I used to believe business existed mostly to fund ministry, that the people in the pews wrote checks so the people on staff could do the real Kingdom work.
I grew up in a pastor’s house. Ministry shaped everything: Sunday mornings, Sunday nights, Wednesday nights, and the hours between. I went to Bible college and seminary fully expecting to spend my life in full-time ministry. Business was necessary, sure, but it was for other people.
However, as I read Luke 19 more carefully today, I realize Jesus doesn’t tell his servants to plant churches or care for the poor or grow in spiritual disciplines. In the parable of The 10 Minas, Jesus says this:
Calling ten of his servants, he gave them ten minas, and said to them, “Engage in business until I come.”… When he returned, having received the kingdom, he ordered these servants to whom he had given the money to be called to him, that he might know what they had gained by doing business. -Luke 19:13, 15
The master doesn’t hand his servants a theology quiz or a spiritual gifts assessment. He gives them money and says, “Engage in business.”
Not prayer. Not Bible study. Not ministry. Business.
This Parable Ruins My Categories
When the master returns as king, he asks about ROI (return on investment). The servant who turned one mina into ten gets authority over ten cities. The one who made five gets five cities. The one who buried his mina?
He’s slaughtered.
Not demoted. Not reassigned to a lesser role. Killed. Jesus puts these words in the mouth of the returning king: “As for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me.”
I want to soften this. I want to explain it away as hyperbole or limit it to the political enemies mentioned earlier in the parable. But the servant who buried his mina is grouped with those who rejected the king’s reign entirely. Playing it safe wasn’t neutral. It was rebellion.
Apparently, Jesus believes something I struggle to accept: fruitfulness isn’t optional. Multiply what the Master entrusts to you and receive cities. Bury it? You’ve declared whose side you’re on.
To the master, one’s fruitfulness in business today seems to determine one’s fitness to rule cities in the age to come.
I realize this makes most Christian men uncomfortable. Some of us have been trained to see business as secular, something we do to fund ministry or a necessary evil to provide for our family while we wait for the real work of the Kingdom to begin. But Jesus presents business itself as a proving ground for eternal authority.
Why Business?
When I think about my experience in starting, growing, and ultimately selling my business, a few reasons come to mind.
Business forces you to create value where none existed. It requires you to manage resources, assess risk, lead others, and bear the weight of both success and failure. It tests whether you can be faithful with what’s entrusted to you when no one is watching and the outcome is uncertain.
Business reveals character like few other pursuits. You can fake spirituality in a prayer meeting. You can coast on charisma in ministry. But business is ruthlessly honest. Did you create value or didn’t you? Did people freely exchange their resources for a solution you offered or didn’t they? Did you multiply what was given or let it stagnate?
Business joins God in His mission of being fruitful and multiplying, and his subsequent blessing to us to do the same. Any successful business revolves around solving problems for people. The whole endeavor focuses on turning someone’s chaos into order, exactly what God did when he took an empty and formless earth and turned it into something orderly and beautiful.
The Bigger Story
When God created man, his first words to us were not “be holy” or “worship me” or “evangelize.” His first words were, “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.” Not only was it a command, but it was also a blessing. Genesis 1:22 starts the command by saying, “He blessed them…” We were created to work. And it’s good (until work is cursed in Genesis 3; it’s still a blessing, but now it’s toil).
This is the original job description for us: Take what God has made and make it more fruitful. Extend order into the chaos. Multiply goodness. Create culture and civilization from raw materials. Take the garden and grow it until cities like it cover the face of the earth.
This is what business does at its core. It takes resources, applies our creativity and effort, and produces something more valuable than what existed before. It’s subduing the earth. It’s multiplying fruitfulness. It’s fulfilling the original design for manhood that God stamped into us at creation.
The Master’s command to engage in business isn’t an arbitrary test. It’s reconnecting His servants to their primal purpose as image-bearers. It’s asking:
“Can you do what men were made to do? Can you take what I’ve given you and make it fruitful?”
Training Ground for Cities
In Luke 19, the servants who succeed in business receive cities to govern.
This is the connection I missed while in Bible college and seminary. Business is not an end in itself. The goal isn’t only to make money. It’s preparation for rule. It’s the fulfillment of the Genesis 1 blessing had sin not entered.
When I built a business, I was learning to:
Assess people and situations accurately
Make decisions that impact my family’ life, my employee’s lives, and our customers
Bear responsibility for outcomes that affect others
Multiply resources rather than merely preserve them
Lead people toward productive ends
Create order and value in a small domain
These are precisely the skills required to govern a city. The man who can make one mina into ten has demonstrated he can take a small domain and multiply its fruitfulness. He’s ready for a larger domain.
The man who buried his mina revealed he’s a steward who preserves but never increases. He maintains but never multiplies. He’s risk-averse, suspicious of his master, and content to merely survive rather than grow. It appears that this man is not fit to rule anything.
What This Means for Men Today
If business is the training ground for Kingdom rule, then our work as a Christian man is not a necessary evil or a distraction from real ministry. It’s the arena where we’re being tested and trained for eternal authority.
The faithfulness we show in building our businesses, managing assets, creating value—this is not separate from our spiritual formation. It is our spiritual formation.
Every hard decision we make is teaching us judgment. Every risk we take is training us in faith mixed with wisdom. Every person we lead is preparing us to shepherd a city. Every failure we endure and recover from is forging the resilience we’ll need to govern in the age to come.
This has implications for how I father my sons. I’m not just teaching them to love Jesus and be nice people. I’m training them to be fruitful, to multiply what’s entrusted to them, to take dominion over small things so they’ll be ready for greater responsibilities. And every day that my 15 year old son gets excited to see his hard-earned money growing in mutual funds, and the patience he shows when it looses money and he doesn’t pull it out, he’s learning to have a long-term perspective on ROI.
The Master Cares About ROI, so I Should, Too.
To the seminary version of myself many years ago, the most unsettling part of this parable is how much the master cares about return on investment. He’s not impressed with the man who played it safe. He’s furious with him.
The master calls him wicked for not even putting the money in the bank to earn interest. He demands fruitfulness, not just faithfulness in the sense of careful preservation. He rewards multiplication, and he punishes stagnation.
This reveals something about the heart of God that shapes how I think about my life right now. The Kingdom is not coming to men who merely showed up and didn’t make too many mistakes. It’s coming to men who took what they were given—gifts, opportunities, resources, time—and took risks to make them more fruitful.
God is not honored by when I play it small. He’s not glorified by my risk-averse self-protection. He’s entrusting me with minas today because he’s preparing me for cities tomorrow.
The question is whether I’m engaging in business or burying what I’ve been given.
Every hard moment I face in business, in leadership, in leading a family, and multiplying—that’s not a distraction from the Kingdom. That’s training for cities. And the Master is watching to see what kind of return I’ll bring Him when He comes back as King.
P.S. In 2013 I was in the startup grind, trying to grow a brand new business with a wife and three small kids depending on me. During that season of life, Timothy Keller’s book, “Every Good Endeavor,” (affiliate) completely shifted my understanding of what I was doing. I wasn’t just trying to survive financially or even grow a business. I was seeking the Kingdom and joining the Master in His work. I highly recommend this book.
