Early in my career, I was a banker at a local credit union. One day, a teenage girl came into my branch with her mother needing a document notarized. I took a look at the document and saw it was a form providing parental consent for a minor seeking an abortion. My heart broke for her. I didn’t know her story, or what she was feeling. It was simply my job to notarize her mother’s signature.
I think about this story often and all the “what-if’s.” What if I offered a word of encouragement or some type of alternate path forward? Not from a spirit of judgment, but from one of hope? Realistically, that probably would not have ended well for my employment.
This story illustrates an example of living in a world where there are challenges aligning our values with what we are expected to do. Often, this appears in our places of work:
- A public school science teacher teaching his students about creation without a Creator.
- A pharmacist providing a patient with emergency contraceptive pills.
- An employee working for a Fortune 500 company that donates millions of dollars to organizations pushing an agenda contrary to Biblical values.
As Christians, sometimes we don’t have many good options when confronted with these scenarios. If I politely refused to notarize that document, she would have found someone else to do it, and I may or may not have a job afterward.
We might not have the choice to align certain areas of our lives completely with our values. If you work at a large corporation, you could be serving your customers well and providing for your family, but you know part of the profits you generate are going to support causes you don’t agree with.
However, there is an area of your life that can be aligned with your values, and you probably haven’t thought about it—your investments.
If you own mutual funds or ETF’s, through your stock holdings, you are an owner of the corporations you’re investing with. As an owner, you have a responsibility for the services and products of the companies you own. Naturally, you want your investments to perform well. That means you are hoping these companies sell more products or provide more services.
There is technology that allows you to see what moral and ethical issues are present in your portfolio. Not only can you have transparency to what you currently own, but you can invest in mutual funds and ETF’s that align with your values!
The faith-driven investing movement is not new. It’s just more widely accessible today than ever before.
The first step is to make a personal decision to educate yourself on what you own. To assist you on your journey, Stewardship will provide a complimentary Impact Report so you can see what positive and negative issues are currently in your investment portfolio.
The second step is to make a decision to join the faith-driven investing movement. Is it possible to invest in a way that promotes good and brings you more joy? Absolutely!
Will you join the faith-driven investing movement?
