Jesus’ warning—“You cannot serve God and mammon”—is one of those verses we nod along to in church but quietly file under “theoretical.” Yet sitting across from Peter Greer, a man who has spent his life building a Christ-centered microfinance organization that has invested nearly $2 billion in some of the world’s poorest communities, that verse stopped being theoretical.
I wasn’t coming to Peter as a disinterested interviewer. I was coming as someone who has stood in several very different worlds:
- the religious and humanitarian nonprofit world (as a former pastor and someone who has tried to launch educational projects in places like Chennai),
- the big corporate finance world (Deloitte Consulting, Countrywide Financial during the run-up to the 2008 crisis),
- and the cooperative finance world (CUNA Mutual Group, serving credit unions built on “the debt shall die with the debtor”).
Those experiences have taught me that the tension between God and mammon doesn’t disappear just because you put a Bible verse on your mission statement. In fact, it can get more dangerous, because you start baptizing your blind spots.
So when I ask Peter, “How do you resolve this tension?” I’m not asking for a slogan. I’m asking as someone who has seen what happens when we get this wrong.
And I’m also asking in the context of a series I’m publishing on my Sunday premium series: how our culture has quietly transformed the seven deadly sins into social virtues.
Greed is now “enlightened self-interest.” Envy is “competitive drive.” Gluttony is “lifestyle.” Sloth is “self-care” (misunderstood). Lust is “authentic expression.” All of these, in one way or another, run through how we handle money, credit, consumption, and “success.”
So let me walk through how those strands came together in my conversation with Peter.
From Fearing Money to Understanding Its Power
I grew up, in many ways, instinctively suspicious of money.
As a kid shuttling between Canada, the U.S., and then Sweden (after being kidnapped in a domestic custody battle), I absorbed early that there were big systems at work—capitalism, communism, socialism—and that money sat at the heart of the struggle. I watched epic hockey matches pitting Sweden, the Soviets, and Canada, and even that took on ideological overtones.
Later, as a young man in Europe, I rejected what I saw as American materialism. I went with a suitcase, a one-way ticket, and a determination to “serve,” not to get rich. When the Gulf War broke out, I heard “blood for oil” chanted in European streets. Gorbachev was a hero, “winds of change” were blowing, and I was aligned, having concluded that wealth itself was suspect. If I ever became materially successful, I thought, there would be something morally wrong with me by definition.
That attitude took a toll—spiritually, emotionally, physically. I was eventually diagnosed with an autoimmune condition. I’m convinced that both physical and severe cognitive dissonance on several fronts was behind it. Part of what I had internalized was a form of misdirected asceticism: if I had money, I must be compromised; therefore, it was safer not to have it.
Only later, as a husband and even later a father, did I fully realize something simple and uncomfortable: I had to provide. And not just subsistence. To educate my children, to serve others, to start anything that would last, I needed some degree of wealth. I needed to engage in the very thing I’d been avoiding.
That realization sent me on a very different path: Deloitte, consulting for major financial institutions; Countrywide, where I watched from the inside as a CEO ended up on the cover of Time as the symbol of not only the mortgage but a broader meltdown; as documented in the book and the movie “The Big Short”. And then CUNA Mutual, serving credit unions rooted in Christian social thought and books like The Debt Shall Die with the Debtor.
I went from fearing money to understanding its incredible power—for good or ill.
And that’s where the Bahá’í line I quoted to Peter comes in:
With fire we test the gold, and with gold we test our servants.
Gold isn’t evil. It’s refined in fire for a reason. Its real spiritual danger is not in what it is, but in what it reveals. It’s a test. And many of us are failing that test precisely because we have rebranded the classic sins as virtues.}
The Seven Deadly Sins and Our Financial “Virtues”
In my Sunday premium series, I’ve been walking through how each of the seven deadly sins has been quietly repackaged in our time. You can see all of them lurking in our financial life.
- Greed becomes ambition and “shareholder value.” “More” is always better. No one ever says, “I have enough.”
- Envy becomes competitive edge. We call it “keeping up” or “winning.” Whole marketing campaigns exist to make us want what neighbors and influencers have.
- Gluttony becomes lifestyle. We don’t consume food and stuff; “this is who I am.” Identity is attached to brands.
- Sloth becomes a distorted self-care—checked-out, numbed-out, avoiding the hard work of actually tending the garden of our life and community.
- Lust, which I’ll focus on next in the Sunday series, becomes authentic expression. If I want it, it must be part of my truth. That easily bleeds into how we talk about money and career: “I deserve it”; “I owe it to myself.”
Run those currents through the global financial system and it’s no surprise we get bubbles, crashes, predatory lending, consumer debt spirals, and whole communities locked out of access to capital.
In that light, Jesus’ “two masters” warning isn’t about a particular dollar amount. It’s about which operating system is running in the background. Are we serving money’s logic (ever more, at any cost), or is money being subordinated to a different master entirely?
The Bahá’í writings capture the same dynamic in a single, piercing line:
“O SON OF BEING! Busy not thyself with this world, for with fire We test the gold, and with gold We test Our servants.”
— Bahá’u’lláh, The Hidden Words (Arabic), no. 55
Gold—wealth, resources—is not inherently evil. It is refined by fire for a purpose. Its spiritual danger is not in what it is, but in what it reveals. It becomes a test of the heart.
And many of us are failing that test precisely because we have rebranded the classic sins as virtues. We are “busy with this world” in exactly the way Bahá’u’lláh warns against—serving mammon while telling ourselves we are serving God.
That’s the deeper question I brought with me into the conversation with Peter: not “Is money good or bad?” but “What does our relationship to money say about who our real master is?”
Probing the “Two Masters” Question
When I asked him, “How do you resolve this tension?” he didn’t dodge it.
He went straight to the heart: money is a horrible master, but it can be a useful tool.
“It’s not an issue of money or heart,” he said. “It’s a question of how we hold that.”
He’s seen both pitfalls:
- People who make money the ultimate destination—the thing to hoard, measure themselves by, and quietly derive their identity from.
- People so afraid of loving money that they refuse to engage it at all—and therefore remain stuck in perpetual poverty, unable to unleash generosity or build anything lasting.
I resonated with both errors. I’ve lived one, and I’ve worked inside systems built on the other.
So I pressed him:
- How do you actually structure loans so they don’t become usury?
- How do you justify the transaction costs of a $100 loan when a $10,000 loan is so much “cheaper” to administer?
- How do you decide what interest rate is sustainable for both the borrower and the organization?
- How do you keep the charity impulse from sliding into the dependency cycle Bob Lupton describes: appreciation → anticipation → expectation → entitlement → dependency?
Those aren’t theoretical questions for me. I’ve watched in Chennai as well-intentioned humanitarian funds were diverted from education to disaster relief after the tsunami. The motives were good; the result was shattered trust and a failed project. I’ve watched at Countrywide as exotic loan products served short-term greed and long-term devastation. I’ve watched in the credit union movement how cooperative ownership changes incentives, but doesn’t automatically eliminate human sin.
I’ve gotten used to asking, sometimes to the discomfort of religious audiences: “Show me the structure. Show me the governance. Show me where the temptations are.”
To Peter’s credit, he welcomed that line of questioning. And his answers were instructive.
Money as Tool: How Hope International Actually Works
First, he insisted that Jesus talks so much about money precisely because it so easily becomes the proxy for our heart’s orientation. Hope International’s whole model is designed to keep money as tool, not master.
Two design choices stood out to me.
1. Choosing the Poor When the System Won’t
Peter explained something most of us know instinctively but rarely think through: the formal financial system is incentivized not to serve the poorest.
If you’re a bank officer trying to maximize return and minimize risk, would you rather make:
- one $10,000 loan to a customer with collateral and a credit score, or
- one hundred $100 loans to people with no collateral, no score, and no banking history?
Same capital deployed. Vastly different staff time, overhead, and perceived risk.
It’s entirely rational, within the system’s logic, to focus on the first and ignore the second. That’s why whole neighborhoods become “unbanked,” why loan sharks charging 400% interest exist in every poor community Peter has visited, and why payday lenders cluster in exactly the zip codes they do.
Hope International deliberately goes the other way. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, they choose to eat the higher costs and take the perceived higher risk in order to serve those the system excludes.
That doesn’t automatically sanctify them—but it does flip the usual incentive structure. It’s one mark that mammon is not the master.
2. Using Character and Community as Collateral
Instead of relying on traditional collateral, Hope relies on character-based group lending and savings circles, often anchored in local churches.
Here’s how Peter described it:
- Groups of 10–20 individuals come together in a village.
- They receive small loans—$5.25 a week was one example he used—to invest in things like pigs, fruit trees, food stands, sewing machines.
- The group becomes each member’s “social collateral.” If I miss a payment, the others step in and cover it, because the group’s access to capital depends on everyone’s faithfulness.
- Over time, they also save together, making their own rules, setting their own small internal interest rates, deciding on penalties for late payments.
This is not charity in the narrow sense. It’s partnership. It assumes people—even very poor people—have agency, creativity, and the desire to provide for themselves and their communities.
It also happens, by the way, to look a lot like the healthiest credit unions I’ve seen, but at a village scale: member-owned, community-based, shared risk and reward.
And the repayment numbers? Around 98% on nearly $2 billion of total investments. That’s not what you get if greed or sloth are the guiding spirits.
Lust, Greed, and the Shape of Our Ambition
How does this connect to Lust, the next topic in my Sunday premium series?
Lust, at its root, is not about sexuality alone. It’s about unchecked desire—wanting to consume without covenant, to take without committing to the long work of tending. It’s wanting the fruit of union without the bond of responsibility.
That logic shows up in how we treat:
- other people (as objects),
- the planet (as a mine),
- and money (as a means of self-indulgence rather than stewardship).
Greed is lust applied to wealth. Gluttony is lust applied to consumption. Even sloth has a lustful element: a craving for comfort without effort.
One of the most striking things about Peter’s work is that it reorients desire:
- For borrowers, the desire shifts from consuming handouts to building something that lasts—a business, a field, a restaurant, a herd.
- For lenders and donors, the desire shifts from the quick dopamine hit of “We gave them stuff!” to the slower joy of “We unlocked what was already in their hands.”
In both cases, it’s a move away from lust’s “I want it now, no strings” toward love’s “I’m willing to covenant with you for the long haul.”
That, to me, is the deeper way of “serving God, not mammon.” It’s not about whether you touch money. It’s about whether your relationship to money mirrors lust—consume and discard—or covenant—invest and tend.
So Can You Serve God and Mammon?
Not as co-equal masters. That’s Jesus’ point.
But you can serve God with money—if you refuse to let money dictate the terms.
My own path—from suspicious asceticism, to big finance, to credit-union cooperativism, to these kinds of conversations—has left me with a permanent allergy to naïve talk about “Christian finance.” I want to see:
- Structures that acknowledge human sin, not presume it away.
- Governance that takes trust as its core currency.
- Products that honor human dignity and creativity, not just extract short-term yield.
- Practices that resist our culture’s baptized seven deadly sins posing as virtues.
When I asked Peter my probing questions, I was looking for those signs. I didn’t hear perfection—no honest leader claims that—but I did hear a man and an organization trying, very deliberately, to place money under a higher allegiance.
That, to me, is worth paying attention to.
As I continue the Sunday deep-dive into Lust, and its brothers Greed, Envy, Gluttony, and Sloth, I’ll keep coming back to this: what we do with money is one of the clearest X-rays of who our real master is.
Fire tests the gold. Gold tests the servants.
The invitation is not to flee the test, but to pass it.
Sneak Peek: Coming Up on Created in the Image of God
If the intersection of faith, money, and human limitation intrigues you, you’ll want to join us for next week’s shows.
On Sunday, June 14th at 7:00 a.m. US Central time, I’ll be talking with Kelly M. Kapic—theologian, author, and teacher. We’ll explore suffering, grace, and the limits of being human, and how embracing our weakness can actually lead to a deeper, healthier faith. From pain and exhaustion to embodied hope and humility, Kelly reminds us we were never meant to “do it all”—financially, spiritually, or otherwise.
Then on Tuesday, June 16th at 8:00 p.m. Central time, I’ll sit down with Miroslav Volf—theologian, author, and founder of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. He’ll help us wrestle with identity, forgiveness, and human flourishing: what it means to build a life, and even an economy, shaped by reconciliation rather than resentment. From justice and public faith to the deeper pursuit of joy and a life truly worth living, we’ll keep probing what it means to bear the image of God in the real world.
Different guests, different angles—but the same underlying question: in a world that worships mammon under many names, what does it look like to truly serve God, with everything in our hands?
