Finance Helps Us Fulfill the Creation Mandate to Be Good Stewards

Following Christ as a Financial Analyst

In an interview with The High Calling, Will Messenger discusses seeking Christ in the world of finance.

You asked, “How do you follow Christ as a financial analyst?” Do you have a working answer for yourself?

I worked one summer as a financial analyst in an investment bank. I got assigned to work on a project to see whether we could get private equity investors to buy power plants from electric utilities. If so, we could earn a big fee on every transaction. The way we approached it was this: I would build a financial model for each power plant to show how many megawatt hours it could generate, the price it could sell each megawatt hour for, the cost of coal, wages for employees, etc. Then I would crunch the numbers asking the maximum interest it could afford to pay on junk bonds that private equity investors would issue in order to raise cash to buy the power plant.

Then we could see whether we could find investors who would be willing to buy bonds, even though the interest rate would be too low to really compensate them for the high risk that the power plant could go bankrupt if coal prices rose, or electricity demand fell. I was at the bottom of the totem pole. The person who came up with this project was fairly inexperienced as well, trying to generate fees by proposing a few deals. To me that wasn't a particularly redemptive way to go about it. It wasn't about how to finance the power-generating needs of the utilities. It wasn't about creating a sustainable financial structure to help a company endure the ups and downs of the energy markets. It was just about seeing whether we could get a bunch of deals done and earn big fees.

Unlike at IBM, I couldn't see what business problem it was going to solve. I believe that in all things Christ is working for the redemption of our world that is busted in all kinds of ways—not just in our worshiping the wrong things and running after false gods in a very literal way, but in economic things and in organization things that are wrong in our world. I think God is interested in power generation. I knew that the power generation industry was hampered with all kinds of problems at the time. But I didn't see how our exercise was addressing the real issue of the actual job of power generation.

So was there anything you did as an investment banker that you thought was redemptive—or meaningful from God's perspective?

Oh, yes! I helped another company recapitalize itself by issuing convertible preferred stock and using the proceeds to pay off debt. It gave them a more secure financial base, so they could focus on the growth of the business. Plus it made sense for investors. I don't want to overstate how redemptive a good financial transaction is. There's a clear distinction between someone's soul and financial structure in an organization, but I don't think God doesn't care about finance either. Financial structure makes it possible to research and produce useful goods and services, to employ people, and to provide investment income for retirees, college endowments, and the like. The picture of the final Kingdom, eternity if you will, is not one of us becoming disembodied spirits flitting off somewhere where there isn't anything. Instead we see a new heaven and a new earth, and the kingdoms of the world bring their treasure to the New Jerusalem. So we continue to have the spheres of life fully embodied—the stuff of creation is transformed, but not eliminated.