17 Sep For God, or With Him: The Question Underneath Every Financial Decision a Family Makes
A family that has built or inherited enough to need a family office is rarely short on effort. The trusts exist. The entities are current. Someone is watching the portfolio. The giving is real and often substantial. And still, some families who love God would admit, if asked plainly, that nearly all of it is being done for God rather than with Him.
For and with are two different things, and the difference isn’t trivial. It is operational. We encourage story before strategy as a sequencing rule: understand the family before drafting the documents. This episode of the StoryLens podcast establishes the framework, Story One and Story Two, the story God intended for an individual and a family, or the life built on the culture’s terms with God set aside. This conversation also adds the test. A family doesn’t have to guess which story it’s in. It can look at what it keeps choosing.
What does it mean to do this with God rather than for Him?
For is a transaction, and a transaction can be conducted at arm’s length. With is a dance, and a dance has two people. The lightbulb moment for many believers is when they start integrating faith into every aspect of their lives, whether in managing a business, managing a portfolio, or how they engage with their family. Only about 28 percent of Christians integrate their faith at work (Barna Group), which means many family enterprises are run on one set of convictions but prayed over with another. That is both a spiritual and continuity risk. A family transmits the story its decisions tell, not the story it states, and the next generation inherits those decisions.
Why does a family with real resources still decide out of scarcity?
Because the mindset was set long before the money arrived. What most limits a family’s judgment about money is formed at home, during childhood, and is rarely revisited. Whether money felt available or withheld, whether vacations were possible, whether asking was safe: these become the invisible defaults underneath decisions. A scarcity mindset isn’t simply a balance sheet condition. A family can hold substantial wealth and still make decisions as though there will not be enough. Nor is it a failure of intelligence or faith, but rather, an unexamined heart issue.
What does the parable of the talents actually say about freedom? (Matthew 25:14 to 30)
Read the parable of the talents again. One servant received five talents of money, the next two, and the last one. The master gave them no direction; he gave them money and went away. Each of the first two servants invested the master’s money and doubled it, but the final servant buried his in the ground and only returned the original amount. The master’s complaint against the third was not that he lost money, but that he would not even place it where it could earn interest. What separated them was not instruction. It was whether they moved out of wisdom and freedom, or out of fear.
Burying money is something a person can do alone. Investing is not. Investing requires others in the form of companies, systems, and people, which means coordination isn’t just a preference in the parable. It is structural. Without instruction, the first two servants acted from freedom, invested, and doubled what they held, while the third acted from fear.
Why is the rut so hard to see from inside it?
Fifteen snowmobiles run a line through fresh snow. The last rider can’t steer though, because the fourteen ahead have packed the grooves hard. Now, nobody chose those ruts. They simply appeared as a well-used and hardened path, a direction set by those who had come before. Families and individuals learn the same way. Patterns persist because they are already in motion, not because anyone selected them, and momentum is easy to mistake for direction. The cost compounds quietly. Decisions are more difficult to change at sixty than at forty, and by then the ruts are deep enough to feel like terrain.
What closes the gap between what a family says and what it does?
Naming it, in writing, on a schedule. The last document in the StoryLens process is the Table of Strategic Alignment, and it is deliberately plain. Column one is what the family says it wants. Column two is what the family is actually doing. Column three is the next step, to move toward what the family wants.
For example, a family says it wants the children to run the business. Column two shows that nobody is coaching them, and nobody has even asked whether they want it. Column three is therefore not a sentiment but a schedule: begin coaching the second generation, create an engagement plan, and set a timeline for the transition of governance and assets, if appropriate. The same table gives feedback on estate plans, charitable giving, business succession, family governance, and next-generation training and engagement. The document isn’t glamorous, but it’s the one families reopen years later, because it’s the only place where the distance between intention and behavior is written down.
Where does a family start?
Start with the question beneath the resources rather than the resources themselves. Not what structure do we need, but what is the Lord asking us to do with this and are our current choices an answer to that question or a substitute for it. Charitable giving is an easy test. Giving framed as an obligation often feels exhausting and flat, whereas giving framed as participation in something God is already doing is a partnership that brings joy to the giver. Naming the gap doesn’t close it, but nothing gets fixed before it’s named. This is the work StoryOne exists to coordinate, by helping families align their mission, vision, values, and goals with their strategies, tactics, and tools, so that deep family engagement actually shapes the legal structures, the investments, and the giving.
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