Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
A podcast for visionaries who lead with purpose and live on mission. Rob Hoskins, President of OneHope, has spent decades equipping leaders around the world to impact the next generation for Christ.
Each episode will dive into conversations that challenge, inspire, and empower you to lead with clarity, conviction, and Kingdom impact.
I define, generosity as six t's. It's not always money. Sometimes it is money. Right? But sometimes it's time.
MART GREEN:Are you willing to give your time to other ministries or always about yourself? Talent, treasure, thankfulness. Are are you thankful? You know, testimony, are some of those things that we're looking for and and trust.
ROB HOSKINS:Welcome to the missional leader, a podcast for kingdom minded leaders who are looking for mission forward insight, practical strategies, and spirit led solutions. In each episode, we'll have conversation designed to fuel your calling, strengthen your leadership, and empower you to advance the gospel with clarity, courage, and conviction. Let's get started. Hey, friends. Rob here.
ROB HOSKINS:I am so excited to share this conversation I just had with one of my dearest friends, best friends in the world, Mark Green. Mark is part of the Green family. The Green family established Hobby Lobby, an incredible business, and in my mind, they are probably the greatest generosity family lifetimes. Their vision to give their wealth away to help change the world is like no other family in the world. So we have a unique opportunity to jump into the heart and mind of a man like Mark Greene, who thinks about generosity every day of his life and turns it into action.
ROB HOSKINS:I can't wait for you to hear his insights about how you can grow your generosity. You're gonna be challenged and encouraged by this conversation, so let's dive in. Well, here with my great friend, one of my dearest friends, Mark Green, and so excited to talk about this particular topic. So obviously, the Green family, really known for being a family of generosity and sort of you do business to support your missionary habit is kind of the way I I I think about it. And so many people that I've talked to know we're in a relationship and there's there's always kind of the same question that that always comes up.
ROB HOSKINS:It's like, how do you as a family decide what you're gonna give to? Like, what's your process? And so that how do we know question is really out there, whether you're a family that has great wealth or you're a business that's giving or whether you're a couple that's just starting on the generosity journey. So just love to dig in on that a little bit with you.
MART GREEN:Yeah. Well, thanks for the question. It's evolved over time, as you would imagine, just like anything else. We first started giving together as a family back in 1997, so now we've done this for a while.
ROB HOSKINS:I know about that really well.
MART GREEN:Yeah, you know that really well because One Hope was the first ministry that we gave to. But before that, we didn't give collectively. Personally, I give my own tithing, but we wanted to tithe out of the business. And my dad made the decision, even though he's a founder, him and my mom could have decided where to give. They said, no.
MART GREEN:We wanna give with with our children that had been in this business and and and worked here. So there's seven of us. We've all worked together between forty and fifty years. And so, like I said, in 1997, we decided we're gonna tithe our profits, and we're gonna vote together. So there's seven of us that have voted from 1997 till today, and we all get one vote, so it's equal votes.
MART GREEN:But yeah, how do you give to? What do you give to? Because after a while, we get way too many requests. We can't give to everything. And so I'm a visual person, so actually, we meet once a month, the first Wednesday of the month, to talk about what we give to, and there's a jar up front.
MART GREEN:In that jar are a bunch of marbles, and most of them are white, and then there's a few green marbles. And so what we say as a ministry investment team, we call ourselves the ministry investment team, that we'll bring you excellent ministries. That's our job, to look and make sure that we have the priorities that we want. But the family votes no, we don't take it personal because we did our part. They have to vote and find the green marbles.
MART GREEN:And so what are our values? What is it that we like to give to? And at the very highest level, probably, you start with there's only two things that last forever, the souls of men and women and God's word. So most of what we give to is gonna wind up in those two areas, and so that's helped us guide us there. Then as we've gone through time as a Ministry of Investment team, there are certain things that we're looking for.
MART GREEN:It wasn't that long ago, I try to make things simple too, so I got it down to RS and RS and T. What's R? R is relationship. We wanna build a relationship over time with the people that we're giving to. And so we've chosen to give to a few people deep versus lots of people wide.
MART GREEN:No right and wrong. This is where we evolved to.
ROB HOSKINS:And it was still finding that sweet spot within that green marble souls and God's word. So those are the ones that you're gonna go deep on.
MART GREEN:Yeah. And so let's spend time with them. So we in the Mission Investments say we didn't make the money. The 50,000 employees at High Belotti made the money, but can we add time and talent to the treasure that they give to? So we try to actually be a part of some of these.
MART GREEN:We can't all the ministries, but there's about 13 ministries that we actually are involved with more than just money. We also give our time, talent, and those things, and so that's the R for relationship.
ROB HOSKINS:So it's relationship. So you've got your others. Your other simple letters.
MART GREEN:S is story. They have to be able to tell their story. We actually find that most people give to story. Story is what attracts people. And that's important.
MART GREEN:You've gotta be able to tell your story, and you wanna build relationships. So, let's say we have those two parts, but we also need that third T, is trust. And trust takes time, and under trust would be, do they do what they say they were gonna do? Do they stay on mission? Is their mission this year the same as it was last year?
MART GREEN:Consistency. Do they have good governance? We think long term that that good governance So there are people who are phenomenal storytellers and phenomenal relationships, but we found out long term, they just didn't match what we were looking for as far as governance, so that it would be there for the long term. And so those are some of the things that we look for. And then when you look for a relationship, the three things, keep it as simple, I have three letters for that too, and it's G, H, and I.
MART GREEN:What am I looking for in relationship? Well, one John two sixteen, it tells us that Satan really only has three tricks, and because he's a deceiver, his heart language is lying, he has to take some of that God gave us, and he has to lie to us about it. So the three things that God says in one John two sixteen is the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, pride of life. So I got to thinking about that. Okay, the lust of the eyes, what's the neutral there?
MART GREEN:And that's possessions. There's nothing wrong with possessions. There's nothing wrong with my car. There's nothing wrong with my house. But they can become idols to me, or they can be something that I think, Oh, if I just get a larger house, if I just get more, I'm gonna be happy.
MART GREEN:That's what Satan wants to do to us, so that's the lust of the eye. So I thought, Well, how do you defeat that? What should I do? It's generosity. You're somebody who's generous who's giving stuff away, and they're not worried about getting more stuff they're trying to figure out how to give more.
MART GREEN:Generosity would be that. The second was the pride of life.
ROB HOSKINS:So you're actually looking if a ministry is generous?
MART GREEN:Yeah, we want the ministry to be generous.
ROB HOSKINS:And how do you measure whether a ministry is generous?
MART GREEN:Great question. Obviously, they're wanting generosity. Every ministry wants generosity because they need to have economic sustainability. They're looking for donors. But there's little things that can happen and big things.
MART GREEN:Are ministries willing to share other ministries with me? Even in your case, you introduced me to Bobby Grunwald. Well, not a lot of ministries invite me to meet other ministries because they know, Oh, well, you may give money to them, and I may lose that money. So they see me as a zero sum game versus that. But in your case, and the one hopes, it's no, we want be generous, and here's a great idea, and it's this Bible.
MART GREEN:I know you're passionate about you knew I was passionate about Bible.
ROB HOSKINS:Yeah. Actually had someone tell me when they heard that you tell that story somewhere. I don't know if you told it or Bobby's told it, and they said, you gave them your donor? And I said, you're asking an unbiblical question. Yeah.
ROB HOSKINS:They're not my donor.
MART GREEN:Yeah.
ROB HOSKINS:They're God's donor. Right. Right? And and we're stewarding the best we can with what God gave us, and one thing he gave us was the relationship, your relationship. But it's not an exclusive relationship.
ROB HOSKINS:We're the body, so that's a measurement of kind of the generosity side of it.
MART GREEN:Yeah. And are they generous with what they have? We've helped them in even the Bible space. Sometimes the Bible's intellectual property.
ROB HOSKINS:I guess what I want people to hear is this just comes out of this isn't just the way you give. This is like who you are as a family and even how you run your business. So like Hobby Lobby was, I mean, is always ahead of everybody else. Like, they're trying to legislate minimum wage and you guys were so so you were generous with your people. And I think that's that's one thing that I've I've noticed in my relationship with your family.
ROB HOSKINS:Like, you kind of take what God has instilled in you as as not just a philosophy of generosity, but actually the practice of generosity and how you run your business. And and in my interactions with you over these how many years now,
MART GREEN:you're good
ROB HOSKINS:with the years thing.
MART GREEN:Yeah. Seven.
ROB HOSKINS:Twenty seven years. Like, I can just see that you're you're always trying to discover, like, are you being generous in the same way that Hobby Lobby was? Now, it's a different thing. We're a for profit business. You're a nonprofit.
ROB HOSKINS:But I think those actual actions and practices are things that you're looking for.
MART GREEN:Yeah, yeah, and I define generosity as six T's. It's not always money. Sometimes it is money, right? But sometimes it's time. Are you willing to give your time to other ministries or always about yourself?
MART GREEN:Talent, treasure, thankfulness, are you thankful? Testimony are some of those things that we're looking for, trust. So you had trust.
ROB HOSKINS:So Mark's throwing a lot of alphabet at us.
MART GREEN:That's right.
ROB HOSKINS:He likes to keep it simple, but there's a lot of and so just for everybody to know in the show notes, I'm gonna have all this material for you to go through sort of what was that GE had? What was the RST? What are the five, six T's? So we'll have all that in the show notes, so don't worry about that. You don't have to go through all of them.
ROB HOSKINS:It's so Generosity.
MART GREEN:Yep. And then, like we said, the pride of life would be power and position. We need power and positions. There are CEOs at companies. There's power in their position.
MART GREEN:That's normal, but Satan wants pride of life, and so when somebody takes that We've all been under that situation where somebody took power over us and it just was not good. That's what Satan's trick is, what is the antidote to that? And to me, it's humility. We're looking for people who are humility in the partners that we come alongside. Again, all these things, you can't just see them.
MART GREEN:They're not on a sheet of paper. It's because of life, and that's why we like to get in relationship. When I'm in a relationship over two or three years, I'm gonna know, and those people who have these characteristics, I can run long, long, long term. There are some ministries we got involved for two or three years. They're good ministries, but they just didn't have what we were looking for, that DNA that matched our values.
MART GREEN:So the third one would be the lust of the flesh, and that's our pleasures. God gave us our sexuality. He gave us food. He gave us the pleasures of life. Satan just tries to trick us with those things, and that's the only three tricks he has: lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, pride of life.
MART GREEN:Everything comes under those three. But what do I want in that one? What do I want when it's the lust of the eyes? That would be somebody with integrity. Do they live a life of integrity?
MART GREEN:Do they do the same thing in front of people as they do behind the scenes? That's the G, H, and I. If people have generosity, people and the ministry itself, a ministry can have those characteristics. It's usually because of the people, generosity, humility, integrity. Then we're probably going to be running with that for a long, long time, and we've been running with one hope for twenty seven years because we saw generosity, we saw humility and integrity, and of course, I've got to challenge myself to be more generous, more humility and integrity.
MART GREEN:Don't So know we'll figure it I've got to portray those same characteristics.
ROB HOSKINS:Yeah. And, man, have I seen that in your life, Mart, over these twenty seven years where we've been friends? And I would say the greatest gift the Green family has ever given me, I say this to my kids, my wife, our team at Wine Hope, is our friendship. Our friendship is more valuable than you as a generosity partner. Yes, absolutely love it, but more than that, it's that deep trusted friend.
ROB HOSKINS:And I think that's the way the kingdom should work, right? And it's just you've added so much value to my life. And I just think that's such a beautiful picture of how ministry can work so well between it. So it's not seeing, you know, a donor as an ATM. Not seeing them as it's a true deep partnership.
ROB HOSKINS:And I think you've modeled that as well in two ways. I sort of want go two ways with this now. You're triggering me here on on so many things because we have twenty seven years of relationships to play off of. But there's been some initiatives that actually your family has has started yourself because along the journey of souls and bible, you saw some gaps. You you you saw some things from the seat you were sitting sitting in as a generosity partner that just didn't make sense.
ROB HOSKINS:And I've seen you do that several times, but probably the biggest project that you personally sort of initiated on behalf of the family, they voted on it, it was a green marble, but was just the whole state of translation. So so tell us a little bit about where you see a gap in giving, and as a as a generosity partner you go, man, God's actually calling me. And so now are you a generosity partner? Are you a ministry leader? The answer is yes, right?
ROB HOSKINS:Mean, tell us a little bit about that, where you saw a gap, particularly in the translation space, and stepped in.
MART GREEN:Yeah. I had an unusual experience in 1998 where I felt like the Lord put on my heart that someday there'd be a project so big that no ministry could do it by themselves. They'd come together. No donor could do it by themselves. They'd come together, and both of those groups would come together.
MART GREEN:Then in 2010, when I was down in Guatemala, I just felt like the Lord said to us to eradicate Bible poverty. What if you brought resource partners and ministry partners all together to the table and discussed this issue of 02/1950? 2150 was the year the last Bible translation was gonna start on planet earth. Now, most people don't know, but there's 6,000 vital languages on planet earth, and so about a third of those at that time didn't even have a translation started. Another third were already in process, so it was like, Man, this is a long, hard job.
MART GREEN:I'm not gonna be alive in 02/1950, I don't think, And so what could we do in our lifetime? So we got 11 CEOs and five resource partners. We have met every month basically for those first ten years to say, what could we do
ROB HOSKINS:stop right there. How many years?
MART GREEN:Ten years. Every month? Every month. Flew to Dallas Airport, C21, the largest animal club in the country, meet, to do what we just talked about earlier: build that relationship, build trust. Could we do So what
ROB HOSKINS:you're saying is building trust is hard and takes a lot of time?
MART GREEN:Yeah. Say noise attacks at the point of unity. So that's the reason my marriage is hard. That's why marriage is The most unified thing we have on planet earth is a marriage. Satan shows up.
MART GREEN:Anytime you try to unify something God tells us in John seventeen twenty one, When we become one, the world will know who Jesus is, right? And so how do we do that together? And so Satan attacks us.
ROB HOSKINS:So you bring together all these CEOs. I was in the Bible Agency. Was one of the chairman for the forum, and we've been trying for years to do sort of what I call unity for the sake of unity. Like, let's just get along, right? Let's just make sure that the right hand knows what the left hand's doing.
ROB HOSKINS:You're going, no, no, no, no. You gotta do better than that. We're need to do more than that. We can't wait till 2150. Like, we got we got we got to shorten this gap.
ROB HOSKINS:So you you pull together the these CEOs and you start building trust between them and sort of jump to the end of how that initiative that you and some other generosity partners coming together, what difference has that made, like in the big scope of the Bible translation?
MART GREEN:Yeah. The big deal is we set a goal of 02/1933. All translation won't be done, but everybody will have some Scripture by 02/1933. We hit our goal, we're still trying to get it there. We're about 02/1944.
MART GREEN:We've gone from 2,150 to about 2,044, so the next ten years we've to get twenty years worth of work We believe in 02/1933, 95% of this world will have the full Bible, Old and New Testament. 99.96% will have at least the New Testament, and that last point 04% will have at least the first 25 chapters started. So it's called an all access goal. That's the operational engine. Once we had the operation engine going, we thought, Well, let's go to the resource partners and see.
MART GREEN:Now, that's the hardest thing, as we talked about earlier. I'm asking 11 ministries to bring their best donors to a gathering.
ROB HOSKINS:To share their donors again.
MART GREEN:To share their donors now, so that's scary if you take a certain type of mentality, which is So the normal we bring those together, and it's been phenomenal to see what happens to resource partners when they say, Oh, you're knocking out duplication. You're working together. You're sharing tools. All the stuff that they want as a resource partner because they're generous. Now they're seeing generosity being played out among 11 players.
MART GREEN:So it's been phenomenal to see the resource partners step up and say, If you guys will partner together, we'll make sure. Because obviously, it's gonna cost more money. Yeah. We had $2,001.50 to get all funded. Now we've get funded by 2,033.
MART GREEN:So if we're gonna ask the ministries to step up, we as resource partners, now it's our turn to step up to make sure the car has enough gas to keep going.
ROB HOSKINS:My goodness. I mean, just such a wonderful tangible way to see like where you as a family are so passionate about something, and yet just through the principles that really had been working through your own life and through the life of your family, you're able to make a massive difference in the kingdom to see this translation gap, eradicating Bible poverty. Actually, not be for a hundred years from now, but within our lifetime, that's just an incredible story of these principles being applied to make a major difference and an impact. Now, that's the really good side of the story. Like, I want I want people to hear though, like, what are some of the greatest challenges you have in ministries actually coming together and working in unity?
ROB HOSKINS:I'm sure there's been massive I mean, if it was easy, it would have already been done. But somehow, unity's hard. What have been the biggest obstacles, either on the generosity side of partners or on the ministry side? Or were the ministry partners actually the greater challenge than the generosity part? I know the answer to that, but unpack that a little bit for us, if you would.
MART GREEN:Yeah, it's just human nature and natural. If you're a CEO of a ministry, you've got a board, and that board has certain things they want you to get done and what you have to do. You're there. So, for somebody to come in and ask you, hey. To partner with these people, that means you've got to see the value add.
MART GREEN:So then that comes back to whoever's organizing to say, well, why would you stop and give time to this? So we had to go and spend time with boards, actually, because boards was, why is my CEO once a month, why is he flying to Dallas? So you just have to be persistent, and we just kept showing up. So we didn't get everybody. We have 11 partners now, but we didn't in the beginning.
MART GREEN:We had three or four, so we had to start simple. And then we had some that wanted to play ball with us. Some said, No, don't want to. Don't want to. We said, Okay, that's fine.
MART GREEN:We'll keep doing what we're doing, and if someday it's a value add, you'll join the team. What's been neat is most everybody that we want is now part of the team because they see the value of it. It just takes time to build that trust, so
ROB HOSKINS:And it's interesting for me that, you you would think like, Man, it's hard to get these generosity partners together. But sort of go back to the original story, and how many of the generosity partners are still part of the story, and how many of those original CEOs are still around that table?
MART GREEN:Yeah. Well, guess I did good on the ministry part. I mean, the gospel patrons of the donor side because we still have the same five we started with are still with us. Here we are fourteen years later. And of course, every CEO has switched over time.
MART GREEN:Every one of them. Every one of them have changed to the original partners that we worked with because there's new CEOs, and they've been there seven years or ten years, but nobody's been there all fourteen years. So, yeah, then you have new CEOs. Okay. Is this new CEO gonna be wanting to collaborate?
MART GREEN:Because some people like to be the hero and the champion, and that's their skill set, and that's their bent. We have to hope that they have a collaborative. But the good news is it's kind of where the water's flowing now. In the beginning, we were swimming up the river. Now, it feels like we're swimming downriver,
ROB HOSKINS:and Sometimes we're always the children of the world are wiser than those of us in the kingdom. Right? Because we're in a collaborative economy. Yeah. And I think we're in this new era, I call it a new era of philanthropy, where we're seeing collaborative generosity and collective impact and the principles of that.
ROB HOSKINS:And I'll put that in the show notes as well, sort of principles of collective impact. Good. What's the operating system that you guys actually we won't get into that now, but I think it's a tremendous conceptual framework. Stanford and Harvard came up with it. They have five principles.
ROB HOSKINS:You added one called prayer, so people can look in the show notes and find out what that is. But just some I think you're right. The tide is moving in that direction, and we're almost crazy not to have a collaborative spirit if we're going to fulfill. And hey, I think Jesus talked about this in John 17, right? He was a little bit ahead of the world on saying, If we come together in unity, then the world will know who I am.
MART GREEN:Yeah, and Stanford is the one that came with a collective impact, which makes sense. By myself, I can do so much. Collectively, we can do more. It's just common sense, but they went back after ten years and they studied 70 different collective impacts. It was a long, long article, the very first sentence was, Collective impact is really, really hard.
MART GREEN:So it makes total sense, but saying the tags are point of unity, we're just humans
ROB HOSKINS:and Really hard. Everybody goes Yeah. I think,
MART GREEN:yeah, that's true.
ROB HOSKINS:Ten years every month and the Dallas Airport. Really, really hard. Yeah. I know that's been well. Man, thank you just for your commitment to that and these incredible values that your family.
ROB HOSKINS:So you've really unpacked for us sort of the how, but I love the story of sort of the why of your family, like the values that have kind of driven your family to really say, look, this is not our business. This is God's business. And I love to say that people look at your family and go, man, they're the most generous people, and you always have a line about you're actually probably not the most generous person that's been in your family lineage. So who was that, and what impact has her values had on who your family has become?
MART GREEN:Yeah. If you dial the clock about one hundred years ago, a young lady and her dad were pitching tents and doing revivals across the middle part of America. So they would go, they'd pitch a tent, they'd preach, they'd move the tent, they'd preach again. One night, a young man walked in, and he gave his heart to two people. He gave his heart to Jesus, and he gave his heart to that young lady who was on the stage that was preaching, and that wound up being my grandmother.
MART GREEN:That's Walter Marie Greene. When your parents are co pastors, there's really only three jobs you can have. You can be a pastor, a missionary, or an evangelist. That's pretty much what you want to be, and everything else is, I guess, whatever. Grandma and grandpa got five out of one, which was my dad.
MART GREEN:So he didn't get the preaching gift, but he got another gift that my grandmother had. My grandmother, even though they never had a 100 They had considered a 100 a megachurch back in her day. 100 people. In their day, a 100 people. She was very generous.
MART GREEN:If she had two dresses, sometimes she'd give a dress away. If they got an offering or she got a Christmas gift, she would say, What's that Christmas gift worth? It's worth $5 Well, then I need to pay 50¢ tithe. And so instead of trying to go pretax and post tax, she's adding her income, you know, just so she can pay tithes on. And my dad would say she'd sew little doilies, back in the day, and my grandpa, why are you selling those doilies?
MART GREEN:She says, well, I wanna give him the missions offering. I gave him the mission offering for us. She says, No, I want my own mission offering. Dad said, If nobody bought her dually, she bought it herself, just so she'd have a missions offering. That generous heart.
MART GREEN:So yeah, we say it's not the size of the gift, it's the size of the sacrifice. And so, when I asked my dad, one time we made our largest gift, and I said, Now, dad, have we all given grandma now? He says, No, no, no, no. We've always given out of our excess. My mom gave what she didn't have.
MART GREEN:And so, that's kind of where we get that
ROB HOSKINS:spirit powerful. Thank you, Mark. Thank you for all your family means to the kingdom and your leadership. And these principles are just so practical. Thank you.
ROB HOSKINS:Thank you, Rob. Thanks for joining me today. This episode was brought to you by One Hope, the organization where I have the privilege to serve serve and lead. At One Hope, we are passionate about affecting destiny by providing God's eternal word to all of the children and youth of the world. For more information about One Hope, visit 1hope.net.