David Green and Bill High: How One Family Built a Billion-Dollar Company That Gives Away Half Its Profits

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] What happens when a business decides faith matters more than profit? Apparently, it flourishes.

Hobby Lobby, founded by David and Barbara Green in Oklahoma City in 1972, is a private, family-owned corporation now with over a thousand arts-and-crafts stores nationwide. The stores are closed on Sundays, do not sell any Halloween-themed products, operate debt-free, and are run according to Biblical principles, emphasizing the value of faith and family life.

David Green told me in our recent interview: “God blesses us when we do what we should do, rather than what’s maybe most profitable.”

“When we closed on Sunday, we did less business. When we stopped selling Halloween, we did less business. I can name seven or eight different things that … cost us, but it was the right thing to do,” he said. “So I think God is asking us to do the right thing and not what’s most profitable.”

In 2012, the owners of Hobby Lobby sued the federal government for requiring company insurance plans to cover four specific contraceptives—two morning-after pills and two copper IUDs—that they argued could end life after conception. Facing daily fines of $1.3 million, the Green family filed a lawsuit that culminated in a 5–4 victory at the Supreme Court.

In my interview with Green and his longtime friend and co-author of his many books, Bill High, we talk about their latest book “The Legacy Life.”

How do we build a lasting, meaningful legacy? How do we become good stewards of our resources, time, and talents? How can families ensure their values are truly passed on to later generations—and not lost over time?

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

David Green, Bill High, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

David Green:

Good to be here.

Bill High:

Good to be here.

Mr. Jekielek:

Let’s start by talking about something that the Hobby Lobby managed to do at the Supreme Court. I mean, you set a precedent that a business could infuse its religious values into its functioning, into its operations. So tell me about how this all came about.

Mr. Green:

It came about when the Supreme Court, or the government, told me that with our insurance policy we would have to provide four prescriptions that we believe would take life, and that’s something we couldn’t do. And so that’s where our family said, we just can’t do that, even though the government said, you’re going to do it, and if you don’t do it, we’re going to charge you $1.2 million a day. Now that number comes from the number of employees we had, so we mathematically figured we’re going to either do what the government tells us, or they’re going to pay $1.2 million a day. 

So that’s when we had to make the decision that we had to sue the government. We like our government and we love our country, but at the same time, they were asking us to do something we couldn’t do. And so that’s how the whole thing started with us to get us to the Supreme Court.

Mr. Jekielek:

And that was, I think, 11 years ago, kind of an ongoing battle. Did you believe that it would end up on this side? It was even a very close decision.

Mr. Green:

Yes, it was. We won by one, and we don’t even know why we should win by one. We should have won by all of them. No one should ask someone to take life or give them a fine if they didn’t, and that’s what was happening to us. So we’re very thankful that we did win the case. But during the time that we were taking it and even after that, we have people that will not shop with us because of our culture. Our culture is one that doesn’t please everybody. 

But we have found out in every area in life it seems like, or in our business, where things look like they wouldn’t work, they do. For instance, closing on Sunday didn’t work either. So when we closed on Sunday, we did less business. When we stopped selling Halloween, we did less business. But I can name seven or eight different things that when we did, it cost us. But it was the right thing to do. 

So I think God is asking us to do the right thing and not what’s most profitable. It wasn’t most profitable to sue the government, but at the same time, I think God blesses us when we do what we should do, rather than what’s maybe more profitable. 

Mr. Jekielek:

This is a central theme in your new book, in fact, you know, just basically living by values and infusing those values into the family and setting up structures which are kind of beyond anything I frankly ever imagined within the family to accomplish said things. One thing I noticed in the store, let’s talk about the store for a moment. I visited a shop before this interview, and I noticed two things. One is that it’s Christmas real early, and the other thing I noticed was that there are fall decorations. They have the colors, but there really is no Halloween at all, which was kind of surprising.

Mr. Green:

Yes, one time we carried it, and we just felt like the Lord just led us like he did. We were open on Sundays. We just felt like the Lord was saying we shouldn’t be selling Halloween. And so, yes, we were selling tens of millions of dollars, and now we do not sell Halloween. So those are some of the things that I know that the Lord just worked with our family that we should do some of these things. Definitely, it changes the culture as far as the people that will and will not shop with us, but somehow or another God has always blessed us because of our doing or trying to do the right thing. 

Mr. Jekielek:

What is the issue with Halloween? How would you describe that?

Mr. Green:

When I was a kid and I came from a pastor’s home, I was the first one out and the last one in. It was time to get candy, free candy, and we didn’t have a lot of candy, so we took advantage of it. And I think it was more of something more for children, but now you go in and you see your competitors with ghosts and skeletons and things like that, and it just doesn’t look like something that we ought to be involved in.

Mr. High:

Yes, even in our neighborhood, the front yards are decorated with graves, and so it’s like it’s a celebration of death, something much darker. And so I think it was a good decision to turn away from a celebration that wasn’t God-honoring. It turned from the innocence. Even when I was a kid, you’d dress up in a paper bag because you wanted the candy, but now it’s not, it’s much more blood and gore.

Mr. Jekielek:

So you’re writing this book together. Tell me a little bit, Bill, how you came to be working together on this.

Mr. High:

Dave and I have been working together for about 25 years. And it’s just been an evolving thing, but probably the biggest thing that we’ve done together is we’ve hosted leadership events. So we bring in CEOs from around the country. In fact, in the next two days, we’ve got about 100 leaders from across the country who are coming in. 

And they’re coming in to hear the Hobby Lobby story. How did they do this? How does this business work when it shouldn’t? Not too many businesses close on Sundays, close at 8 if you’re a retail business, and give away half of your profits and have it still work. So people want to come hear the story and they want to learn and they want to grow. So it’s been a fun journey to be able to work with David and the family over these years.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, so you mentioned so many things that are all things we have to cover here. Okay, so first of all, the Hobby Lobby story. Not everyone watching will know it. David, perhaps you can give us the picture of where it started and how you got here.

Mr. Green:

Yes, it started with Barbara and me. Actually, a friend of mine and I came together. We borrowed $600 from the bank in 1970, and so that’s how we started making frames in our garage. We would have our kids, I had seven and nine, Martin and Steve were seven and nine, and they would glue the frames together, and we gave them seven cents a piece. My wife worked for five years without pay at all, so that’s how we started just making frames in our garage. 

We opened our first store in 1972 right here in Oklahoma City, and it was only about 600 square feet. So that was our first store. So now we’ve got over a thousand stores, and God has blessed us, and we’ve worked real hard, and we have great, great people, and we’re thankful for what God has done with our company. 

Along this trip, Bill came alongside us and helped our family with a vision, mission, values document that we have, and that’s helped us a lot to know this family, this is our mission, this is our vision, and this is our values. And Gen 1 and Gen 2 came together. He worked with us to come up with this document. We have a hard copy of who we are, and I think that’s helped our family. 

We meet once a year in January, this is who we are, this is the document. We have a special Bible that everybody gets when they’re 16 and older. Right now we have, I think, 51 in my family. I say, I think, because it keeps growing; we keep adding pretty regularly. I’ve got 24 great-grandkids. God has blessed us with a big family, and we love our family.

Mr. Jekielek:

Is there a single one or a couple of decisions doing the right thing instead of the easy thing, or the right thing instead of the thing that will give you a lot of cash in a moment sort of thing that was a tough decision, but it worked out?

Mr. Green:

There was one store that we had to leave after we had been there five years. We had ten years left on the lease, and it was good when we signed it, but the neighborhood went down, and it seemed like that can happen over just a few years, and it was a bad neighborhood. And so we knew we needed—we were putting people in the store in harm’s way—and so we knew we needed to walk away from this. And we had a wholesale liquor company that would take our lease and take us out of it. And I thought, no, we just can’t do that. Someone might say, well, God is going to bless you for that, but we paid 10 years on that lease. 

So that’s one of the many instances where  I could tell you that we did the right thing, but it didn’t necessarily directly look like it was the right thing. And that’s what we’re supposed to do, I believe. We’re supposed to do things because it’s right, not because it’s profitable. 

But over the years, God has blessed Hobby Lobby, even though we’ve made those kinds of decisions, like suing the government, or closing on Sundays, or not selling Halloween. So there’s a lot of those types. I just gave you one, of course, with this store that we had that we needed to get rid of for 10 years. We didn’t let someone take us out of that lease because we knew it was just the wrong thing to do. 

Mr. Jekielek:

I saw a quote on the wall outside of this store here, something to the tune of that you don’t want to make your decision-making too complex. Where does that come from?

Mr. Green:

I could talk for an hour on all of those. One of them says, keep it simple, and one of its close counts. We’re not perfectionists, because when you’re running a store that’s got literally millions of products that you could put in it, how do you keep it simple? We run one store a thousand times, basically. We tweak it a little there, but we try to run it. 

And one of the things that says, ask the Lord for direction, and another one says, study, study, study. And too many choices are harmful to business. That’s what’s on the wall. But all of that together comes in with business, in our ministry, about every place; all of those things come into play. Too many choices are just harmful to life and to business. And so that’s what we try to do: eliminate the number of choices that we have.

Mr. Jekielek:

So tell me a little bit about this process, Bill, of coming up with a family mission vision and why this is so important.

Mr. High:

Just yesterday, the Wall Street Journal actually published an article about how families are actually working on this family side, family mission statements to keep the family together. And here in the U.S., I don’t think we appreciate this idea that families really are meant to be generational in nature. And the idea of a family lasting 150 years, that’s much more commonplace around the world—Switzerland, Japan, and Italy. You’ll see companies that have been in business for a thousand years. And why not? 

If Hobby Lobby can keep going and maintain its culture, its giving, and all the people employed, it’s good for the country; it’s good for our culture as a whole. So that’s the idea. But you’ve got to start with what’s the family vision, mission, and values.

Mr. Jekielek:

And certainly you hear about, you know, nobility and royal families and stuff like thinking like this, but you’re saying, I think, this isn’t just for people who have the means. This is actually something that could be helpful for everyone, right?

Mr. High:

This is every family. So our best examples are actually young families, no kids, or getting ready to have kids. We see families that if they start on this process, they’re gonna keep their family together and they won’t split apart. And so that’s the basic idea. Nobody wants to have a family that splits apart. The greatest grief that you’ll have is when you have a kid who walks away from the family values that you’re trying to teach.

Mr. Jekielek:

How do you actually kind of implement this in a family? Which presumably not everyone is like, yes, of course, this is exactly what we need to do. I think most people will probably be like, oh, that sounds like a great idea, Jan, but we’re not really into that. We’re not really participating. How do you build this?

Mr. High:

It’s really pretty simple. You don’t have to be the Green family. You don’t have to be Hobby Lobby. We say that every family, if they just would start with defining your five family values—your three to five family values: God, family, people—we have five. But you just start with what are the five values. Sometimes we’ll say, what are the five words that describe you? 

So if you write down just those values, and then you put them down on a piece of paper, put them at your dinner table, put them on the wall of your home, and say, let’s live by those values, and you talk about them. If you just did that much, then you’d have a good start on helping your family come together.

The Bible talks about this idea that these things should be on your heart and that you should talk about them when you get up, when you lay down, when you’re walking by the way, and publish it on the doorposts of your house. That’s what we do, and we just say that that’s for every family. So just values, if you just did that much. You can go further, and you can have a vision statement and a mission statement. 

We give some examples in the book. The Green Family mission statement is to love God intimately and to live extravagant generosity. And that’s a gathering point for the family. That’s why they have the annual family celebration. So it really is pretty simple. It’s just that we tend to not treat family as intentionally as we do our business or our careers.

Mr. Jekielek:

There’s also, you know, there’s kind of operational things here, you know, annual family celebrations that you encourage people to have. There’s a monthly family meeting. It’s a bit like running a family like a business. Is that right?

Mr. Green:

We have, our monthly meeting is one of giving. And the ones that give the money are the ones that earned it. I would rather have someone who’s non-family that was a Christian than a family member who was not going to use the money in the right ways. But we do have enough people in our family that are part of the business that we come together once a month and we decide where we’re going to give the money that we give away. And one time, the way it got to 50 percent is like I said one time, I said, you can’t outgive God. And that’s where I got in trouble, you know? 

And that’s where it all started, you know, because at the time we were tithing, and Barbara and I have always tithed, and we were given some money from the companies, but I said, you know, the Bible said, well, so this was what I felt. I felt that He was saying, oh, so easy to say, you can’t outgive God; you haven’t really tried. So I’d never heard a message on it; I didn’t know how to do it. 

So Mark, my oldest son, and I came up with the same idea. We said, you know what we’re supposed to do? I think we’re supposed to give this amount. And then a month later, six months later, we doubled it. Now don’t double it every six months, but add that same amount. If you give a dollar, then 2, 3, and 4 dollars. That’s what we decided we were going to do. 

We looked down the road and we said, you know, in about seven or eight years, we’re going to— that’s about the total volume. It’s not going to work, but at least we’re going to try to outgive God. That was 25 years ago. If you looked at how we started, we were ahead of that. 

At some point, we said, at the time we did it, the government would let you write off half of what you earned. We said, we’re just going to give half. For probably about 25 years, we’ve been able to give half of our earnings to various ministries. That’s what we do once a month. We bring the family together. Here again, out of 40 of us, there are only about six of us that work here. 

We don’t think it’s our job to tell someone what God has for them. So some of them are in ministry, some of them do things totally outside the company, but we all are on one page in terms of this is who God wants us to be. Every single one of us has a purpose, even though you’re not part of Hobby Lobby. That’s the purpose. But you have a purpose; everyone has a purpose, and we just want everybody to fulfill whatever God has for them. 

My mother and dad were just pastors of small churches, and they both had a purpose. My mother’s purpose was, I think, she witnessed to a lot of people. She had people come to know Christ, but I think one of her main purposes was raising six children to serve the Lord. Those six children, she’s going to receive reward for what she’s done through the people that she has raised. So every one of us has a purpose, and what is that purpose?

Mr. Jekielek:

This idea of giving as a normal part, explain to me how that works in the context of the business and in the context of the family. Is it 50 percent for both? 

Mr. Green:

I think the family believes that whatever we earn we should tithe, and that’s what we do. We tithe on whatever we earn. And so the business is, we came—the Bible says, in fact, it’s in Psalms 24:1, which says that God owns everything. You’re not an owner of anything. I personally don’t have a hard time telling people that you own nothing; God owns everything. So we’re all just stewards; we’re not owners; we’re stewards, the Bible says so. 

So we came to that decision that we’re not owners, we’re stewards, so we’re here to steward what God has given us. So everybody that works here, which is six or seven of us, we get a salary. I make less than I did 25 years ago when you look at the cost of living. So it’s not ours, but I should get paid for what I do. 

So if you work for Hobby Lobby, you get paid for whatever your responsibilities are. But everything else is not ours; it’s God’s. And so then what we want to do is we want to be good stewards of what He’s blessed us with, because it is not ours. We have accepted. 

That’s a big deal for someone to accept. Well, I worked harder, I’m smarter, you know, whatever. No. Whatever you have, God has given you, and He owns it, and you need to be good stewards of it. And that’s what we try to do with Hobby Lobby. It’s not just about business people that have money to give. 

It’s a matter of our time, because everything belongs to God. He’s given us our talent. What God has created them for may be totally different than mine, but He has created all of us to make a difference. I don’t want to make it sound as though you have to have money to have a purpose, because that is what God has put in our hands. Maybe He’s given someone else different talents and other things that is their talent and what He’s given them to do.

Mr. Jekielek:

One of the things that keeps coming up on American Thought Leaders is this idea that we’ve kind of forgotten about the family here, and you alluded to this earlier in our conversation. What is the prescription for a family that isn’t there? Do you have any insight into this? There are people who aren’t necessarily looking to have lots of children and aren’t necessarily up for this whole thing but see that something’s not right and are looking to get some inspiration.

Mr. Green:

Certainly, there are families that don’t look good. I think that my only thought is that God still loves you and He cares for you, and He wants to take you from wherever you are. He wants to take you to the best you can from where you are. When I bring all of our co-managers in, we bring everyone that’s a co-manager. Every manager has been here, and we talk to them. 

One of the things that I tell them is, I want you to be more concerned about your marriage, your family, and your children than Hobby Lobby. Hobby Lobby is less important than your family. We think we should put a lot of emphasis on family and marriage. Barbara and I have been married for 65 years in about two weeks, two months. We think that’s important, and we think family is very important. 

There was a particular time that I know that God said to me, I’m putting these people in your charge. I’ve got 50,000 people that He’s put in my charge. I want them to know that their family is more important, their marriage is more important, and I really want them to spend time together. That’s why they work five days a week and not six long hours, and that’s why we close on Sunday. We think that family is more important than the business. By the way, because I think we do that, business is taken care of better than any other way that we could be.

Mr. Jekielek:

How many businesses work like this? I mean, seriously. You’re telling me, what you’re saying almost sounds fantastical to people.

Mr. High:

I would say that it really boils down to what I would call a family worldview. In Chapter 4 of the book, we talk about what’s gone wrong. Why are so many families experiencing alienation? Why do most family businesses fail by the third generation? What are our numbers like? An 85 percent failure rate in generation 3. And why is that? That’s not the design; that’s not what anybody wants. We prefer to put things in motion that last. 

Ultimately, what’s gone wrong really is this worldview that we’re just raising up individuals to go off and spread out all over the world, kind of idea. This hyper-individualism is fighting against the notion of family as a team. Family is supposed to be a team, and it’s supposed to grow and expand together so it has more influence and takes more territory. 

David and I really grew up that way, even though he’s a little bit older than me. As a family, we had to work together because if we didn’t work together, sometimes we didn’t have food on the table. That idea of family as a team is competing with this hyper-individualistic state that we’re in the world today. That’s why we have so many families that are small families, countries that have one-child policies and the like that really create this notion that I’m more important than the team.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, this is actually something that I was thinking about as I went through the store. There’s starting to be a shift. A lot of manufacturing, especially of products of the sort that would be found at Hobby Lobby, was done in China. There’s been a starting shift of these products to other places. I’m wondering how that is happening here. A little bit of a diversion. We’ll go back to the major conversation, but it’s something I think about a lot.

Mr. Green:

What’s happening is that Hobby Lobby has over 2,000 different vendors. We have an awful lot of vendors from every country in the Far East and in Europe, just a lot of different countries, many of which have come from China. Over the past several years, a lot of it has moved out. But some of it’s hard to move out because the cost in China is at a point where it might still be advantageous to buy from China. 

What we’re trying to do is earn as much money as we can to tell more people about Jesus. So our buyers are not confused; they’re out here buying the very best items we need from whatever country, but a lot of it is moving out of China into various other countries that we would prefer, but we don’t prefer it over spending more money for it.

Mr. Jekielek:

Let’s talk about your involvement in the Museum of the Bible, which, by the way, is an amazing institution. I loved going there.

Mr. Green:

My youngest son is chairman and has been from the very beginning. He says that God tricked us into it because we had no idea that we were going to be involved in a museum. But that’s the way it happened. Someone came to us and wanted us to help them in Texas. They had no money, no space, and nothing. For some reason, God got us involved in buying some antiquities. 

After a while, we said, I think we’re supposed to be the ones that put this museum in. I say that we’re the ones. We had a lot of people come alongside us to help us with finance and put it together. We really feel like God’s Word needs to be lifted up, and that’s what we’ve tried to do in Washington, D.C., with the museum. We’re really proud of Steve and all of his crew that put it together. 

We made more than our share, but God helped us through it, and we’re really proud of what God has helped us accomplish with a lot of people helping us put together in Washington, D.C. because we believe that His Word needs to be lifted up. That’s what we’ve tried to do in Washington, D.C.—lift His Word up. Along with that, my older son is involved in getting all the languages translated. Now there are over 6,000 languages, and every year, more and more of them are translated. 

The Bible says to preach the gospel to every creature. How do you do that without the gospel? I think it’s very important, and that’s one of his main jobs, my older son, to work with a lot of other people to get all the different languages done. In the museum, you’ll see a spot where these languages are completed, these we’re working on, and these haven’t been started yet. I like that particular display more than any other because I see that we’re moving in the right direction to see that everybody has God’s Word in their language.

Mr. Jekielek:

Something that I’ve noticed over the course of my life is that often institutions start small with a really great idea. When they reach a certain scale, they seem to go off the rails. It’s almost as if the purpose of the institution becomes to perpetuate itself as opposed to live up to those ideas or enact those ideas. I’ve seen this in all sorts of contexts, actually. It keeps being reinforced. I thought of this as a kid, still very young, and I’m finding myself wondering how it is that you here at Hobby Lobby accomplish preventing that from happening, or do you see it as an actual potential problem?

Mr. Green:

No, I think it’s a real problem. You think about some of our universities, like Yale or Harvard, that started out as Christian, and they’re about as far away as they can be. We see that even in church organizations that all of a sudden, accept this and that, and it’s just not biblical. What we do is we have five things that we give to, and it’s documented. Every single one of them is God’s Word and man’s soul. If those two things are not part of it, we’re not involved with it. 

I see a lot of money that’s given in churches and in ministries that is nothing more than vapor. You know, curing cancer is good. Give to it. But we give to things that have two things, and they have to have both involved: God’s Word and man’s soul. We want to make sure that people are really focused on what the ministry is about. It’s okay to feed people, but you need to feed them to tell them about Jesus. You need to get people clean water, and we do, but you need to tell them about Jesus. 

Everything we do in our document outlines what we give to, and we have five different things we give to. We think those five include everything that’s in the Bible. It’s really important for us to study to see what the purpose of that ministry is. Is it about telling people about Jesus, them accepting Him as their personal Savior, or did they get off the rails? Because you can get off the rails. God has given us, because we think one of the things you see out there on the sign is to ask God for direction. I think you have to do that. I think He’s given us good direction. 

When you think about two ministries we’ve been involved with over 25 years, Every Home for Christ, and One Hope. One Hope gives children the gospel, and we’ve given it to over a billion people. Every Home for Christ has reached over a billion homes with the gospel. Those are really solid. God’s Word and man’s soul—those are the two things that have to be involved for us to write a dollar check to anybody.

Mr. High:

Let me jump in here too because your question is really about governance. How does a family govern itself? How does a business, how do institutions govern themselves? There’s a book out there called, How the Great Philanthropists Failed. They fail because they don’t do some basic things. They don’t define vision, mission, and values. 

But equally important, David referenced this idea: you’ve got to determine who the next trustees are, who the next group of leaders is, and you’ve got to have criteria for what those leaders look like and how you appoint them. Then you’ve also got to have provisions for how you remove them if they fail to subscribe to that vision, mission, and values. That’s why most of these institutions go awry. That’s why most families go awry: they don’t actually have good governance systems. 

That’s what part two of the book is really about: how do you have good governance systems? You’ve got to have vision, mission, and values. You’ve got to have a code of conduct. And that’s what Hobby Lobby has really built into its stewardship trust, so they can govern for a long time. 

In our Western mindset, Hobby Lobby has been at this for a little more than 50 years, and we think that’s a long time. But you go to other parts of the world, and business has been around for a thousand years. If you go into the Bible, there are stories of families in the Bible that are a couple of thousand years old. 

We just need to appreciate this idea that we need to think much longer term here in this country. One of the chapters is chapter 11, and it’s really about the story of the broken legacy, because certainly there are people who would watch and listen to this podcast and say, wow, I’ve got a messed-up story, and how can I ever put the toothpaste back in the tube? 

That chapter is really a story of hope because there are so many stories, even in the Bible. Father Abraham, well, Abraham kicked out a son, you know, and had all kinds of dysfunction. And you go through this throughout the scriptures; there are these stories that seem to be very broken, and yet God always redeems and restores. I don’t know how, or why, or when. Sometimes it might take a generation, but He does. 

That’s God’s theme. And so we just want to give people hope that it’s a good story. Even if it may not seem that way right now, you have a good story, and if you’ll be faithful today, God can set right that which is broken.

Mr. Jekielek:

You’re just reminding me of one particular story in the book, a pretty short one, but there’s a pastor who was working in Africa somewhere and basically ended up leaving the area feeling like he was a complete failure, but then people came in later.

Mr. High:

80 years later.

Mr. Jekielek:

And 80 years later, they noticed there’s a lot of Christian activity in these areas, and they figured out that it was this guy from 80 years prior. So the point is you could have a profound impact without even realizing it, even if you haven’t immediately.

Mr. High:

David’s mom and dad were pastors of small churches. When they got to the end of their lives, did they say, wow, look at our big giant church? No. But if you look at what they set in motion with their six kids, they could have never imagined Hobby Lobby. 

Mr. Green:

I talk about my mother because she died in the arms of my sister. And she said, do you see them? Do you see them? And she was seeing angels. And I think about my mother, who had six children that served the Lord. There was nothing in this world she wanted. Now you’re rich when you don’t want anything. She wanted for nothing. She had a tremendous relationship with the Lord. I would say a billionaire who didn’t know the Lord would love to die the way my mother did. So my mother was very, very wealthy. 

So how do you describe wealth?  In my opinion, it’s someone like my mother who really wants nothing and has a tremendous relationship with the Lord, and their children serve the Lord. And I think that’s what we all want.And that’s not happening for all of us, but God still has a spot for us no matter where we are because that’s what’s important. 

So I’m not as concerned about the family running this thing 100 years from now, but I would like 100 years or 200 years, if the Lord tarries, that the profits of it tell people about Jesus. But what I do want is I want the family to be united behind God’s Word, and that’s why we put together the document that this is about God’s Word, and that’s where our unity hopefully is behind God’s Word. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Hobby Lobby is just such an astonishing story. I think this scale issue, I think you said it earlier at the beginning; you said you try to run a thousand stores individually. How did you frame it? 

Mr. Green:

We try to run one store a thousand times. Sometimes I say I’m not smart enough to run a thousand stores, but I can try, and we all work together to run one store. We have a few tweaks, but we pretty much run every one of the stores with that exact same encounter there, and they have the same items, and so we try to do it a thousand times and make a few tweaks. And so that’s what we would like to do.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, as we finish up, a final thought?

Mr. Green:

I had news people talking to me the other day, and they kept asking, what are you going to do next? What are you going to do next? And they asked several times. I always said the same thing: I want to tell more people about Jesus. So that’s what Hobby Lobby wants to do. There is good news out there, and that’s that someone died for us and paid for our sins, and I want to tell as many people as I can. And that’s what we’re about. 

That’s what we want to be about: we want to be bigger to tell more people about Christ. Why do we want to be bigger? Why do we add 50 stores a year? It’s because we want to make more money to have more influence on more people to tell them the good news. And that’s what we want to be, and that’s what we would like to be.

Mr. Jekielek:

Bill, a final thought?

Mr. High:

I just want to reiterate the thought that this book we’ve written really is this idea of it’s a book of hope, this idea that you just never know what you’re setting in motion with your life. If you’re faithful today, trust God, and He will take care of the rest, and that’s really what The Legacy Life is about.

Mr. Jekielek:

David Green, Bill High, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. 

 

This interview was partially edited for clarity and brevity.