Hobby Lobby is a family-owned $1.4 billion chain of some 350 retail stores spread from the mid-Atlantic states to Utah and Arizona, from the Rio Grande to the Canadian border. Founder and CEO David Green has always viewed the business as a conduit for giving. In his book More Than a Hobby: How a $600 Start-up Became America’s Home & Craft Superstore, he tells about his first big “stretch” to advance God’s work back in the late 1970s:

           “I was attending a large convention of our church in Tennessee. Missionaries from all over the world gave presentations on their work. I paid close attention, remembering how my mother had always given special care and effort to mission funding.
            Flying home after the meetings ended, I was looking out the airplane window when something unusual happened. It seemed that a quiet voice inside my spirit said, You need to give $30,000 for literature. One of the speakers had talked about the need for more printed material in his particular field.
            My first reaction on the plane was that this was far too much money to consider. The company wasn’t nearly big enough to afford this. Where had that number even come from, anyway? Impossible….
         But the impression wouldn’t go away.
         God, I don’t have $30,000, I silently prayed. But … you’re serious about this, aren’t you? Well—I suppose I could write four checks for $7,500 each, and postdate them a month apart for the next four months.
            I sat there pondering this option. I did some calculating in my head. Maybe this would work after all.
            When I reached home, that is what I did. I put the four checks in an envelope, took a deep breath, prayed that I could make good on them, and mailed them back to Tennessee.
            When the church official on the other end called to acknowledge my gift, he made an intriguing comment. “The very day your letter was postmarked,” he said, “was the same day that four African missionaries had a special prayer meeting for literature funds. Looks like God answered their prayer!”
            Something clicked inside me at that moment. Maybe God has a purpose for a merchant after all. Maybe he has a place for me.
            I am happy to be able to report that we made good on all four of those checks. It wasn’t easy. But the dollars worked out in the end. And I had been stretched in a good direction.”

Hobby Lobby’s giving today is many times larger, of course. Near the end of his book, David Green describes a main goal of his life:

            “… to use my resources to present Christ to as many people as I can. Actually, I shouldn’t say “my”—I should say “our”—because this is a passion of Barbara and our children and our nephews as well; together, we make up the board of directors. Once a month we gather to look at our earnings and decide as a group how much to give to various projects. It’s one of the truly rewarding things we get to do.
            In order to keep giving, we need to keep growing Hobby Lobby and its affiliate companies. This is what energizes my day-to-day work in retailing now—the knowledge that if we can add stores and thereby boost profits, we can give away that much more to make a difference eternally. I’ll definitely get out of bed in the morning to see that happen!
            We don’t make a lot of noise about the specific programs to which we give, for obvious reasons. Some of them are local here in Oklahoma City. Others are far away on other continents. We watch carefully to make sure they handle the funds responsibly and touch people’s lives in the way they said they would. And we celebrate the results together.
            Inside the company, we do share some of the details with our various managers. In fact, we sometimes hear from them, “You guys ought to tell us more about what you’re giving. We’re a part of this, too.” So we’ve put up a few charts and photos. But we remain pretty careful about this. Jesus once said it’s better when the left hand doesn’t even know what the right hand is giving (Matthew 6:3), and we try to stick close to that principle.
            Businesspeople have said to me, “When are you going to take Hobby Lobby public? You could float quite a stock offering, you know.” Yes, I suppose so. But I’m not interested. For one thing, we don’t need the additional cash these days; we’re able to grow as fast as we want. And second, I don’t want to have to debate with stockholders about what we do with the profits. The family and I want to stay free to run the holiday message ads [in newspapers], to pay for a hospital in Haiti, to support our local City Rescue Mission that serves the homeless downtown, to print the sixty-four-page Book of Hope (a biography of Jesus condensed from the four Gospels) for people in faraway places who are curious about him.
            This is what gives us joy. “

Reprinted from More Than a Hobby by David Green with Dean Merrill (Nashville: Nelson, 2005) pp. 191-192; 195-197. Available at local bookstores as well as online sellers. See http://www.thomasnelson.com/ for more information.

The corporation’s website: http://www.hobbylobby.com/.