Hobby Lobby CEO walks away from owning company

CEO David Green of Hobby Lobby announced in a Fox News opinion piece that he decided to walk away from the craft store chain and choose God instead.

“Patagonia’s founder recently made news when he gave away the ownership in his company to allow the mission and purpose to remain intact … I experienced a similar decision-making process with my ownership of Hobby Lobby; I chose God,” he wrote. “We want to be stewards of what God has given us, and that’s the difference. There’s a huge paradigm change between owning a company and stewarding it, and we want to be stewards of what God has given us.”

Green said 100 percent of the company’s voting stock has been moved to a trust where the stewardship can continue to pass on to one person from another. “All the voting stock is in 1 percent in its trust, and it is being managed and being stewarded instead of seeing ourselves as owners,” he said

Rescinding the company’s focus on ownership helps honor God by alleviating the burden of wealth.

“Wealth can be a curse and, in most cases, if you drill down on it, wealth is a curse in terms of marriage, children and things of that nature; so we’re stewarding our company and, therefore, our children come to work and they get what they earn,” Green said. “It’s a paradigm change from ownership that can really wreck a family.”

Green challenged business leaders to assess their source of truth, offering hints of wisdom from the book of Proverbs and stressing the importance of tithing.

“For me, my source of truth has always been prayer and the Bible,” he said. “I truly believe that if leaders pray and seek truth from the Bible that their businesses will be revolutionized. For instance, the Bible talks about giving a tithe, or 10 percent. Can you imagine what would happen if every top leader in business became a tither? There would be literally billions available for good work around the world.”