Who is my Neighbor? with John Terrill

Transcript

Tim Weinhold:

Your pieces are addressing how does the response Jesus gives when asked who is my neighbor, and he tells the good Samaritan story, essentially how that story is meant to apply to how we think about business and inferentially beyond that to business investing.

John Terrill:

It’s fundamentally a question about agency and responsibility, and this Samaritan stops and assists this person in distress. Not only helping them there in the moment, but also taking them to an innkeeper and paying a fair bit of wages to ensure over time that this person is healed and then offers to even do more. And I guess in the context of business, it raises the broader question of who am I responsible to in my business, who are my stakeholders and what priority or precedent do they take?

John Terrill:

One’s neighbor in business far transcends, far exceeds, if you’re in a public corporation or a corporation that has external owners, it far exceeds the exclusive realm of shareholders. I am of the strong belief that in business to really run businesses and to lead businesses that are honoring to God, we need to think more holistically about who it is that we’re called to serve. And there are a lot of things that play into this, our sense of agency, our sense of responsibility, competing demands. I think in business, we often have to respond in react in real time.

John Terrill:

But I would say emphatically that we need to think about our neighbors in business beyond our shareholders.