Shepherding Clients | Pastoral Wisdom for Financial Advisors—Part 2

We slid into the red booth, gave the waitress our orders, and dug into the basket of tortilla chips and bowl of salsa. We passed a few pleasantries, but it was soon obvious that this was not going to be a casual pastoral lunch. The young man told me that he and his wife were leaving the church. He was not angry. Worse, he was wounded and sad. 

“My dad was in the hospital,” he said, eyes turning moist and red. “We felt scared, and you never came.”  

I told him how sorry I was and how I regretted that I hadn’t understood what he needed. He forgave me, and we shook hands before we left. Sadly, they still left the church.

Over the decades, I’ve reflected on this moment early in ministry. I’m still not entirely clear on all the expectations that were at play. I was new to the position and had never met his dad, a man who’d never been to our church. However, what is clear to me is that this young man’s deepest desire and need wasn’t really about the particulars of a hospital visit (though I certainly wished I’d shown up, and I know it would have helped). What he was truly asking for, even if he didn’t have the words to explain it at the time, was for someone to come alongside him, help him name his anxiety, and then show him how to step with courage and hope into these hard and unsettling places.

Parishioners need pastors who do this. This is shepherding work. But clients often need their financial advisors to do something like this, too. They need a guide who will be present with them, offer clarifying wisdom, and encourage them to keep moving forward.

Against Anxiety

Financial advisors often connect with clients at pivotal junctures when they are facing scenarios laced with anxiety. People in their 20s may feel invincible and think “retirement” is a word from a different planet. They rarely reach out to an advisor. But those with families to care for, seniors pondering their legacy, or investors who’ve just seen the markets tank and their portfolios plummet are likely to make the call.

We need financial advisors because of their skill and expertise, but we most often recognize that we need this skill and expertise because reality has given us a jolt. We face unfamiliar questions or issues, and we are acutely aware that we need help.  

Thankfully, advisors have concrete counsel to offer, practical strategies to help us navigate many of our financial dilemmas. However, a faith-centered advisor can offer far more. An advisor operating in the larger story invites clients to understand their financial uncertainties or their worries about the future as one more opportunity to entrust their lives to the God who cares for them. 

It is a genuine gift to sit with a couple wringing their hands over their accounts or debilitated by uncertainty and remind them that God holds their future. It’s always a powerful experience to encounter a client’s anxiety and offer them Jesus’ striking, assuring words: 

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? (Matthew 6:25-27)

Investing in God’s New World

Anxiety also influences our investing in subtler, more pervasive ways. Worried over whether we’ll have enough money for our future, we can easily be tempted to ignore our values and instead pursue a short-sighted, one-dimensional approach to profit. And financial advisors are in a unique position to help us see these oft-unrecognized realities and offer hopeful, strategic options for pursuing God’s good future for us and for the whole world. 

Few clients invest in exploitative or destructive companies because they’re bent on injuring their neighbors or creation. Sometimes, we make unworthy investments out of ignorance. We don’t comprehend what it means to be an owner of a company, or we have no real idea what the companies we own actually do. A lot of modern investing philosophy trains us to understand precious little about the companies we own and to investigate little more than our account statement and annual return. 

Further, clients don’t often realize what’s at stake when choosing their investments. Too often, we simply don’t understand an essential part of investing’s purpose: using our resources to care not only for ourselves but also for others and for God’s world. Who—other than a wise, principled financial advisor—can shepherd a client through these complex conversations? Who else will have the opportunity, much less the expertise, to engage these monumental, reorienting questions? Who else is equipped, or invited, to help us understand how our investing joins God’s liberating, healing future? 

And with all this, the aim is never to stiff-arm or shame anyone into any particular investment. Rather, what we’re describing is joyful, open-handed, and generous. An advisor simply extends the invitation for a client to say yes to their Spirit-led desires and join God’s exhilarating mission to make the whole world new (Revelation 21:1-8).

Advisors get to share with their clients how investing toward God’s purposes can expand rather than limit possibilities. Investing in harmony with God’s kingdom drains anxiety and fuels joy. “If you won’t let Jesus Christ use you to form a new world,” wrote Walter Brueggemann, “then all you can do…is service the old world. And that’s debilitating.” Brueggemann wrote these lines to pastors, but they work for advisors and clients too.

It’s suffocating to live under the regime of a constrictive, dehumanizing world. But we don’t have to serve the old world. We can invest in the new. 

Relaxing into Grace

For each reader here who is seeking to serve God and others by helping the rest of us tend to our investments with wisdom and conviction, I want to say this plainly: Thank you. What you are doing matters. We need you.

Perhaps there are seasons when you strain under the weight of your work. Guiding clients through their myriad concerns while maintaining your own core principles can be a challenge. You traverse complicated terrain littered with competing ideals and expectations. And these difficulties pile on top of the normal exertion of blood, sweat, and tears required to build and grow a healthy business. All this takes a toll. 

The gravity you feel reveals how seriously you take your work. However, the strain also provides a reminder of how essential it is for you to relax into the grace that God always makes available. While you are responsible to be faithful with your skills, the results are not your concern. Your job is simply to steward the opportunities God gives you. God’s renewal, strength, and love saturate every part of your life and business, and this truth can free you from the oppressive demand to succeed or achieve.

And this very same divine mercy and kindness—this God-fueled hope and relief—is what God enables you to give away to your clients. “Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others,” Peter says, “as faithful stewards of God’s grace…” (I Peter 4:10)

If a client disagrees with you or ignores your advice, there is grace. If you later learn of some ethical quandary you have with a company’s business philosophy, a revelation that may have altered your recommendation, there is grace. If you make a decision you regret, or realize your priorities have gotten out of whack, or fail to meet your goals…Grace. Grace. Grace.  

I once sat in a room full of weary pastors. Dallas Willard, the author of Divine Conspiracy and longtime philosopher at the University of Southern California, stood to speak. He must have felt the exhaustion in the room, the fatigue of good people trying to do holy work. He read Jesus’s familiar words about God’s yoke being easy, and his burden light (Matthew 11:30). And he paused. Then in Dallas’ gentle, penetrating way, he added: “If you’re under a hard yoke, and the burden you carry is not light, you need to shift some weight to someone else.”

You have embraced a profound calling to serve and shepherd your clients. And you can rest easy in this holy work, knowing that God is the true Shepherd.