Beyond Impact Investing

Should we add a category of investing?

I recently attended a gathering where the theme was Transformational Sacrifice. My “sacrificial” experiences are not worth mentioning when compared to others: they are mainly first-world sacrifices. It was inspiring to hear the stories of others, however, and the theme sparked a question for me about how sacrifice applies to investing.

Sacrificial Investing

Sacrifice transforms. That's not a devotional platitude, it's a mechanism. Something dies so something else can live — a lamb, a savings account, a Tuesday afternoon you'll never get back. If sacrifice transforms, then sacrificial investing transforms too, which means we owe ourselves an honest answer to the question: What is Sacrificial Investing?

I don't think it's “giving generously.” Generosity is lovely, yet it doesn't cost you your sleep. Sacrificial investing is a different animal, and I've been noodling it long enough without articulating its elements. May I suggest some ideas, not as a tidy definition but as a conversation starter?

1. It's required because the world is broken. You don't need a sacrificial posture toward capital in Eden. You need it in Chattanooga, in Lagos, in a boardroom deciding whether the quarter matters more than the community it sits in. Brokenness is the precondition, not the interruption.
2. It's decided. Nobody backs into sacrifice. Abraham didn't wander up Moriah by accident — he saddled the donkey himself (Genesis 22). Sacrificial investing is a determined, selfless act, chosen before the cost is fully known, which is the only kind of choosing that counts as sacrifice.
3. It runs on a long horizon. The widow at the temple gave her two coins with zero expectation of ROI inside her lifetime (Luke 21). William Carey sailed for India in 1793, funded by a cobblers’ collection that made no sense on any five-year plan — and it took him seven years to see his first convert. Deep horizons are the native habitat of this kind of capital.
4. Its due diligence breaks your spreadsheet. Try modeling the return on Mary of Bethany's alabaster jar — a year’s wages, poured out in one act, defended by Jesus himself as “a beautiful thing” (Mark 14). Judas ran the numbers and got outraged. He wasn't wrong about the math. He was wrong about the variables. Kingdom Economics adds line items for which your DCF model has no field.
5. It's messy in the moment. Obedient investing looks more like a moonshot than a carefully crafted strategy. Sacrificial investments rarely announce themselves as such while you’re living inside them. The unknown outcome drowns out clever derisking.
6. It includes “impact moments” that deepen empathy with the brokenness in (1) above. The Good Samaritan didn't just write a check — he touched the wounds, paid the innkeeper, and promised to come back (Luke 10). Cadbury built Bourneville not as a marketing gesture but because George Cadbury had walked the slums his workers came from and couldn't unsee them. Empathy is the receipt sacrifice hands you.
7. Its outcomes weave ethos, eschatos, and cosmos* — and I want to underline cosmos, because we're comfortable investing in people and eager to invest in eternity, but we go quiet on the systems that keep people locked in poverty, debt, distraction and fear. The early church in Acts 2 and 4 wasn't just discipling individuals; they were restructuring an economic system inside the community. That's cosmos-level transformation, and it's the strand we skip most often. (* I have covered this topic in some depth in my book, Investing with Africa, devoting an appendix to it.)
8. It produces long-term results on earth. Wilberforce's decades of political and financial sacrifice ended the British slave trade. Slow, visible, historical.
9. It produces real, eternal results you may never see on earth. Most sacrificial investors die not knowing the full yield. That’s not a bug in the model. That is the model. Sacrificial investors have an eye on the great cloud of witnesses in heaven and not so much on the “likes” and “follows” of the crowds on earth.
10. And underneath all of it sits obedience — which may or may not lead to sacrifice, but sacrifice without obedience underneath it is just a tax write-off with better PR.

I don’t believe this list is finished; I don't think it's supposed to be. It's not just an Early Church phenomenon either. Here are a few modern threads, for anyone who wants contemporary proof of concept:

Stanley Tam signed 51% of his manufacturing company over to God in 1955, then in 1975 gave the rest away too — decades before "impact investing" was a term anyone used at a conference. Truett Cathy poured Chick-fil-A profits into WinShape for fifty years, foster care and scholarships funded by chicken sandwiches, with a horizon measured in generations of kids, not quarters. And in 2022, Yvon Chouinard restructured Patagonia's entire ownership so that essentially all profits — roughly $100 million a year — now flow to fighting climate change, forfeiting his family's claim to a company worth an estimated $3 billion. That's element #6 in real time: an impact moment costly enough to deepen empathy with the brokenness it's aimed at, not just gesture toward it.

For those of us doing this work in and around Africa: Francois van Niekerk placed the majority shareholding of his South African businesses into the Mergon Foundation, structurally severing his family's claim to the upside so the enterprises themselves would fund Kingdom work in perpetuity. That's element #3 and #2 fused — a decided, structural act built for a horizon well past one lifetime, not a one-time gift but an ownership decision.

I would add “Solving the World's Greatest Problem” to the list too — an emerging modern phenomenon, capital deliberately redirected on horizons and criteria that make no sense apart from Kingdom Economics variables. Element #4, institutionalized.

This topic has also jogged my memory on a self-assessment around kingdom investing. Wealth advisors… how do you view your clients? Yourself? You can explore this at http://globalgiants.foundation/kia.html?group=si-blog

If you are a Family Office or larger investor, how is Sacrificial Investing factoring into your strategies? This FOIL (Family Office Impact & Legacy) survey might jog some good conversations. https://globalgiants.foundation/foil.html

So — your turn. What's your definition of sacrificial investing? What have you seen, funded, or survived that fits this shape? I'd genuinely like to know.