Review: Business for the Common Good – Wong and Rae

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The book begins with a fairly straightforward argument challenging the sacred/secular divide in the area of profession, returning to a classic “priesthood of all believers” brand of argument.  The authors then go on to argue that some people are actually called to business as a vocation—a call to what they argue is the advancement of “the common good through transformational service.”

The chapters go on to look at how business might be a “crucible” for Christlikeness—a place where our call as Christians can be sharpened through the opportunities business provides.  The book then marches through such topics as marketing, globalization, environmental sustainability, and leadership—working through the ethical quandaries that face Christians in each area.

In each of these chapters there is much good, and this is certainly a welcome book through which to engage important questions of not only business, but money and vocations in general.  And yet here’s the “but”: Wong and Rae do not deeply enough question “the market” itself and in so doing they miss the opportunity to embrace the hope of the Gospel not only for “the market” but people seeking a means of right livelihood in a world that can be seemingly ambiguous if we let it.

As Wong and Rae state in the book’s introduction, “a broken world creates complications, sometimes without perfectly clean or clear resolution…we are living between the ‘now” and ‘not yet’ in terms of the full realization of kingdom values in this world.”  They go on to write, “A broken world may also mean that we may find ourselves operating in the very real gap between the normative (what we should do) and the realistic (what we can do)…To be sure, we need ideals to inspire, guide and properly motivate us even though we cannot perfectly achieve them in this world.”

This Nieburhian “realist” position permeates the book and works to short-sell the accomplishment of the cross and resurrection.  If Christ rose victorious from the grave on Easter then we must work now to make that resurrection reality in every domain of life.  We do not do this by settling into the compromises of the “not yet.”  Our life as Christians is to be lived into the eschaton, as a witness to the reality that is here and is coming in completion.  Of course the kingdom has not come in its fullness, the lion does not yet lie down with the lamb, but neither does can Christians run a business that refuses to employ people full-time and yet not provide them with the means of a living simply because “competition” would not allow it. Christ opens us to a creativity and reality far more interesting than these simple compromises.  Unfortunately we have to turn to companies like Patagonia to find people doing business in radically different ways rather than the Chik-fil-a’s and Service Masters of the world (both companies run and founded by those who claim Christianity).

It was because of this refusal to see the radical and creative possibilities of a completely new reality that Christ makes possible, that I finally have to hold back from fully embracing Business for the Common Good. Christians who would go into business or lead a life in business would be far better served by studying the lives of exemplars such as John Woolman, whose journals (available as a free Kindle ebook ) exhibit a Christian seeking to serve the community through his work and yet continually struggling for a high level of holiness without “realist” compromises.  Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove’s God’s Economy would also be a book I would recommend to Christians in business.  It does not treat business per se, but it does offer an orientation toward money and the abundance of God’s economy that Christians in business should seek to join.

In the end Business for the Common Good is a helpful orientation to the issues of Christian business ethics, but one that fails to fully embrace the radical abundance and possibilities of God’s economy.  We are left again to remember Stanley Hauerwas’s warning that business ethics should not be a special concern of the church, but that just as our primary vocation is always a response to “follow Me,”  our lives must be patterned into the primary ethical demand of “be like Me.”

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Ragan Sutterfield is a writer and agrarian who lives in Little Rock, Arkansas. He is the author of the book Farming as a Spiritual Discipline, and his newest project is SoulWOD.