Salt & Light

There is no sacred-secular divide. Your company is your mission field and your work itself is worship (Avodah). Work is not a consequence of the Fall to be endured until heaven; God placed Adam in the garden "to work it and keep it" before sin ever entered the story. So your desk is not a lesser place than a pulpit. You are not a volunteer squeezing ministry around your business; you are commissioned to carry Christ's reign inside your enterprise. Before you are a business leader, you are a disciple under the Lordship of Jesus, and a job becomes a true vocation only when you do it for God and for others rather than for yourself alone.

Tim Keller traces work back to Genesis 2:15, before the Fall, and distinguishes a mere job from a vocation. One is a calling from God for the good of others; the other is self-serving labor. He also names the twin dangers of making career your identity or treating work as a necessary evil. Salt & Light steers between both.

A surrendered identity. "I am a disciple of Jesus who happens to run a business," not "a businessman who happens to attend church."

Write a one-paragraph "Marketplace Commission" naming your specific mission field: the people your business lets you influence. Bring it to Session 2.

Facilitator Note: Open with your own story of learning to see work as worship, including where you got it wrong. You set the tone here: this is peer discipleship over a table, not a lecture from a stage.

Business Concepts: A Call to Leadership & Principles & Dynamics of Management.

Integration of MBA Concepts: Introduce personal leadership as a true vocation. Frame "Work as Worship" through foundational management principles and a clear organizational vision. The shift from "businessman" to "disciple" reflects a change in leadership identity, aligned with establishing a strong foundational culture within an enterprise.

Kingdom economics rests on three truths: God owns everything (Absolute Ownership), His economy multiplies rather than hoards (Covenantal Abundance), and true wealth is measured by how it lifts the vulnerable (Just Distribution). You do not own your assets; you manage the King's, and assets means more than money. Your capital is every resource entrusted to you: cash, time, skill, network and influence. None of it is yours to keep for its own sake; all of it is on loan, meant to be repurposed for Kingdom ends rather than hoarded for personal security.

Brett Johnson reframes the stewardship question from "how much can I keep" to "what is this capital for." He argues capital was never meant to terminate on the owner; it is a tool God releases through His people for Kingdom ends.

Open-handed stewardship: releasing the illusion of ownership and the grip of scarcity-fear.

Conduct a personal "Lordship Audit": name one asset, decision, or ambition not yet surrendered, and consecrate it in prayer with your accountability partner this week.

Facilitator Note: Model surrender concretely. Share one thing in your own business you had to release to God, and what it cost and yielded.

Business Concepts: Financial Management.

Integration of MBA Concepts: Integrate principles of managing assets, capital structure and resource allocation. Present financial management as a stewardship function where capital, whether cash, time or influence, is analyzed and repurposed for value creation and broader impact rather than mere accumulation.

The marketplace is a battleground against three systemic giants. The kingdom leader confronts systemic poverty by creating dignified, living-wage work rather than dependency; refuses institutional corruption even when bribery is "the cost of doing business"; and rejects unethical practices through just weights, fair contracts and honest dealing. Each of the three giants grows wherever capital is hoarded, misdirected or extracted rather than repurposed toward the flourishing of others.

Johnson's Kingdom Economics argues that responses to systemic poverty and injustice often fall into two extremes: withdrawing from the problem or looking to government intervention alone. He proposes a third way: capital, rightly repurposed by Kingdom-minded business owners, working against these cycles from the inside.

Holy courage: the resolve to say no when everyone insists this is just how it is done.

Identify one recurring ethical "gray zone" in your industry and pre-decide your Kingdom response now, before you are under pressure to compromise.

Facilitator Note: This is where confession happens. Go first with a real failure or temptation of your own. Guard confidentiality fiercely.

Business Concepts: Business Ethics & Economics for Manager.

Integration of MBA Concepts: Use ethical decision-making frameworks and an understanding of macro and microeconomic environments. Discuss the economic impacts of systemic poverty and corruption, and equip participants to face ethical gray zones with a commitment to just weights, fair contracts and honest dealing.

Reject the dualism that treats wealth as inherently evil and makes Christian entrepreneurs apologize for success. Poverty cannot cure poverty; a bankrupt business funds no impact. Profit is not the ultimate goal, but it is the engine that fuels Kingdom impact. Revenue and profit flow into job creation, community wealth and gospel expansion.

Keller reads Genesis 1:28 as a cultivation mandate: people made in God's image bring order and fruitfulness out of creation. Johnson adds the capital dimension: a Kingdom economy is marked by multiplication rather than hoarding, so profit flows outward into jobs and generosity.

Freedom: from both the love of money and the false shame of God-given success.

Sketch your own "Kingdom success loop." Name one concrete way next quarter's profit will create jobs, bless your community, or advance the gospel.

Facilitator Note: Help the group separate biblical prosperity (stewardship for blessing) from the prosperity gospel (God as a means to wealth). Keep Christ, not money, at the center.

Business Concepts: Operations Management & Marketing Management.

Integration of MBA Concepts: Connect value creation with operational efficiency and market strategy. Discuss how optimizing operations creates jobs, community wealth and flourishing. Include ethical, socially responsible brand marketing as a method for contributing to nation-building and ensuring profit fuels economic and social advancement.

Salt preserves and purifies: your presence should arrest the moral decay of corruption, exploitation and greed in your industry. Light exposes and guides: through radical transparency and a flourishing, ethical business, you become a lighthouse that proves a company can be deeply profitable and deeply righteous, so that others see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.

Keller's treatment of common grace is useful here: God gifts skill, insight and excellence to believers and unbelievers alike. A Christian's distinctiveness in the marketplace is about excellence, integrity and generosity done consciously as worship rather than self-interest, made visible over time.

Visible, intentional witness: being unmistakably different on purpose.

Choose one concrete act of "salt" (to preserve or purify) and one of "light" (to expose or guide) to carry out in your company this week.

Facilitator Note: This session is the program's center of gravity; it is the literal output we are aiming for. Let the group dream specifically about their own companies.

Business Concepts: Management Concepts for Information Technology & Human Resources Management.

Integration of MBA Concepts: Highlight the role of systems, data transparency and organizational culture in acting as a visible witness. Discuss how information technology can create radical transparency and accountability, and how effective human resource management supports ethical treatment of employees and a distinct workplace culture.

A discipled Kingdom business redefines success across three returns: Spiritual Return (disciple-making, ethical treatment, evangelism through daily operations), Social Return (fair-wage jobs, local supply chains, radical generosity), and Economic Return (sustained profitability, fair taxes, future expansion). What gets measured gets discipled.

Johnson pushes stewards to track capital's Kingdom return with the same rigor applied to its financial return, as evidence of what the capital was repurposed for.

Stewardship accountability: bringing the rigor you give to financials to your spiritual and social fruit.

Draft one starter metric for each bottom line (spiritual, social, economic) that you will begin tracking in your business.

Facilitator Note: Keep metrics simple and honest. One real, tracked number beats ten aspirational ones.

Business Concepts: Managerial Accounting & Applied Management Science.

Integration of MBA Concepts: Emphasize tracking and analytics in decision-making. Expand cost and profit analysis to include rigorous metrics for the Triple Bottom Line, applying analytical rigor to spiritual, social and economic returns.

Honest discipleship names its obstacles before sending. The cost of integrity (lost contracts, slower growth), the time poverty of busy leaders, the loneliness of leadership and the difficulty of vulnerability, the scarcity of credible role models across industries, and the temptation to be valued by the church only as a donor. Disciples who count the cost are the ones who endure.

Keller is candid that even faithful, gospel-motivated work remains marked by fruitlessness, pointlessness and friction that will not fully resolve this side of eternity. Naming that honestly lets a leader keep working with hope instead of denial or despair.

Resilience anchored in community: a formation that survives Monday because it is not carried alone.

Name the one cost you most fear paying, and ask the group to commit to walking with you through it.

Facilitator Note: Begin intentionally surfacing role models across different industries within the church. Part of the long-term answer to the role-model gap is sitting in this very room.

Business Concepts: A Call to Leadership & Economics for Managers.

Integration of MBA Concepts: Revisit leadership dynamics and economic realities. Analyze the tangible economic costs of maintaining integrity, including slower growth or lost contracts, within the personal resilience required to lead organizations through friction and change.

The output of this journey is a discipled leader sent to be salt and light in their own company, and equipped to disciple the next leader. The Great Commission reaches the systems of commerce when marketplace disciples multiply through peer cohorts, incubation and mentorship. You were formed in order to form others.

Johnson's vision for a Kingdom economy is explicitly a movement, not a set of isolated good businesses. He ties the whole framework to an awakening among God's people that spreads leader to leader until Kingdom economics becomes the default rather than the exception in a given market.

A sending and multiplying heart: from disciple to disciple-maker in the marketplace.

Three deliverables: (1) a personal Salt & Light Action Plan for your company; (2) the name of one emerging leader you will begin to disciple (your "Timothy"); and (3) a decision on how this cohort continues, whether as an ongoing peer cohort or through one-on-one discipleship.

Facilitator Note: End with commissioning, not merely a wrap-up. Lay hands on and pray over each leader, sending them as salt and light into their own companies.

Business Concepts: Human Resource Management & Principles and Dynamics of Management.

Integration of MBA Concepts: Focus on organizational development, succession planning and talent management. Equip leaders to identify, incubate and develop the next generation of marketplace leaders, embedding leadership multiplication into the broader systems of commerce.