Shepherding Clients | Pastoral Wisdom for Financial Advisors—Part 1

Early in my ministry, I was a bi-vocational pastor in Denver, Colorado. I spent weekdays helping clients consider their investments, then weekends and weeknights helping parishioners contemplate God and their souls. We might think these jobs are wildly dissimilar endeavors belonging to completely unrelated universes, and for sure, each has a unique calling. However, there’s also a lot more overlap than we imagine. 

The first thread connecting these vocations is the essential truth that all good work is holy work whenever it’s engaged as worship toward God and in humble service to God’s world. A financial advisor, nurse, pastor, carpenter, or homemaker—we all share the same baseline job description: we’re to use our skills, energy, and resources to love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, and soul. And then we’re to love our neighbor as ourselves. This means that every portfolio rebalanced, every dish washed, every brick laid, and every sermon preached can be done toward God and in pursuit of God’s purposes. 

However, when I reflect on the peculiar specifics of that season when my investing and church work moved in tandem, I recognize how much my pastoral sensibilities helped me better serve clients. My pastoral commitments shaped me to see clients in ways that honored their God-given dignity and influenced the advice I gave and every interaction. Pastors and financial advisors are doing so much more than merely selling a religious or financial product. Pastors and financial advisors both come alongside people as they navigate crucial, often tender, transitions. They both help others name their deep hopes and values and help them confront powerful fears or temptations. They can both assist people to prepare for a good life and for a good death.

In a recent interview with author and Eventide’s Editor-at-Large Amy Sherman, philosopher Jamie Smith commented on how financial advisors should understand themselves as something like a spiritual director (one-on-one pastoral ministry practiced in certain Christian traditions), because both advisors and spiritual directors “are asking people to become intentional about ultimate things…” The connections really are there once you start looking. 

Similarly, Finny Kuruvilla, one of Eventide’s founders, believes that advisors should not only shepherd a client’s capital but also shepherd the client. How then might a financial advisor learn from the work of a pastor? How can an advisor shepherd her client? 

God is the Center

The starting place is elementary, but it’s important to return to the basics over and again. It’s essential for us to remember that God sits at the center of everything we’re doing. Though we get confused about this far more than I care to admit, pastors must regularly remember that our work is not fundamentally running a church or organizing religious events or delivering a rousing sermon. Those are tasks. But the axis, the pulsing center of pastoral work, is God. We want to receive and give God’s wisdom. We want to live out of God’s truth. In everything, we want to honor God and love the people that God loves (which, of course, is everyone).

This is no less true for a financial advisor seeking to faithfully follow Jesus. When a client sits in your office and opens their statements or launches into their questions, the endgame of the conversation isn’t merely making sure they understand a sound retirement strategy or achieve proper diversification—or for them to leave so enamored with your knowledge or service that they bring you more of their business. These efforts each have their place, but in my view, none of them are the center. None of these are your actual purpose. None of them offer the guiding principle that undergirds your motivation or organizes your office. 

Rather, here’s the core: God is the Lord over our money, Lord over our futures, Lord over our work. When we truly believe this, then we have the clear-eyed focus to be able to discern together with clients how to manage money in a way that aligns their portfolio with these convictions. 

And these convictions remain true even when you are working with clients who do not share your faith. Unwavering clarity about your aim (serving God before anyone or anything else) provides a distinctive ethos that will shape every part of your business. Operating from a radical, God-aligned core will produce an abundance of humility, generosity, and attentiveness that weaves itself into every conversation, practice, and relationship. God’s light and love will shimmer through your work even if you never mention his name. And you will be working from the center, living true to your God-designed purpose.

The Art of Listening

I’m chagrined to admit how often I failed at this basic instruction, but one of a pastor’s primary responsibilities is simply to listen. It’s remarkable to discover how many times Jesus, rather than giving an answer, asked a question—and then he listened for the reply. Rather than following Jesus’ lead, however, too often we dash past the questions because we already know exactly what we intend to say. A good pastor and a good financial advisor must truly listen to those we serve.

Our impulse to speak before we listen is especially powerful because we assume that our expertise means that the answer is already fixed. Often, even if we feign an open-ended query or a listening ear, we’re really trying to get past pleasantries so we can move on to our agenda. However, genuine listening means more than merely allowing someone else to have their say. Listening well is more than polite decorum, more than a smart sales technique. Listening is a virtue, a way of loving the one who is our partner in the conversation. Listening honors how this person, an image-bearer of God, has something unique to offer. “Listening is a form of spiritual hospitality,” wrote Henri Nouwen. Listening expresses humility, making space for all the details we don’t know yet, all the surprises we might discover if we only allow room for them to emerge. Listening tempers our assumptions and program. Listening invites God to be active in the conversation. 

“Listening is rare,” wrote Edward Farrell. “[C]ertain people…have such a deep capacity for hearing; not hearing words only but hearing us as a person…We cannot discover ourselves by ourselves.” When we welcome others into an unhurried space and are able to keep our agenda in check, then we make it possible for someone to share their deeper fears and anxieties. We might learn how to better assist them with those concerns they are slow to mention (or can’t even identify) initially. 

If the aim is to help someone honor (and even encounter) God with their money, then we must listen for more than only their net worth, investing objective, or time horizon. We’ll need to listen to their heart and their longings. We’ll need to listen for what God may be doing in the midst of their questions and circumstances.

The Larger Story

And this—listening for what God may be doing—is crucial. A faithful pastor steadily invites people into a larger story, into God’s story. And a financial advisor grounded in God’s always-present action does the same. Whenever you help clients understand fundamental principles (e.g., investing as ownership, moving capital into business as a means of loving our neighbors and serving the common good, etc.), you are helping them joyfully discover how their money is one piece of an entire life that God intends to shape into something beautiful and whole. 

When I have a pastoral conversation with someone facing a crisis (a dire report from a doctor, a struggling child, a layoff from work) or someone struggling with a major decision (a career change, a marriage, a big move), the person often enters assuming that their options are narrow, with all the issues at play already categorized and predefined. They often have a constricted vision of what is possible. Almost always, they need someone to come alongside them and assist them in recognizing what God might be up to amid all the uncertainty.

It’s remarkable how often a simple question (how do your hopes for your future align with God’s wisdom? or how is your worry reshaped by the truth of God’s character?) alters the trajectory or opens their imagination for possibilities they’d never considered. Advisors have the profound opportunity to help clients catch a glimpse of God’s wider story for the world and for their own lives. Advisors can, when they are invited to do so, aid clients in imagining how their work and their investments can participate in God’s healing, a vision so much larger than only building a comfortable retirement. 

“Neither revolution nor reformation can ultimately change a society,” wrote Ivan Illich. “[R]ather you must tell a new powerful tale, one so persuasive that it sweeps away the old myths… If you want to change a society, then you have to tell an alternative story.”

We do have an alternative story to tell, a powerful and healing story. A story that’s good for us and for the whole world. And advisors can shepherd their clients, offering guidance that helps them move courageously into this expansive, revolutionary, God-sized story.