Stephen Green is one of the foremost bankers in Europe. He is chair of HSBC. He is also a priest of the Church of England. It is those two, perhaps conflicting, vocations that caused him recently to reflect on the implications of the world financial crisis. Now that the panic is over and the rebuilding has begun he attempts to help us remember what makes life worth living, indeed, holy in his new book, Good Value: Reflections on Money Morality and an Uncertain World.
Forget, he seems to say, complicated investment schemes and the famous invisible hand of the marketplace. He makes a stunning, if not entirely original, accusation that we are all guilty of compartmentalization. In the south, we called that the difference between the hymns we sing and the prayers we pray on Sunday morning, and the way we acted on Monday morning. Is there, he asks, more to running a business, especially one that affects so many only tangentially related to it, than maximizing shareholder value . . . which has often become a euphemism for maximizing my commission check? Do we have responsibility to take social consequences of our decisions seriously? Is there a place for rightness or wisdom outside church pulpits or the lecture halls of first class universities?
Green advocates commitment to certain ideals: “integrity, treating other people as ends in and of themselves, not just as a means to an end; aspiring to contribute the most, not to receiving the most; striving for balance between family, friendship and work; and, if you should find yourself in a leadership position, focusing on service rather than power.”
I pointed out recently to a group that the first name of the company of followers of Jesus was "The Way". Before the church was even a church, before it was a collection of dogmas proclaimed by old men in fancy dress, our forbearers in faith were folks, not all that dissimilar from us, who found meaning and value and hope in their lives by trying to emulate what Jesus did. And they found so much meaning and value and hope that they believed others would find that message equally compelling and transformative in their own lives.
Those of us who have been blessed in living (and, by world standards that includes all of us) have an obligation to give extensively of all our resources, not only financial, but time and personal, to proclaim common, community values as opposed to rugged individualism. I don’t know if it was Chairman Stephen Green or Father Stephen Green who wrote this book, but the questions he raises are worth deep reflection. We’ve tried living for ourselves the past few years. How did that work out? Perhaps it’s time to remember the other Way. Perhaps it’s time for us to show the way.
Beloved, God’s peace.
