from heaven where I am. It's not just a place for me to make money or for me to hire people that are good people. It's actually a place for me to bring influence from the Kingdom of Heaven. It is a totally different paradigm shift, and we see all the time that people just don't realize they're actually on kingdom assignment because they have believed the lie that it is just a job. It is just a way to pay their bills. It's just a way to get by until they retire or until they can do a more holy work.

The biggest thing as we travel that we see is they just haven't realized really that they're on assignment now.

Martha: Jim and I often talk about like we had the American perspective, because that has been our world. But what you're saying is there's even like globally this disconnect that is needing to be refined, or restored maybe is a better word. Because if Jesus changes our life, he changes all 24/7. That's one of the things that's, okay, we don't leave him at the door when we go into work. If the Holy Spirit indwells in us, he's walking with us everywhere we go. So do you see any difference between men and women as far as understanding that, or is it universally a struggle?

Katherine Burnett: I think it's universally a struggle. Men and women both were called to transform culture because the Bible says in the last days, I'll pour out my spirit on all people, and we need the Holy Spirit wherever we go. We need that discernment. We need the voice and the leading of the Holy Spirit to make strategic business deals. We need the leading of the Holy Spirit to know who to hire, to know when to change protocols or whatever for protection of company or employees. We need him. And it doesn't matter if it's male or female.

And generally I think the disconnect from their assignment, from what people view as their assignment versus the truth of what God sent them to do, is the same across all genders.

Jim: I love that. Speaking of men and women leaders, we're excited at iWork4Him to join forces with the US Christian Chamber of Commerce to invite each one of you to attend the April, 2026 Expo in Orlando, Florida called "Yes&." Visit the website swc2026.com and use the code iWork4Him for 10% off your tickets. Martha and I'll see you there as we get to emcee that event. That's swc2026.com. The 10% off code is IWORK4HIM.

So what is Global Marketplace Leaders doing about this problem, this disconnect, this consistent issue that believers think they should quit their jobs and go into a full-time "sacred" ministry instead of recognizing the marketplace as a sacred place? And instead of recognizing that they really have, they have an entrepreneurial call. They have a business call on their lives.

Katherine Burnett: That's a great question. So Global Awakening does a lot with pastors and leaders, and so our heart is to actually, we're creating curriculum right now to be able to be launched into churches, because we've had so many pastors that are high level pastors that said, can you create something? We just don't know how to disciple business leaders.

It's like foreign territory for them. 'Cause they've always been in ministry and they don't know how to connect with marketplace. So we actually have a team, there's seven of us right now, that are creating a curriculum that will be launched in partnership with churches where some of their strong business leaders can do small groups to train other leaders on how to hear the voice of God, on how to lead on integrity, on generosity, just the nature of God that they can display in their workplace.

We have coaching programs that we do. We take people on international trips. We have mastermind groups, and Jim and Martha, this is one of my favorite things that we do. We actually have groups that meet on a regular basis and we'll put seven or eight leaders in a room and they'll just throw out their problems. They'll be like, Hey, I'm having a problem with this employee. How would I handle this?

And through the power of the Holy Spirit, through wisdom and experience, we get some of the most phenomenal answers that help unlock things for business leaders. And it is just really neat to see the Lord move. And so that is one of my favorite things that we do with Global Marketplace Leaders is our monthly mastermind groups.

We do a lot of book studies. We're getting ready to launch one on catalytic leadership, but we just, it's really neat for us to be able to come alongside the body of Christ and be like, Hey, what do you need to train and equip your marketplace people? And so we're actually creating a curriculum a training program, one for business leaders and one for marketplace influencers. There is just so many things that is needed that we see not just in the US but across the globe. And so our team is super excited about what God is doing.

Martha: Okay, so I wanna take a minute here. I am imagining, our listeners are saying, okay, I want to be able to maybe bring a Bible study into my area of influence that can help people in a way that they're not reinventing the wheel. God told us a decade, more than a decade ago, don't reinvent the wheel. If people like you, Katherine, are already creating the curriculum. How do people engage with that? What does that look like?

Katherine Burnett: Yeah, so we are actually launching right now a pilot program for churches that wanna host it. And so Global Marketplace Leaders, you can go to Global Awakening.com to find out more about the programs and the things that we are launching. We are just doing final edits on it, eight week curriculum that we train 'em as well. So we're really excited about the things that are coming, but they can go to Global Awakening.com and find out a whole lot more.

Jim: So as part of your curriculum, is there mentorship involved? So in other words, there's some business people out there that get this and there's some business people out there that don't get this. And there's a lot of pastors that don't get it at all 'cause they don't understand business. It's one thing to educate and to really open their eyes in eight weeks, but it's a 80 year process. I mean, it's a lifetime process. How are you partnering up business leaders that actually understand the call of God in their lives with business leaders who are understanding this for the very first time, how? How do you make sure you perpetuate this so it doesn't just die off in week nine?

Katherine Burnett: No, absolutely. It's a great question. So we piloted a program with Global two and a half years ago that has now gone and around the world and is in underground church and other nations as well. And so we've learned a lot about how do you do discipleship?

And so my husband and I pilot a program for them. And so now we are doing the same thing in the business aspect. How do we raise up disciples long after the eight week curriculum is done? And so a lot of those curriculum basis will be done around small groups. Now, you guys both know there's a lot of type A business people that do things on their own time and don't want the connection, they want the information.

We have the ability to release curriculum for them, and that's great, but in an entire other program will actually have the discipleship model built into it. So we'll have strong leaders that walk them through it, but they'll also continue to facilitate discipleship even after that time is done. And so we're excited about that, and we're really excited to see what God is gonna do and how he's going to continue to train and equip long after the curriculum is done.

Jim: Do you guys ever get to interact with college students?

Katherine Burnett: Great question. My husband is a college professor of 25 years and we actually did a lot of college ministry prior to coming to Global Awakening. We saw thousands of college kids saved and we just have a heart for it. And so one of the things that actually the Lord has really been on our heart is how to engage the 18 to 25 year olds. Because as you probably know, a lot of people are in their thirties and forties and they're like, "there has to be more to life than just getting up and going to work." And so for so long everybody's been going after them to say, you're called with a kingdom purpose. Your job is something.

We are actually wanting to target the 18 to 25-year-old and really just dive into how to influence them before they ever graduate college to realize they're on a mission. They are sent, the sent ones into the marketplace. And so we're currently working on a program for them as well to engage them and to really hear their needs, but as well as cooperate with FCA and different programs at different universities, CRU, things like that, across the US that have already reached out and asked for information.

Martha: That's awesome. And I hear just hints of collaboration in there and I love that. Again, not reinvent the wheel, the people that already have the ins, let's get them the resources so that they can disciple this next generation. For iWork4Him, excellence is a core value, and we have several supporters of our ministry that are affiliate partners that really do represent excellence. SaferNet is a cybersecurity software created to protect your data and all your devices, computers, and cell phones.

And Patriot Mobile is a cellular company built on pillars of faith, family, and freedom while providing excellent US-based service. To see all of our affiliate partners go to iWork4Him.com/sponsors.

So what training do you give business leaders to use the supernatural as they serve at the pleasure of the king?

Katherine Burnett: This is probably one of my favorite aspects of Global Marketplace Leaders, is this supernatural. You know, how to hear the voice of God because the Lord knows everything and he has access to everything. And so as we're in partnership with him, he reveals things to us that help us. And so one of the things that we do is teach people how to hear the voice of God.

Another one is how to get a word of knowledge in a business setting. And just an example of that is I would do contracts in my construction business. And I would hear the voice of the Lord give me a number for what the contract amount should be. And at first I dismissed it and then I started realizing, oh Lord, you're trying to partner me with me in the supernatural for the benefit of the client and also for the benefit of my business.

So when I started listening to the Lord, it was always, generally the number was always higher than what I thought. But the client would always say, oh, that's less than what I thought the contract would be. And so I started partnering with a word of knowledge in business. And the scripture talks about it, but how you partner with the word of knowledge is just listening to the voice of the Lord. And then even small things, like I was sitting on a plane one day and I felt like the Lord said, Hey, you need to get work comp insurance for this new employee. And it was something that had slipped through the cracks.

And I was like, oh Lord, that's you giving me a heads up before an attack of the enemy would come. You're trying to protect. And so God is so gracious, if we'll just partner with the things that he's made available to us through his scripture, through his son, and I absolutely love teaching people how to do that.

Martha: I love that example, 'cause how many times have people, listeners might be listening right now and say, oh yeah, there was a time where I had this thought, that I should have gotten work comp and I forgot to do it, or maybe it was fixing a threshold in their entryway or whatever that might be, and they dismissed it rather than taking action.

I know that, Jim, over the years we have become way more aware of that still small voice because it's a warning from our Heavenly father, or like you said, partnering with us and saying, Hey, I have something that you need to know and I'm sharing it with you. And I think that's so valuable because so many, if we don't learn to listen, we end up with a lot of hitting ourself in the head saying, Jim uses the example all the time of, I knew I needed to move that ladder.

I felt this nudging that it was, I was a few inches off on something and then it was unstable or whatever that example might be in our lives is, it's the Holy Spirit partnering with us. And so I think that's such a great reminder and seeing it as a partnership rather than an anything else is a really valuable way to see it.

Katherine Burnett: And if we've separated at our job from Holy Spirit, meaning it's just somewhere we go and it's not a call, it's not an assignment, it's not a mission field, then we all, by default, separate out partnering with the Holy Spirit because it never crosses our mind. This is something we do. This is a task we do. And then we go back to serving the Lord at church and in our quiet time. But when we marry those two back together, it is that partnership that you talked about, Martha. I'm partnering with him every day, so he has keys, he has insights, he has wisdom in my everyday life for the advancement of the kingdom.

And we talked about excellence, but Daniel was excellent in Babylon and the king took notice. It brought advancement because of the excellence he carried. And when we hear the voice of the Lord in small things, that saves the company money or saves loss of life or injury, it brings notice to the king. And so it's one of those things that we cannot separate out, the call in our placement as a mission field in the marketplace.

Martha: And I feel for some reason it's really important to bring this up right now for our listeners and for each of us to be reminded. When God created me, he gave me certain passions and certain gifts and abilities. And that is why I've been driven by the work that I've done over the years.

And for Jim and I, when we were 40, we finally understood. Okay, God created us to be really good business people. He didn't expect us to put that aside in order to do something different, but to use it for him. And so even though we were doing it with excellence, we were doing it with integrity, we didn't really embrace that. You know what? God didn't make a mistake. He made me really good at these things for a purpose. And I think that there's a lot of us that need to be reminded of that on a daily basis.

Katherine Burnett: Absolutely. And my husband and I always joke and say that your pastoring gift doesn't stop when you leave the parking lot of the church. Maybe you're pastoring a small group at church or you pastor in the kids' ministry. That doesn't stop when you leave the parking lot, your gifts that God's given you go with you wherever you are. So we need to utilize those in pastoring the people that we work with, or being an evangelist and sharing the gospel or whatever it looks like, using hospitality as an inroad to people's heart that does not stop outside of the church walls. And we just encourage people in the marketplace to use their God-given gifts wherever he's placed them.

Jim: Katherine Burnett, great conversation. We've covered so much, but I wanna make sure people really plug in with you after today's show, Global Awakening dot Com's a website, but I believe you could do gml.Global Awakening.com in order to be able to get to the Global Marketplace Leaders section of that website, gml.Global Awakening.com.

Katherine Burnett, thanks for being with us today. Appreciate it.

Katherine Burnett: Thanks so much.

Jim: And make sure you guys check out SaferNet on our way out of the show today. Check out check out SafeNet, just for all the protection on all your computers, safenet.com.

You've been listening to iWork4Him with your hosts, Jim and Martha Brangenberg. We're Christ followers. Our workplace, it's our mission field, but ultimately iWork4Him.

10/8/25 - 2115: Ownership is a Trap

Jim: You've tuned into iWork4Him, the Voice of Collaboration for the Faith and Work Movement.

Martha: And we are your hosts, Jim and Martha Brangenberg. And our mission is to inspire every workplace believer to recognize their workplace as their ministry place, where they work with God every day. What can that look like in your workplace? Let's find out right now.

Jim: Are you a pastor? Do you work in a church? Do you have to work in a church to be a pastor, or to be in ministry? Why is it so many Jesus followers today are feeling disenfranchised by their local church because their faith on Sunday seems irrelevant to work on Monday. Where did the disconnect happen between the early church and the church of today? And a disconnect it is for sure. Today, we have tears of importance and work that's not worship and so much frustration and stagnation of believers in their workplace. Where did this come from?

I know the frustration, but where are the solutions? In the 12 and a half years of this podcast slash radio show, we've only interviewed two pastors who have understood the reason the faith and work movement was necessary. Martha and I have only located a dozen or so churches that truly focused on Sunday on equipping the ministry workers for Monday, and the interviews of those churches haven't happened yet. In July in Cincinnati, we saw the most amazing thing: four church pastors on the stage, all speaking the language of iWork4Him.

 One of those pastors is James Lenhoff. James is a leadership development pastor and author, a speaker, hosts his own podcast, runs two businesses, Wealthquest and Charis Coffee and Creamery. That's a resume we need to talk through and understand. James Lenhoff, welcome to iWork4Him.

James Lenhoff: Wow. Thanks for having me. What a great intro. I hope to be the person you think I am.

 (laughing)

Martha: And we know just by chatting with you a little bit before is there's actually more that we could even talk about as well. Everybody, I just wanna encourage our listeners, hang on tight because this is a conversation - I have no idea where God is gonna take it, but I know that he has teed it up for a lot of areas that are really relevant to our listeners and so we're excited for it.

Jim: That's right. James, we got a ton of things to talk about and we gotta talk to 'em really quick today, but do it at a pace that people can understand, because they always like to listen at one and a half times and it's impossible for this podcast.

Martha: Not today.

James Lenhoff: You already speak at one and a half times.

Jim: That's exactly right. I do speak at one and half. I do. All right. And that's without caffeine. You should try listening with mountain Dew in me. Alright, let's start off with your Jesus story. How did you come to walk in the dust of your savior and Lord?

James Lenhoff: So I grew up Catholic and had this really beautiful experience with the tradition of the Catholic Church and the honor that was present in those rooms, but also there was a lot of monotony, a lot of an experience of just, we say the same things, we stand up, we sit down. And when I was in high school, there was a man named Matt Massey who led me to Christ, this personal experience of a relational Jesus.

And he then went into ministry and started a church, North Star Community Church, which I then jumped in and was part of after Amy and I got married. We jumped right in and been part of it since then. So I have walked with Jesus now for 35 years or so, and it has been a a lot of beauty and a whole lot of learning. It's been a fun experience.

Martha: Awesome. And I know that there's a lot of that ebbs and flows in a story like that, but the bottom line is God's using you every day and growing you. And I can tell that just from our conversation. So like we said, it is not very often - in fact, it's very few, where we find a local church pastor who understands about business, much less one that is running multiple businesses.

So you launched, you have a company called Wealthquest Business. Let's start there. When it was formed, was it patterned after the world or did it have a kingdom pattern?

James Lenhoff: Yeah, so I had the joy of starting that business with a fellow believer, Wade Daniel. He and I solved the problem of the industry so wealth management, financial planning firm.

And what we realized is, we're solving the wrong problem, as an industry. We keep holding out this idea that the problem that we're solving is investment management. It's a rate of return point. At the end of the day, the real problem is people are lost and they're scared, and they don't understand who to talk to.

They got an accountant over here, they got an attorney over there. They got several different places where money's invested and none of those people talk to each other. And so the model was, we're gonna bring all these things in house. We do our clients' tax returns, we do their estate designs, we do everything in one place. And it created so much more clarity and confidence because what we set out to do, we founded the company with this mission statement of we empower families to live meaningful lives.

And so it is intentional to give people the confidence to say yes to the things that they feel called to. And so it was always this mix, quite frankly, of we have to operate in the world structure of how wealth management companies work. We're regulated by the SEC, we have all these same rules that we have to follow. And we also didn't want it to be something where, by saying to the world, we are a Christian company, that means that people who aren't following Jesus feel like they can't use us, they can't engage with us.

And so we just wanted to make sure everybody knew we're gonna, we're gonna lead people with a biblical worldview, but we're not gonna market ourselves as an exclusive Christian company so that we can have families that we impact in a deeper way. And so it's been a beautiful expression of giving people the ability to say yes to things they would naturally say no to, because they have the confidence to actually press into those things and follow.

Jim: It's so true. And as part of that, that conversation where so many financial advisors get people financially prepared for retirement as best to their ability, 'cause obviously it's up to the people to do the saving. But the church has done an absolutely rip roaring terrible job of preparing people for retirement because they promoted that the American dream of retirement is actually biblical or it's not, and retirement's just another phase of life and very few financial advisors prepare people for what they're going to do in retirement. They all know what they're retiring from, but very few help them to know what they're retiring to. Did you guys help people to know what they're retiring to?

James Lenhoff: We use that exact phrase - we told everybody's got something they're retiring from but if you have nothing to retire to, you are losing the script. You're left listless. And I would have people retire and they would say for the first couple of years, this is great. Every day is a Saturday. Then eventually they would say, this is terrible. Every day's a Saturday. I don't know what to do with myself. I don't know how to actually invest myself in anything.

And so one of our most important aspects of planning is finding meaning. What are you gonna put your hand to? This idea of just retiring into a life of leisure sounds great. It's actually deeply unfulfilling. And so we would always be aiming people at, invest your life into something. We'll do the rest. In fact, that was our marketing tagline: "invest in your life, we'll do the rest."

Martha: Wow.

James Lenhoff: And the idea was, we'll take care of all these goofy moving parts. You go do the stuff that matters.

Jim: So we did a 20 year onsite experiment for misery in retirement by living in Florida for 20 years in two different retirement neighborhoods. One of them, both of them, were homeowners associations, which is literally living in purgatory on earth because those people who have no purpose become the presidents and board members of homeowners associations, and because they're so miserable, they want everybody else to be miserable too.

But they control the money so they can actually make you miserable financially and physically. But we saw the dissatisfaction with living in pleasure. They had the ideal life. They got to live in Florida right off the beach. They got to look at seashells every day, play tennis and golf, and they were miserable people. And it was sad. It was just sad.

James Lenhoff: It's, to me, the parable of bigger barns. Jesus tells this parable, and the farmer that builds these bigger barns, 'cause he has so much abundance, he doesn't know what to do with it. The issue that I see Jesus pointing us to is that the farmer says, he says to his soul, you have ample goods, for many years. Relax, eat, drink, and be merry, effectively, check out and indulge in complete selfishness. That's what Jesus is challenging us with. That is not what I'm calling you to. Endless selfishness is not a biblical model.

Martha: No.

James Lenhoff: That's for sure. And so we need to step into selflessness.

Jim: Say that. Say that again.

Endless selfishness

Martha: is not a biblical model.

Jim: And somehow that comes across

Martha: as the American dream.

James Lenhoff: And that's right. That's the whole point. We do all these things so that I can be endlessly selfish in the end.

Jim: I'm just thinking that would make a great sermon.

Martha: I think we're gonna, we're gonna have to have this conversation with our iRetire4Him.

I love just how God is aligning our hearts in so many things because there is nothing new under the sun. God has given us all of the truths that we can have at our disposal to live by, but we don't often put them through the lens of our daily work.

And that's where I know we fell short in a lot of ways and our eyes have been open. So how did you transition from being a business owner to being a "biznistry" steward? Actually seeing it as stewardship.

James Lenhoff: I had a moment - I did mission work in Haiti for many years and my first trip to Haiti was right after the earthquake. And we're driving, we land in the airport. There was a bunch of rain that came through right before we landed, and so we're driving around all these giant potholes that are full of water. So this was 2011, something in that range. And, as we're driving around this pothole, I look down and there is a little boy in the middle of the pothole that's filled with water and he is naked.

He's probably seven years old and he is bathing himself. And in that moment God just broke through in this deeply profound way. I don't hear an audible voice. This is probably as close as I've ever come to that, but I just felt very confident he said, Hey, James. That little boy did nothing to deserve to be sitting in that pothole. You did nothing to deserve to be a wealthy white man in the wealthiest country on the planet. This story is not about you and none of this is yours. And I was like, oh, I get it now. I get it. This is all for your glory. It's all your resources. The breath in my lungs is yours. The interactions I have with clients, the interactions I have with employees, my job is not to hoard and own anything.

My job is to join hands, link arms with the king of the universe in the work he is doing in the people in front of my face. That's all I have to offer, and that's all that I have to experience. And so I just, it was like this light switch. And from then on Wade and I, my business partner, we were constantly challenging each other: what feels good to us in the Holy Spirit? What are the decisions that the world would say are really terrible business decisions, but we know are the right decisions? We know God is wanting us to move in different directions.

So one example was we developed a mental health benefit for our employees where we pay for all of our employees to get counseling, marriage counseling, individual counseling, get their kids into counseling, whatever. Because we're facing nowadays situations we don't have tools for. We recognized that, as part of our jobs, as the patriarchs, so to speak, of this family of families, we need to invest in their health. Not just their physical health, but their mental health. And so just those are moments where there were just these lightning rod kind of kairos moments where time stands still and God's like "this." And we go, okay.

Martha: Wow.

James Lenhoff: And we would just take those actions and move things forward. And what a joy to see the impact that has made just because we're willing to say yes to things that all of our competitors would say, that's dumb. Make 'em pay for it themselves.

Jim: Yeah, we did, in fact, we just hostsed a conference that was entrepreneurship and mental health as a, from a Christian perspective. So I wanna know, who or what was the biggest obstacle that you faced in that transition from business owner to business steward?

James Lenhoff: Yeah, the biggest obstacle is me. (laughter) I have found that the biggest - I wrote a book called Living a Rich Life, and in that book I talk about this, these generosity circuit breakers, that there's these moments, these stories that we tell ourselves that cut off this hard wiring, that we're supposed to be generous, and I think that's God's image in us. He's a generous God. And one of the things that cuts that signal is this story about being self-made, where we say, I did it, I created it, I put in the effort. I built it, so it's mine. And if it's mine, I get to have authority over it. I get to do whatever I want with it. I get to enjoy it.

And this was Ebenezer Scrooge's problem, right, in the Christmas Carol. He's " I did it. Nobody helped me. Why should I help you?" And then the ghosts of Christmas past shows him the truth. You were never alone. All these people impacted you in deep, profound ways. They're the reason you're here. You're not self-made. You're incredibly fortunate. And I started to realize, like I could have been born as that kid in Haiti. I could have been born during the plague. As I looked back and told myself a different story, I realized a hundred percent of the things that mattered the most, I had no control over. So to claim anything as mine is not just naive, it's insulting to the owner, right?

Martha: Oh..

James Lenhoff: And so I needed to get my mind right on this idea of ownership as a trap. If it's mine, I will make really selfish decisions with it. But if it's his, he gets to do whatever he wants with it, and I just say yes.

Jim: Ownership is a trap. I love that. Speaking of being a steward, every aspect of our work needs to be well managed. We talk on the show often about being a person of excellence to reflect Christ. Well, it's hard to be excellent when your computer's getting attacked by viruses or other nefarious people, or you get exposed to terrible things online.

SaferNet.com is who we use to help us steward all of our electronic devices at home and at work. Their internet controls, filters, virus protection, help us steward our time and our resources to accomplish the calling God has given us. We encourage each one of you to go to safernet.com, sign up, get it on all your devices, and let 'em know that you heard about it right here on iWork4Him.

So with all that perspective, James, and you look 19 years back and 19 years forward, that decision, a recognition that you're really just a steward. You're not just a steward, you have the privilege of being a steward. What's the long-term result 19 years later?

James Lenhoff: I think I would say the biggest result is the trajectory of growth of our business went parabolic.

Jim: Okay. You used one of those words not everybody's familiar with, especially if they didn't like geometry, okay? (laughter) And if they're watching on YouTube, it means up, it went up, it went like almost straight up.

James Lenhoff: Yeah, that's right. Exactly. Yes. That's great. I call this math in the air.

Yeah, so straight up. And part of that was we recognized if we're not owners, one of the things that we want to do is get ownership, the experience of ownership, to all of our employees. And so we became a hundred percent employee owned. We got all the employees involved in it. They started getting profit distributions from the company, started to realize that this thing is really meaningful and valuable to their family. And it started to change their lives.

And one of the things that I think we tend to do when we have an ownership mindset is we say, I had to pay my dues. I had to, struggle and fight and overcome, and you should have to do the same thing too, and I'm not sure that's healthy. I think if we have an opportunity to open doors for families, that give them access to more freedom, more beauty, more health earlier, why would we prevent them from experiencing that?

And so we started to just be way more open-handed and generous with getting owners on on the team that used to just be employees. The other thing is we got super engaged in generosity as an organization. So finding opportunities to invest our team in service projects and different ways to express this, not just monetarily, but also with our physical bodies. How do we actually honor him? By going and serving. And that led to a lot of really meaningful connections for our employees. They found things that they were passionate about and they became connected to those organizations and started to really run with them. And so it just getting them access to some of this stuff was life changing and it was a beautiful experience to watch.

Jim: It's quite a shift. Quite a shift.

Martha: Wow. Listeners, I know that you might be longing for this same kind of paradigm shift in your own business and just can't imagine how to get it done. We are getting some examples today.

A great resource to help you gain confidence in running a Kingdom company is the US Christian Chamber of Commerce and you can attend the Chamber Expo next April 2026 in person, get encouragement and challenged while you're there, Jim and I have the pleasure of being your guide as MCs for this event. Go to swc2026.com. Use code iWork4Him to get registered and we'll see you there.

Jim: All right, James, I know because you're a glutton for punishment, not only have you had this extensive experience at Wealthquest, you're a pastor, a leadership development pastor at your church, you also started a coffee shop. Tell us this story.

James Lenhoff: Glutton for punishment, for sure. I would've lost every bet on the planet that opening a coffee shop would be harder than running a wealth management firm with 2000 clients. It's so hard. (chuckling) But the idea, it's used to be an Italian restaurant that's attached to the church building that we rent our church space. And when I went out of business, I said, I'm gonna put a coffee shop in there. I never had a dream for this. I never had any intentionality for it. And I had no idea how to do it or what I was doing. All I cared about was community space.

I have recognized that people are not coming to church, particularly people that don't know Jesus. There's nowhere for them to gather. And so the coffee shop attached to the church, it's called Charis Coffee and Creamery. Charis is the Greek word for grace and kindness. And we are just this open space, we donate all of our profits to local charities, but it's this idea of creating community. I actually am not a coffee snob. I don't care that much about coffee. The coffee's really good, but it's not because I have anything to do with it.

The bigger goal is just holding space for diversity and connection, and we have tons of Muslim families that hang out there all the time, and they feel safe there, which is beautiful. I had a wonderful connection with a individual that said, Hey, I know you're a pastor. You talk about being, working next door. And I was like, yeah. And she said, I think I'm a Muslim. And I said, yeah, of course. And she said, I don't understand it. I've never felt this safe and warmly welcomed anywhere in the city. And it doesn't make sense to me that would come from you. And I said, oh, that's easy. You are safe and you are warmly welcomed and I'm delighted to have you here.

And it now, in her context, she's experiencing what it feels like to have this unconditional love. She's never gonna walk in the church next door, but she's at least started to taste and see that the Lord is good, right? And so just holding space for people to just be human with each other is my vision.

And then the biggest thing that I've been surprised by is the ministry opportunities for staff members. We're hiring people that have medical issues or backgrounds or all kinds of things. We're bringing them in and giving them opportunities to grow. And it has been a joy and also has nearly destroyed me. (laughing) So both of those things are true at the same time.

Martha: And there, I'm just sitting here laughing because he doesn't even know. I know you don't even know, but this is just that, the journey that you have been on so parallels a lot of the things that Jim and I's journey looks like. In fact, to the point...

Jim: 4 days before this podcast launches,

Martha: we opened a coffee shop. So

James Lenhoff: No way. You should have talked to me beforehand. I'd have talked you out of it. (laughter)

Martha: Yeah, but you know what? It's actually called The Gathering very much for the same reason, a place to have community where people can sit and gather, put their feet under the table, and feel like they can linger and allow whatever needs to happen in that space.

Jim: And we didn't just open the coffee shop. We took a 150 year old building with a hole in the roof the size of a car and rehabbed and re brought back to life this building. And then we're putting a coffee shop in it.

Martha: Yeah.

Jim: And we did all the work ourselves.

Martha: It's been quite a journey for us. But one of the things I wanna hear from you, James, is in the midst of it all, like what kind of conversations did God allow you to have with people, I imagine, that sounded pretty much, what are you doing? Are you crazy? Why would you do this?

From a business standpoint, a lot of things that we step out in faith to, don't look like they make sense. So talk about that for a minute and why you know that it was the right thing for you to do, even though it's probably the hardest thing you've ever done. (chuckling)

James Lenhoff: Yeah, I have, I think, just recently crossed over from a sense of deep regret of having done it because it's been so hard to seeing the beauty of it. And God has really been kind in the, Hey, I know it's been hard, but look at this. Look at this. Look at this. He's been just pointing to things and it's really made my heart come alive. But we're talking the last few months. This is, we opened in May of 24.. So it's been a little over a year. And it is, I think the biggest thing for me is recognizing the deep felt need that the community has had for this place to just be allowed, to just be near each other, be with each other.

When I'm in the barista mode and I'm making a latte, I'm literally pouring the milk and praying over it, and I say, I bless the conversation that will happen over this beverage. I bless the community and the relationship that's gonna connect over this drink. We have gelato as well, so as I'm digging out gelato, I bless this child to joy as they engage in this. It's just an opportunity to take what would be a monotonous thing, because work is worship, turn it into a way to glorify the owner of all of this.

Yeah I don't know for sure if he was like, Hey, do this, or if I just did it. And he's like, I'll use it. I haven't teased that out yet. I tend to jump off cliffs and then he's okay, I'll catch ya.

Jim: But that's not what we're encouraging our listeners to do.

James Lenhoff: Yeah. (laughter)

Jim: We encourage you only to jump off the cliffs your Heavenly Father's asked you to jump off.

Martha: No, but I will say that a lot of people feel like their work is maybe meaningless or that they're not fulfilled in it. And yet in everything that God calls us to, as you've said several times, work is worship, and right now God may have someone in a job that they don't particularly like. They don't see why they're there. It's giving them a paycheck. Maybe that's the only reason they took the job, but God can use every single day, every hour of every work that we do, if we come into it with that approach that it is worship unto him.

And yet we're doing it for whatever that purpose is, as long as it's legal, that it's a position where you can bless other people by being that cup of cold water that they may need in that moment no matter what you're doing. I do believe that even if it's people don't feel like they're in their calling, they are in their calling because God has you there for purpose and on purpose.

James Lenhoff: And if you open your eyes to it,

Martha: yeah

James Lenhoff: you get to join the king of the universe and the work he has. It's a delight. We tend to get stuck in the monotony, but when we just lift our eyes up and say, all right, this is your day, these are this, the breath in my lungs is your breath. What do you want me to do with your life?

The way I read Galatians 2:20, I've been crucified with Christ and I no longer live. The idea of me is dead. It no longer exists. The only thing that's happening now is Jesus living through me. So how do I show up in my day-to-day monotony as Jesus? That's what we need to be called to, and that's what I am teaching at the church.

Like guys, people that don't know Jesus are not coming to church, but they're going to work. Ministry to the non-believer, the unchurched, is not gonna happen here. You need to be activated and prepared to do what God is asking you to do every moment of the day when you go to your place of work. We need to see it differently than just a paycheck. I totally agree.

Jim: We need to have you back to have a couple more conversations. One about church, how do we get our church to be like your church that actually looks at business not as a necessary evil, but as an opportunity for community ministry? But also talk about this retirement, go deeper into that.

But I wanna just close out with this question: many of our listeners today are struggling with the staleness of their faith in their work. Whether they're running a business or whether they're operating a piece of heavy equipment or digging a ditch or selling cars, whatever it may be, they're worn out and they've got very little support or understanding from their local church body. How can you encourage them today?

James Lenhoff: I think the biggest mistake that the Big C Church continues to make is this separation of "this is where holy things happen, and this is where worldly things happen." I think we have done a huge disservice and what I encourage people who are finding their jobs monotonous, who are burned out, who are weary, if you just recognize every moment as holy. Jesus is in every one of these moments, every breath that you take, you are breathing him in. And every exertion, everything you lift, every piece of paperwork that you file, everything you are doing with your physical body has an opportunity to bring glory to his kingdom.

If you bring your everything to it, as monotonous as it is, you're glorifying him. And the most beautiful thing that has happened so many times for me is when someone notices that. When they say, why do you care so much about this? Why are you putting this much effort into it? Because their tendency is to just check out, do it in a half effort way, and call it good enough.

But when you show up with excellence, it is deeply attractive and really uncommon, and they want to know why. And you get so many opportunities to tell them because you're doing it for the king. And he deserves it. He deserves your best.

Martha: James, there are so many things that you have said or brought up or touched on lightly or that we just didn't have enough time to cover that our listeners have been digging into for a long time, and I just want them to know that one of the things that we're gonna do is put a resource in the show notes of a sermon you just preached that we have said for years on the iWork4Him, show that people have never heard the sermon, that their work matters.

They've never heard the sermon about so many things that the scriptures actually have to say about our work. So listeners, I'm giving you this little bonus, you're gonna have a sermon that you can listen to that James presented to a church, just to take that next step and say, here's somebody who gets it, that is teaching others, and that it can happen around the globe because I believe that the scriptures, a lot of us have just had our eyes covered and our ears plugged to the truth of what God really has in store for us on a day-to-day basis.

And I love just what you just said about every moment is holy. And that's really what it comes down to, is that perspective, that paradigm shift that we've been talking about.

Jim: James Lenhoff, thanks for being on iWork4Him today. Thanks for sharing some of your story. I hope you'll agree to come back and we can have some more of these conversations.

James Lenhoff: You betcha. Yeah, you just tell me when, I'll be here.

Martha: Awesome.

Jim: You've been listening to iWork4Him with your hosts, Jim and Martha Brangenberg. We're Christ followers, our workplace, it's our mission field, but ultimately iWork4Him.

10/1/25 - 2114: Bold Faith in a Hostile Culture

Jim: You've tuned into iWork4Him, the Voice of Collaboration for the Faith and Work Movement.

Martha: We are your hosts, Jim and Martha Brangenberg, and our mission is to inspire every workplace believer to recognize their workplace as their ministry place where they work with God every day. What can that look like in your workplace? Let's find out right now.

Jim: Your faith is under attack. Everywhere you go, the biblical ideals you hold firm to are ridiculed as out of date and old fashioned and definitely not inclusive. In the past 20 years, the government of the United States has ruled against you. State laws have been passed that prohibit the free exercise of faith on sidewalks. You've been told you must comply or you'll be destroyed, deplatformed, silenced or canceled.

So where do you turn when the government you elected turns against you? For decades, the National Center for Life and Liberty has been defending churches and Christian ministries, caught off guard by lawsuits, government overreach, and unexpected legal issues. David Gibbs III has been on this show many times, but in the last four years, national Center for Life and Liberty has been so swamped with legal challenges on behalf of many believers across the country, we've just said we're not gonna bother David 'cause he's just been so busy being in front of the Supreme Court and all these other things.

We have missed David's incredible wisdom and pointed humor. So David is back with us today to share how God's been working and what you should be looking for and preparing against. David Gibbs, welcome back to iWork4Him.

David Gibbs: I am delighted to be with you, Jim, and before we went on the air, we were talking about, you're a pen and paper guy, so you know, back when payphones and dinosaurs roamed the earth (laughter) and so you're gonna do it the traditional way. You're gonna hold firm. But we will remind everybody, God gave us a book, not a video, so you know, you're probably in sync with how values get handed out.

Jim: That's right. And it started with rock and chisels, so let's just, at least I'm not carrying a rock and chisels.

David Gibbs: We don't know that. We hear pen and paper, but we don't know that.

Jim: I just showed it on YouTube. (laughter) On YouTube you could see the pen and the paper right in front of me. David, last time you were on the show was August of 2021. How would you describe these last four years in light of the calling on your life?

David Gibbs: Busy, and incredible, in terms of what all has happened. You think about the last four years. We have gone through massive changes in the world. We use a word like COVID and people go, oh yeah, I remember that. That was a little while ago. And the reaction of our culture and our government and what that did to the legal system, kinda wildly. Courts backlogged.

So today as we look at like disappointments, I mean trying to get your case to court, trying to get judges, everybody was working at home and criminals go to the top of the pile. So if you're not charged with a crime, getting your case in court can be difficult. Lawyers all went home for a while and a lot of 'em figured out they want to get paid more and work less. And so all of a sudden in the church world, where churches don't have necessarily unlimited resources like a big corporation and don't have the ability, and so we have been unbelievably busy.

Now, on a positive side, there's afternoons where I sit, I am here with you and I'm in court in 3, 4, 5 different states and never leave my office. The Zoom world has really changed how the legal system works and the process and so I think as people look at that, they think of a justice system. But the reality is try to get your case to court is expensive and time consuming. And then what is also tragic is you can go from judge to judge. You wake up one day and you know what rights you may have. This judge says yes, and then you go to another court or another even judge in the same area and they say no.

And I don't think people understand just how our system is so dependent on the men and women that have the ultimate voice of authority and how that's done.

Martha: Wow. It's amazing when you think back to, I think of when you said, thinking back to COVID and like all the things that had changed, we got to the point where we didn't even say that word. We would say "in this time that we're in." We all know what that means, right? This unfamiliar and uncertain time that we've all experienced and what has happened in it.

I am a cup full person. But I wanna start with, what are some of the low lights? When you sit around the dinner table, you always hear families say, give your highlights of the day and low lights of the day. When you look at the last four years -

David Gibbs: by the way, that's a pretty heavy dinner table. (laughter) Mostly what are we gonna eat? What are we doing afterwards? And what's on tonight? Yeah you're talking a pretty serious table. But go ahead. (chuckling)

Martha: Yes. So we have some friends that are very intentional as parents, and that's something that we learned from them is give us your highlight of the day, give us your low light of the day. 'Cause then you learn a lot about the people around the table.

So in this table we're sitting around, David, what do you think of as some of the low lights of the last four years in respect to the justice system?

David Gibbs: I'll give two with the courts. I think I mentioned them, but I think we can definitely touch on. The speed with which justice is meted out in this country is too slow. To have a case that you file today and then to be adjudicated two, three years down the road and then appealed for another year or two. Is justice in five years justice? And it can be a marathon really 'cause you just keep going and the reality is, businesses don't stop. Families don't stop. Life doesn't stop. But litigation just moves at its own pace.

So I think you have to look at that. The inconsistency is troubling. The judges not being anchored to absolute truth. I think we had a legal system that was more based on common law, and this is what the law is, this is what the legislature did, and we see this in big federal cases, we see even at the Supreme Court. Law is now what a given judge thinks on a given day. So that's a little scary for people and businesses, trying to base their life on what judge do we get? Whether this is going to go one way or the other.

I think culturally you've gotta look at a couple big shifts. One is in the area of life, I think we're watching over the last four years, a lot of trend towards what I call the quality of life lie. And let me just tell you what that is. If you don't have sufficient quality of life, your life isn't worth living. I was the attorney for Terry Shiva's family. You remember that back in Tampa Bay now 20 plus years ago. And back then it was traumatic that we would take the life of a disabled woman that was alive. Now we're talking about, Canada has right to die. The west coast has right to die. Now all of a sudden, people want to go to their doctor and end their life because they're depressed or miserable. And you start looking at a culture that says, is life a gift from God or is life just what we think it is and we can end it at any point?

And then I also think you've gotta look at maybe a cultural shift towards the church or towards ministry. There used to be, you say the word Bible, you say the word minister, you say the word pastor, you say the word church, there was a cultural respect. They didn't always agree. We knew there was disagreements, but there's a respect. Now all of a sudden we've moved past indifference and I would say over these last four years there's a cultural mistrust. I think in some instances a cultural hostsility. There's some marginalization. It used to be, boy, isn't it wonderful the church is trying to reach a community? Now it's, oh, are they abusing children?

And so I think societally we've watched where the perspective towards charitable work and towards even teachers and educators and others that are involved in nonprofit type work, are now deemed as more suspect. And so it is a little unfortunate. And again, there's other areas you can look at that. Law enforcement, used to be, I grew up and was told, obey the police. He's your friend. Now, it's the policeman might beat you up and take you somewhere because you're the wrong race or because you upset 'em.

And again, i'm using simplization, but the cultural trust for law enforcement, the cultural belief in church and ministry, the cultural looking up to teachers and others that are investing in the next generation, now we've moved into a highly judgmental mistrust in culture and it just makes it that much more difficult. So over the last four to five years, I'd say those are probably some points where I go, wow. A lot has happened. Times have changed in this country.

Jim: And you left out the distrust of governmental organizations is astronomically high today. It was always a little low. Like people thought yeah, i'm not sure. Now yeah, nope. I don't trust them at all.

David Gibbs: And I'll add to that, Jim. I was gonna throw government in. I just didn't know if that was the last four years of the last 40 years. You know what I mean? (chuckling) Because we've reached that point.

Jim: Eisenhower brought it up 75 years ago. Hey, the government industrial complex. Watch out boys. You don't know what you're getting.

David Gibbs: Yeah. Ronald Reagan's quote - I'll be close - "some of the scariest words in the government language is I'm from the government and I'm here to help." (laughter) You know what I mean? That's never a good thing. So you have to look at it. It's been a problem for a while.

Martha: So let's look to the positive side then. What do you see as some of the highlights that have come out of it? You already mentioned even just the ease of Zoom calls to be able to more efficiently maybe do some of the work. What else have you seen?

David Gibbs: I think while technology can help things, it's still helping people. When you talk to a person, so a pastor calls me, a businessman calls me, a leader calls me, and they have a spirit of fear. I'm in trouble. I've been sued, I've been attacked, I've been challenged. What can I do?

And for me personally, there's tremendous joy in being able to say to them, here is the law. Here's what can be done, here is something that can help move this forward. And so I think, maybe over being able to communicate. So it used to be like you would say, can I go to a meeting with a church? And that may be like, they're in Idaho. That's gonna be really expensive. And for just one meeting. But now all of a sudden you're able to say, get 'em together. Let's have this ability to talk. So while technology is maybe less personal than a face-to-face meeting, it's also been able to bring the world really together in some ways for communication.

Even around the globe, you can talk to missionaries and others differently. Your podcasts -look at the people that would never be able to sit in your living room and have this conversation, or even if you had a church or a building, they just couldn't get there. Yeah, but now you're able to get to them on their time.

So I look at the ability to help real people with real problems take away that spirit of fear, give them confidence, let them move forward. My cases have a different feel good. A lot of lawyers, it's, they got paid well or they made a bunch of money, or they made their client a bunch of money and it's got a financial side. There's nothing wrong with that. That's the business side. But a lot of my cases may have a, there's a child that's alive. There was a baby that they were going to end the life in the hospital and that child's alive now with his or her parents and doing well. And so you almost have a, like this child is the result of this. There's a person here. So that's exciting to see.

Or a ministry that could be on the verge of collapse or death and you say this organization is going to no longer be able to minister in this community where they've been, some of them hundreds of years in our nation's history. And to see them continue to move forward and again, I'm a big believer in not just surviving. So the idea is not just to survive. It's to thrive. We wanna go forward and we wanna minister in a really effective way.

And then probably on a personal note, since we're just chatting, I have two grandchildren in the last four years, so I guess I've crossed over that being a dad and now being a granddad, that's a great highlight. And I gotta tell you this too. My kids were all into the names and I was like, nah, whatever the kid wants to call me, I'm fine with grandpa, granddad, whatever. I wasn't too particular. And they're like, dad, you gotta come up with a name or we're gonna name you.

Jim: Oh yeah.

David Gibbs: And so I was kinda like, what are you gonna name me? And I went to Duke, had the privilege of going into their law school, so the kids were like, we'll call you Duke. I'm like, I don't know. That sounds like a dog. Sounds like a school. Sounds like a lot of different things. I just don't, Duke and Duchess sounds like royalty. It's a little snooty, and they're like you come up with a name or we've got it for you.

So I saw a t-shirt that said, in a world full of grandpas, be a fun paw. And so I thought, I said it as a joke. I said, I'll be fun Paw, figuring that would be good marketing with the kids. It picked up, so now I'm fun paw and these little granddaughters have figured out I am good for things, I'm good for toys, I'm good for trips. Fun, ice cream. They like it. And then the nieces and nephews figured out, Hey, we're gonna play into this too. So now I'm uncle Fun paw. And they have jumped into that in a good way, but it is fun to see that next generation coming along, and I don't envy my kids.

You guys talking about change. Social media, it's dangerous, but the kids gotta be able to function in today's world. Technology, what a tool, but what a scary world, the premature everything. Knowledge, information, what gets to... and so how do you balance that? I'm watching my adult children and their spouses now moving through that with their own children. And it has you pausing. So celebrating for those kids and trying to be there for 'em, but on the other hand, it's a wild world we live in right now.

Jim: Sure is. It is. And we didn't talk about a lot of judicial victories, but I'd like to do that after, just wanna make sure I highlight one great thing. 'Cause one of the greatest things that came outta the last four years is the birth and the explosion of the US Christian Chamber of Commerce right there in Orlando, Florida, but spanning across the country in now 23 subsidiary Christian Chambers all over the country. You can find details about their upcoming event in 2026. IWork4Him.com/events.

Martha and I will be MCing the US Christian Chamber Expo in Orlando in April. Go to swc2026.com and enter the code iWork4Him. You'll get a discount. And there's also another great event, the National Faith and Work Summit in Cincinnati in June. So lots of great things going on there.

David, in the last 10 years we've seen free speech come under attack. We've seen the right to assemble in our own church come under attack. We've seen prayer come under attack. In some countries it's now illegal to pray in your head anywhere near any place they don't want you to be praying. We've seen the right to maintain our religious beliefs come under attack. What's next and how do we prepare?

David Gibbs: I'm a big believer - and by the way, whether you, again, politics is a hug or duck, right? There's people that just love what's going on and there's people that don't in any given state and in any, even nationally. Okay? But the reality is we do have a current more conservative, at least national direction, with less regulation, which again, can be good and bad. Maybe less taxes. That's generally good. And trying to instill a little more fiscal restraint into the government.

And I think all of that is a healthy combination that allows business to have more opportunity to thrive and grow and to go forward. But I'm a big believer, Jim and Martha, when you think about business, if you have good people, and by the way, your listeners are good people, and you give them good information, I think you gotta be careful. It's not just what chat GPT spits out. We live in a world where there's a lot of misinformation online, or even scams or spoofs or I just talked to a couple of pastors that lost lots of money in a scam.

It sounded good, and all of a sudden it's a Ponzi scheme. So I think you got good people with good information, they can make good decisions. And I think that's where in today's world, as a business leader, you gotta think about, what can I do to live my faith? And maybe a word of encouragement is they can do more than they realize. They have freedom of speech, they have freedom of religion, they have the opportunity. Now, again, back to hug or duck. You become the strong Christian business of any sort, there will be people that don't like you.

I talked to a church in California today. They scheduled a trip to Israel for next year that they were gonna work to put together. This weekend there are people protesting out front of their church over what's going on in Gaza, and they've got bullhorns and they're yelling as people are coming to their cars. Anything you do - scheduling a trip to the Holy Land at a church now opens you up to potential protests and culture.

So you have to decide, am I willing to face the noise? Now, there'll be people that appreciate it and they'll show up. And you may get more business, more customers, more trust, but you're also gonna have some folks that say, I will never deal with you. And I was talking with some lawyers today. The collegiality in the legal world is not what it used to be. Lawyers now, if it's to their competitive advantage, we'll go file a bar complaint against another lawyer just to try to see if it'll help 'em in the litigation. And it's just an acrimonious and intense way of doing things.

And so I encourage the Christian business leaders, make sure you get good information. Make sure you're moving forward, but then be willing to stand up for your faith. Let your position be known. The NCLL, we have a motto, and I like it 'cause it encapsulates a lot, but this would help you in business in other places. If it's wrong, fight it. And there's a lot of wrong in the world. We can all agree. But if it's right, fight for it. So deciding what is your mission? What is it you are fighting for? What problem are you solving? What are you ending? And be willing to stand on that regardless of the consequence, I think is significant.

And then I would probably put one more thing in for the business leaders that I'm a big believer in, which is lead by example. And by the way, this is church leaders. This is ministry leaders, this is educators, this is business. We all wanna lead by decree, right? We wanna say it, do this, do that. And that's fun, right? To be bossy and sit around, watch other people jump. But the reality is that true leadership is where they see a leader that embodies and personifies what the organization's all about. And so if you're gonna preach it, pastors, you need to live it. Teacher, if you're gonna teach it, you need to model it.

Business leader, if you're gonna ask your employees to run day and night, they need to know that you're willing to go 10 minutes longer and 10 miles further. And when they see that and you're doing it together, when you're that model of it, I believe at that point you get real leadership, real buy-in, and people can get excited about what's going on.

Martha: Amen. And I'm gonna make sure I put a link to one of our previous interviews with you, David, in the show notes. And the reason why is if people have not heard you speak before, one of the things I often share is that you always tell us the things we can do. And I think that's so powerful because we are in a world where we hear all the time as a Christian, what we can't do. And I love that you even just now said it again. You said, what can we do and being leaders that are really worth following, right? Standing up for what you believe, but also needing to know what that truth is.

And you you made an excellent point too, that there's a lot of things that we can find out there that are not the truth. They've been curated to try to lead us in a different direction. So make sure we're getting our truth from the right places.

Jim: Even those protests, now that they have professional paid protestors.

David Gibbs: Yeah, you don't know what ever you're dealing with. And let me say this, I'm a lawyer. I don't like most other lawyers because if you start dealing with insurance and risk and adjusters and mitigators and you put a label on it, right? What's the easiest thing? Don't do it. If you send a rocket up into the sky, oh yeah, it might blow up. You might kill people. You could be sued. But we're never gonna explore space.

You load a truck full of stuff and you go down the highway, could you have a wreck? Yeah. Could you have an incident? Yeah. Could your tires blow? A lot of bad things can happen, but we're not gonna get the goods and services we all live and depend on. It's a management of risk. If you're gonna live risk adverse, you don't ever go anywhere. You're stopped, you're parked, the car's in the garage, you're dead. And by the way, there's churches that have died, there's businesses that have died, a lot of organizations, but you've gotta manage your risk and you gotta decide, why am I here? And then you're gotta be willing to take that risk.

And then, Martha, you take biblical concepts, right? Treat people the way you wanna be treated. That seems so basic. But we live in a world where people wanna almost act like the customer's a pain and I'm just here for a paycheck. And we're watching where the US, and that's our country, is not leading like we once did in certain industries and areas. And so I think we always have an opportunity as Christians. We're commanded to be salt and light. That means we have to preserve and protect and shine and be willing to go forward.

And just decide - if it's all about the money, I will tell you the Bible's pretty clear that you can't serve God and money. And when they talk about the root of all evil, they don't say money's evil. Be careful. People misquote that. But if that's your love, it will ultimately be insufficient and it will ultimately lend to your destruction, 'cause the new car does break and you gotta make the payments. The bigger house still needs to be clean. Electric, taxes, everybody sits there and ends up at some level, frustrated with it. And yet that was what they were living for.

But when you find that purpose, and the purpose is in what God's called you to do, made you. That's why we're in his image, right? We have the opportunity to make our life count for something bigger than ourselves. Wow, that's real legacy. Now, you may die with a little smaller bank account than you could have if you'd just gone after money, but think about the impact, that legacy, and then I'm a big believer, you're gonna stand before him and get to hear some really cool words like "well done." And those are the sort of things that get me excited when you start thinking that way.

Martha: Amen. And if you think about the workplace, which is what we talk about on iWork4Him, , if the living and breathing God is living inside of you, then the gospel has to come out in the work that we do. And Satan can't keep that from happening. But we need to stand and be bold. Living out the gospel should be a part of our DNA.

But sometimes when we have computer troubles, it's hard to live out the gospel. So if you want to do what you can to protect yourself, your family, and your company from viruses or hackers, you can trust all of your devices to SaferNet. Their dashboard allows you to seamlessly see activities and to know what the virus protection, the filters, and the other controls that they have are working hard to protect your mission. Go to SaferNet.com and let them know that you listen iWork4Him.

Jim: We use it on every device. It never lets us down. David, what kind of challenges are you fighting in courts right now?

David Gibbs: I'm facing a lot of issues where churches and ministries are wrestling to even just keep what they have. We're in a world right now where denominations are changing, imploding, changing their beliefs, and here's a church that might have been in existence for a hundred, 200 years, and now an out-of-state corporate denomination that's gone woke, says, we're gonna take your property back. We don't want you anymore.

And these people are like, but this is our church. Grandma's buried out back. And so just even making sure that your organization is safe from takeover or from outside influences, and you say, why would an outta state denomination try to stop a church? It's all money. Greed. They want the assets, they wanna liquidate, they wanna put it in their coffers, and they want to advance their agenda.

And then I would also say, the fear factor. I think Martha said it. There's so many Christians that are like, you can talk about everything. You can talk about your gender fluidity or your sexual orientation and all that is out of the closet. We can talk about that because, it's he him or she her or they them, or whatever you wanna be. That's all cool.

But the Christians, in some measure, fearful, like they gotta be in the closet. And so what I challenge is it's time for Christians to be out of the closet. Doesn't mean you're obnoxious or rude, just means be yourself. If you believe in Jesus Christ, talk about it. If you're going to church, tell people about it. Take people with you. There's nothing wrong with being you, and so living your faith is in some measure, being genuine. Just be yourself. Live your faith, whether you're a realtor, whether you're a salesman, whether you're in ministry or you're just, in your mind, in a secular endeavor, be yourself and let Jesus Christ shine through you.

Think about this. Jesus could have shot us all to heaven, right? Could have just said, you know what, David, Jim, Martha, you won't do anything bad if I just once you're saved, i'll just get you outta there. But he didn't do that, right? Why not? You say, iWork4Him, but I'll take your motto and say We all live for him. Some people work for him because they take their life and they actually put it in their workplace. So I love what you guys do, but the reality is we all are here for him, if you're a believer in Jesus Christ.

So thinking about making your life radiate for him is something that is exciting and encouraging, and I'd encourage everybody to think, am I really serving my purpose as to why he left me here?

Jim: So that's another brand option he's offering is Radiate4Him? Hey, that's awesome.

David Gibbs: We're taking iWork4Him every which way. You've already branded that masterfully in a good way for Jesus glory. But let's just take - by the way iParent4Him.

Martha: Yeah.

David Gibbs: I recreate for him. I do whatever. I hang out with friends for him. What is your - everything you do should really be focused around the "For him" part.

Martha: Yep.

Jim: We so agree. As you look at the next decade ahead of you, what do you see? What do you hear God saying, David, lemme just give you a little hint of what's ahead?

David Gibbs: I would say this: every leader, as you start moving along, has to start as, and some don't do this, and I help them too. But you gotta start thinking about, am I bringing along the next generation? Do I have 20 and 30 and 40-year-old attorneys that I'm training, discipling, mentoring, hiring, working into?

So otherwise, an organization as noble as it could be, will either die with you, which is, some narcissist founders want that, right? They, it's all about them, right? But the reality is, if you're really trying to leave something behind, you want it to continue on. But then the other dynamic with all of that is if you don't do that, then you don't have people trained and organizations can take left and right turns. They can be quacky cults or they can be left-leaning liberal. And people say I don't even recognize this anymore.

Harvard university was designed to train Baptist ministers and look where it is today. And so somebody says, how did an organization change like that? There's a natural tendency to move away from core biblical values. And so that's part of our sin nature. So I think as a leader, you have to think about, am I finding my successor? Not that I plan to stop. I'm healthy, young, wanna keep going, but my point is, you gotta start looking at, are there people behind me?

It's the old farm team concept. Am I bringing people behind? And then culturally, I think we have to expect what I will call bounce back. And what I mean by that is we are going to see where the younger generation is watching right now the older generation, a little bit pushing, maybe just a little more conservatism into the culture, and I think you're gonna see a younger generation that's going to continue to ask some hard questions. Is grandma in her eighties worth paying for? People go, whoa, that's a hard question. Or does it the right to die turn into the duty to die?

Or do social security benefits get tied to mandatory death ages? And you say stuff like this and people go, oh, freak out. That would never happen in America. Canada right now is, can't keep up with all the citizens that they gotta kill. And so we're living in a world where life values, religious liberty... i'll just throw out one big one. Will future generations value the church where it doesn't pay taxes? Or will we be in a day where they say, eh, you guys have had a good deal for a long time, but it's time to start kicking in income tax, property tax, sales tax. And all of a sudden a church that was able to function on a hundred thousand dollars a year budget tax free starts looking at 20,000, $30,000 a year in taxes and they gotta shut down.

So I do think we're gonna see some trends and maybe what I talked about earlier, whether it's life, whether it's respect for ministry, education, what is going to occur in the future, but I am passionate to be that salt and light. And as long as God gives me breath, energy, opportunity, I plan to stay marching forward and keep doing what I'm doing and at least show up on iWork4Him every four years. (laughter)

I kept going to my mailbox 'cause I knew you wouldn't send an email 'cause you're like a dinosaur. So I'm gonna go to the mailbox. (laughter)

Jim: I'll text him next time.

David Gibbs: And I kept looking for a letter from Florida, Missouri, or wherever you guys land at any given moment. I know you're jet sitting around the world doing big things in Orlando and Cincinnati and everywhere else. But I kept looking. I was like, no, not today. I was like, I wonder if Jim just forgot me. 'cause I knew Martha wouldn't. (laughter) but then ultimately she emailed. So it was really your lovely wife that saved this phenomenal relationship. And again, I'm teasing. I hold both of you in huge esteem, but I'm always honored to be on your program. So you say the next 10 years, I hope it I get on at least once or twice more.

Martha: There you go. We'll have a date four years from now. (laughing)

David Gibbs: Okay. That's good. Yeah. At least four years. Yeah, that's right. Every four. It's like presidential elections. Just, your audience can take...

Jim: unfortunately we're out of time.

David Gibbs: Oh, are we outta time? When the preaching gets good, the deacons all gotta slip out and count money. You just never know how it's going. (laughing)

Jim: Oh boy.

David Gibbs: Is this the conviction of the holy spirit? And if I started an altar call, you need to come down first. So I'm ready for you, Jim. (chuckling) Alright, it's your program. I'll turn it back to you, sir.

Martha: Oh, you're awesome.

Jim: Check David out online and his whole team at ncll.org .It'll be in our notes for the show. And I recommend, if you need help, NCLL will be the one to help you or they'll send you the direction of where you need to get help. David Gibbs, thanks for being back with us today.

David Gibbs: Honored to be with you.

Jim: You've been listening to iWork4Him with your hosts, Jim and Martha Brangenberg. We're Christ followers. Our workplace, it's our mission field, but ultimately iWork4Him.

9/24/25 - 2113: The Servant Lawyer's Guide to Faith at Work

Jim: You've tuned into iWork4Him, the Voice of Collaboration for the Faith and Work Movement.

Martha: We are your hosts, Jim and Martha Brangenberg. Our mission is to inspire every workplace believer to recognize their workplace as their ministry place, where they work with God every day. What can that look like in your workplace? Let's find out right now.

Jim: Over the years we've interviewed hundreds of authors, thousands of everyday workers living out their faith and their work, but never have we interviewed a lawyer who wrote a book that reflects the antithesis of how we all view lawyers. So much that this book caught my attention, it also kept me riveted to the pages all the way to the end. The book is called Servant Lawyer and the author is Attorney and Professor Robert (Bob) F. Cochran Jr.

So incredible is this thinking that he reflects in his book, I had to have Bob on to talk about this revolutionary understanding of the kingdom role of an attorney. Throw out everything about your thinking about what a lawyer does and how they should act and open your mind to the endless possibilities of the kingdom role of lawyers. Bob Cochran, welcome to iWork4Him.

Robert Cochran: Thanks so much, Jim and Martha. It's nice to be with you.

Jim: Bob, tell us about your journey. We wanna hear about your journey in making Jesus your Lord and your Savior.

Robert Cochran: Yeah. I was raised in a Christian home, I think a wonderful Christian home, but like a lot of preacher's kids...

Jim: Oh, you're a PK. Oh boy.

Robert Cochran: I am. I am. I ran away from the faith, wanted to discover the world on my own, so through high school and college, pretty much running away from God. And then I got to law school. I went to law school for not such good reasons - of pursuit of status. I just found that that world and that pursuit to be empty, started reexamining my faith and I guess discovering.

Discovering CS Lewis, him speaking to my mind, I'd had plenty of wonderful lessons for the heart, but Lewis speaking to my mind was a big part of that, and I guess it was a search for meaning and truth. So in the midst of my first year of law school, not really a great time to have a crisis of faith, committed my life to him and been trying to follow him since that time.

Jim: But CS Lewis could frame an argument better than almost anybody who's ever lived. I'm sure maybe Socrates was good at it too, but CS Lewis was so good at it. And he could speak at all levels. He could speak at simple levels that he could speak at exquisite levels, so I could see how he touched your life.

Martha: So I'm curious because you said you wanted to become a lawyer, maybe because of the prestige and the return that might come from that. After you really made a commitment to Christ, obviously you continued on with that education, so you must have then decided to really be committed to becoming a lawyer. Is that correct?

Robert Cochran: I went back and forth with the idea of going to seminary, becoming a minister, or sticking with law. But I had really an ever expanding view of Christ and what Christ is doing in the world and what I might do. And then really also just through I think mystical insights, circumstances, a number of things, kept me in law. And it really wasn't until after a few years of law practice that I looked around and I didn't have this nagging sense that I ought to be a minister anymore. I really came to see law practice as a vocation, as a way of following Christ.

Jim: So talk to us about how that really became, your faith became interwoven in your law practice? What was that journey like? Because you've decided that they should be interwoven. We could talk to a thousand attorneys and they would say, law is law. And Jesus is Jesus, they don't have anything to do with each other. You're saying they should be interwoven.

Robert Cochran: Yeah. I guess I'd point to three influences. One was a group of Christian law students who've remained among my best friends for 50 years. I still meet with several of 'em weekly in a Zoom Bible study. They've encouraged me there, helped me to develop this vision of a servant lawyer, and hopefully I've encouraged them as well.

Secondly, I got involved in a church that introduced me to John Calvin and some of his thinking and writing about law and about the world generally, and even about law practice. You may know that he was a lawyer before he became a Christian author and pastor. And so he had thought a lot about it. And one of his great sayings that had an impact on me is "all the world should be a theater for the glory of God." And so it was that kind of a vision that that had an impact with me. I tended to separate the world around me from my Christian faith, but then envisioning Jesus as being Lord of all of life, Lord of all the World, was a great vision.

And then I had a professor named Tom Schaefer, who had written a book called On Being a Christian and a Lawyer. He had just been the dean at Notre Dame Law School and had come to University of Virginia, where I went to law school, as a professor. And and he was really a mentor to me throughout my law practice and then going into law teaching, strong influence with me. So really, all three of those things.

Jim: But there had to been a lot of pushback because you're in a world. I'm not, I won't go to any of the analogies for attorneys. We'll try to be very nice today to the attorneys, but you're in a world that doesn't really emulate the characteristics of Jesus. So when you decided that you had a different perspective on what it really meant to be an attorney, there had to be attorneys around you who were also Jesus followers, who thought you were crazy.

Robert Cochran: I guess I'll push back a little bit. I think attorneys tend to get the reputation they have because of what I would consider to be a few bad apples. Yes, there are attorneys who are like that and deserve the reputation that they have. I do think most attorneys are trying to abide by professional responsibility, rules. Some of the aggressiveness of attorneys is part of representing their clients. And I don't excuse that as something that's wrong, I see it as part of the system and a system that's developed over the decades and has recognized that it's really in confrontation between ideas that judges and juries can, I think, often get a sense of the truth of things.

So I'll defend my profession generally. There aren't many Christian lawyers that think in terms of Jesus sitting right beside them as they're interviewing clients, Jesus sitting right beside them as they argue before court. I think we should view ourselves more that way. And I didn't find that I got pushback so much as "that's an interesting idea. I need to merge those two aspects of my life, or think more in terms of what it would mean for Jesus to be Lord of all of my life."

Jim: That's a good word. Many people struggle to learn what Bob's talking about, allowing our faith to be interwoven in our work and to help you with that shift in thinking, consider joining the US Christian Chamber of Commerce, uschristianchamber.com, where you could surround yourself with other Christ followers, learning to live like Jesus in the workplace.

The resources and networking opportunities even include an expo in April of 2026 where Martha and I will serve as the MCs. The link to the expo is swc2026.com and the code iWork4Him will get you a discount, and we'll see you there.

Martha: So Bob, I wanna ask you a question that maybe not a lot of people have even wondered about this question, but what do you believe is the kingdom purpose of a lawyer? Because you have some thoughts on this.

Robert Cochran: Yes. Yes. I think all the things that we do, what we do should be a reflection of love of God, our love of God. But more specifically for most of us our focus is on love of neighbor. And I think there's a couple of ways in which being an attorney is a way of showing love to your neighbor. Most specifically, most immediately, is gonna be showing love to your clients.

My mentor and friend I mentioned earlier, Tom Schafer, he taught legal ethics and he would, with a wink in his eye, ask people to define the client, and lawyers have all sorts of technical ways, is there a contract, has money been paid? There's all sorts of things you you might wrestle with, but Tom would say that for the Christian, the definition of a client is this person God has brought into my life.

Jim: It's your neighbor.

Robert Cochran: Yeah. Yeah. And you know when you hear that knock at the door, you get that irritating phone call, to be reminded that this is a person God has brought into my life is an important one. And you're dealing with people typically, or at least quite often, at the most stressful time of their lives. You may be used to the legal system as an attorney, but it's a whole new experience for them, whether it's business related, death of a parent or a child, or they've got criminal cases brought against them or they've been sued, those are times when to have a caring person with them and somebody who will speak for them.

Oftentimes people don't know what to say. They're not very articulate, they don't know the law. And so having someone speak for them is a very important way of loving them. But also being a caring person. So many people envision lawyers in the way you've described them, and it'll be a surprise if you find one who loves and cares for you. And not every Christian and not every attorney is comfortable with this, but I would very often in, in cases when we were faced with high stress, say we've got a challenge in front of us. Can I say a prayer for us?

Martha: Awesome.

Jim: Awesome.

Robert Cochran: And I never had anybody resist or say no, sometimes I gotta look like, man, I don't believe this, but we need every bit of help we can get. (laughing)

Jim: Yeah, that's right.

Robert Cochran: And I would just say a prayer and have the sense that God was right there.

Martha: I love that.

Jim: That's good. We're talking today with Bob Cochrane. He wrote this book, The Servant Lawyer, Facing the Challenges of Christian Faith in Everyday Law Practice. We're showing it here, out here on YouTube. We recommend - we'll have the links in the show notes on the podcast. But if you're an attorney or you've got a friend that's an attorney, or you're using an attorney, give them this book as a gift just from you with our recommendation because in there it gives them a whole paradigm shifting look at the practice of law.

Robert Cochran: Let me just say one other thing in response to the earlier question, which was, how do we serve God in law practice?

I mentioned loving our neighbor and the specific client that we're serving but I also wanna highlight the role that lawyers play within our system as advocates for people. So the advocacy system is designed to, the hope is that justice will merge when lawyers - here lawyers make arguments for each client, and then a judge and a jury may be hears those arguments, but also within our commercial system, oftentimes lawyers are representing clients and you're negotiating deals.

So many of the deals that are done, lawyers involved, lawyers anticipate potential problems. They draft documents in ways they're gonna avoid those, and I think they smooth an economic system that creates jobs, creates products for people, and I think that's an a very important role that lawyers serve that often they lose sight of when they're busy just stuck with documents - the people that benefit on down the way from their work.

Martha: Yeah. And I think in a lot of our occupations, we forget the influence that we have over the people that we are working with. So if you're listening today, you're not necessarily a lawyer, you haven't had to work with lawyers on doing deals and things like that, but wherever you are working, you are a person of influence for the kingdom.

And so to take that responsibility with you. Jim, we just interviewed somebody for another podcast talking about bringing our genuine self. If Christ has truly changed us, then we bring him with us into everything that we do, which is such a huge part of our jobs, no matter what our occupation is. So Bob, I wanna ask you this question.

How do you, I don't even know if balance is the right word, but how do you navigate when the world does have a preconceived expectation of what an attorney does and is, and how they act versus how God expects you to be as his son who is an attorney?

Robert Cochran: Yeah. I would say that it's not a balance at all. I would say you look first and foremost, and really only at what it is that, that God wants you to do in a particular circumstance, and you go that route, even if it might get you in in... might ruffle some feathers or might even get you into trouble. I think standing up for faith, following Christ even if the world around you and under some circumstances, even the law would push you in an un-Christian direction.

That being said, I've got a lot of respect for the law as you can already sense. Particularly in the United States, I've got a lot of respect for our commercial system. I think before you challenge it, you should think long and hard. But Christ should be your guiding light. What is good for people? Now again, I'll highlight that you play a role within a system. You've gotta look to the end result that system is designed to give, and sometimes your role will be to argue for someone something that you don't believe, but you've gotta trust the system.

Martha: It is tough because a lot of us have a lot of plates that we spin in our jobs, much like what you're saying as an attorney, but you don't have to hold onto the plate that protects your devices, like your computers and your cell phones. SaferNet is designed to protect all your devices at home and at work, so we can all focus on the mission that God has given us to do while they keep out the bad guys. Their VPN, virus protection, and internet filters work without slowing you down. Check out safenet.com and let them know that you listen to iWork4Him.

Jim: Bob, I wanna close out the show doing some stories, telling us some stories. There's all different kinds of attorneys with many types of specialties, from defending criminals to negotiating divorces to facilitating business deals and so much more, international law and US law. Give us a story of how you were able to reflect the character of Christ in one of those settings.

Robert Cochran: Thanks, Jim. I remember one time lawyers that do divorce and family law work have to wrestle with when they're gonna handle a divorce what their relationship will be with clients. I've had friends who are Christian attorneys and they say in a setting like that, they have enormous opportunities for witness and ministry when people typically are at the very bottom of their lives. As I wrestled with it, it seemed to me there were some circumstances where I could work to get a divorce for someone, and some where I could not.

I had a lady come in. She was an older lady, and she said that she had decided to divorce her husband. And so I asked her to tell me a little bit about her background, her husband's background. It became obvious that they were probably both Christians. She just, she described themselves as going to a Baptist church, et cetera. The pointers were toward her being a Christian.

And so I said that I could refer her to another attorney who could handle that, but I'd made a commitment to not pursue divorce under some circumstances. And her shoulders dropped. She said, I've been thinking about it, getting a divorce from my husband for 30 years. I finally got the courage to go to an attorney and get my divorce, and I picked you out of the phone book and I probably got the only lawyer in Charlottesville who won't get me my divorce. And she leaned over and she pulled a Bible out of her purse and she said, you tell me Mr. Cochran, where does it say in here that I can't get my divorce?

And I leaned over, pulled the drawer out, pulled the Bible out of my desk, and we walked through the scriptures and by the end you could tell she was, that what I'd said had made an impact. So I asked if I could call her pastor or try and get her and her husband together with them, maybe get a little counseling and she said, sure. An example where I think a lot of attorneys would say, my faith doesn't have anything to do with this. If you're, if you're gonna follow Christ, sometimes you have to resist those inclinations.

Jim: A great example. That's a great story. Perfect story.

Martha: Yeah, it is.

Jim: So speak to the Christ following attorneys and their clients that are out there listening today. Encourage them that being a servant lawyer, helping people at possibly the worst time of their lives is in fact, not only possible, it's expected. Talk to people about the general attitude that you present in your book, because there's a lot of attorneys out there that have never been taught that perspective, and that's why I'm hoping you get a chance to mentor and disciple thousands before the Lord takes you home, but speak encouragement to them today.

Robert Cochran: I will put in a little plug for my book. I developed these themes that we've been talking about a lot in the book both for business lawyers, litigators, the lawyer counselor, the lawyer who's in court lawyers, who serve poor people, and law students.

I talk about the moral challenges of law practice and of law school, but I would say be encouraged. I don't think there's any other profession that gives you more opportunity to serve other people, whether that's the individual client who's across the desk from you or the system generally. People make light of lawyers, but you go to a country where there's not the rule of law or where law's disregarded, where you don't have lawyers who are encouraging people to comply with the law, you're likely to hug the first lawyer in this country.

We tend to take law on lawyers for granted, but if they're not around and we can't rely on people's word and documents and safety - a lot of those things, lawyers are there and help to protect us.

Martha: That's awesome. I just had a thought: if we have lawyers in our lives, they're probably hard to buy gifts for, and so I just think that your book, The Servant Lawyer, Facing the Challenges of Christian Faith in Everyday Law Practice would be a great gift.

All of us probably know somebody who's going to law school or they're going to go there after they get their bachelor's or have a practice or you know, whatever their role might be, that you could get this book for them to encourage them through the chapters of this book regarding the industry that they are in, and give them that opportunity to make some new, maybe reinforce or make some new decisions about how they view their work and being the servant lawyer that they've been created to be. So I just think that would be a great gift idea. And Christmas will be here before you know it.

Jim: Hey, that's right. And Bob, I wanna just thank you for your words about the fact that you do have so many ministry opportunities because you, when a client potential client walks in your door, they're possibly at the lowest point in their life. And that's where most attorneys greet their clients, at a very low point. Not always, 'cause sometimes it's business deals and things like that, but you're often dealing with people that are under an extraordinary amount of stress, and that is the greatest open door for being Jesus to those neighbors.

Bob Cochran, thanks for bringing your book to iWork4Him today. Thanks for the discipleship method, the paradigm shifting information, that you've got in your book for looking at law practice as truly a kingdom function and an incredible ministry opportunity. Bob Cochrane, thanks for being on iWork4Him today.

Robert Cochran: Thank you.

Jim: You've been listening to iWork4Him with your hosts, Jim and Martha Brangenberg. We're Christ followers. Our workplace, it's our mission field, but ultimately iWork4Him.

9/17/25 - 2112: From Censorship to Calling - The Power of a "Default Yes"

Jim: You've tuned into iWork4Him, the Voice of collaboration for the Faith and Work Movement.

Martha: And we are your hosts, Jim and Martha Brangenberg. Our mission is to inspire every workplace believer to recognize their workplace as their ministry place, where they work with God every day. What can that look like in your workplace? Let's find out right now.

Jim: So where do you go to buy a book? A download, an audio book, or find the latest, greatest podcast like iWork4Him? Amazon, right? Does Amazon care about your faith in Jesus? Nope. But if they can make money on it, who cares?

They'll sell your faith driven book right next to the pornography section. It is what it is, but wait, there is now an alternative that's viable, proven, successful, and designed for you as a Jesus follower to find all the resources you need for supporting your walk with Jesus, and today we're gonna tell you all about it.

Claton Butcher is here today to present CrossCurrent Digital. This platform has been around for a while, but only this April did I find out about it. I'm so excited for you to hear about a platform where you can get everything you need from Christian media and have it to be sold from a platform where Jesus is glorified and the owner loves Jesus too. Claton Butcher, welcome to iWork4Him.

Claton Butcher: Thank you. It's good to be here.

Jim: All right, so Claton, before we start talking about CrossCurrent Digital, our listeners wanna know your Jesus story. So how, when, and why did you become a follower of Jesus?

Claton Butcher: That goes way back. So I accepted Christ at a very young age. I don't know exactly, it was probably five or six years old. And it's a boring story. We were in the car and I started asking my dad, who was a pastor, questions about how you became a Christian and accepted Christ in the car, in the backseat of the car as my dad was driving down the road. So in that sense it's boring, but obviously it's the most important thing.

Christ is the most important thing in my life and life of my family. And so thankfully I've been blessed to to have walked with Christ my whole life, essentially, that I can remember.

Jim: That's exciting.

Martha: And I just know that there are listeners listening that may wish that they had the boring story that you had. So do not ever discount that, because I do know that the value of what it may have saved you from by meeting Jesus at such an early age. So Claton, fast forward. I don't know much about your career history. Have you always been in the Christian media space?

Claton Butcher: No, I was a worship leader. I graduated with a music degree from Oklahoma Wesleyan University close to 25 years ago now. And so I did that for about 15 years, most of it, bi-vocational. So I was working in retail supplements as well for about eight years, was senior training manager.

Worked up to that there, and so trained managers and all that and got out of that. And when, interesting story that we don't have time to get into because the more important story, if we have time, is how CrossCurrent started. But started getting to the audio books as an audiobook narrator. And at that point, started doing that. Then God said to start a publishing company. So okay, I don't know how to do that, but you say, so I'm gonna do it, but how?

And I described that as my Moses moment. When God said, what's in your hand? I'm like I have $400. That's not the cheapest part for one book. How can I start a publishing company with that? But I had some connections with a Christian publisher and from other Christian narrators from the networking that I had been doing as a narrator. And out of that Two Words publishing was born. We've published about 150 books through nine years now. I think we're in our ninth. It was 2016.

So whatever that math, however that works. (chuckles) And so that then... I don't know if you want me to go then into the CrossCurrent story...

Jim: So how did you get from publishing books to the idea of the CrossCurrent digital platform that you've developed today?

Claton Butcher: It was not my idea. I never would've done this if it was up to me. So we had Two Words Publishing. I also started Black Hills Audio Books, which is our general market brand because there were some books that were not Christian books that I still wanted to publish and actually a book on China before the alarm bells were ringing elsewhere.

And so I thought, you know what, I'm just gonna do another company with this. So Black Hills audiobooks is our general market brand. I heard about a book through I think it was through Colson Center that was not released yet, a book called When Harry Became Sally by Ryan Anderson. I don't know if you heard about that a number of years ago now, but it was a book that I was like, I never want to have a conversation about this in my life, but I think it's important, and so I think we need to be a part of it.

So we got the audio rights to that book and four and a half years ago almost to the day now, just looking at the date down here, it's this week will be four and a half years exactly when Amazon censored that audiobook. So they pulled it completely from Audible, from Kindle, from every new and used seller and of the print version, as if the book no longer existed from all of their different entities.

And it just happened to be coincidentally, I'm sure, two days before the awfully named Equality Act was going to be argued on the floor of the US House. And so our book, which was the most comprehensive and compassionate critique of the deceptive and damaging trans agenda got swept under the rug so that it could not be used as ammunition against what they were trying to push through.

Jim: Wow. And so how'd that end up? How'd that end up? You're just bringing truth out there. Is it out there now? Can you get it on Amazon today?

Claton Butcher: There's more, there's a whole lot more to that story. Do you want it?

 (chuckles)

Martha: It's interesting. This is the story though, that birthed CrossCurrent, right?

Claton Butcher: It is, yeah. So it is the story behind CrossCurrent. And I'll try to keep it short. Within two weeks of the release of that book, or excuse me, the censorship of that book, we had released other books, Tyranny of Big Tech by Senator Josh Hawley and Dictatorship of Woke Capital by Stephen Soko.

Jim: I was gonna say Josh Hawley, great senator.

Martha: We live in Missouri. Great senator of Missouri. That's right. We're grateful.

Claton Butcher: Yes. I got to meet him by Zoom. He recorded the forward for us. But we had somebody else do the book. Anyway, so we had two books that talked about what they could do if they wanted to, that they just did. And Amazon knows that I also own the other publishing company and we talk about biblical identity there in a number of books. It looked like everything could go at a moment's notice. We were fully self-employed for a few years by that point m had stepped back from the music, worship leading at the church, and to devote the ministry specifically to the two things, to the publishing.

And then also part of this is we were host families for Safe Families for Children, which has been administered in South Dakota through Bethany Christian Services. Within a few days of that book being censored, they both changed their statement of faith in order to not lose federal funding on that same issue, but still calling themselves Christian. So we had to remove ourselves from that ministry as well. So we lost, we'd had a dozen babies over four years with that in our home to keep 'em out of foster care, essentially, including four sets of twins. But so we lost that. It looked like we could lose everything financially.

And then we got a phone call from a narrator that says have you seen what's going on with you and with the book that you did? No, I have no idea what you're talking about. And apparently there is, was, and at least to some extent to this day, is a blacklist campaign against narrators that had worked for us, that had worked with us, against myself as a narrator, and threats against our family from that audiobook community.

And so all of that, within about a week.

Jim: Wow. All in the name of inclusion, as long as you agree with them. Not that we're gonna go political today, but so the Lord just shut doors and he said, now are you gonna listen to me and do what I told you to do? I'm guessing that he'd already prepped you and said, I got a platform idea for you.

No? Tell us. Tell us that story. Where did it come from?

Claton Butcher: Okay, so there's a whole question about God's sovereignty that we don't necessarily need to get into here but I think God allowed it, not that he caused it, but allowed it to start things in motion.

So about a month later, there had been - no, we never, ever would've come up with this idea. And even if I had, I would've been too afraid to do anything about it. It was very clear after, in another conversation with an author that very clearly God said, he said, my book is gonna be censored too, because it's about biblical identity.

And that was the point that God said, okay, now build this and laid it out almost word for word to build a Christian conservative digital book sales platform so that when this happens to other books, whether it's Bibles or anything else that talks about biblical identity that goes against the culture, that this will be still available or already available because I don't know if your listeners know this, but depending on the numbers that I've seen, it's between 63 and 83% of all book sales in the US go through Amazon in one form or another. And that is not different in the Christian and conservative spaces.

So Christian publishers are largely funded in that sense as far as where the sales come from by Amazon. And so that is a huge problem that very few people at the time had recognized. More are recognizing it now, but we still need others to get on board, but that was where the idea came from.

Martha: Huge problem is that you're allowing somebody to distribute your information that may choose to no longer allow it to be distributed. Is that what you're saying is the problem?

Claton Butcher: That's part of it, yes. But there's also the whole funding aspect. The platform takes a large percentage in audio books. It's the vast majority of the percentage of the revenue. And so when that platform funds things that are anti-biblical, then that's an issue.

It's not top of mind for a lot of people, a lot of Christians, but because Amazon is so easy, it's you get everything from Amazon and can get everything except for When Harry Became Sally for four years. And so to finish answering your question, Jim you can get it now on Amazon, on Audible because when Trump came into office again and did the executive orders where companies would need to acknowledge biological reality if they were gonna do business, the author Ryan Anderson tweeted saying, Hey, Amazon, does this mean you're gonna sell my book again? The incoming FTC Chair, Federal Trade Commission Chair quote tweets him and says, Amazon, I'd like to know the answer to this.

And voila within a few days, so that they wouldn't lose billions of dollars in DOD contracts, they put the book back up and so now you can get it. But for four years it was as if the book never existed on Amazon.

Jim: So if you're listening today and you wanna see your business or your ministry protected and be a part of a whole bunch of people that support you- Claton has struggled. He felt like he was on his own, like there was no place to go to have fellowship in this whole area when he was being persecuted. The US Christian Chamber, it can be there for you today.

Check out the US Christian Chamber because they help Christian business owners grow their business and impact through expert resources, powerful collaborations, and a national directory for even greater exposure. Grow your business at uschristianchamber.com. And now you can gather with other members at the US Christian Chamber Expo in April of 2026, that Martha and I will be MCing that event. Visit Swc2026.com to learn more and use code iWork4Him when you register.

Alright. Claton, tell us about the platform. Yes. You should become a member of the US Christian Chamber, of course.

Claton Butcher: I already am.

Jim: That's fantastic. I wonder where that idea came from. That's unbelievable. All right. So tell us about the platform. What kind of media's available. Explain it to us.

Claton Butcher: Sure. Basically coming from the audiobook space, that's where obviously what we have and that's the biggest part of it. But we also have eBooks and podcasts as well, so audiobooks, eBooks, podcasts, and the biggest differentiator, aside from ownership and supporting biblical values is our curation. So we curate everything so that nothing goes against biblical values.

The intent is so that nothing will lead you away from your faith or confuse children because there are four or five, 6,000 books that are targeted for kids as, as low as preschoolers with the woke agendas, which include the trans and all of that, that strangely enough the Audio Publishers Association, the American Library Association, the Public Library Association and all of these different publishers weekly and all the different, everything in publishing outside of our Christian circles are pushing this as much or more than anywhere else in the world, essentially. And so publishing is, in that sense, on the front lines of this battle.

Martha: So tell our listeners how it works. You have a membership basis. Just explain the layout of the platform so they understand why they would want to participate in this as the place for them to get their resources.

Claton Butcher: So we have over 16,000 books and the membership is $15 a month for four books. You get to keep one. That's part of our DNA because of the censorship. We wanna make sure that you will have access to that book later, and then you can borrow three more. And those are 30 day borrows.

So there's again, over 16,000 books total. The borrow catalog is a little bit smaller. It's 6,000. We should be at 20,000 and 10,000 very soon on those. So a really good selection of books. And there's also the family plan, so you double that. So you get eight books, two to keep, six to borrow for $25.

And then we also recently rolled out our group subscriptions. And so if you're part of an organization or a church or your business, as business owners, if you wanna be able to provide a biblical resource to your employees, you as a business or as a church can do the group subscription and it's- you may be familiar with Right Now Media. Think of it as Right Now Media for books at a lot lower price.

We go by family group and not by attendee. I'm not a hundred percent sure exactly how the Right Now at Work does that.

Jim: But let's talk about those titles because I'm interested in the titles because this show is all about the connection of faith and work. So of those 16,000 and 5,000 or 6,000, all those numbers you just threw out at me, how many of those titles have to do with what we talk about? How many of them are helping you connect your faith in your work, realizing the significance of your work? How many of those are workplace titles?

Claton Butcher: Yeah, that is a great question that I should have prepped.

 (laughter)

Martha: That's okay.

Claton Butcher: So I'm on the website right now and I'm typing in business.

Jim: So not just business, I mean 'cause it's not just about business, it's people learning to live out their faith and work. I know you've got a couple of great titles that you're gonna be adding shortly, right?

Martha: You mean like iWork4Him? You're leading to the law, right? Yeah, iRetire4Him.

Jim: sheWorks4Him. That's right. (laughter)

Martha: Yes. So that's right. So we are working with you on those, but go ahead.

Claton Butcher: Sorry. So actually we are bringing in, a publisher contract is done. It is just a matter of actually getting the files. So that's where it's gonna take us to 20,000 and then 10,000 on the borrows 'cause they're gonna have all of that under that and there's going to be a ton of business books in that. So I'm excited to be able to get those as a Christian publisher that mostly focuses on business stuff and general marketplace, but also has a number of Christian titles too.

Jim: So is that a good lead? Is that a good lead for you? There's a lot of Christian publishers out there, some small, some big. Are those good leads for you?

Claton Butcher: They are, yeah, definitely. Now, again there are some, we still curate Christian books.

Martha: So you're reading all these books. You must have quite a team that's curating them.

Jim: We've had people curating for about four years now.

Martha: Wow.

Jim: Knowing that this was coming and that we would need to be able to do it quickly when it came. But it's been a long road to get to where we are. I don't know if you know this, but tech companies take a lot of money for some reason.

And we expected to be able to get investment and that really hasn't happened. So we have had to bootstrap this entire thing for a long time. One of the big pieces we don't have is the digital rights. So basically the anti-piracy stuff. And so that keeps us from getting another 40, 50,000 books like this, because those publishers are like let's wait until you have that. So that is a challenge that we are hoping that we can do soon.

Martha: A lot of people that we've interviewed over the years, what we have seen is people will say, when they learn about you, they're like, wow. It's become an instant success, but it's taken 10 years to become that instant success or however many years it might have been. But we know that on the journey God is writing your story and we are just excited to know about it and that's why we love sharing this with our audience.

And one of the things that we know for sure is that digital products take electronic devices in order to enjoy them, right? And if we don't protect those devices, we can't enjoy what we are listening to. At iWork4Him and in our home, our computers and all of our devices are at risk of being compromised by digital desperados.

So we trust SaferNet to protect all of our devices. Their internet controls, their VPN, their virus protection, their dashboard, are all created to help keep the bad guys out so we can keep everything running smoothly. And I think this is an incredible thing to be aware of at safernet.com because we're talking about digital stuff today, and so it's front of mind. So go to Safernet.com and tell them iWork4Him sent you.

Jim: All right, so this has been a long project where you faced a lot of obstacles, including fighting monsters on earth here. Did you ever wanna give up?

Claton Butcher: Yes and no. God has not released us from this and both my wife and I are firmly having again, theological stuff, but having a sanctifying experience a long time ago, which I describe as basically a default yes to God, whatever he wants me to do, I'm gonna do. And so once we knew that it was what God had clearly called us to, there's no sense of stopping. There may be times where I wish he would say, okay, enough's enough. Now you can do something else. (chuckles)

But no, not really. But in many ways it would be so much easier if God said, okay, you've followed me and done everything I asked of you. Now you can step over here and give it up, but there has been no sense of that. And so until God says that, we continue and if we have to end up selling our house and moving and living in an RV, that is on the table because we will do whatever God wants us to do to follow his leading to do what he wants us to do.

Martha: Yeah. And that's so powerful because I think we have a lot of listeners right now that maybe find themselves in a similar situation. It may look different, but they've been on a journey of being obedient, but it's not easy. The trials, the things that you run up against, the financial requirements, the getting censored, all of the different things that you've endured, but you know that you're doing it because God called you to do it.

And so I just wanna encourage our listeners that if you are in that similar position, I just love what you just said. It's like a default yes. Lord, I'm gonna trust you and I'm gonna say yes because you've asked me to do this. And until God tells you differently, keep walking it out. We are grateful that you're bringing this resource to people and making it available, and I just pray that even today some people will hear about it and want to become subscribers, not only because of the great resources that they know they're gonna find there, but also to help in this project of keeping it moving forward so that you can continue to gain more and more access to more and more resources that can help every one of your members along the way.

So we will make sure all of the links are in the show notes for people so that they can go out, check it out, become a subscriber, get some resources, do all the things because that is what it's all about. But I love the whole conversation around having the default yes for God. And I'm sure that will be an encouragement to many people that are listening today.

Jim: Claton, I would tell you that you're gonna know when you succeed when somebody starts calling and say, Hey, we'd like to buy out your platform. They're not gonna be from that other big platform. They're gonna be from some other small platform, but maybe that big platform will own them, and it's gonna be a side job. Don't become, as Tucker became in the car industry, don't become the tucker of the audio industry, the audio book industry.

Be very careful who buys you up because they bought out Tucker and for 40 years all the cool stuff he did sat on the wayside. They didn't have to use it 'cause they bought him out and silenced all that really cool stuff. That's what they're gonna wanna do to you. So be aware of sheep and wolf's clothing. No. Wolf in sheep's clothing. That's what it's gonna be.

Claton Butcher: Yes, that's something that I think is a huge issue. And so that's, that will never happen. We see no exit plan for this. Unless God specifically changes what he's telling us and says, yes, okay, you may do this. But I think that's part of the reason that we haven't gotten a lot of backing is because we have no exit plan. There's not a 1530 multiple that you're gonna get. And because we're not selling, unless again, God specifically leads that way, but it is a huge issue. I've seen it with streaming services, with other christian publishers that have done that. So many of them now are owned by the Thomas Zondervan or Harper Collins Christian. Even Christian Book is no longer Christian owned.

Jim: I heard that. So let me ask you a couple questions before we go 'cause we gotta wrap up. If somebody's listening today and they've got an audio book that's listed on that other place, and they've got an audio book, or they've got a digital book, or they've got a phenomenal Christ-centered podcast, how do they get ahold of you in order to say, I'd like to move my stuff to your platform, or at least have it in both places at first - how do they do that?

Claton Butcher: So email info@CrossCurrentdigital.com. We also have a form on our website so cross digital com / submissions.

Martha: Got it. And I'll put that in the show notes.

Claton Butcher: And so that that helps us know what your book is about and then know whether it would fall under our guidelines.

Jim: And if it's a publisher, we got Christian publishers that send us leads all the time for interviews. Maybe one of them is listening to the show today and they're like, you mean I can actually make money if I put my audio books on CrossCurrent Digital? And you're saying yes.

Claton Butcher: For audio books, you'll double, most likely double.

Jim: What about for digital? Too much to explain today. The bottom line is there's an opportunity here.

Claton Butcher: And we pay better than anybody else, and so know that.

Jim: There you go. Claton Butcher with CrossCurrent digital.com. Thanks for being on iWork4Him today.

Claton Butcher: Thanks for having me.

Jim: You've been listening to iWork4Him with your hosts, Jim and Martha Brangenberg. We're Christ followers, our workplace, it's our mission field, but ultimately iWork4Him.

9/10/25 - 2111: Can Christian Investing Compete?

Jim: You've tuned into iWork4Him, the Voice of Collaboration for the Faith and Work Movement.

Martha: And we are your hosts, Jim and Martha Brangenberg. Our mission is to inspire every workplace believer to recognize their workplace as their ministry place, where they work with God every day. What can that look like in your workplace? Let's find out right now.

Jim: Nine years ago on July 28th, 2016, Martha and I interviewed Cassie Laymon from Virginia. Cassie wrote a book called, I Found Jesus in the Stock Market. I read the book, did the interview, and my life has never been the same. Cassie explained all about Biblically Responsible Investing and how our dollars talk. If we keep investing in companies that invest their dollars in causes and activities that are contrary to biblical principles and standards, then we are officially funding the kingdom of the enemy.

We got motivated. Totally pumped. After that show, I called my buddy and financial advisor Luke Andrews, and asked him to read the book. I told him that I want my portfolio to reflect the principles of Biblically Responsible Investing. I told Luke that if he couldn't do that, I'd have to find another advisor. I didn't want to. Luke read the book and history tells the rest of the story.

Luke eventually left his broker dealer and found one that promoted only Biblically Responsible Investing and shifted all his clients to Biblically Responsible Investing over the next couple of years. And for about five years, Luke appeared on this show promoting Biblically Responsible Investing every month as being a major sponsor of iWork4Him.

Over the last five years, Luke has seen a continued transformation of his life and his way of serving his clients and through his relationship with Biblically Responsible Investing and Inspire Investing, serving as an Inspire advisor. We wanted to follow up on Luke and see how he's doing. So we invited him back to share what God has been doing in his faith while he lives it out at work as an Inspire advisor. Luke Andrews, welcome back to iWork4Him.

Luke Andrews: It's so good to be here. When you had asked me a few weeks ago, let's do it again, I was excited and I've been excited for this time and just can't wait to share all the updates because it's been a little bit. I do miss Dave Cruz, so I'll make sure I share this with Dave and he'll hear our shout out today.

But I had lunch with Dave. For those that are just listening to me for the first time, back in when we first started out, really once a week on a radio show you guys were hosting, we'd come in once a month and it was the Luke and Dave of Bel Air Wealth Management.

Jim: That's right. Luke and Dave from Bel Air Wealth Management online at Bel Air Wealth Management. And Dave would say ".com".

 (laughing)

Luke Andrews: Anyway, I had lunch with Dave last week and he's doing great. His daughter Tammy, Tamara's gotten into the business and they're doing great and he's enjoying life. But anyway, we're here to talk about some updates and some exciting things, but I'm grateful to be here.

Jim: Luke, did you realize it had been nine years since that life-changing conversation?

Luke Andrews: No, I hadn't because I remember, and because it's a story that I tell when I'm sharing this whole biblically responsible journey with prospects or people or whoever wants to listen, is you gave me the book and I'm a skeptic by nature, whether that's good or bad, I think sometimes that's good, sometimes that's bad. When it's bad, God has to keep bringing other people in their life to to push you along, but having that skeptic nature, I read the book, and then I shared with you, Hey, I read the book. And that's how I left it for a little bit.

And I did leave the book on my desk because whether or not I wanted to believe what was in the book or not, I had been building a business for the past several years on just being a good Christian financial advisor. And there's a lot of good Christian financial advisors out there, not necessarily giving good biblical investment advice, but just good Colossians 3:23 financial advisors: "work hard at whatever you do, as if you working for the Lord and not for man."

So it wasn't an immediate change for me. I read the book, and I put it on the desk. But shortly after that, again God has a way of using other people as well, brought in another person. And he had asked me, Hey, am I invested in whatever it was at the time? I don't recall exactly what he asked me, but it had something to do with biblically aligned or faith-based investing. So this time I went back and read the book again, but I studied the scriptures that were laid out in the book.

I started praying about it and then this is where God started transforming the way I saw investments, 'cause I was probably like many financial advisors or even potential investors today who hear Biblically Responsible Investing, they're not really too sure about it. They're super comfortable where they're at. There might be some misconceptions on, "I'm not necessarily profiting from abortions. I'm not really profiting from the distribution of pornography." So really there, there is this journey that took place the day you gave me the book, but it wasn't like an immediate transformation.

It's taken time and then when you said nine years, I'm like, holy cow. That's, it's been such a fast nine years and so much has happened during those nine years. I can't wait to share more about it.

Martha: And that's the part that I love about this story is how God worked in your heart. Because you, like you said, you were building a practice that was based one way, because that was the way it's always been done traditionally, and then revealed a new way that would've meant a big shift. And I know we're gonna talk about that big shift, but let me ask this question: why don't you think that all Jesus following advisors promote Biblically Responsible Investing? Why do you think there's still a gap?

Luke Andrews: Financial advisors? I got real stories because I've got several friends and other believers that are in the business. Some look at their secular business as a way to minister, which is awesome. Hallelujah. I'm still able to do that, as well as focusing my practice on just Biblically Responsible Investing. I pray with our clients. They send me prayer requests, so these are things that we get to do, leading some to the Lord. We have unbelievers that are partnered with us as well and having that influence in their life.

So mainly, misinformation. This idea that you can't build a biblically aligned portfolio that's gonna keep up with historical returns that they're seeing in their own investment accounts, which is untrue. There's misinformation or maybe they don't see, if you own an ETF or a mutual fund, an exchange traded fund or a mutual fund, you don't actually own the stock per se.

So there's all sorts of ways that, in my opinion, the devil gets in there and just likes to confuse and lie and deceive. So these are actually real conversations that I've had with other advisors who may, who are running their practices how they're doing as a Colossians 3:23 type financial advisor. Yeah, a lot of it just misinformation.

Comfortable is probably another big one. They've had their book of business 10, 15, 20 years to convert a business like that into a BO. Now it's absolutely possible - inspire has several advisors who had huge books, who had been doing what they've been doing for 10, 15 years that have partnered with us. And it is a transformation.

But you mentioned, it has to happen in the heart. God really has to get ahold of you and hopefully the right people in your life to give you that influence and answer those questions about, what does that look like? What's the process look like? I don't want my clients to have a bunch of taxable gains because we're converting it all to Biblically Responsible Investing. Those are legitimate concerns.

But the good news is that there's a process out there, so for any financial advisor who loves the Lord, who is Colossians 3:23, who wants to take this next step and just start praying about and seeking information about BRI, you can contact me directly. I'd be honored to have that conversation or Inspire in general.

Martha: And I'll put your contact information in the show notes, Luke, for people so that they can reach out and have a couple of different options. I think it's important before we get too far into this conversation, to just explain really quickly and we can even put some links to some past shows we've done with you where you've gone into more detail, but why essentially it is so important to understand that if we just own general investments or if we have general investments, that it can actually be supporting things that go against our very biblical principles. 'cause some people may not even have ever heard this concept before and I don't wanna leave them out of the conversation.

Luke Andrews: Yeah, when you own a stock, okay? And if you own an ETF or a mutual fund or the stock outright, you own shares of stock, and shares of stock gives you an ownership interest in the business. And the Bible has a lot to say about ownership, right? Everything belongs to God. We're just managers, right?

And I'm an extension of you, Jim and Martha, as managers of what God has asked you to steward. I'm an extension of that stewardship. So when you look at, just when you start to look at things from a stewardship mentality, I think it changes everything. So when you own a stock, you're going to, your investment in that company is you want a return on the investment.

So you invest in Amazon because you think Amazon's a great online retailer, and they're gonna make a lot of money for you. They're gonna generate a lot of revenues and that revenue, if the stock is doing well, sorry, if the company's doing well, generating high revenues, keeping costs down, nice gross margin, fundamentally they're doing really well. The value of your stock goes up, right? That's that return on investment.

That's the connection when you're looking at Biblically Responsible Investing and just stock ownership. Now, some people might say then why do you shop at Amazon if you don't invest in it? Consumership is different, right? Amazon sells pornography. They sell an abortion drug. I don't use Amazon as a consumer for those things. I got some Muscle Milk the other day. That, that's what I used Amazon for. I don't order pornography and I don't pull from their abortion drugs or anything like that. But when you have ownership, whether it's to a mutual fund, which is weighted with some Amazon stock in it, so Amazon does better, the ETF or the mutual fund value goes up as well, you're profiting from that.

So anything a company does, whether say they sell alcohol, gambling, tobacco, pornography, anti-family values, abortion drugs, supporting abortion, there's a lot of companies that after COVID, you know, and after Roe v. Wade, some of their states banned abortions or brought it way down. There's a lot of companies that said we're gonna pay for abortion travel, and where does that money come from? It doesn't come out of the sky like where the government prints money. They use the money that they're generating from the profits they're selling from selling pornography, from selling abortion drugs. They're using your financial or your investor dollars that you have ownership in to do these things that don't align with biblical value.

So there's your problems, right? When you own a stock, whether it's individually or through a mutual fund and exchange traded fund, when the value of that stock goes up, you get a return on that investment and it's because of what they're selling. So BRI essentially avoids companies that are selling alcohol, gambling, tobacco, abortion, pornography, or even supporting other different philanthropic issues that don't align with biblical values.

And then we also, we don't just wanna screen out companies, we wanna find the best companies, 'cause we've also found when companies are on a mission, and not necessarily Christian companies, we'd love to find those, but companies that are just looking to take care of their employees, they're taking care of their communities, they're taking care of the world, they're making a positive impact, they historically also have a tendency to perform better because people are holding onto those stocks for more than just the returns.

Martha: Yeah. That's so good. Thank you.

Jim: So why do you think - everybody listening today, I'm guessing a large majority of people listening today do not have financial advisors that are investing only by biblical responsible investing standards. So why is it that Jesus followers don't insist on it?

Luke Andrews: Yeah, it's communication, right? It's not something financial advisors are preaching. When I do talk to Christian financial advisors, and I ask 'em have you at least even offered Biblically Responsible Investing to your Christian clients that, if they knew that they were profiting from pornography, they would probably be mortified?

Now, that's just a transformation in the way you think about things though, too. Most people, we've always been taught, we're just investing for our future. We're just investing for retirement. We've never been taught we're investing God's money. And would God be happy with the returns on where those investment dollars are coming from?

And if God says "Thou shall not kill," one of the 10 Commandments, and then we're supporting and we have Amazon - I'm beating up on Amazon today just because Amazon is probably in 90% of our listeners portfolios - whether they own the stock individually, whether it's in a mutual fund, whether it's in an exchange traded fund, they own Amazon stock. Thou shall not kills in the Bible. We know that killing is not good and essentially abortion is murdering and killing of a baby. So if Amazon is selling the abortion drug, that's part of their revenue. Their revenue dictates what their stock price is doing, and that's what dictates your returns.

So it's educational. There's $21 trillion in the households of those who profess to be believers or a Christian, $21 trillion. We could make a huge impact if we had 1% of that, so really it's a messaging thing. It's getting other Christian financial advisors to start having those conversations.

Jim: Yeah. Just an awareness, which is why we're doing the show today. Yeah, it's dangerous when we allow most of our input to come from society at large without putting it through a biblical filter. That's what Biblically Responsible Investing does for your investments, and that's why we love the US Christian Chamber of Commerce.

We surround ourselves with people who love business, the Lord, and the truth. The US Christian Chamber of Commerce has many different opportunities for members from all over the country to connect and learn. And in 2026, you can attend the SWC. What's that? Spiritual World Citizens. SWC2026.com event that Martha and I'll be MCing in Orlando in April of 2026. Use code iWork4Him to save on your registration.

Luke, when you went out there and you said, okay, this is something I wanna do, you found Inspire Investing to move your firm to, to establish where you were gonna grow what you were doing under Luke Andrews. What was it about Inspire that said, that's a company I wanna walk with?

Luke Andrews: From the bottom, not the bottom in hierarchy or anything, just for, I would say, from the person who answers our phones to our CEO Robert Netzly, who you've spoken to, who we've had on the show before, there is a commitment from the bottom to the top, okay, of transforming the way Christians invest God's money. And I didn't have to, I was in a great place with Bel Air Wealth Management. I love those guys. They're doing great things over there. For me it just came down to did I want to create this biblically responsible movement there or do did I wanna join a movement that was set to transform the industry?

And that's really the biggest part for me was I wanted to join something that the vehicle was already moving. I wasn't trying to build the vehicle. But it was already moving, and then every single person was committed to changing and transforming the way Christians invest, plus we give 50% of our corporate net profits to charity. Right now we're doing church plants in Cuba. And when I say "we," it's Jim and Martha's, right? You're partnered with Inspire.

We don't charge you more fees. We just started from the beginning and said, we're giving 50% of net profits away and you're helping build churches in Cuba. We made a big donation to Lifewise Academy recently through this Give 50 initiative. Lifewise Academy, it helps bring biblical education to public schools during school hours? Not after school, not before school, not during lunch, but actually a Bible education class to public schools.

So every single client that partners with Inspire is a part of that. It's an extension of your own household giving without you doing anything further. And then the third thing that why I joined Inspire is the shareholder engagement. We are the world's largest exchange traded fund money manager. We have nine exchange traded funds that we have built and offered the general public. The shareholder engagement is what I'm gonna talk about next and then Give 50.

Shareholder engagement, this is a big deal, whether you know it or not. Planned Parenthood is losing a lot of their funding, but what they're doing is they're starting to use other distributors to distribute the RU-486 drug, the Mifepristone, that you may have heard of. But like Costco, Albertsons, Kroger, Walgreens, they're all being pressured by the FDA and other institutions to start distributing the abortion drug.

We just had a pretty great shareholder engagement strategy for about the last year with Costco. They just withdrew their application with the FDA to distribute the MIfepristone. That's a part, another extension, of what Inspire does. When you talk about why Inspire, why I joined - let me back up. When I joined Inspire, there was a lot of faith. Jim and Martha, you guys were a big part of that decision. Christine Heartland was another big part of Har har you'll help me. And some other people were a big part of that decision because Inspire, when I started, I think we were like under 200 million and there was maybe nine financial advisors. This was way at the beginning when we had a handful of exchange traded funds, but we had a lot of faith. And today we manage over 3 billion.

Martha: That is so great.

Luke Andrews: We're talking six years. We are, USA today listed as just recently in 2025 as the third top registered investment advisory firm in America. USA today.

Martha: Wow.

Luke Andrews: I was just looking before I came on with you guys and on Friday, Inc. 5,000 came out with their fastest growing companies and we're on it for the sixth year in a row.

Martha: Oh, my word.

Luke Andrews: FA Magazine lists us in 2025 as one of the top RIAs in the country. When I say it was, God, you guys know this, right? I took a leap of faith and God has transformed my business from where I at when I started a little over six years ago, actually coming up, yeah, six years ago this month.

Martha: Yep.

Luke Andrews: When I started with Inspire, and my business has grown 500%.

Martha: Okay. So I wanna talk about this right here, Luke, because there are people listening - number one, hopefully you're firing up some people that have investments that have never thought about this before, and you know that we get fired up about talking about it because that this is the conversation we've had for years and it is awareness and it's letting people know, and we feel responsible for letting people know that there is another way to do things that's more biblical.

But let me also encourage our listeners - you may not be in this investment world, but what world are you in where you can make the same difference? Taking that step of faith and saying, God's convicting me about something that isn't right in my industry, and I know there's another way to do it, and I just wanna encourage the listeners to try to take that same lesson into their own work and say, what is it that God's been convicting me about that I have not had enough boldness or enough faith or whatever that might be to take that next step?

And Luke, you are such a great example of, you didn't know that your business would grow 500 times or whatever, you had no idea, but you said I know that I don't have a choice. God has convicted me to this, and I need to take this step of faith, and it makes me emotional just thinking about it because Luke, you were willing to do that no matter what the outcome was. And it has been a very good outcome. And people are catching on, but it's much like when we started iWork4Him.

There were very few people talking about even connecting our faith with our work. Now we're talking about connecting our faith with the financial decisions that we're making that are a result of our work, right? That the income that we get, that we are stewards of, like you said, I know I'm getting very fired up. (laughing)

Jim's just grinning over here, but that's where we're all at. When we work, we make an income. What do we do with that income? How does it honor God in the way we use it, stewards of what he has given us? And so that is why this important, this conversation is so incredibly important. Okay.

Luke Andrews: Yeah. Proverbs 15:22: "plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisors, they succeed." When you're facing these decisions on how you can honor the Lord with whatever it is you're doing in your workplace, it's seeking advice, it's getting information from iWork4Him and other resources.

And then having an attitude of gratitude, right? We're in a place some, I know some people probably don't love what they do. They have a tough boss. They're in a tough industry. But understanding that having this attitude of gratitude and being able to display that because wherever you're at, you're gonna be a light. You're gonna be the light of darkness or gonna be the light of the Lord? And so wherever you find your place, whether you feel like, oh, I can't really make these type of impacts where I'm at. Oh, yes you can. It's having that gratitude, understanding that God had you there for a reason and getting counsel.

Jim: Yeah, Luke mentions light of darkness. Speaking of darkness, it's so important we protect our devices from the enemy. We wanna give a shout out to SaferNet. SaferNet.com is a software package or an app that you can use to download to protect your phones, your PCs, your iPads, your laptops, everything, not only from viruses but it's a VPN that keeps the bad people from even knowing where you're at.

Internet filters so that your whole staff can be safe in your company. Check it out online. It's super powerful. SaferNet.com. We use it for everything we do here at iWork4Him. And if we have one of those links, people will send you on one of those emails you're like, is this real or not? If you click on it, SaferNet will keep you safe. Without it, you may destroy your entire network.

Look, before we go, you have shared so much information and people are gonna want to get in touch with you, which all that information is gonna be in the show notes. But what is it you wanna say to the financial advisors out there who are like, yeah, but the returns, they're just not as good when you do BRI and this is too much work to shift over. Speak to the financial advisors listening to the show.

Luke Andrews: Past performance doesn't guarantee future results. Jim, it's so funny.

Jim: I said that! (laughing)

Luke Andrews: You used to love saying that. That was like one of the, we would say something and Jim was like

Jim: "past performance is not guarantee future results." Actually, I'd say past performance is not indicative of future results.

Luke Andrews: Yeah. Here's the deal with that is, when I first started on my journey, I started with my own personal accounts, okay? So this is my advice. Don't jump in with both feet. First off, call me. I'll send you a book, Robert Netzly's book. It was just updated so that biblically responsible - any of your listeners who want that book, Martha will put my information in the comments that you just reach out to me and I'll make sure I send you his book, and you can learn more about Biblically Responsible Investing.

But for those financial advisors who might be interested is, number one, pray about it, right? Seek counsel. " The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man listens to advice." There's so much biblical wisdom in Proverbs. So you start searching, you start counseling. Then when God has shown you that this is the way, this is a way that I could be honored, is you start with your own personal accounts, okay? And you'd give it a one quarter, two quarter, three to six month timeframe and say, okay, here's the investments that Biblically Responsible Investing offers.

Let me see if I can build a portfolio that I would feel comfortable giving to my clients. So that's what I did. I started with my own account, my kids' accounts, and within a few months, I'm like, all right, I can build a portfolio, whether it's conservative or whether it's to the most aggressive, I can build a biblically aligned portfolio.

That's number one. And the second thing is, what are the returns looking like? And some years the secular benchmark is going to outperform, because they have the magnificent seven. That's Facebook, Amazon. Am Netflix, it's Tesla. It's seven of the biggest companies in the world. That's the magnificent seven. We don't invest in any of that because they all have some issues. That's another conversation for a different day.

But when you start looking at historical performances, some years we're gonna do better. Some years we're gonna do the same. Some years we're going to outperform, okay? I will say that we also have some sector models, and I don't, I'm not gonna give returns of our sector model, but our technology model has been absolutely amazing. And it's way past what the s and p 500 was able to do the last three years, at two and a half years, we'll say, so 23, 24, and halfway through 25.

Our technology sector model has absolutely been on fire and amazing. Again, past performance doesn't guarantee future results, but we have an outstanding portfolio management team at Inspire that does these things for us. So for other advisors, so you're not gonna sacrifice returns. Your clients, matter of fact, are gonna be more excited about what you're doing for them than what you're giving for them. Investment returns are a part of what we do. It needs to be, but when you're doing things that are honoring the Lord... investment returns aren't secondary. They're important, but they're no longer what you're thinking about all day and night. If the market's up or the market's down, you're fine. So that, that's probably the biggest thing.

Martha: Luke, before we go, I just thought of something and I wanna put this in the show notes, but is there still that tool where if people own a stock they can put it in and see how it is rated as far as BRI?

Luke Andrews: Yeah. It's www.inspireinsight.com. And that is a free tool. You can put in the ticker symbol, ETF ticker symbol, a mutual fund ticker symbol, and it'll pull up instantaneously, all the reports, and we actually, we don't just say, Hey, this company has a negative score or a positive score.

If they have a negative score, you can actually drill down and figure out why they have a negative score. And then when you click on it, it'll give you the source. It'll give you the website that you can go verify that Amazon does sell the abortion drug.

Martha: Yeah, so if people have gotten curious and they have their own investments in front of them, I'm gonna put this link in there, you can go check for yourself so that you get a better understanding of what you own and why this conversation really matters. And I love that tool because it's private. You can just see for yourself and do a little bit of your own research.

Jim: That's right. Luke Andrews with Inspire Advisors. Another incredible conversation. I love that you've got just a little passion about this.

 (laughter)

Luke Andrews: Amen. Yeah.

Jim: Thanks, Luke, for being with us today.

Luke Andrews: I appreciate you guys. Thanks again for having me. Been a little too long, but I was super excited to be here. Appreciate it.

Martha: You bet.

Jim: You've been listening to iWork4Him with your hosts, Jim and Martha Brangenberg. We're Christ followers, and our workplace, it's our mission field, but ultimately iWork4Him.

9/3/25 - 2110: Designing Spaces, Reflecting God

Jim: You've tuned into iWork4Him, the Voice of Collaboration for the Faith and Work Movement.

Martha: And we are your hosts, Jim and Martha Brangenberg. Our mission is to inspire every workplace believer to recognize their workplace as their ministry place, where they work with God every day. What can that look like in your world? Let's find out right now.

Jim: Interior design. Is that a kingdom skill? Is there anything about designing the interior of a building that reflects an attribute of our God, the creator?

Everything he designed was outside, right? Until the 1800s. That's what we, everyone thought. And then we discovered the incredible riches just below the soil and just below the skin layer. That was interior design, right? What about the human body? Talk about incredible planning and layout. The human body is the most incredible interior design of all time.

So if there's any doubt at the beginning of the show, there's no doubt now, interior design is a kingdom skill that reflects the creative and planning attributes of God. Emily Miller of Miller Interiors of Columbia, Missouri, is here today to tell us her story of God in her business and of a special Main Street event that she's part of later this fall. Emily Miller, welcome to iWork4Him.

Emily Miller: Thanks, Jim and Martha, I'm happy to be here.

Jim: All right. So before we get to hear your faith and work story, let's talk about when you became a follower of Jesus. What's your story?

Emily Miller: Sure. So I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, so pretty close to Columbia, in a Christian family. So to be honest, I don't quite remember a time when God wasn't part of my story. I guess specifically I think my faith became more real and personal when I was in elementary school. My parents have been strong Christians my entire life, setting a really significant example for me, and I've been really blessed to have close friendships with other godly men and women my entire life. So really my faith has always been a part of who I am and my identity and my story.

Martha: Thank you for sharing that and what a blessing, and then you get to share that with future generations as well. So let's talk then about your career. Why did you pick interior design? Is it something you always knew you wanted to do or how did you get into it?

Emily Miller: Yeah, so I actually, I went to the University of Missouri for college and I started my freshman year as an education major. So growing up I thought, oh I'll be a teacher. That will be the right career path for me. And when I started taking some specific education courses, I honestly kept thinking about what my classroom would look like, and I slowly just began to realize I like kids. I don't know if I wanna spend eight hours a day with kids.

And so from there I looked into what is the architectural studies program at Mizzou and just fell in love. I had always been creative and appreciated beauty and aesthetics but just hadn't really thought maybe that was the career path for me until starting those education courses. Just fell in love with it specifically. The program I was in focused mostly on commercial interior design. And it just, it's such a fun combination of creativity and problem solving. That is just a challenge I still love to this day.

Martha: I love that. So you're saying, like you were more into okay, what's my classroom gonna look like? And then you might have wanted to move on at that point. So that was good that you had that assessment of yourself at that point.

Jim: Did you ever get to implement any of those designs in your friends' classrooms?

Emily Miller: So I worked for Mizzou, actually, for the campus for a number of years. So I, I did higher education design, which was really fun. And I will say, I think the relational aspect of education that was intriguing to me. There's carryover, right? In design. One of my favorite parts of my job is working with clients and identifying their needs and helping meet those needs, and even just getting to know them as people. Yeah, there's definitely carryover from education, but I don't think God had me created for the classroom environment. (chuckling)

Martha: There you go. I know so many friends that are teachers that, boy, the aesthetics of their classroom set the tone for the whole year and teachers do pour a lot into that. So as we're back to school and all the things for the. Fall, thank you, teachers, for all that you do. I'm just gonna throw a shout out there because I believe we have a lot of teachers that listen to the show and are trying to incorporate their faith in their work. So there you go. There's my shout out.

Jim: So having gotten our first jobs in the late eighties, knowing that interior design in the corporate world was non-existent. It was buy a big square building, put walls and walls of cubicles up, and there you go. That was designed, and maybe a creative design was, maybe a color, a two-tone cubicle, not a one-tone cubicle. Is it really possible to make office interiors exciting or enjoyable or even pleasing?

Emily Miller: I've spent a career doing it, so I hope so. I sure think so. I really, I believe that your space and your environment really matters. And a business and or a corporation that prioritizes that and prioritizes the comfort for their staff and ease and flow of a space and just the overall aesthetics, I think it's important, I think where you work matters. You spend a lot of time there. So I've had a lot of fun working on a variety of office projects. Yeah, I think it's important.

Jim: All right. I can't wait to walk into one of those office environments that you've designed and be able to do the "ah."

Martha: Yes. But you know what, Jim? I will say, we are not experts, but we rent offices to small businesses. And one of the gals, she had decided this was too far away from where she lived to stay here, but her biggest struggle with leaving here was she says you've got it decorated so pretty, and I love it here, and I'm gonna have to go figure that out on my own.

And she's a counselor, so she needs an environment that is a certain way. And it did matter for her. And we do feel good in an environment that is to our taste and is comfortable and all the things, you are way better at that than most of us. But when she said that, I was like, oh yeah, I get that.

Jim: We can have you come down to Marionville, Missouri, and do an analysis of our office structure. All right, so you're a mom. You're a wife, you got two kids, six and nine years old, and you run a successful business. How do you manage all that together?

Emily Miller: That's a good question. I think you have to eliminate the desire for balance. I don't think that there's a world where you, every single day feel balanced and everything's under control. I think, personally, I've had to lower some of my expectations on a personal level, a family level, definitely on a career level. And we can get into that a little bit more later, but I also have an incredible husband who is an incredible partner, and it's truly 50 50.

So I've always worked as a mom and really from the early stages of being parents, we sat down and in a very practical way said, okay, what are you managing? What am I managing? And that's how our household runs. Some things are backwards. He actually does most of the laundry. I do most of the finances. Like we've figured out what our strengths are and we're a team. There are some weeks, like this morning I realized we were basically out of lunch food for school.

And there's ebbs and flows and I just, you have to be gracious with yourself. Sometimes your inbox isn't as organized as you want it to be, and your home isn't as organized as you want it to be. But I think you can define what are cultural expectations I'm putting on myself, and then what are godly expectations I should have on myself?

Jim: That's why Oscar Meyer came out with those Lunchables. I can't make a sandwich. Here's a Lunchable. (laughter)

Emily Miller: They would love that. They would love to eat the yellow nacho cheese Lunchables every day. They Love that.

Martha: I'm guessing she's not allowing that to happen. Jim, I love the fact that she's like very specific. It's a different generation. We just look at it this way: our bodies have a lot more preservatives in them, so we're gonna last longer because we're well preserved, right?

When you talk about all the different roles that you do have and that you manage, it can be hard to manage all those different hats that we wear in our day, but to be a good steward of what we do manage, it's often important that we find other people that can come alongside and take care of the things that are within their expertise. So at iWork4Him, we choose to have SaferNet by our side to protect all of our digital devices. Their web filters, VPN, and virus protection keep the bad guys out so that we can focus on the things that we need to manage and let them manage our devices.

Check out SaferNet.com and let them know that iWork4Him sent you. All righty, so what does it look like for you to live out your faith and have your faith reflected in your interior designs?

Emily Miller: Good question. In some ways, I guess I don't really think through in a physical, tangible way how my faith is reflected in my designs. Maybe that's something I should think on a little bit more. But I do think, there's a long detailed, often complicated process from when a client engages us for a project to its completion.

And just thinking of that path, there are so many ways that my faith should be integrated and impact the process. And, I think it's just having integrity. Most of our time is hourly billable and having integrity to be honest in that, I think it's being thoughtful.

Right now I have one employee and looking to grow my team and so I think it's being really thoughtful and how can my leadership give my team a flourishing life? It's not just a paycheck. I want them to feel meaning and purpose behind their work. And how can I pause in the crazy, busyness of our project load and think through what team members specifically need on a personal and a professional level? I think it's really being patient and thoughtful when clients are thinking through their project and defining their needs and not rushing past that and just trying to think through how can my skills, how can my team skills, really bless and honor this business?

Whether it's an office renovation or a clinic or a hospital, how can we really pause and use the gifts that God has given us to honor our clients and then even honor people that are gonna use those spaces that I will never meet? So yeah, I think it's just reflection, it's pausing, it's integrity, just being thoughtful.

Jim: One of the biggest problems, hospitals, there's some beautiful hospitals out there, but you go inside, they all still look the same eventually. And it's the smells.

Emily Miller: I can't help with the smell. (laughing)

Martha: No, you can't control that.

Jim: But are you saying interior design can't impact the olfactory? That's a sense. Interior design's about the sense, impacting the senses. I think you need to work on some way to impact the smells, because if you could make walking into the waiting room a lavender experience, to bring calm, a little lavender when you walk in.

Emily Miller: I think that's the engineers in the HVAC. (chuckling)

Martha: There you go.

Jim: All right. When you're dealing with designs with people, they're sharing their heart. Not only are they sharing their wallet, like this is gonna cost me a lot of money to build this building, 'cause commercial building is so expensive, but they want their heart reflected.

So I imagine often you get involved in conversations with people where they're sharing their heart with you. Do you ever get a chance to pray with people after they've shared their heart with you, or to pray over a design as they're talking with you? Have you ever had that opportunity yet?

Emily Miller: I have not. I think it's a delicate approach. In some instances I want to be respectful of them and there's just a delicate line of being professional and not necessarily bringing your faith into a conversation that is more business related. I do have clients that are very vocal about their faith. I work with a health system that is Catholic and their mission, which is really beautiful and special. So I have had meetings where we've gotten to pray together and just talk through their mission, which is very much so aligned with my faith.

But I would say my approach is not so much let's pray, but I hope that through my work ethic and patience with you and the process and the end result, that they would sense something different about how I do business.

Martha: So good. If the fruit of the spirit is showing through in all that you do, you've said patience several times and I only can imagine in the design world where, oh, maybe I'm not gonna go with purple. I want everything yellow or whatever, it's okay, you have to regroup and and kudos to you for all of that. (laughter)

Jim: Emily, we made our connection because of the Main Street Summit event that's coming up here in November 4-6 in Columbia, Missouri, right where you're living. What's this event all about and why are you involved?

Emily Miller: Yeah, so Main Street is, it's really wonderful. It's about a two day long event focusing on small to medium businesses, business owners, operators, I would say anyone with an entrepreneurial spirit, would enjoy it. It is full of amazing speakers and some larger group sessions and then some smaller, more intimate group settings. A lot of networking, a lot of opportunities for conversations, honestly, just like this. And yeah, so last year I spoke at the event and really enjoyed it, really loved it. And they've asked me to come back. So I'll be speaking this year again.

Jim: And are you gonna give us a little hint of what you're talking about?

Emily Miller: Sure. I am in the faith and work track. So this year is a little bit different. They're defining seven different tracks, and faith and work is one of them. I will certainly be integrating my faith in the message but also want it just to be open to anyone interested in the topic I'm discussing, which is leading with purpose at work and at home, so talking through some practical strategies of managing home and work, which we've talked about this morning, talking through partnership with your spouse, and specifically a spouse that is also driven in their career and how to support one another and cheer each other on.

And then lastly, just talking through some biblical encouragement for working parents, something I have just really wrestled with in my nine and a half years as a mom is God's calling for my life as a working parent. I grew up with a mom who stayed home, which was lovely. My husband is a pastor. And I think this has changed and evolved in the church over, the last decade, but I do think specifically for women, we haven't spoken enough about God's calling to us as workers.

Jim: As marketplace leaders for sure, absolutely. Which is a great reason to plug our sheWorks4Him podcast that we've done all about Christian Working Women at Work. You can find that, access to that on our iWork4Him website. iWork4Him.com. You gave the plug so I did it.

We will include a link to the Main Street Summit in the show notes so you can find out about it. It's November 4-6 in Columbia, Missouri. The Faith and Work track is full of phenomenal speakers you've heard right here on the iWork4Him podcast, especially Emily Miller, who you get to hear today. And speaking of other great events in the faith and work space, there are several events Martha and I will be involved in 2026.

Two big events are the US Christian Chamber Expo in Orlando called Yes& and the National Faith and Work Summit in Cincinnati. The US Christian Chamber Expo is in April in Orlando and the National Faith and Work Summit Cincinnati, in june. Go to iWork4HIm.com/events to learn more about 'em. Choose one or both to attend and we'll get to see you there.

Martha: All right, so you talked a little bit about what you're gonna be talking about at the summit, but being a speaker there, you're likely to meet other speakers who have things that you may want to learn about being a business owner. Since there's seven different tracks and speakers like David Green from Hobby Lobby, we've loved hearing the story of Hobby Lobby over the years.

Jim: What a sweet heart he has. We've gotten to spend some time with him.

Martha: I'm guessing you've looked through who else is gonna be there. Who else are you interested in hearing from?

Emily Miller: I should have a better answer to this question. I have looked through the list and every year , every single speaker I have attended has been phenomenal. It's often, though, been the speakers that I didn't know a lot about, maybe don't have a huge following that i've learned a lot from.

And then I think in addition to that, which I referenced earlier, just those sidebar conversations have been very meaningful. People you maybe sit by at a session and get to know, trade your information, there are still people that I met last year that I keep in touch with and we talk about business things, we talk about life things, and I think it's, I think all of the speakers are phenomenal. You will not choose a speaker you don't like. But I think as important as is just the connections that you can make.

Martha: Yeah. And that's true, Jim was talking about some events that we're gonna be MCing this year and in 2026 and both of them are in person, much like your event, because there's so much value there is in sitting next to each other. Yes, zoom calls are great. Yes, doing virtual things help us to continue to learn, but there is just something about that unscripted time where you're just getting to know people over a lunch or whatever that might be.

And so I wanna encourage our listeners, if you're looking ahead to your calendar, either for this fall or for next year, try to include an in-person event in your agenda. Yes, it takes more time. Yes, it takes more money, but it's just got a different value on it and I encourage that because God created us for community and sometimes that just has to be in the flesh and blood.

Emily Miller: I agree.

Jim: He created us all for community, but he didn't give us all the gift of creativity. But you, Emily Miller, have been given a gift from God, creativity, organization, and the ability to make spaces feel warm, purposeful. Do you see yourself as the hand of God, as you transform buildings and companies because of the spaces you create?

Emily Miller: I hope so. I think that what's really fun about my job is I get to take a client's needs and create a vision to meet those needs that they most likely couldn't create themselves. And I think that's so similar to our walk with God, right? God knows what we need and he has plans for us that we can't even comprehend.

And there are some times in our lives where we're able to pause and reflect and just thank God for what he's done. Just seeing, okay, you had a plan here that I couldn't have comprehended, but it was perfect for my life. And not to say that I am God, but I hope that, there are moments for my clients and like I said earlier, patients in a hospital or at a clinic or employees at a business that can enjoy the aesthetics and the comfort and the safety and the durability of a space that I have helped to create, and can just feel at peace. And so yeah, I hope that I can honor people in that way.

Martha: That's so good and it's good to reflect on that and to see where God has brought you in the journey. So what is one last word of encouragement that you could give our listeners right now about running their own business and their marriage and their family that you've maybe learned that you wanna make sure other people know about?

Emily Miller: Yeah, so I have a two word phrase that I have used a lot over the summer and it is "not now." Whether that is things in my home like a mess in the dining room or a disorganized toy room or it's things in my office that I wish looked different or even clients I really wanna go after, but I don't have the margin, I think just saying "not now" and finding peace in that and just, yeah, setting those realistic expectations is really important.

Martha: Oh. That's so good.

Jim: That was good. Very good. You could write a sermon series. "Not now." There might be a book. There's a book there. Not Now by Emily Miller. That's right. (laughter)

Emily Miller: Not now. It's definitely not a book right now. Nope. (laughing)

Jim: Emily Miller, thanks for being on iWork4Him today. Thanks for talking, just sharing your heart with us. If you're interested in meeting Emily face to face, check out mainstreetsummit.com and attend the event November 4-6. There's lots of great speakers who are gonna be there and Emily will be one of them. Emily Miller. Thank you.

Emily Miller: Thank you both.

Jim: You've been listening to iWork4HIm with your hosts, Jim and Martha Brangenberg. We're Christ followers. Our workplace, it's our mission field, but ultimately iWork4Him.

8/27/25 - 2109: This Might Be the Most Dangerous Idea You Believe

Jim Brangenberg: Did you know that 65 was a magical number? Yes, this one number, 65, has the power to change everything in your life. It has the power to end your job and send you on a permanent vacation. It has the power to kick in basically free healthcare for life. The number 65 is the magical yet made up number that everyone tracks their life by. When someone starts work at age 20, they only have 45 years to work, and then they'll get a well-deserved lifelong rest.

65 is magical, or is it? Since almost every movie has a villain and a hero, I'm here to introduce the truth about 65. It could be a villain and a hero - terrifying and terrific. It just depends on your perspective. Our guest today has a perspective on this magical 65 number thing, and she's here to debunk the magic all the way til the cows come home out there in Stanley, North Dakota. Danita Bye is from North Dakota. She's 65, and she has a story to tell. And maybe a small sermon to preach. Danita Bye, welcome to the show.

Danita Bye: I'm delighted to be here. Thank you for the invitation.

Jim Brangenberg: I hope you feel that way when we're done. Danita, this is what you say. You say, traditional retirement is dangerous in this epic moment because it silences our sages, benches our mentors, and vacates the gates of influence just when the world most needs wisdom, courage, and truth. In fact, you summarize this by saying the church's view on retirement is terrifying. That's a strong statement.

Why do you say that?

Danita Bye: It was Elon Musk who used the word terrifying when he introduced Grok 4, and he introduced it last week, and he said that it's smarter than all graduate students in all disciplines performing at a PhD level, across the board. And when he introduced it to the global media, he used the word terrifying and unnerving.

So he used that word, and I wanna say dangerous, but you're right, it could be terrifying that during this time of just incredible shifting and changing, I believe it is that our spiritual sages have been silenced and our mature spiritual mentors have been set on the bench because of this 65 number, and that is dangerous for the world. That's what I think, Jim.

Jim Brangenberg: 10 years ago, maybe even longer, I said that for so long we've been sticking our retirees back in the grandstand, out in the grandstand. And I say, no, let's get 'em back in the field. Maybe they don't need to run the plays anymore, but they need to get on the field as coaches, as mentors, to pour into the next generations.

Maybe they don't have the ability to maneuver like the current generations, young generations, certainly on the internet with AI, which is exploding. Even just this year, in six months, it has exploded. Explains everything John ever said in Revelation. It explains it all. But why do you think... is this something when you, 20 years ago, you were 45, at the peak. You were vaulting into success all over the place.

Minneapolis, I believe you're still back then, working in Minneapolis. Did you imagine that at 65, you'd be sent off to the pastures and people wanna set you off to the side, stick you in a small group with a bunch of other old people and say, Hey, us young people, we got it. Is this current observation this terrifying thing or have you always known 65 was terrifying?

Danita Bye: I don't think I've known that 65 was terrifying, but there are three things that come together to make this season so terrifying. One is the AI revolution. You may have heard last week President Trump had the speech of a lifetime: "winning the race, America's AI action plan."

And he talks about that all this scientific and technology that we're having is going to change the world, the way we live and work. It's couched with breakthrough technologies, but when you have robots like they are in Revelations, when you have some organizations that are trying to create God, that's terrifying. And then you combine with that these 85 million retirees who have so much wisdom and insight and knowledge and discernment that, that they've gathered over the years, especially our biblical followers of Jesus, those are the ones that they cannot be set on the bench.

We have got to activate them. And then the third factor that comes in here is across the nation is this incredible loss of purpose. Statistics are that at least 30% of retirees feel a lack of belonging, a lack of meaning. Over 50% of millennials and Gen Z have a lack of belonging, a lack of meaning. So we have this massive crisis in purpose. So we have this AI, where the world is speeding up at unimaginable paces, and then we bring that together with our wisdom, which is slowing down, sitting on the bench, taking it easy...

Jim Brangenberg: playing pickleball

 (laughter)

Danita Bye: Playing pickleball. (laughing) And then we have, even the young people have this restlessness that they're looking for or that they're feeling, and it sparks me to wonder about what will happen if we as leaders, as spiritual leaders, don't step up to the plate.

Jim Brangenberg: I think I could tell you what happens, and we'll let Martha jump in here anytime she wants.

I think that's where euthanasia fits in, because they've already said, Hey, you chronologically superior folks, you folks 65 and older, stay off to the side. Eventually you say, Hey, you're in the way, so let's just get rid of you. Hey, you can end your purposeless life on your own. They do it in Canada already. They're doing it all over Europe already.

Yeah, they're just gonna say, Hey, if you have a purposeless life, go ahead and end it so you're not in the way and wasting money, 'cause the boomers are almost done retiring. So in another three, four years, the boomers will be done hitting age 65. And I know that because we're not boomers, we're Xers, but we're at the very beginning. We're right at that little tip there. But that's where this heads to " my life is, has no purpose. Therefore, I don't wanna have a pulse."

But we say if you've got a pulse, you do have a purpose! If you are not dead, you're not done! When you retired, your calling didn't retire! Martha?

Martha Brangenberg: Okay, so Danita, I knew that this would be hard for me to get a word in edgewise with the two of you. (laughter) But I love it. And I believe our listeners love it too, if they're really paying attention to where this conversation is gonna go.

Because these are ideas that we're just chipping away at a little bit and saying, what does God really want for us as believers in every stage of our life? You talk about the younger ones that feel purposeless or restless and not sure what the future's gonna hold, and yet we have been told all of our lives that, of course retirement is at the end of our long career.

And we have a different perspective on that and I hope that the listeners will be challenged to do some introspective work and to really pray with the Lord and say, what is that stage of life supposed to look like for me? And really believe in the calling that God has placed on each individual person's life, that does have purpose.

So Danita, unpack this a little bit more. What do you think it is about retirement that you don't agree with as a word or as a concept? Talk about retirement.

Danita Bye: Two things come to mind. The first one is the scripture. Psalms 90:12, I believe, "teach me to number my days that I may be wise." Now it was irritating to the max that the Holy Spirit brought that to my attention when I was like 26 years old. All my friends are out, American Dream, making it happen, and the Holy Spirit is inviting me: "Teach me to number my days." What does that mean, spiritually and relationally and physically and intellectually and financially?

The Holy Spirit has been haunting me with that. Quite irritating. (laughing) People are out like having fun. They're playing pickleball, they're golfing, they're doing, they're, taking the trip of their lifetime.

Jim Brangenberg: Have you ever been golfing? People that are golfing are not having fun. Mark Twain said it 200 years ago almost: "golf is a good walk spoiled." The pickleball, we've done pickleball. Pickleball is actually pretty fun.

Danita Bye: No, I've done pickleball too. It is fun.

Jim Brangenberg: It is fun.

Danita Bye: But I had another one that connects with that.

Martha Brangenberg: Yeah.

Danita Bye: I was hosting a friend of mine from Tanzania. Her name is Chilwah. She had been a governmental official, had been Muslim most of her life, had recently come to the Lord. I was hostsing her in Minneapolis and I was so excited for her to meet one of my spiritual mentors, Priscilla, and Priscilla was in a retirement community in Minneapolis.

It was the nicest retirement community, and as we entered the door to this beautiful plush facility that's filled with spiritual leaders, I notice outta the corner of my eye that Chilwah has tears streaming down her face. And I'm like, my first thought is, did I offend her? Was there a cultural faux pax that I made?

And I leaned over and asked, what's wrong? And she said, I cannot believe what you do to your elderly. And I'm like going, what in the world is she talking about? This is a beautiful place. She said, in our country, it is a deep honor to take care of our elderly and what we get in return is all their wisdom.

Wow. Now that rattled me. And I begin to think about what are the consequences of silencing the very leaders that we should be listening to? And what if the exact wisdom, insight, knowledge, and discernment that we need for these increasingly crazy times, what if it lies with our spiritual elders?

And so those are some of the questions that I raise as the Holy Spirit challenges me to think about how I do my life. Even though, or considering I'm 65, how am I called to continue to live out what God has laid out before me?

Martha Brangenberg: Yeah. Such powerful concepts. Such a different way of looking at life. Specifically here in America, we think they've reached the ultimate if they can be in a place of luxury and have everything taken care of for them. And yet we've disconnected the spiritual leaders with those that need the influence, not even purposefully, thinking that we're maybe doing a good thing, but yet it's made such a separation between where the wisdom can be flowing into the next generations.

Danita Bye: I have to add one other thing. I grew up in North Dakota. This is a homestead territory. People who moved here at all times in life, we have had to accept grit and determination from the moment we wake up until our last breath. So built into the culture, the ranching and farming culture, is this innate DNA to give and to contribute. So that's another gift I bring, which is actually a little irritating to my husband who would prefer that we would play pickleball a little bit more often.

 (laughing)

Jim Brangenberg: And go to Florida probably. If you've ever spent a winter day during a blizzard in North Dakota, you know that when the wind starts in Montana, it doesn't stop till it gets to Duluth. It's just unbelievable.

But what you just said about your friend from Tanzania is so powerful because I have often said that we have convinced all of the elders of our country to move to Florida and Texas, and used to be California, now it's Arizona. But move to the south away from everybody that you know and away from everybody that you care about, including your grandkids, so you can live in 55 plus purgatory. Because that's what it's all about. You live in a homeowner's association, run by formerly militant individuals who are now militant as a homeowner's association.

And you lose your freedom, but you're hanging out with a bunch of people who are in the same spot and you don't get to influence your grandkids. You get to see 'em a week a year maybe, unless you go home, and you're a snowbird.

And it's so true. We, our society has been designed around pushing chronologically superior folks off to the side because it's inconvenient. They're a little bit frustrating, or they move at a different pace than we do. They wanna tell us stories. Oh yeah, I like telling stories. I'm not quite 65 yet, I like telling stories. But it's so dangerous. It's just dangerous what we've done, and she's hit the nail on the head that a lot of other cultures that are honor cultures would never think about doing that.

But we are not in an honor culture here as many Asian and Middle Eastern cultures are. Talk about something else that's dangerous? When we allow most of our input to come from society at large without putting it through a biblical filter. That's why we love the US Christian Chamber of Commerce. We surround ourselves with people who love business, love Jesus, and love the truth. The US Christian Chamber of Commerce has many different opportunities for members to connect and learn. And in 2026, you can attend a huge event in Orlando, swc2026.com. Use code iWork4Him. Get signed up, be there. We'll be there, and you'll be surrounded by people from all over the country who wanna see business impacted by the kingdom.

All right, Danita, let's talk about consequences. Consequences of our actions. We've already talked... your friend's example is fantastic. Why do you do this to your people? Let's talk about the wide ranging consequences on our American economy and on the church in America. Let's talk about that because the church in America should be influencing the American economy. We have $29 trillion of assets in Christian control that are in our 401Ks. And we're spending it on houses on the water in Florida that get blown over by hurricanes. What are the, what do you see as those wide ranging consequences of traditional retirement?

Danita Bye: The area that I think about is AI, and I think of the consequences to our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren. Excuse me, if we're even around for our great-grandchildren and how are they going to discern? How are they going to navigate? There's historians say once every 500 years that there's such a revolution in how we live and how we think they call that time "epoch." E-P-O-C-H.

So think of like the industrial revolution, and we are in the middle of that type of change happening. Personally, I think this is more than a once every 500 years change. I think this may be once in a history of the world change and I think of, there was a book I read called The Coming Wave by an AI expert, Sulliman, and listen to this quote, he says, "this coming wave of technology is bringing human history to a turning point. The consequences for our species are dramatic, potentially dire."

Jim Brangenberg: But we know it's not dire. Sorry to interrupt you, but we know it's not dire because the Bible talk doesn't talk about the elimination of the human species until the end. So we know that part. This guy doesn't have a biblical perspective.

Danita Bye: But we have, there are people around the world, so I just think through how in the world does my grandson, Evan, who's currently 10 years old, how is he going to navigate this? How is he going to balance this? How is he gonna discern? And there's a part of me that says, oh, I should be and I am concerned about the economy for the United States. I am concerned about my grandchildren. And how in the world are they gonna navigate this? How are we gonna help them? What kind of tools, what kind of resources?

And so for me that is the biggest consequence is our children. And I guess as I think about it, the people in America have not necessarily made decisions that prioritize children and prioritize the future. I think of abortion. I think of euthanasia. That those are issues that we as a culture have had to wrestle with. My biggest concern is our grandchildren and how are they going to navigate this with a biblical framework.

As an aside, and I'm interested in the the Christian Chamber Organization, a friend of mine, you may know him, Jim Garlow, he has a number of time mentioned to me that with the America 250 celebration that we're doing, that it's so important that the people of God understand the difference between the biblical foundations of our country and the enlightenment foundations of our country.

I thought that was interesting 'cause I didn't know the difference. So I go to my friend chat GPT and ask what are the differences? And I'm like going oh, Danita, there are some things that are clearly biblical, but there's a couple of other things that I've bought into the Enlightenment agenda. So I need to challenge myself. We'll have that one as a next discussion.

Martha Brangenberg: There you go. Okay, but you bring up a great point because without true biblical discernment, it is hard to know what things we've accepted as being biblical or some other agenda. And we often talk about, and we said it earlier in the show, a lot of people believe that the American way of retirement and the American dream is biblical, yet the Bible does not discuss retirement unless you are a Levitical priest. And even then you continue to mentor. So you give up the cutting, but you teach others how to do the trade.

So you know, I was sitting here thinking about what you were saying, and it drew me back to conversations where Jim, you and I would sit with my grandparents and actually sit in the living room and have conversations about things they've learned in life that they wanted to pass on to us. It brings me to tears to even think about it because we don't do that anymore. Yes, there may be families that have pockets of time where they do things like that, but the level of intentionality that my grandparents generation had towards us was so powerful. And yet we took it for granted. Because we just thought that's the way it was.

Jim Brangenberg: We still drove 350 miles to go see 'em.

Martha Brangenberg: We drove a long ways to go see them, and they were very intentional, and grandpa was a very good storyteller. So it was enjoyable to sit and hear about the past and the things that God has taught them. But the lessons that we learned in those conversations are priceless.

And I think what I'm hearing you say is that if we resort to learning everything by AI, that one of the dangers is gonna be the personal touch. The trial and error that came from other generations saying, I did this and it failed and this is what I learned and this is how I changed and God taught me this lesson. You don't get that with a straight line of fact that might be proposed to you. Those are some of the dangers of taking the personal out of relationships as people look at how they retire and what they do with their futures.

Jim Brangenberg: And you can understand why people used to say, let's go get a cave. Let's go buy a cave. We'll go live in a cave and protect our families from all the stupid that's coming, right? 'cause for the last a hundred years, a lot really for the last 150 years, a lot of stupid has come in waves. And people are like, let's get outta here. Let's go wait until Jesus comes back and hide in a cave.

And maybe Jesus is around the corner 'cause this AI thing is cutting edge, but I know that's not what we're called to do. We're called to engage the world, we're called to bring the kingdom to earth. And I wanna finish up a conversation talking about what are you saying to yourself about your next 25 years?

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All right, Danita, this conversation's amazing and I think we could probably go on for three or four hours, but we can't, 'cause people maybe stop listening, but maybe we'll come back. You never know.

I wanna know, based on everything you've talked about, the terrifying things we've talked about, the scary things we've talked about, the frustrating things we've talked about... you are 65. Knowing you, you've got at least 25 years of running outta you. Maybe just 20, but maybe till your mid eighties, maybe till 90. What are you saying to yourself today about how you're gonna handle your retirement years? Because the world is telling you, check out. Sit on your cash, enjoy the good life, go play some pickleball with Gordon, but what are you saying to yourself?

Danita Bye: So there's a couple of things the Holy Spirit's been working with me on during this season that, I call it the "Moses speaking strategy." Moses was effective because he heard what the Lord said and spoke it. So I have to tell you what the Holy Spirit's working with me on.

Jim Brangenberg: Okay, fair enough.

Danita Bye: First is prayer. So my friend Jim Garlow, recommended a book he said changed his life. I'm going wow, changed his life? I better read it. It's a book called Destined for the Throne, how Spiritual Warfare Prepares The Bride of Christ for Her Eternal Destiny.

Jim Brangenberg: Show a picture of it on the screen so people can see. Okay. All right. If you're watching this on YouTube, you can see a picture of the book, Destined For the Throne by Paul Billheimer.

Danita Bye: Paul Bilheimer.

Jim Brangenberg: Bilheimer. Okay.

Danita Bye: This is not a normal book on prayer. I've had to stop and I've spent a couple weeks on page 46. John Wesley says, " God does nothing but in answer to prayer." And then E M Bounds says, "prayer should be the main business of our day."

I ask myself, if God does nothing but an answer to prayer, how am I praying for my grandkids? Not just God bless them, but how am I really praying for my grandchildren? How am I praying for my kids as they parent and their marriages, not just bless the marriage? How am I really praying for them? What about my work on the state board of higher ed?

I believe that God has called me as their assignment. Am I really praying about it? And we're starting a classical Christian school. We believe this is a God thing, but if God does nothing but in answer to prayer, do I really believe that? And so that's one of the places where the Holy Spirit is challenging me.

And I think that's a place to challenge all of us that are over 65. Many of us have extra time. We at least have control of our schedule, and I'm sure we all know that prayer is not just sitting down. We can be praying all over the place, but is prayer one of the ways that we stay engaged, that we be intentional, that we be strategic? Is prayer one of the ways that we lead during this time when the world is nuts and becoming increasingly dangerous for all of us?

That's a place. The second place that the Holy Spirit has me working is going back and looking at revisiting vision, mission, and values. And Gordon and I participated in a one day workshop where we worked through this together and Gordon and I had to talk through different, you know, whenever you work with it together as a team that's always a challenging experience, but so valuable.

Because it helps us, it gives us some common language to say are we focused, are we on target? Are we involved in things that God has graced him with? What about me? How are we doing this together? So that's another exercise that we've done recently is to revisit our vision, mission, and values together.

Jim Brangenberg: That's good. Okay. So in the answer to the question then, how do you see God laying out your next 20 years? Has he given you a vision for it? Has he given you a vision for the next five? And I take it none of it involves a lifetime of pickleball, tennis, golf, and the beach.

Martha Brangenberg: No, but knowing Danita, there's probably a little four-wheeling involved or hiking or something.

Danita Bye: Maybe some hiking and some walks and some of those types of things. There's a couple of things, when I look at my own priorities, obviously grandchildren, you can tell grandchildren, whatever we need, I'm going to be there.

Like you, parents. We are called to honor our parents. And so what does honoring look like? And that's gonna be very different for each of us. For me, i'm healthy. Some people aren't, and that's going to shift what they're working with. But I'm healthy and my intent is to be like Moses and Joshua and the people in the Bible to finish strong. And to keep going and to keep challenging myself and to challenge other people.

As I was thinking about our time, I remembered a conversation. I was 14 years old and I was in an adult bible study and I was the only teenager in that adult bible study, and we were looking at Mark 10. And it seemed to me that we skipped over Mark 10:27 completely: "with man this is impossible, but with God, all things are possible." So as any 14-year-old would do in an adult Bible setting, I said I think this is really an amazing verse. All things are possible with God. And the pastor not only looked but locked eyes with me and says, Danita, it says that, but it doesn't mean that.

Jim Brangenberg: How sad.

Danita Bye: How sad. And in the world of leadership studies I had what was called a word test. Whose word am I going to believe? And I see that as impacting this next season that I have. There are things that are bubbling up within me. We're starting this Christian school in Stanley, in the Northwestern corner of North Dakota, 80 miles from the Canadian border, 80 miles from the Montana border. And I mentioned to someone we were doing this and he said, that's impossible to do.

Jim Brangenberg: Ah, that's exactly why you should be doing it 'cause it's impossible.

Danita Bye: That's exactly why we should be doing it. So it's almost like the challenge, one of the places where I'm challenging myself is, what are some of those things that God has placed in my heart that look and sound impossible? Let's start praying about them.

Jim Brangenberg: Amen. Danita, what an incredible conversation. I loved it. I'm so grateful that you just poured your heart out, and it's exactly how we feel. That's where iRetire4Him came from, as a side ministry to iWork4Him, is that we cannot afford as a country, as a church, as a body of Christ, to allow the brain drain, the wisdom walk.

I just thought of that, wasn't even written down.

Danita Bye: That was good.

Jim Brangenberg: Can I keep going? That's good. Yeah. Is there a rap there?

 (laughter)

Danita Bye: That was good.

Jim Brangenberg: We can't afford for this to happen. And yet it is "impossible" to change the tide of this in the church in America. It's impossible to change it in the tide of the economy of America. So it's impossible. That's why we should be doing it.

Martha Brangenberg: With God all things are possible.

Jim Brangenberg: Exactly. And it's a Romans 12:2 paradigm shift. We have to change the way we think. Danita, I would love to pick up this conversation again one day in the near future to hear what God has revealed to you even further about retirement.

And for all of you listening, you know, we're releasing this as an iWork4Him and iRetire4Him podcast for one reason only: I want everybody to have this perspective. If you're working, you're not done at 65, and if you're retired, you're not done either. People seriously - get off the pickleball court, get in the word and get out in the community. 'Cause the community that you live in desperately needs you.

Martha Brangenberg: Actually stay on the pickleball court, get in good shape so that you have the energy to do everything that God has called you to do.

Jim Brangenberg: Because motion is lotion, that's what they say. When we get older, motion is lotion. (chuckling) Danita Bye, thank you so much for being with us today.

Danita Bye: Thank you. It's an honor.

8/20/25 - 2108: The Real ROI of Christian Business Networking

Jim: You've tuned into iWork4Him, the Voice of Collaboration for the Faith and Work Movement.

Martha: And we are your hosts, Jim and Martha Brangenberg. Our mission is to inspire every workplace believer to recognize their workplace as their ministry place where they work with God every day. What can that look like in your workplace? Let's find out right now.

Jim: It's gotten to be an issue. How do you know when a business can be trusted? How can you know who will actually do what they say they will do? For years, we had the Yellow Pages, but that was everybody who was doing a thing.

Then we established all kinds of ways to find Christians in business so we could do business with them. But was that really any better? Then the internet came upon us, and we can find people easier. But who's gonna go do the vetting? Who's gonna tell you, yes, these people are really going to serve you well?

Huh - Darrell Geis, he decided to be part of that solution. Almost 35 years ago he joined the team at Christian Blue Pages. Eventually a website was created and now an app. Think about that. He was in business before there was a website. All along Darrell has been doing the hard part, so you can just keep your life moving forward.

We're here to let Darrell tell the rest of the story. Darrell Geis, welcome to iWork4Him.

Darrel Geis: Thank you, Jim and Martha. Great to be here.

Jim: All right, and you got a friend along. I'll let you introduce Dr. Shantel Thomas, and then we're gonna come back to her in just a little bit.

Darrel Geis: Yeah, Dr. Shantel Thomas with the Sound Mind Counseling Service has been an advertiser with us for over a decade and a half. And she has just been an absolute joy to know. Godly woman. Very talented counselor. And been just a great experience and friendship with Shantel.

Jim: And we're gonna capture Shantel's story a little bit further in the interview. I wanna introduce - for those of you're out there on YouTube watching this, you'll see who's the smiling lady on the video - I'm like, okay, I didn't wanna ignore her.

Alright, Darrell, it's the first time you've been on iWork4Him. I'm sorry, okay? We've known each other for a decade. I'm sorry, Darrel. He sent me an email going, Jim, how come everybody else I know in the whole world has been on iWork4Him but me?? So I'm like, okay, we gotta get this done. (laughter)

Martha: For such a time as this.

Jim: That's right. God's timing is perfect, Darrel, and you need to trust the Lord. (laughter) That's right. All right, Darrel, tell me about this. How'd you come to be a follower of Jesus?

Darrel Geis: I was raised in a church as a young man and all my upbringing that really influenced me. I probably would've considered myself a Christian. Went off to college and got involved in a lot of different things that really led me astray from any foundation of faith that I had. Had a breakup in college of a girlfriend, sent me into a spiral, took me a while to graduate.

Finally did, moved to Cincinnati to start a career in sports broadcasting, 'cause I graduated with a television news degree, and I moved in with two guys who were recommended by my sister who was a born again believer who knew that there was a church being formed in Cincinnati and the campus ministry at UC, and these two young guys were looking for a roommate as well.

The same time I just happened to be moving to Cincinnati and moved in with them, did my own thing for about three months. Through a series of unfortunate personal circumstances, I came to know a person in Christ that led to a very transformational, spiritual relationship, obviously with Him. And I started reading the gospels, encouraged by my roommates, and came to Romans 5:8 and said that "God demonstrates his own love for us in this, that while we're still sinners, Christ died for us."

So I finally realized that I was a sinner in need of a savior and that savior was Jesus, who I knew about and actually believed in him, but didn't understand that I needed him to save me from my sins. And my good works weren't gonna get me to heaven. So anyway, all that said is that's become a now a 36 year journey of faith that, it has been amazing.

Martha: Wow. Okay. So just shortly then after that, the Christian Blue Pages was founded, 1991. So I'm doing the math 'cause we said 35 and 36 and all of that. You were there to join the team at Christian Blue Pages. Tell us about the vision at that point.

Darrel Geis: Yeah, what happened was a captain in the Air Force at Wright Pat Air Force Base in Dayton, a pastor of a church in Dayton, and a Christian business owner in Cincinnati purchased a franchise of a Christian business directory company out in Arizona. And they were all a part of a association of Churches that had campus ministries as their main outreach of the church.

And these three gentlemen decided to hire the campus ministry leaders at three of their colleges and universities. University of Cincinnati, where I was, university of Dayton, and the Ohio State University in Columbus. And so of those three people, the Columbus person, happened to be my sister, Jolene, we all got hired as the original green behind the ear sales staff for Christian Blue.

We came to find out that not every campus ministry leader's necessarily called to or gifted in advertising sales, so the idea was, is that, sell advertising during the summer months when school's out, and then make relationships with these business owners and maybe even get supported further, be released on campus full-time during the school year, similar to a campus Crusade for Christ type of situation.

But, so that was the original vision. And so I was hired, I was asked to do it and I said yes and left this idea of broadcasting behind and haven't looked back. And God has given me a ministry beyond any thing I could ever imagine in the marketplace.

Jim: You haven't thought about broadcasting all those years?

Darrel Geis: No, I have. And I was working at a TV station in Cincinnati at the time when I got hired at Christian Blue. And so I was able to experience that a little bit. And I had actually interned a couple TV stations in Columbus, Ohio. But I get to do radio and tv. I have for, all these years. And, I get to have sports as my fun thing. I don't have to make it my career. And it's allowed me to stay home and be with my family and raise two boys and homeschool them, and just enjoy a life in that way.

Jim: But if WKRP had offered you a job, would you have taken it?

 (chuckling)

Darrel Geis: No, actually, when I got offered the job as sales manager after two years of working with Christian Blue, in 93, sales manager, and I got offered to radio station sales manager positions as well at the same time, two different stations. Then I just felt, I really believed in what we were doing at Christian Blue and bringing Christians together across denominational and racial lines in the marketplace in our print directory and then eventually the website, and I just said, Hey, I'm good with it and never looked back.

Jim: So you took over the company in 97, so for the last 28 years it's been your baby. How is the vision different today than it was back in 91?

Darrel Geis: I think the initial vision was twofold. It was, Hey, let's get a Christian directory here in Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, 'cause it was just one directory back then in 91. Now it's three separate directories. But the vision was twofold. It was that, form this directory where Christians can come together and support one another and obviously as a conduit for funding campus ministry.

So it's grown beyond that obviously. But at its heart is the idea of rallying the body of Christ in support of one another in business and ministry and coming together across those like I said, denominational and racial lines that too often divide us on Sunday morning. And so it's just the way we do it today is different, obviously, much broader than what we did back in 1991. But same mission. We're still on mission pretty much the same way.

Martha: So then you have three locations, right? Am I understanding that correctly? But you have an online presence, right? Tell us about that, because that's come a long way from the beginning.

Darrel Geis: Yeah, we have a print directory that serves Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky. We produce 30,000 copies, distribute those to 1100 locations, including churches and businesses and bookstores and YMCAs and banks and all that. We have a directory for Dayton- Springfield, Ohio, which is 28,000 copies, about a thousand locations. And then Columbus and Central Ohio, another 25,000 copies to about 850 locations.

So those are the three major print products. Along with that, pretty much everybody that's in the print directory also goes online. And then once you get online under your categories, whether it's accountants, dentists, plumbers, veterinarians, or zip lines, we have everything A to Z, 336 business categories that are featured on our website, then you can enhance your presence there.

And then in 2011, we launched the Christian Blue Pages mobile app. So it was the first mobile app of any Christian directory in the country. And that's been just a great experience for people to be able to have at their fingertips 24/7, 365, a way of connecting with these Christian businesses. And we do notifications once a week where we send inspiration, we send faith at work features and send contests and just digital deals and all that kinda stuff. So it's expanded beyond obviously the initial days, but print, web and mobile directory opportunity.

Jim: Wow. I love that. And I love the vision. And we're gonna talk more with Darrell Geis and his guest, Dr. Shantel Thomas in a second.

In this current era, we do much of our work in commerce online. That's why Christian Blue exists. With that in mind, we need to protect our online presence everywhere we go. Martha and I use SaferNet, found online at safernet.com, on all of our devices in the office and at home. SaferNet has virus protection, VPN, internet controls, web filters, and so much more. They keep the bad guys out so we can keep working online everywhere we go, including a trip to Ohio in July. Learn more at safernet.com.

All right, Dr. Shantel, you have been working with Christian Blue for a long time. Thanks for joining us today to give us a little bit of your story.

Shantel Thomas: Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here.

Jim: So tell us a little about your Jesus story. How did you come to be a follower of Jesus?

Shantel Thomas: So when I was a little girl, my great aunt, she would always come and pick me up and in the summers I would stay for her for about two or three weeks and we would always walk along the railroad track to church. And she had a little tambourine. She would play and we would sing all of the old traditional hymns and songs as we walked.

And I might have been, probably between the ages of five, I remember as early as five, all the way up to maybe 11, going with her for at least two or three weeks in the summer. She didn't have any children, so my mom would let me stay with her. So that was my first introduction. But then after that, I started to have dreams nightly about talking to God and walking with God when I was like a preteen or a teenager. So I told my parents I wanted to find a church home and my parents weren't really going to church on a regular basis but they did find me a church home here in Cincinnati and I went with a friend.

They would come pick me up for church every Sunday and take me home. Then when I got to college, there was a guy that I was dating and his aunt and his mom were the Sunday school teachers. I said, Hey, I need a church home. I know I'm here in college. And so when I got to that church, I really started to develop a strong relationship with Christ.

I was involved in the children's ministry and I just really felt like there was something more. I kept saying, I'm missing something. I dream all the time and I write all these dreams down and sometimes they come true. And so she started to talk to me about the different gifts and she was like, you're a dreamer, so you have visions.

And she was saying, you can write these down and interpret them. And so I thought what else is there? And they were like, have you ever been baptized? I said, no. They was like do you know what the Holy Spirit is? I said, no. And I was 19. And so I went down, I went there and I said I think I'm ready. I want everything that God's has for me. And so in that moment, she said everything? And I said everything.

And it was the Sunday school teacher who was also my boyfriend's mom. And I went down in the water and I came up and I was speaking in tongues and I was like, what is this? I don't know. And I covered my mouth and she hit my hand. Covered my mouth again. And she said, you asked for everything and you received everything in an instant. And she was like, now here's your first Bible. And so she had a Bible there that she had signed and she said, I'm your spiritual mother and I'll walk this out with you.

And she did. She walked with me my whole journey until she passed away from cancer. And so that was my introduction.

Jim: Did you marry the boy in the story?

Shantel Thomas: I did marry the boy in the story.

Jim: Okay. (laughing)

Martha: Jim, you always have to get those details right?

Jim: I wanna know.

Martha: That's awesome. So tell us about your work. What is it that God has you doing?

Shantel Thomas: So A Sound Mind Counseling Service is taken exactly from 2 Timothy 1 & 7. So "for God is not giving us the spirit of fear, but power and love and a sound mind." So I thought I was gonna name it Majestic Metamorphosis. But then again it was gonna be this beautiful butterfly changing, and I was asleep and I heard the Lord talk to me and say, that's not the name. You're going to be A Sound Mind Counseling.

And it was like the words just lifted off of the page. Like I was asleep but there was this bible. And so I went to my, at that time I was in my master's program in college, and I went to my professor and I said, I want to open a Christian counseling service. And she said to me, that's not possible. Christian and counseling don't go together. Psychology doesn't match up with biblical precepts. And she said, it's never been done. It's never been done, and you can't do it. And I said to her, watch me. I said, don't tell me what I can do. I always tell people what I can do, and as long as God is with me, it can be done.

And I graduated with my master's degree and I started my practice and from then on, God has just grown it. I went from just myself in a small one room to now I have two locations. I have four locations before COVID and with COVID, half of the therapist decided to work from home, so now we have two locations. Probably 90% are Christians, and then we have a couple people who are figuring it out and trying to decide. Either they're just like, I don't know. I've never been to church. So we get a chance to witness.

80% are people who are coming from churches that have referred us. And I really believe a lot of that has to do with the Christian Blue Pages, but I'm a Christian counselor. I take biblical precepts, I add them to my training from school, and we just come in, we pray, we talk about God freely, we talk about God's work and we use the Word of God to help us heal and live well. Healing and deliverance is what I'm all about.

Jim: Yeah. I'm glad you went away from the metamorphosis thing because somebody would've, what? What'd you say? Metaphysical Metamorphosis or what was it?

Shantel Thomas: Majestic. (chuckling)

Jim: Yeah. I think it, I think God's a lot easier. A Sound Mind makes it a lot easier for you to do that. (laughter) All right, so what first got you the attention of Christian Blue? What said, I need to do this?

Shantel Thomas: So I remember being at this festival, it was years ago. It was outdoors, and I was walking past one of the booths. And there was Darrell and he was talking to me about this Christian Blue Pages, the magazine and how you can advertise in here. And at that point it was just me and I had never thought about advertising.

And he was saying, we talk to Christians and other Christians in here, you can find other businesses and companies that have the same belief that you do. And that just struck me like, i've never heard of this. This is really different. But I really would like to support other Christian businesses and have them know I'm here so they can support me as well. So it was him. I talked directly to him at this booth, and from there our friendship started. He still comes to me directly and we still talk and pray. And I would, if I don't advertise anywhere else, I will always advertise in the Christian Blue Pages.

Jim: That was like a commercial, Darrell. That's pretty good. (laughter)

Martha: Pretty good endorsement.

Darrel Geis: Hey, Shantel's a very special person. We always pray for our clients at the end of every appointment, and every time I pray with Shantel, I'm ready to have her pray for me. And it's just such an amazing blessing. She and my wife are friends and my wife's a social worker as a LSW, and so anyway, it's just a joy every time I get a chance to meet with Shantel.

Shantel Thomas: Thank you. Thank you.

Martha: You know that's so good to hear because it goes so much more than just a transaction. And that's one of the things that I want our listeners to hear is just to be reminded that it is not just the transaction. It's so much more than that.

So are you able to know how many people you're getting from Christian Blue or what kind of impact it has had - for people like that just really wanna hear those kind of details. What can you say?

Shantel Thomas: So yeah, so how we track is we have an intake form. At the bottom of our intake form we ask, did you hear about us from Christian Blue Pages or did you hear about us from the radio or television or a friend? And people will check those boxes. And one of the reasons that I continue to advertise with the Christian Blue Pages is because we get so many people that check the box and say, yes, I heard about you through the Christian Blue Pages, and this is where we continue to decide who we will advertise with and who we will not. Christian Blue Pages always leads in the numbers, so it works. It really does work.

Jim: Darrell, I've been pounding you for a long time, like, why aren't you doing this in other states? Why? Ohio is your territory, but I'm sure over the last five or six, seven years, I've gone Darrel, when are you gonna expand this? Right now this, Ohio is your territory, right? You are you covering all of Ohio?

Darrel Geis: Yeah, we do a little bit with Cincinnati, Dayton, and Columbus, and then we do a little bit of digital in northeast Ohio and in Indianapolis and central Indiana. But primarily Cincinnati, Dayton, and Columbus is, which is the area that we originally started with. And we've, we've discussed that. We've had so many people inquire over the years and we just go with the lead of the Holy Spirit. And I always say, Jesus told his disciples to minister in Jerusalem, then Judea, then Samaria, then the other ends of the earth. We're still in Jerusalem. (laughter)

We're still, there's still so many people that we feel like we need to serve better and more business categories to cover in our local areas that it just, that's what has been the direction, at least at this point in the ministry. Now we get inquiries from all over the United States and we also have a caroling ministry. Go caroling.com is the website that serves that and we get caroling group registrations from all over the US and Canada. So we are ministering in that way.

And you can be certified Christian Blue, certified as a Christian business anywhere in the country. If you're a Christian business, you can get certified with us and that includes a lot of connections through newsletters and space, listing on our website and a variety of other things, faith-based resources to help you live out your faith in your work life. So we can serve anybody in the country that's a Christian business owner.

Martha: Let me ask you, so a couple things that makes me realize why you don't have to be transactional, that you can be personal, because you actually know and care for the people not only that you are advertising with you, but that you're serving. I just heard you say, there's more layers of ways we could serve people better, and so I love that you're staying true to that. And in an area where, if you went national, it'd be much more difficult to not be transactional.

But the other side, what you just said about being certified, talk about that for a minute. Because is that part of like how we as individuals... you could do a little bit of vetting for us. Is that essentially what it is?

Darrel Geis: Yeah. So what the Christian Blue Certified is, we have three basic core requirements to be certified as a Christian business: that you profess Christ as Lord and Savior, Romans 10:9, "confess in your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raise him from the dead. You shall be saved." Be actively involved in a local Christian Church. Hebrews 10:25: "do not forsake the gathering together." And then strive to operate your business with excellence for the glory of God. " Work heartily as unto the Lord and not unto men."

So those are the three core requirements. And if the business owner operator commits to those three things, usually we do it on an appointment, in-person appointment the very first time. It's also an interview. So it's not just an advertisement appointment, it's an interview. Take a look around and we obviously do research on the businesses that come in. So anyway if they agree to those three requirements, they could be certified. And that comes with a listing under one category.

Like for example, for Shantel, it would be counseling services on the website. And then from there you get newsletters. We have a consumer newsletter that goes out to consumers and we have deals and features of Christian businesses. We have a member newsletter that goes out to businesses and prospective clients of ours that deliver faith-based resources.

Currently doing a series called The Daily Office, a video series. It'll be a five part series where it's just encouraging Christians to, before you go into your work office, to secure your daily office with the Lord, as your time with the Lord. That works out how you do a time, a place, and a plan.

So anyway, so those are resources. Then we do events like we're partnering with the Global Leadership Summit for the third straight year, fourth straight year and providing opportunities for our clients and prospective clients to come to the GLS simulcast at a discount.

We do At Work on Purpose. You might have mentioned it earlier. We'll be At Work on Purpose, XL Summit, and just a lot of other resources we provide clients. And prayer covering, a prayer ministry, and just a lot of things that brings value to be certified. And then you get our logo either the Christian Blue Pages logo, christian blue.com or christian Blue certified logo that you can put on your website link to your profile on, on our website.

And it's kinda like what people do, they put their Better Business Bureau logo on their website, link it to their profile and that type of thing. So we can certify any business anywhere in the world as Christian owned and operated through our certified process.

Jim: So Darrel, if there's somebody listening today from a different part of the country and they're like I really wanna do this in my state, would you ever consider that conversation?

Darrel Geis: Yeah, we have those conversations pretty regularly. And we have a process of how to, explore the idea. There's so many ways for businesses to advertise. It's a very difficult thing. You think every Christian business would wanna be certified and then wanna take advantage of their certification by advertising further with us, right? But it's just not that way because maybe they have a very limited advertising budget or maybe they advertised heavily in digital and they pigeonhole us in because we're Christian Blue Pages.

They pigeonhole us in it as an old Yellow Pages type of thing. And our format is similar, at least the print directory is similar to the Yellow Pages, but it's always the choice of the consumer to go pick up a directory because it's a faith-based targeted niche product that people have been using for over three decades.

So anyway, all that said, is there's lots of reasons why they don't. But yeah, we would always communicate with people, you know, ways that we could potentially explore expanding in other territories. But it just hasn't happened.

Jim: Sure. Dr. Shantel, what's been the biggest surprise for you? Biggest God surprise, as part of this whole Christian Blue journey?

Shantel Thomas: So I guess when I started out, I wasn't sure. I thought let's try this and see, but just the number of people that continued to tell me that they found me in the Christian Blue Pages, just the way it has helped to grow my business, I have to say that it's the only advertising that I've started with and I've been consistently with because the numbers show that it works.

And I was telling Darrel that when we met, he's like, how do you track it? How do you know? And I'm like, we do the little tally at the end and every month we have calls and some people call and say, they will say, I found you in the Christian Blue Pages. Or they'll say, I'm calling because I need a sound mine. And I really believe that, God just - when my professor said to me this won't work, I had some doubts, some fear, but then it's like God sent the help, right? The Christian Blue Pages, the churches, they make sure that we stay in business. It's all God and it's all Christian based and it's all the supportive christian community.

Jim: So have you ever gone back, sought out that professor to have a conversation with her?

Shantel Thomas: You know what, actually I did not have to. She called me after 10 years in business. She called me and she said, I have to apologize to you. And this was phenomenal for me. It just really was warmed my heart. She said, we have been tracking you here at the university and we use your business to show how counseling and Christianity can partner together and be successful. We actually use it in our master's program when we work with students now.

And I was like, what? And she said, yeah, you're one of our biggest success stories. She said, I'm so sorry that I didn't believe in you, but I'm so happy that you continued on your journey and you went ahead and opened your business as a Christian practice.

Jim: Wow. Now that's the God story. That's the one right there. That's amazing, 'cause partnering with Darrel and partnering with God and getting your degree. Obviously he didn't just stop at your master's degree, went on and got your doctorate. Whew, sure glad it was you and not me. Dr. Shantel Thomas and Darrel Geis , thank you both for being on here today, sharing a little bit of this story, sharing the excitement of what God's doing there all over Ohio. Thank you both for being with us.

Darrel Geis: Thank you so much. God bless you and your ministry as well.

Shantel Thomas: Yes, God bless you. Thank you.

Jim: Before we close today, we really wanna draw attention to the US Christian Chamber of Commerce.

Martha: Yeah. Our work can be very lonely sometimes and we know even when it's directed by God, we need people around us on this journey. And there is a community waiting to embrace you and challenge you to keep your kingdom perspective like we've been talking about.

The US Christian Chamber of Commerce unites Christian business leaders to build with excellence, lead with integrity and advance God's kingdom in the marketplace. And in 2026, we will gather together in Orlando, Florida, to take this even further. Visit swc2026.com and use code iWork4Him to save on your registration. Jim and I will emcee this event and look forward to seeing you there!

Jim: You've been listening to iWork4Him with your hosts, Jim and Martha Brangenberg. We're Christ followers, our workplace, it's our mission field, but ultimately iWork4Him.