Invested with Purpose (Part 4): Complete Obedience

Since this series started in June, we've shared several different things that are required if you're going to be "invested with purpose." You can find the previous blogs here. This month, we're going to focus on having complete obedience, not just partial obedience. We will see how Art was completely obedient in this endeavor to begin Biblically Responsible Investing.

In 1992, Art had a successful practice in Orlando called Covenant Financial Management. Although Covenant was successful, he felt called by God to make a change – he wanted to do more for God's kingdom than he was doing through this practice. The creation of his Christian mutual fund started because he knew that pastors from independent churches didn't have options for retirement plans. He wanted to create a retirement program for these pastors.

During the beginning stages of creating this retirement program, Art knew he couldn't use companies advocating sin when he was wanting pastors to use it. He needed investment products to build biblically responsible portfolios; however, he didn't find anything that met the criteria. When he was researching different options, he found that the investment options that would screen, would only screen out alcohol and tobacco, not issues such as abortion and pornography.

While Art had 18 years of experience selling mutual funds, he had never operated one. This would be a challenge he faced; however, he wasn’t pleased with the current mutual fund offerings from a biblical standpoint. In the beginning, he struggled to gain the funding; however, over a 6-month period, God provided for him! During this period of time, he had people placed in his life that he didn't know before, and he received all the funding he needed for the mutual fund.

Two years after the initial start, in 1994, Timothy Plan was launched – a mutual fund based on founding commitment that we would never compromise biblical principles. Art gave all the glory to God in the successes Timothy Plan has seen since the 90s. When you experience successes in your life, do you take the credit or do you give the glory to God? It can be easy after putting in hard work to want to take all the credit for the success; however, Art's story reminds us that God deserves all the glory!

While this condensed story of Art's experience launching Timothy Plan seems simple, it didn't come without roadblocks. The Christian mutual fund was not welcomed with open arms by a lot of people. Some of the common feedback was around people saying that it won't be successful because you couldn't just eliminate some of the most profitable companies and expect to get good returns. Do you know Art's response to this criticism? "Obedience trumps performance every time." While this is how he responded, it didn't mean that they suffered performance-wise. Over the long-run, their mutual fund was comparable to the other secular mutual funds. We've talked about the issue of performance with BRI in our last series:

Timothy Plan probably wouldn't be around and successful today if it wasn't for Art's obedience. They struggled at the beginning! In the first 18 months, they ran out of the initial $1 million; and over the next 5 years after, they ran out of money 4 times. A major challenge for them was attracting shareholders because the common viewpoint was that church and business should be separate. Through this, Art realized that Christians needed educated on the importance of stewardship and that the church and business shouldn't be separate. This was when he took the break to write the education material mentioned in last month's blog.

While Timothy Plan had a lot of bumps in the road, Art continued to have faith in God, and in July of 2018, they had $1 billion in assets under management. They now also have a family of mutual funds and recently launched ETFs. This wouldn't have happened if Art didn't stay obedience to God and fully trust him! Do you have areas in your life where you need to put more trust in God?