What does God value as a good return on investment?

For three years, our group has been meeting monthly through the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology in Cambridge, working through the questions that sit at the intersection of faith and finance. In the first episode of The Capital Stewards Podcast, we decided to start where every other question eventually leads: What does God actually value as a good return on investment?

It’s a deceptively simple question. Most of us, if we’re honest, already have a working answer — somewhere around 7 to 10 percent, benchmarked against the S&P 500, optimized for retirement. But once we began to examine that answer, we realized it rests on a worldview none of us would defend out loud.

We’ve inherited, largely from the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, a habit of treating the human person as a machine to be optimized — and capital as the raw material of that optimization. The same instincts that drive an athlete to chase marginal gains in blood work and lactic acid have migrated into the way we evaluate portfolios, endowments, and our own financial lives. The self becomes the starting point. Performance becomes the metric. Everything else gets pushed out of view.

The biblical story radically de-centers this. “Be holy, for I am holy. Be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect.” From the opening chapters of Genesis through the teachings of Jesus, human life is oriented outward — toward God and toward neighbor. We are not our own. We are members of God’s household, mediators of his blessing, a royal priesthood. That changes the question of return entirely. Before we can ask what a good return is, we have to ask whose team we’re on — because the team defines the win.

This means investing has to be evaluated first as a human activity. It can’t be morally neutral, and it can’t be at odds with what it means to be a good human. The fruitfulness we see in Genesis 1 is not reducible to gross domestic product. It’s the same fruitfulness Jesus describes in the vine and the branches, and Paul describes in the fruit of the Spirit — love, joy, peace, patience. Financial return is one expression of that abundance, but it is not the whole, and when we make it the whole, we end up worshipping the metric instead of the Master.

We also kept returning to the connection Jesus draws between money and anxiety. The rich fool in Luke 12 isn’t condemned for his harvest. He’s condemned for hoarding it in the face of his own mortality. Anxiety about provision pulls our trust away from God and toward our balance sheets, and once that happens, we cannot see the value that’s actually in front of us.

A better frame, borrowed from Finny Kuruvilla, is total return as financial return plus impact return — what the investment does in the world, how it loves God and neighbor. That’s closer to the ledger that lasts. It’s the return on which, at the end of it all, we hope to hear: Well done, good and faithful servant.