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With Andy Moore
93 Plays2 years ago
Andy Moore joins us this week to bring us insights from his unique background spanning full-time evangelism and corporate finance. Looking at the shifts happening in big business and the personal lives of his financial colleagues, how can we respond to the questions of purpose, moral responsibility and meaning that dominate these worlds?
Andy Moore is a Director and Entrepreneur with experience across Corporate, Private Equity, Charitable and start-up sectors. Andy leads an Angel-investment network, with a sister-Venture Capital fund focussed on scaling for-profit businesses that solve social or environmental problems. Besides this, Andy serves on the Board for a Christian charity which focuses on human rights and religious freedom.
Andy is an experienced public speaker and holds associate positions with The OCCA, Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics and Transform Work UK. Andy has spoken at some of the world’s largest corporates, including Facebook, UBS, Goldman Sachs, KPMG and Barclays among others. Andy is a Chartered Accountant in England and Wales and holds a Masters in Philosophy from the University of Birmingham. Andy is married to Rachel and enjoys the highs and lows of following Manchester United and the Irish rugby team!
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Transcript
Introduction of Hosts and Guest
00:00:10
Speaker
Well, hello and welcome to another episode of Hep Talk, the best way to evangelism podcast. I'm Andy Bannister from the Sola Center for Public Christianity, and I'm joined as ever by the lovely, the wonderful, Kristy Mayer, coming to you from the the environs of Oak Hill College today, looking at your background there. Stop it, Andy, stop it. Yeah, I am. You smell it.
00:00:35
Speaker
Look at all the books and the bare shells behind me are shed yet to fill. Is space for all the books you're going to write, mate? That's what it is. No, no. Space for all the offcuts of the PhD, which is...
00:00:51
Speaker
Yeah, taking its time. It's cool. Well, we have an exciting guest for you today.
Andy's Career Journey
00:00:56
Speaker
We thought just to confuse listeners, if you're new to the show, we are joined today by the very wonderful and the very exciting, the very dynamic Andy Moore. Andy, welcome to the podcast. Hey, you guys. Great to be with you. And it's going to confuse people because we have two Andes on the show and we have Moore and Mayor.
00:01:20
Speaker
Do you love to banister as humor? Andy and I, we've known each other for years, right? Do you remember when you and I did an event in Salisbury about four years ago, and there was you, there was me, and there was another guy we had on the podcast, Andy Kind, and that was just hilarious. That's right. I remember it well. That was a very confusing day.
00:01:45
Speaker
with Andy Vanister, more Andy and another kind of Andy. So there we are, but there we are. But today, two Andes and more in there. This gets worse. Andy, for people who don't know who you are, tell us a bit about who are you and what do you do?
00:02:01
Speaker
Yeah, of course. Well, I guess there's kind of two things that are part of my story. One is a love for business and finance and always having been a kind of entrepreneurial chap. And secondly, evangelistic ministry. So those two things have interwoven throughout my career. And I've done some in major emphases and some in minor emphases across
00:02:24
Speaker
across different periods of time. But I started as a finance guy working as an accountant with one of the big four accounting firms in London in Canary Wharf as an advisor to private equity houses, which was very interesting. Got to do lots of excellent things and learn so many things about the economy during those years. But then quite unexpectedly and much to the surprise of my colleagues, I flipped
00:02:49
Speaker
and went into full-time evangelistic ministry and did that for close to five years with a kind of focus on trying to explain the gospel and bring people to encounters with Christ through the lens of questions of work and of business and the workplace.
00:03:06
Speaker
And then COVID and some other things conspired to give me a flip back into business and I'm now in the world of venture capital and specialising in what's referred to as the impact economy, trying to raise capital and create investment opportunities for businesses that are pursuing a profit but with their business model trying to solve a social or environmental problem.
00:03:32
Speaker
So it's a great kind of weaving together of my sense of purpose from the Christian worldview with some of those harder finance skills that I acquired earlier in my life. What a wonderful selection of experiences there, Andy. You mentioned something about investigating questions in the workplace. We'd love to hear more about that, particularly in the, you mentioned that you're working Canary Wharf
00:03:58
Speaker
and elsewhere. What kind of questions did you encounter in the workplace? Great question.
Purpose and Integrity in Business
00:04:05
Speaker
The thing about that kind of experience of city life and the lifestyles of people that work in this particular sector of the economy is really, probably as you guessed, working really hard, all sorts of long hours.
00:04:19
Speaker
and maybe not creating too much time to think about the big questions. But actually, whenever you spend a lot of time in that kind of context and it comes to the end of the day, people are breathing out and you find that there's a real opportunity actually just to chat about these things. And there's one conversation that I will never forget, which gave me an insight into what I think are the two biggest questions of business.
00:04:44
Speaker
And the first one is to do with purpose. What am I doing here? Why am I working so hard? What's the point? Are all of these sacrifices and time away from my family and kids, are they worthwhile? And that's definitely a question that many people who are, let's say, the midpoint or senior in their careers. But purpose is also a question that people starting their careers are working through because
00:05:10
Speaker
If you're a graduate now or somebody who can, you know, basically choose to do whatever you want to do with your life, that's one of the great freedoms of the world we live in now. Well, what should you choose to do? There's a kind of paralysis of choice that I think many, many young people are thinking through.
Capitalism Challenges Post-COVID
00:05:27
Speaker
So I'd say that question of purposes is definitely number one. And indeed, you know, why we're all wrapped up in this system of capitalism and do we think that's a good idea on the other side of everything?
00:05:39
Speaker
we've exposed with covid now but then maybe more personally you know people also kind of wrestle with what i would say is a question of kind of personal integrity and how is my heart being shaped in this world that i'm part of and
00:05:54
Speaker
Am I being true to the place I grew up in or the family that I'm part of? And it's true that pressure can lead people to find themselves in compromising situations and with accounting standards or different questions to do with banking, there's ambiguity, which raises that question of integrity. So I think it's purpose and integrity were the two things that I saw most often.
00:06:18
Speaker
Yeah, I totally agree with you. I think that there are these huge questions out there. Obviously, Andy, you've been thinking about this for a while. You've been in those two worlds, both of ministry and work, which has given you wonderful preparation for engaging with some of this. But perhaps somebody who's listening to this, who hasn't had all that experience that you've had,
00:06:39
Speaker
I guess a couple of questions that are sort of connected if I may. Firstly, how do you learn to recognize those questions? You mentioned purpose and integrity. Are there things we can be doing as Christians to be perhaps more attuned to the questions our friends are asking? And then perhaps the second half of that question, how do we then connect it to the gospel? Because I know some of those Christians have a danger of going, ah, you're asking questions about purpose, Jesus.
00:06:59
Speaker
And that's sort of right in a sense, but it's sort of quite a leap. So how do we learn to discern what the questions are? And then how do we take people on conversations from those in the gospel direction naturally? Any kind of advice or wisdom you could share?
00:07:14
Speaker
Absolutely.
Listening in Evangelistic Conversations
00:07:15
Speaker
And there's no genius on my part for having discerned this. It caught me by complete surprise one day in one of these conversations at the end of a long kind of experience in the office. And I actually remember exactly which day this was. It was the 22nd of July, 2013. And I remember it for two reasons. One, 22 over 7 is the fractional approximation to the value of pi, 3.14 or whatever.
00:07:45
Speaker
I do apologize. But also after this conversation, I went back to my hotel room and on the TV it was the BBC reporting that Prince George had been born to William and Kate. So I don't know, it just always sticks in my mind. But that was a conversation with a colleague and it's been as I described this kind of in the kind of melting pot experience working extremely hard, much longer hours than we should have done. And he got a message from his girlfriend
00:08:15
Speaker
And his girlfriend wanted to break up with him. And he basically just had this meltdown right in front of me where he expressed all of these things that I kind of described about three minutes ago. Is this worth it? Am I in the right place? All of these sacrifices I'm making, it's just caused this breakup with a girl who I really loved. I thought she was the one.
00:08:36
Speaker
All I did was listen. So that would be the first tip. Your colleagues are asking questions, maybe not explicitly, but implicitly in the other things that they say. And if we're in a position where we're just kind of taking what they say seriously as Christians, rather than just being poised always to leap onto the thing that we want to say, but actually to listen. And then maybe I could use the phrase, discern what the question behind the question is.
00:09:05
Speaker
Right, so the guy who says, my girlfriend's dumped me, I don't know if I want to work here anymore, it's so hard. Well, he is going through some kind of question of purpose and all of the amazing things that the Christian world realises to say, how we can talk about hope and how our work matters, et cetera, et cetera. So it's just listening out is the first tip. The second tip would be trying to discern that question behind the question.
Christian Faith in the Workplace
00:09:32
Speaker
That's such excellent tips, Sandy. And just so easy to do, aren't they? I mean, I think Andy and I often say that one of the most, the biggest challenges in evangelism is thinking about what's the next best question to ask. And they're great kind of tips of ways into that.
00:09:49
Speaker
Also, I mean, it's such a unique workplace and environment that you were in. How did you find living out your faith in the workplace? I mean, did you see it as only as an opportunity, as a platform for evangelism? Or do you think there's something deeper as well going on?
00:10:05
Speaker
on there for the Christian in the workplace. There's so many things connected with this. I can I'll just share my own kind of personal story and everyone's workplace culture varies from from workplace to workplace and my experience won't necessarily map onto everyone's but there was a kind of real freedom in the expression of faith in my workplace where there was a recognized Christian fellowship who were able to get together once a month and
00:10:35
Speaker
have an event or a little prayer meeting or something like that and that was part of the kind of diversity culture of the whole organization and of course there was the Jewish group and the Islamic group and the LGBT group. We also had our little group and to that extent there was a freedom but on the other side of that you know I must confess that certainly when I started
00:10:58
Speaker
in that workplace. There was a little bit of embarrassment that came for it as well. And the particular team that I was part of was a team that had 19 members of staff, 88 of which were men. So there was an extremely kind of
00:11:17
Speaker
bravado, ladish, masculine sort of thing going on, which just created banter around faith, really, and I acquired this nickname of being the priest. So I was known as the priest around my team for a couple of years, which
00:11:35
Speaker
didn't bother me too much. I was okay with that, but I wouldn't want to kind of pretend that there was no such banter or teasing from time to time. But I must say that as things continued on, I was with this particular company for close to 10 years. And towards the end, we really felt that as a Christian group, we had a great place within the organization. We were given opportunities to talk about our faith. And we felt to be a blessing to colleagues.
00:12:07
Speaker
related to that, Andy, one thing I'm struck by, and I think you and I have talked about this before, in fact, is that
00:12:15
Speaker
you know, the workplaces, there's obviously been quite a shifting culture going on, isn't there? As I think people are beginning to ask some critical questions around capitalism, the idea that, you know, just profit is perhaps not the only thing out there. You know, companies want to be more environmentally aware, more socially conscious, and so forth. By hunches, that is also creating a space for Christians to sort of, you know, get involved in conversations that might not have happened in workplaces.
00:12:45
Speaker
know, five, 10 years ago.
Business Shifts towards Social Solutions
00:12:47
Speaker
Am I right? Is there something in that? And in which case, what again would be perhaps your advice on this? I know some of those conversations and see those not just as opportunities, but also again, a way for, you know, Christians to really be a blessing to the workplace by their presence, not just their words.
00:13:03
Speaker
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right, Andy. You know, there are three or four different reasons that we could cite for having brought us to this point. You know, financial crisis of 2008 and this kind of crippling inflation that we're experiencing now and the crisis of climate change, all of which are things that big business has been very culpable for. There is just this kind of agreement everywhere that something needs to change.
00:13:32
Speaker
and that business needs to be part of good news for the world as opposed to only creating problems. I think the first thing that started was this so-called ESG movement. Maybe six or seven years ago, businesses started to want to tell themselves how sustainable we are and how well-governed we are and how diverse we are. You might summarize that morally as saying businesses realized they had to stop doing bad stuff.
00:14:00
Speaker
But I've noticed a real transition in the past maybe three to four years across the moral rubicon into businesses actually wanting to do good stuff. So you see the difference between stopping doing bad and then actively pursuing the good. And this is actually the particular area of business that I'm involved in mostly now. Some people refer to it as the impact economy, where businesses are now trying to structure profitable business models around the solution to a social or environmental problem.
00:14:29
Speaker
And I think for Christians, there's absolutely loads to say about this trend, loads to welcome about it, loads to praise about business wanting to solve climate change and to be a better place to work and to solve social problems. I think we need to be encouragers of our colleagues who kind of feel
00:14:48
Speaker
instinctively that this is who they want to be. We can be those encouragers. But when opportunity arises, you know, I think there's a chance to continue on and look through the lens of that discovery, the phrase, question behind the question we had just a few moments ago, what's really going on? And why do we feel this kind of optimism? Why do we think the future is worth trying to rescue? And as Christians, we've got so much to say about that.
00:15:14
Speaker
You know, I get to explain my motivation for being part of the impact economy because I think God wants to rescue the world. I think he demonstrated that when he rose Jesus from the dead. And I've got hope in the future because Christ is going to return. It's a story which makes sense of all of these moral convictions that business is starting to discover. And when you contrast that Christian worldview with other possible worldviews,
00:15:40
Speaker
you know, you see just how amazing the Gospel actually is. You know, consider someone who doesn't believe there's a God, they're within an atheistic worldview, but they still feel they want business to do good. Well, why? If the universe is just going to burn up in a million years from now and nothing really matters. Or if you're a worldview from the East where you believe that history just goes around in circles and there's no linear progression, there's no particular hope, that doesn't make much sense either.
Engaging with Different Worldviews
00:16:09
Speaker
So I think where we can apply that Christian worldview to these moral convictions arising within business, there's something really powerful there. Thank you, Andy. There's some really rich reasons for engaging, being part of the impact economy. I was just thinking about what you just shared. And just to ask you a slightly more provocative question, if I may. You were just talking about
00:16:37
Speaker
addressing some of the underlying presuppositions of different worldviews and how they engage with some of these projects. How fruitful do you find that? I mean, to kind of say to somebody who's an atheist, well, we're nothing but time plus chance plus matter, what real reason do you have for engaging with this? Is that persuasive? How do you engage with that?
00:17:02
Speaker
Yeah, do you know what, Chrissy? I think that's such an insightful question because possibly that picking fault in what other people believe and trying to tell them why they're wrong and why Christianity is true is a style that might have worked 10, 15 years ago when we thought we were fighting with Richard Dawkins. Your question is so insightful because I think now, especially post COVID, where people
00:17:27
Speaker
don't believe in any ideas as far as i can see anymore everything just seems to be broken they're just looking right for something that works and something that brings a sense of fulfillment i actually really like what the evangelist um in sydney uh by the name of sam chan has to say about this and i've forgotten the name of his book but maybe we can find it in time um i have to talk about you this without sounding like an idiot is it something like that that's a
00:17:55
Speaker
Sam, let's talk about Jesus without being that guy. That guy, sorry, yours is.
00:18:06
Speaker
So all credit to Sam Chan, this was not my idea, this was his idea, but I really like his idea, where he says, let's change it round instead of telling the other person to begin with that their worldview is wrong and here's why it's wrong and it makes no sense and you should change your ideas and become a Christian. And then maybe in five years, you'll kind of find that it works and it brings you joy and purpose and all of these things that people are searching for.
00:18:34
Speaker
But actually, I'm going to start with kind of telling you why you're wrong. You know, Sam Chan flips it around and says, start with the constructive message.
Sam Chan's Evangelism Approach
00:18:43
Speaker
Hey, this works. It actually does bring joy. I know Jesus for myself. It helps me experience fulfillment.
00:18:54
Speaker
It gives me some foundation for when the questions of the world seem overwhelming or I don't know what's going on with COVID or I don't know what's going on with Russia and Ukraine. I find that there's something that I can hold on to which works and it changes my experience of this world.
00:19:11
Speaker
And I'm happily, so from that point on, you continue then to discover in this life of discipleship that it is also true and all of the ideas make sense and it contrasts very nicely with other possible worldviews. But I, when I read that thought, that's totally true. And yeah, Christy, yeah, good to bring that out. It's interesting, isn't it, that I'm always struck by the idea there's nothing new under the sun, because of course, that's in a sense, it feels like we're back at
00:19:40
Speaker
you know, that very famous quote from Blaise Pascal, that if I was a true philosopher like Christie, I'd get absolutely right, but I could mangle, which is about the idea of preaching and talking about the gospel in such a way that good people wish that it were true, and then show them that it is, you know, tell that compelling story, you know, show why it's attractive and why it's persuasive and why we trust Jesus and think he's amazing. And then in such a way that people are like, wow. You know, we found this- And that's the hardest thing to do, isn't it, Andy?
00:20:09
Speaker
Which, Andy, we were directing that to. Sorry, to you, Ballister, or to both of you. That's a harder thing to do, isn't it, to present the positive vision for faith in Christ. It's really hard to do. Well, I wonder whether, and I'd love to get the other Andy's take on this.
Living Authentically as Christians
00:20:23
Speaker
Andy, do you think it's one of the reasons we struggle, actually, is I think it comes back to fear. We're afraid if we do that, we'll get shot down. We still think we're perhaps living in that age of the new atheism and together. The moment we say anything positive about faith, we're going to get the new atheism flung at us and everything else.
00:20:38
Speaker
And so, in a sense, that can force you onto the more defensive rather than the be positive, be winsome. And then, you know, and then you say, pick up these other questions and show how Christianity tells a better story and begin there. And there's a time needed when the critique is needed. But we start with a positive story. But I wonder whether we're too afraid that the moment we try that, we're going to get fired upon.
00:21:06
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the first thing that came into my mind when you, you know, sort of began to describe the question Andy was how, to me, it feels not primarily an intellectual task, but it is eventually an intellectual task. But I'm actually someone who can compare the different experiences of being a quote unquote, kind of evangelist, try traveling around,
00:21:32
Speaker
speaking in different places, doing full-time ministry with the day-to-day grind of being part of the workplace and constructing the positive message in those two different contexts is very, very different and focusing on the workplace. The reason I say it's not predominantly an intellectual issue is actually
00:21:53
Speaker
whether or not it's an experience and a joy and a kind of fulfillment that we are ourselves experiencing and to that extent we can't fake it whenever we try to say it to others. They actually see how we live every day, they see what we're like, they notice our character in challenging moments.
00:22:13
Speaker
And that I think is what then gives you the license to then be able to bring the intellectual constructive conversation into, you know, into the opportunity. You know, you guys will be really familiar with the, you know, the sort of mandate for apologetics and sharing our faith in this way. 1 Peter 3 15, always be prepared to answer questions. So this is assumption that questions will come by virtue of the way that we've been living at odds. And so,
00:22:42
Speaker
The constructive message to do with Christianity is, first and foremost, one that needs to be written on our face as well as what comes out of our mouth.
Conclusion and Farewell
00:22:54
Speaker
Andy Moore, what an utter pleasure it's been chatting with you. Thank you so much for your time this afternoon. My pleasure, guys. Forgive me for withering on if I have done, but lovely to have joined you.
00:23:06
Speaker
No, not at all. I think there's so much there for us all to kind of chew on and to take away. I'm very thankful for your life and ministry, brother. That kind of brings us sadly to the end of this episode. Andy Bannister, we'll be back again, won't we, in a couple of weeks' time with another guest? We will indeed. More guests, but not a more guest. And it continues. We look forward to being with you in two weeks' time, everyone. Thanks for tuning in. Bye.