For InsideWork the question was, “So when’s the last time you heard a sermon on cash flow?”

Not money—not giving or tithing or alms or stewardship or benevolence, but cash flow, receivables, write offs and balance sheets.

Generosity is spiritual. Hardly anyone disputes that. But, beyond platitudes, conventional religious leaders don’t have much to say about the process by which we come up with the money. By their silence, are they saying that making money, so we can give it away, is the point of business? That’s it?

“The Church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays.” Dorothy Sayers in “Why Work?”

That, in a nutshell, is the line of questioning that got InsideWork started: A bunch of middle-aged white guys (sorry, it’s where we were 12 years ago) sitting around complaining that our spiritual leaders had virtually nothing to say about business in the global economy. We thought our business activities must (Please God!) have some greater spiritual purpose than just making money for our churches to distribute.

So, in the absence of adult supervision, we set out on a quest to see if the Bible was as silent about commerce as our name brand denominations.

It wasn’t. The Bible turned out to be loaded with the stories and insights of creative, hardworking, value-adding entrepreneurs, family businesses and partnerships (not to mention all the bums, hacks, crooks, cons and punks). Our quest took us from end-to-end through the Bible on a journey lasting eight years. Everyone kept his day job so we communicated by phone and fax and email (We started in 1992 when it still wasn’t clear if email would turn into anything.). A couple times a year we gathered for a few days to hash through what we were learning.

We were learning plenty. Right out of the gate we saw that our Creator is a Worker—a designer, an entrepreneur, an inventor, a farmer, rancher, geneticist, surgeon, gardener, hydrologist, environmental engineer, manager, accountant, venture capitalist, an HR specialist. That’s not all, but we thought it was a quite a beginning.

So here we are a dozen years later, with what we think is a cool story about reclaiming the spirituality of work and commerce with Biblical Best Practices.

Exactly what we mean by that is at the heart of the tools, consulting and learning events we’re creating to:

• build your leadership skill set
• develop your corporate culture and
• mentor the next generation of company leaders.

Browse around and see what we’re up to. And come back soon to see what’s next at InsideWork.