Lakewood Church—long associated with prosperity gospel teach-
ings—declared that the US was “not simply a capitalistic society” but
also a “theocratic” one. And Wendy Lea, then the CEO of Cintrifuse,
a nonprofit network trying to make Cincinnati the startup capital
of the Midwest, admonished aspiring entrepreneurs that victims
were not welcome in her world. “I don’t want to talk to you if you
feel sad, you’re not sure, someone took that away from you. I’m not
into that,” she said. “What I’m into is an abundance of resources.”
Perhaps most jarringly, Calev Myers, an Israeli lawyer, deliv-
ered a long presentation on a new sort of Christian maxim: “Gold
Is Good.” Amid a smattering of line-treading Jewish jokes (“This is
something Jews have known for centuries,” he riffed) and a revi-
sionist reading of Matthew 19:24—the verse that says it’s easier for
a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to
get to heaven—Myers told the audience that gold was good because
it represented “the value you’ve brought to humanity.” Gold was a
record of services rendered to other people, he continued, asking
audience members to hold aloft money from their own wallets and
then give themselves a hand. “This is a certificate of appreciation for
your service!” he said. Following this logic, he continued, Bill Gates
was arguably a better servant than Mother Teresa—a fact deducible
from their bank accounts. “The reason Bill made billions,” Myers
concluded, “was because he helped billions.”
in the movement, a choice between two dueling trajectories the
faith-and-tech world could take: a frenetic, always-be-crushing-it
emulation of Silicon Valley, armored with biblical justification; or
the humbler embrace of more modest goals and the necessary
trade-offs between business and life success.
“Both of those messages are important,” Tome says. “Every-
body in that audience is going to be in a different season, and
we need to speak to all of those seasons in somebody’s life, or in
somebody’s business.”
Looking back on the evolution of Unpolished and Ocean in a
recent phone call, Brunk says, “There have definitely been speak-
ers in the past where we looked at each other and thought, ‘Whoa,
this isn’t what we want to promote.’ ” Messages about
revering profits and disowning vulnerability didn’t just
feel wrong, they felt stale. “There’s a million forums
where you can talk about the hustle,” he continues.
“We wanted our emphasis to be on the softer side.”
But as Unpolished grew, he says, “it was harder to
control that message.”
“I know that what we were standing for is that money
doesn’t define success,” Reynolds says. During the con-
ference, he allows, there was a divide between the main
stage keynotes—with “the big names that get people in
the seats”—and the side stages where local entrepre-
neurs were continuing to share moments of struggle.
But there’s reason to believe that, as the movement
spread beyond Cincinnati, the message on those side
stages had a more enduring resonance. Kristi Zuhlke,
the cofounder of Chicago’s KnowledgeHound, went to
Unpolished’s 2015 conference and appreciated how the
speakers addressed both practical questions of getting
funding and also “how to have a heart” as an entrepre-
neur. She returned to Chicago and, together with Jason
Henrichs, started a small group for entrepreneurs at a
downtown Chicago WeWork. Occassionally, they also
met at their church, Soul City—a progressive, diverse
community where the husband-and-wife pastor team
reference Tinder in sermons and staff wear “Black Girl
Magic” T-shirts. As happened in that first small group
at Crossroads, the group quickly gravitated toward
discussing immediate, intimate concerns: What is the
Christian way to fire someone? How should you grap-
ple with investors who want you to scale up too quickly,
even if that means misleading your customers? Should
Christian entrepreneurs build businesses with an evan-
gelizing or social justice mission, or is it enough to live
out your faith by being an honorable boss?
“That’s helpful because, as an entrepreneur, you
struggle with what success looks like,” Zuhlke says. “You
have to remember that success might not be the big exit.
It might just be impacting people’s lives because they
have a job they love and you’re paying them money and
they get to feed their family with that money.”
Zuhlke also reached out to Victor Gutwein, the
founder of an early-stage micro-venture-capital fund
called M25 that targets Midwestern companies, who
had invested in her startup. Only after getting funding
from Gutwein did she realize that he was Christian too.
(M25 is a reference to Matthew 25 and the Parable of
the Talents.) Now she was getting in touch with Gut-
wein to suggest that there might be enough folks like
them in Chicago to support a speaking series like Cin-
cinnati’s Unpolished—because she felt that there was
“a groundswell of people talking about what a crazy
faith journey it is to be an entrepreneur.”
They held their first event, called InnoFaith, in 2017.
They didn’t publicize the event widely, but, like that
first public gathering of Unpolished, they maxed out
the room. (Since their first event, the group has comeThe
conference
seemed to
embody
a tension