In this week’s episode of Retire in Texas, Darryl Lyons, CEO and Co-Founder of PAX Financial Group, explores the concept of Redeeming Money – how faith and finances intersect and how money can be used as a tool for greater purpose. Many people struggle with aligning their investments and financial decisions with their values, but Darryl shares insights on how faith-driven investing is growing and shaping the financial industry.
Key highlights of the episode include:
- The shifting landscape of faith and secularization in America and what it means for financial decision-making.
- How biblical principles can guide investment strategies, including moral screening, impact investing, and corporate engagement.
- Why financial advisors and investors are taking a more intentional approach to where their money goes.
- The role of faith-based investing in driving positive change and advancing values-driven financial stewardship.
- Insights from the Redeeming Money Conference and how thousands of advisors are embracing this movement.
Your money isn’t just a resource – it’s an opportunity to make a meaningful impact. Whether through avoiding harmful investments, supporting businesses that align with your beliefs, or advocating for change within companies, there are ways to integrate faith into financial decisions.
For more insights and to learn how PAX Financial Group can help you align your finances with your values, visit http://www.PAXFinancialGroup.com.
If you found this episode valuable, share it with someone who could benefit!
Transcript:
Hey, this is Darryl Lyons, CEO and Co-Founder of PAX Financial Group. And you’re listening to Retire in Texas. This information is general in nature only. It’s not intended to provide specific investment, tax, or legal advice. Visit PAXFinancialGroup.com for more information. So, this particular topic is interesting to me because it will feel sermon-ish.
And I think every now and again it’s good to hear a sermon. So, hang with me if that’s not your thing, because there is, I think, some substantive information that you’ll appreciate. But I wanted to share an article that was, that hit my newsfeed called One Nation Under God. It’s a New York Times article by Lauren Jackson, and she’s working on a project.
So, I imagine she’s continuing to build upon this topic. And the idea is where are we at in our country when it comes to Christianity? And she pulls from a lot of different resources to give her commentary. Of course, Pew Research being kind of the gold standard of research in this space, and Brookings Institute, but she does I think, does a good job of giving us the lay of the land.
And I think it’s important to reference, there was an author, and a preacher named Russell Moore. He asked the question; Can American Christianity survive? Because people have stopped going to churches and, like, in mass. And then they moved to this idea of secularization. So, the problem with that move is that it doesn’t fill that hole in the heart and that we have as a purpose in life.
And so, I think what we’re seeing is this massive move away from the church into secularization. And then people are hanging out there and saying, wait, this falls short. I thought this was going to be better. Interestingly enough, when they surveyed, Pew did this study, when they surveyed U.S. adults, 86% of them still believe that people have a soul or spirit in addition to a physical body, 83% still believe in God or a universal spirit.
79% say there’s something spiritual beyond this world, and 70% believe in an afterlife, a heaven or hell, or both, and 92% believe in some combination thereof of those. And so, generally speaking, people have this idea that there’s something greater than just our physical selves. And so, as people have begun to leave the church, what we’re seeing now is that the leaving of the church has kind of stopped, stabilized, so to speak.
And I, you know, there’s something about this idea of secularism or moral relevancy that absolutely falls short of meaning. And even in Silicon Valley. And we’ve seen this like, even if you listen to Joe Rogan or Elon Musk, you know, they have begun to kind of get to the tipping point of considering the idea that not only Jesus lived, which is historically accurate, but the idea that he was actually resurrected from the dead, that they’re starting to recognize that there could in fact, be truth there.
There’s been a lot of what you might consider religious adjacent projects that have been going on. I mean, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, immorality, this is all out of the Silicon Valley during the pandemic. People, in fact, did lean on their faith. In fact, Pew Research said that, about a quarter of American use their faith to strengthen their resolve.
And so, I think the pandemic did give us an opportunity to just think deeply about what life is like and that secularization or humanism, or moral relevancy has its limits. It falls short. In fact, its very end is fatalism, I mean, really sad if you take it to its extreme in terms of its logical thought process.
But the good news is 83% of people in America believe in God or a universal spirit. Now, of course, I take contention with. I’m not, like angry at anyone for believing in a universal spirit, but I would recognize that it’s absolutely not the same thing as, the God and the creator of the universe who gave his only son Jesus.
It’s significantly different. There’s, not all roads lead to the same place. As much as we would love to believe that, the message of Jesus Christ who says I’m the way, the truth, and the life, is inconsistent with the idea that all roads lead to the same place, but the idea that 83% of people in America have at least an idea that there is a God or a universal spirit, I think that is, I can handle that.
That’s, to a certain degree, progress. It’s better than the alternative. Even Elon Musk, he said he believes in the teachings of Jesus, which is just good in and of itself. So, the ranks this idea of godless has at least stopped growing. So, that’s good. So, is God redeeming the church? And when we think about church, you think about the steeple is one thing, but the body of Christ is another thing.
And so, I tend to think about church as the body of Christ, the group of people who have a common mission and vision. And Jesus said, go make disciples of all nations. So, as God redeeming, which redemption means the act of buying something back, recovering, reclaiming, or saving something or someone that was previously lost in distress. And so, we have here the church that appears at one time, appeared to be lost.
And God is redeeming that. And so, what’s cool about this is that I went to a conference, and it was called Redeeming Money Conference. And I went with, for those that don’t know, Laura Simpson, Charles Garcia, Roger Stukkie, the four of us who went to this Redeeming Money Conference. There were 2700 financial advisors from around the country that were saying.
I’m either curious or I am absolutely fanatical about what God can do in and through me in the space of money, because God loves to redeem a lot of different areas. Not only does He love to redeem the church, He loves to redeem politics, which He can and will do and has done. He loves to redeem the schools which He has and will do, and He will redeem money.
Think about this in Psalms 24, going to the Old Testament, right in the middle of the Bible. You open it up. Everything’s His to begin with. It says the Lord, this is 24:1, the Earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof, the world and all who dwell therein, everything’s His. So, when we say redeeming, He’s bringing it back what’s already His in relationship with Him.
And this idea of Him redeeming money is very, very interesting to me. Something that I’ve been a student of for a very long time, and to gather with 2700 people, financial advisors like Roger and David and all these, everyone that you know here, and say, how can we participate in this idea of God redeeming money? That’s actually really, really exciting.
And so, for you to know that God is doing something really cool in and through money and He’s redeeming money, I think should be encouraging to you, because sometimes we look at the news and we say, man, is God redeeming anything? And He’s very covert. He’s redeeming money. So how do you know? What are some of the kind of tangent things that I could maybe share with you guys regarding this Redeeming Money Conference that we went to?
Well, first of all, when it comes to money, there’s a lot of areas of money that we talked about saving and giving and investing. I always talk about the three elements of this idea of redeeming money. Some people call it faith-based investing. Some call it biblical responsible investing.
I mean, I wrote a book on it. But the idea is that there’s three ways to think about your money when it comes to investing that have started to get a lot of traction. One is moral screening, and that’s where we collectively say, you know what? We actually care about our investments, and we no longer want our investments, our money, our retirement income, what we’ve saved and worked hard for.
We no longer want to put that in places that destroy our families. And so, this idea of moral screening says that when you invest, we’re going to screen out alcohol or tobacco, gambling, pornography, and then it gets very nuanced from there because like, what is pornography, is Netflix pornography? So, there’s certainly nuances to there. But you generally get the idea of moral screening.
And some people and I’m very careful. I don’t want to beat anybody over the head with the Bible. I think it’s a conviction between you and God. And we can kind of unpack scripture on this if you want. But the idea that if God is encouraging you to screen out your investments, to exclude companies that are behaving antithetical to biblical worldview, that are destroying families, then if God’s put that on your heart, then that’s being done right now in the marketplace and it can be done for you.
We certainly do that at PAX. There’s one guy who said, I don’t want gambling. So, we asked why, and he said, because his dad was never around, he was always at the casinos, and he never saw his dad. The casinos stole his dad, and he didn’t have anything to do with gambling. So, it gets very nuanced from there because you ask yourself, wait, is fantasy football gambling?
Is sports betting? That’s kind of that’s a big business and big money. Am I okay not participating in some of these returns of high margin items where people, the companies use addiction at the way at the way of getting these high margins. It’s a really difficult thing to reconcile in your heart, but moral screening is a way that us in the body of Christ, the church is now stepping forward and saying, you know what?
God’s going to use me and my money to redeem this area of the marketplace. The second area that God is doing some redemption is, is called impact investing. So, in the moral screening, you take away bad companies and impact investing. You hyper focus on the good ones. And there’s some people that’s where their conviction is at.
And by the way, you could have all of these convictions. Don’t get me wrong, I just don’t want it to be legalistic, which means that I take the Bible and hit you over the head and say, if you don’t do this, you’re going to hell. That is not something that I will do and I don’t think anyone should do.
But if you get in the Word of God and you pray and these things are like God’s calling you to do these things, I think you lean into it. One could be moral screening, the other one could be impact investing. I actually at this conference had a great experience with impact investing. I saw in real time this company that showed me a picture.
They blotted out the young girl, the teenage girl. She was blotted out. I couldn’t see her face. But this picture showed in the background this like 1980s, bedspread that she was sitting on. And this like 1980s curtain that was in the background. This company developed artificial intelligence that identified those specific curtains and bedsheets. And within an hour they found this girl because they used intelligence so rapidly that they identified where these specific bed sheets and curtains came from, that they pinpointed the hotel and rescued these girls.
That type of company needs capital markets and needs your retirement money to be able to accelerate growth. And that’s called impact investing. So, investing in companies that do good things and we certainly do that. I know our partners at Eventide do that well. And there’s others. So that’s really fun when you’re able to say, not only am I making money for my retirement, but I’m making an impact.
So, we love to do that. And we think about that deeply. The last one’s corporate engagement I love this one. This is where, you know, if you own a company, you have a vote. So, you get to vote for or against issues. And oftentimes that vote if you’re using a mutual fund or exchange traded fund, that vote is transferred.
So, the fund votes on your behalf. And so, saying, you know what, I only want to use companies that will use my vote in a way that’s aligned with my values. And this is becoming more and more of an issue. I actually saw something this morning on CNBC where the teacher’s union starting to use their vote.
As you would imagine, it may not be aligned with what you find to be important, but I think it’s important that you start thinking about your vote. I think about it nearly every day. How do we use our clients’ votes that is their right for good? Let me give you an example. There was a pregnancy care center that was spending $10,000 a month to promote their services.
And if you’ve never been a part of a pregnancy care center, I want you to discount everything you’ve heard politically and go and visit one. These people are remarkable people. They do incredible things for the community. They are not bad. Despite what some politicians, Elizabeth Warren specifically said, pregnancy care centers are wonderful, wonderful, wonderful organizations that are doing good.
But politically, Google started suppressing their ads and will no longer get their ads in front of the right audience. So, one of the companies that used your vote approached Google and actually addressed this issue and reconciled it and got it fixed. That’s what happens when the votes of these companies and the church are used intentionally.
They can resolve some of these issues, including the suppression of religious freedom. So, the wonderful thing about this conference where God is redeeming money, this Redeeming Money Conference is so cool because God’s restoring this, is this idea of moral screening, impact investing, and then, advocacy. What did I call that one, just a minute ago?
It’s corporate engagement. Excuse me. Those three things are really happening at a fast pace. And PAX is very focused on what role we can play. So, we want to hear from you. If you find those things to be important, and we want to build an infrastructure that can support those things for the body of Christ, redemption doesn’t mean that God lost it.
Like, oh, I lost money. Now I found it. No, it just means that He’s restoring this relationship. Think about Luke [15:20]. So he got up and went to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him. So, he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him like that’s what God is doing.
He’s redeeming money, not redeeming money per se, but redeeming his people so they’re no longer slaves to money, the bondage of money. And that’s really what we’re doing here. And so, I’m enjoying, it’s just so much fun for me. As a leader of PAX Financial Group, in the community to play this role in just figuring this out and, love hearing from you as clients and parts of the community on what areas that you want to play a role in, whether it’s this screening out, this moral screening, impact investment, corporate engagement.
I would love to hear from you. And what’s a priority for you, what God is calling you to do. And then let us help you get there. Thank you very much for listening to this episode today of Retire in Texas. I hope you enjoy the rest of your day. And remember, you think different when you think long term. Have a great day.
Listen on:
