images shift to buildings with boarded-up windows,
empty strip malls, and plastic bags snagged in barbed-
wire fences. “Maybe God lets things break just so he can
make everything new,” the child says. “Maybe he’s call-
ing for new pioneers, brave enough to start rebuilding.”
The promo resolves onto a background shot of blond
wood, superimposed with the logo for Unpolished.
It’s an affecting spot. It also spoke to a certain dis-
sonance that arose as Crossroads put its stamp on
the young faith-and-tech community: When filtered
through the church’s production machine—which, as a
2017 Bloomberg Businessweek profile of Ocean noted,
includes a 75-person “experience team” that serves as
“the equivalent of an in-house advertising agency”—
Unpolished became something significantly glossier.
What had started out as a trust exercise in enabling raw
honesty about the travails of startup life seemed to have
morphed into a platform for glorifying entrepreneurs as
the new heroes of the church. And in this context, the
message at the movement’s core, that money doesn’t
equal success, sometimes seemed to waver.
Tome, who was on his way to leading one of the
nation’s largest churches, had acquired a wide range of
influential contacts, and he began calling in big names
to support his latest venture. In early 2014, Unpol-
ished hosted reality TV maven Mark Burnett, execu-
tive producer of Survivor, The Voice, and, of course, The
Apprentice, to discuss how America was built on the
Bible and free enterprise. (In his talk, Burnett regaled
a crowd of 2,500 with the story of how he’d convinced
Donald Trump to join The Apprentice after a campaign
of carefully applied public flattery.)
By mid-2015, Crossroads’ support had helped trans-
form Unpolished’s lecture series into a full-blown
multiday conference with high-profile speakers. In
his introductory remarks, Tome, wearing an untucked flannel shirt
and cargo pants, set the tone, declaring that while entrepreneurs
were not God, they were like Him. “You have creative capacities
that no one else has except for God,” he told the audience. “Improv-
ing current processes never changes the world; doing something
more methodically never changes the world; growing something
incrementally never brings life. It only slows down death.”
“You’re here today because God wants to grow your business!”
Tome continued. He recounted the Parable of the Talents, a story
Jesus tells in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 25. It describes a mas-
ter who gives his servants various quantities of money to watch
over and, upon returning, rewards the two servants who invested
and increased that gold but punishes the third, who hid his in the
ground for safe keeping. Tome called it “the most ancient reference
we have to investment banking.” The moral: “Jesus says if something
of a spiritual nature is not growing, there’s something wrong with it.”
More than a dozen speakers took the main stage over the course
of the conference, and their messages weren’t uniform. One, a for-
mer Procter & Gamble executive who’d become a bigwig at Google,
recalled how much he’d once been like Gordon Gekko, the “greed
is good” antihero of 1987’s Wall Street, until the sudden illness of
his daughter snapped his priorities straight. Sutton, the cofounder
of Noble Denim, described a new venture he’d begun: a clothing
line housed in the shell of a failing Tennessee garment factory that
had been forced to lay off most of its workers. After fundraising on
Kickstarter, Sutton’s team had helped the factory owner rehire those
workers, at living wages, to manufacture sweatshirts and other
high-end basics—proof, he said, that believers could build the King-
dom not just on the mission field but in whatever field they chose.
A number of speakers, though, reinforced Tome’s capitalist apol-
ogetics, declaring that God had created entrepreneurs “for creation
and conquest”; that the Apostle Paul was an entrepreneur; that
when Jesus wanted to spread the gospel, he eschewed “the reli-
gious elite and the academicians” for brass-tacks businessmen.
John Gray, an associate pastor at Joel Osteen’s 40,000-memberBrian Tome,
the lead
pastor of
Crossroads