The storm over the tax benefits of making charitable donations brings into sharp focus the question of generosity – are donations generous only to the extent to which donors derive no material benefit for themselves?

Generosity may always be difficult to talk about, but periods of economic recession make it especially challenging. Yet this is precisely when the needs of the needy are most acute. It is of some encouragement, therefore, that although overall giving declines in recessions, giving from people of faith increases.

Recent research also reveals that the giving of money and time (volunteering) by religious people is disproportionately high, not only to religious charities but to non-religious ones. Should, therefore, the mounting anti-religious movement succeed, the charity sector would implode.

The fact that this movement shows no sign of success globally provides no room for complacency. While the giving level of the 'faithful' is relatively high, its average is below the tenth prescribed in the Hebrew Scriptures. And the fact that giving is inversely related to income – the poor give proportionately more than the rich – means there is vast disposable income amongst the devout that is withheld from charitable causes.

Although fundraising is becoming increasingly professionalized, there are no clever formulas that can liberate this wealth. Giving is not about equations and intensives. Nor is it about being confronted with need, as the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus in Luke's Gospel illustrates. It is ultimately – as demonstrated in Luke's contrasting accounts of the encounters of the rich young ruler and Zacchaeus with Jesus – about a spontaneous response to the grace of a lavishly generous God.

In Cape Town in 2010, this response inspired the launch of a campaign to encourage a global culture of Christian generosity. The Global Generosity Network is now establishing resources and local networks, helped by leading entrepreneurs.

Such entrepreneurs understand that wealth distribution relies on wealth creation – their business thinking and practical skills generates wealth for the common good. But they want to engage their hearts, not just their head and hands. They therefore not only invest in, but give to, social causes, motivated by encounters with a self-giving God who demands no return.

Their example demonstrates that thrift and generosity go together. It also shows that liberating generosity is not only about liberating funds, nor even about liberating others, but about our own liberation. The heart of the matter is the matter of the heart.

Peter Heslam

Since his untimely death, so many tributes to the co-founder of Apple have poured in from across the world that the internet has buckled under the weight of the words 'Steve Jobs'. It is a measure of the depth and breadth of his impact.

One thing in particular accounts for that impact: Jobs' foresight and vision in anticipating, and seeking to fulfil, people's needs and desires. This was not the result of the superior market research and technology consultancy; he disdained such services because he sought to generate new markets and products: 'You've got to start with the customer experience and work back to the technology, not the other way around'.

This reverse progression is made difficult by the fact that most potential customers find it hard to articulate their needs and desires - either because they cannot imagine solutions or because they are looking for them in the wrong place. The generation that initially dismissed personal computers, mobile phones and emails as unnecessary is now the generation that cannot live without them. As Henry Ford is attributed with saying: 'If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would've said "a faster horse"'. Steve Jobs, arguably Ford's successor as the world's greatest entrepreneur, put it more even more succinctly: 'A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them'. He used ice hockey to make his point: 'I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.'

Jobs was no saint. His employees often found him arrogant, impolite and mercurial. Following complaints about his 'Management by Frightening' technique, he was ousted from the leadership of his company, only to return years later. He has also been criticised for bequeathing products to the world that encourage individualism, hedonism and social disintegration.

Peter Heslam

Diarrhoea and pneumonia are the biggest cause of death in children worldwide. The recent decision of the leading pharmaceutical company, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), to radically reduce the cost of vaccinations against these diseases in low-income countries is welcome to all fair-minded people. The same is true of the company's commitment to ensuring that the world's first malaria vaccine, which GSK is close to creating, will be sold in such countries for little more than the cost price.

The company's rationale for taking these decisions, as articulated in a recent article in The Times by its CEO Andrew Witty, is worthy of consideration. Witty admits to having a vested interest in immunisation because of the profit it delivers. But profit, he points out, is important for three reasons: it makes a healthy return to the company's shareholders; delivers sustainable financial growth to invest in research into new drugs and vaccines; and provides jobs for workers. To make and sustain such profits, Witty contends, the company's operations need to be 'in step with society and its expectations'.

Two aspects of this are particularly striking. First is the emphasis on achieving a 'healthy' return and 'sustainable' financial growth. It stands in stark contrast to the 'maximization' of returns and growth that is often taken to be the purpose of business, by business proponents and detractors alike.

Second is the emphasis on the generation of profits, jobs, and beneficial products; and on the need to win trust. These things are so fundamental to the role of business in society that they only need spelling out in a culture that, while deeply consumerist, is also deeply cynical and suspicious towards business. For they have always been indispensible to all viable companies.

They thereby act as a reminder that we live in a moral universe in which all spheres of society – including business – are called to serve the common good. Because of this, no commercial enterprise can expect to be unaffected in the long-term by its lack of ethical integrity – a lesson some banks have recently discovered to their cost. Amongst those things that are required, as much of companies as of any other social sphere, are three basics highlighted by an ancient Hebrew prophet: justice, kindness and humility (Micah 6.8). With their appeal to moral imagination, these timeless principles stand ready for adoption by all entrepreneurial companies, not only those in whose hands lies the fate of millions of children.

Peter Heslam

'Happy New Year!' The use of this phrase at the start of a new year reflects a secret about human beings – we crave happiness. However divergent our aims, the pursuit of happiness is common to us all.

This year, our pursuit of that goal takes place during commemorations across the English-speaking world to mark the fourth centennial of the King James Bible. The impact of that translation on the culture, language and beliefs of the Anglophone world is of such magnitude that the celebrations extend far beyond the religious sphere. They are a reminder that the Bible is today, as over the past 400 years, the world's best-selling book.

So does the world's most popular book have anything to say about the world's most popular pursuit? Indeed it does, but the Bible's insights on happiness call for a revision of today's standard version, which is deeply hedonistic. One such insight is that true happiness comes not through material prosperity, power or pleasure but from the practice of wisdom. Words from the King James translation set the tone: 'Happy is the man that findeth wisdom…for the merchandise of it is better than silver, and the gain thereof than fine gold' (Proverbs 3.13-14).

A master of 'merchandise' who grasped some of this is John Spedan Lewis (1885-1963), the founder of the John Lewis Partnership who has been polled Britain's greatest business leader. Although not outwardly religious, his admiration for Quakers influenced his decision to relinquish his claim to an income greater than that of his entire workforce and to introduce a profit-sharing scheme allowing employees to become partners.

Without external shareholders, this 'experiment in industrial democracy', as Lewis called it, now has 70,000 partners owning almost 300 stores. They subscribe to a constitution embodying his vision that 'the Partnership's ultimate purpose is the happiness of all its members'. Such happiness, Lewis explained, is to be understood 'in the broadest sense of that word' and requires 'a sense of all-round fairness, a sense of all-pervading justice'.

Politicians from left and right are proposing the John Lewis Partnership as a model for public service provision. They are also emphasising the importance of happiness. Although unable to offer detailed policy prescriptions, the practical wisdom of scripture, not lost in translation, offers direction. The bible resembles a compass, rather than roadmap. But on a journey through uncharted territory, that is exactly what you need.

Peter Heslam

'Tis the season to be jolly. Or is it? According to the debt counselling agency, Christians Against Poverty (CAP), 91% of UK residents are worried about the cost of Christmas. But CAP also reports that almost 1500 of its clients are looking forward to the festivities because they can fund them from their savings, CAP having operated as a savings bank.

The term 'savings bank' conjures up antiquated images of piggy banks and National Savings Certificates. But globally the rapid rise of microfinance, which relies on savings habits, is a development success story. And in many low-income countries, the chief lenders to small- and medium-sized enterprises are members of the World Savings Bank Institute (WSBI).

At a summit held earlier this year to celebrate the bicentenary of the global savings bank movement, senior banking figures, including representatives of the WSBI, paid respect to the person they revere as the movement's founder: Henry Duncan (1774-1846), a church minister in a remote Scottish village.

On arriving in Ruthwell parish, Duncan was so shocked by the poverty he encountered that he imported Indian corn to sell at cost price. But realising this was only a temporary solution, he added 'social entrepreneurship' to his pastoral duties, convinced that the poor are best served when they are helped to help themselves. He created jobs for women by importing flax for spinning and weaving. And in 1810, in a tiny cottage, he founded of a savings bank.

The scheme caught on in other villages as Duncan, who was gaining a reputation as a creative genius, used a newspaper he had founded to promote it. Spreading rapidly throughout the UK and beyond, it triggered a locally-based financial revolution. Its impact is reflected in the name of the Grameen Bank, the world's largest microfinance institution, which was launched in Bangladesh by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Muhammad Yunus: Grameen means 'village'.

In the wake of a financial crisis caused, in part, by the rich encouraging the poor to borrow beyond their means, Duncan's vision has renewed appeal. In his discovery that the most effective way to tackle poverty is from the bottom up, using a local, relational, people-orientated strategy, lies the genius of savings banks. Perhaps his scheme can suggest alternative banking and development models for our time. If so, they will eventually do much more than put the sparkle back into Christmas.

Peter Heslam

The eradication of poverty. That was the vision of the United Nations at the turn of the millennium. As if that wasn’t ambitious enough, it added seven more development objectives, ranging from universal primary education to environmental sustainability. The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), to be achieved by 2015, were subsequently adopted by all 192 member countries.

With only five years left to go, are we on course to achieve them? The UN recently held a summit to address this question. Delegates took stock of the devastating impact of the global economic crisis, while cautiously noting areas of progress. The one goal about which they were overwhelmingly optimistic was the first one – to halve by 2015 the proportion of people who in 1990 had an income of less than $1 per day.

Good news like this can prompt odes to the effectiveness of international aid. But we need to note the key reason this target may be met: the economic growth of China and India. When such growth is looked at from the bottom up, the real change makers in overcoming poverty turn out to be commercial entrepreneurs, even though the infrastructural improvements of aid programmes can be crucial to their success.

This Sunday the date is 10-10-10. Development organizations around the world are marking the day by stepping up their advocacy for greater economic justice. Spearheading the campaign is a global coalition of activists called Micah Challenge, which is mobilizing millions of people around the world to take action to help the poor.

The key action Micah Challenge is calling for on Sunday is prayer. But surely that’s no strategy for change, as its effectiveness can’t be measured! True enough, but today’s generation of believers has prayed against fierce injustices that have eventually crumbled before their eyes, the tyrannies of fascism, communism and apartheid included. No causal link can ever be proven, of course, and historians are right to document the range of observable factors involved.

Likewise, many agents will be involved in eliminating poverty. But it is time to acknowledge the leading role that will be played by those most often overlooked - the world’s entrepreneurs. Without them, there are few prospects for a life of dignity for the millions trapped in poverty. Even if we regard their release more as a matter of aid, rather than of enterprise, there is no aid without the wealth creators. Perhaps they deserve a mention in prayers for the poor.

Peter Heslam

If it is true that the motto of a traditionalist is 'some change is good but no change is even better', there are few traditionalists in the UK at the moment. While the desire for change in the run up to the general election may not be as palpable as it was before the US presidential election in 2008, it is rising sharply.

But is pinning such hope on politics justified? Until recently, this question was anathema to politicians, many of whom felt that an air of self-importance was crucial to winning the confidence of voters.

Things are different now. The economic crisis, which has left gaping holes in public finances, huge budget deficits and rapidly escalating national debts, has had a sobering effect on western politicians. It has driven a consensus amongst many of them, including Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat leaders in the UK, that a top priority is the reduction of the structural deficit and that cuts in government spending is the best way to achieve this.

As a result of all this, voluntary associations, charities, NGOs, businesses and faith communities are set to become the true agents of change in western societies, rather than professional politicians.

Faith groups in particular are aware of the coming shift. Recent statements by Faithworks, and by the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, make it clear that voters should not to be seduced into thinking that Government is a social cure-all.

Judging by their recent interviews and speeches, it won't be politicians that turn out to be the seducers. All three candidates to become British Prime Minister are repeating the message that real change needs to come from the bottom up, where in communities across the country it is voluntary associations, driven by a sense of purpose, that see lives transformed.

But resisting a seduction is not the same as exercising mistrust. Indeed, representative democracy, however inadequate, is something that should inspire our trust. Viewed historically and globally, it is a rare achievement, made possible only through the struggle of previous generations. And it embodies many of the same ideals that are prized by voluntary organizations, such as liberty, justice and responsibility, all of which are central to scriptural traditions.

At a time when most of the world's poor live under regimes in which the abrogation of these principles is flaunted, this is not the time to lose faith in democracy. But it is time to do democracy differently.

Peter Heslam

As the new academic year gets underway at universities and colleges, what are the prospects for students heading for a career in business? The proverbial 'milk round', when big companies visit universities to recruit the most promising finalists, is in as steep decline as perceptions of the integrity of business. In the UK, trust in business leaders has slumped to just above that of trust in politicians at only six per cent of the population.

But towards the end of last term at Harvard, in the world's most renowned business school, some students began to address this mistrust head on. With help from two professors, they created an MBA oath that committed swearers to eight pledges, such as shunning decisions that 'advance my own narrow ambitions but harm the enterprise and the people it serves'.

On circulating the oath, the students hoped 100 fellow MBA finalists would sign it. To their surprise, more than half of them did (over 400). Since then, requests to use the oath have poured in from scores of business schools worldwide and the number of signatories has grown exponentially. As the leader of the initiative, Max Anderson, a former theology student, put it: 'Our inbox just exploded'.

Not all responses have been so enthusiastic. Some have dismissed it as naïve idealism that will dissipate as soon as the oath-takers are confronted with the fiduciary duty of managers to maximize profits for shareholders. Whatever the truth of such criticism, the oath represents an attempt to elevate business to the status of a profession and there are good reasons why this ought to be welcomed.

First among these is the notion of calling. In the monastic communities that birthed the universities, the divine call (vocatio) required a human response (professio) that went beyond a profession of faith to include a commitment to excellence in areas of study that would serve humanity. Thus emerged the non-clerical 'professions', such as law and medicine, each with norms focused on service. Ironically, however, the one area of expertise on which all the others relied – wealth creation – failed to be regarded as a proper calling.

In popular perceptions ever since, business has languished as a sphere for amateurs in which service of self, rather than of others, is the ruling norm. While this is reflected in the use made of MBA graduates as scapegoats for the economic crisis, it is heartening that some of them are keen to embrace business as a professional vocation, with all its ethical implications.

Peter Heslam

It was me. That's what a bright, young, Eton- and Oxford-educated former banker called Tetsuya Ishikawa, who spent seven years at the forefront of the credit markets, admits about himself. During a banking career within some of the world's major banks, he structured and sold subprime securities to global investors. Now he confesses all in the form of a novel that is taking the bestseller lists by storm.

The title of his book, How I Caused the Credit Crunch, is as intriguing as its contents. Too often during the current financial crisis the emphasis has been on technical problems of risk management, and on what technical fixes now need to be imposed. Ishikawa's book provides, in contrast, a vivid reminder that financial markets are not the workings of cold mechanical forces, but of warm flesh and blood. Reflecting human choices, they have innate moral dimensions.

What is true of financial markets holds true for the rest of the economy. The attempt to understand and to operate in markets through the suspension of moral judgement forces economics and business into a moral vacuum that eventually suffocates them. Because they are essentially about relationships, markets require sound morals to survive. The credit crunch is as much a wake up call to the destructiveness that can occur when morals go wrong as 9/11 was to the destructiveness that can occur when religion goes wrong.

But attempts to use bad morals as an excuse to eliminate moral responsibility from markets – whether through the imposition of secular worldviews or of mechanical fixes - will be as misguided and counterproductive as the attempt to use examples of bad religion as an excuse to banish religion from public. For most people in the world, religion is the magnetic field in which they set their moral compass. It is the context in which they perceive and pursue visions of the common good, stimulated by the sense of personal moral responsibility that religion tends to engender.

This is what inspired Mel Gibson to ask the camera crew of his blockbuster The Passion to film his hand as that of the centurion holding the nails that were driven through Jesus' wrists. Gibson's act reflects a mindset Ishikawa's book can help stimulate. For while his spotlight is on bankers, Ishikawa insists that ‘we are all responsible in our small way' and that ‘the arrogance of the [banking] industry has gone out. There is a greater sense of humility'. Were we all to embrace such humility, the green shoots of recovery would be sooner to appear.

Peter Heslam

When Jeff Skoll became the first full-time employee and president of eBay, he had two failed businesses behind him. But he wrote a business plan that led this start-up company to legendary success. It was so successful, in fact, that when he cashed out a portion of the company, he joined the ranks of the world's billionaires.

He could be spending the rest of his life on golf courses, private jets and luxury yachts. Instead, he has founded Participant Media, a company that has funded Oscar-winning feature films and documentaries that promote social values; and the Skoll Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, which is behind the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at the Saïd Business School at Oxford University.

This week, the Skoll Centre has been hosting its annual Skoll World Forum for around 800 of the world's leading social entrepreneurs from 65 countries. Prominent figures from the public, academic, finance, corporate and policy sectors have engaged with them in debates, discussions and workshops focused on accelerating, innovating and scaling market-based solutions to some of the world's most pressing social issues.

The climax of the 3-day Forum is the giving of the Skoll Foundation Awards. This year's recipients included a young woman called Soraya Salti. She left a job in business consultancy to join INJAZ al-Arab, the only education programme in the Arab world that helps students learn entrepreneurship and life skills as part of their school education.

Another awardee, Gary White, is the founder of WaterPartners International. Over twenty years ago in Guatemala, he watched a young girl carry contaminated water back to her shack alongside a stream of open sewage. At that moment he decided to dedicate his life to helping poor people gain access to safe drinking water but in a way that was commercially viable.

Similar stories of vision, passion, risk and adventure have poured forth, not only from the podium but in hundreds of hushed but animated twilight conversations in darkened streets and college precincts. It is as if the dreaming spires above have born silent testimony to the enduring values of stewardship and responsibility that put such things as entrepreneurial skills and a cup of clean water in the hands of a poor child.

For the faith that inspired those spires teaches us that the hands that receive them are Christ's own. It's the kind of faith that inspires business plans for start-ups from people who have failed more than once in business but who have a social conscience. It can even help lift the global economy from its knees.

Peter Heslam