In middle school, Alex and Peter launched their first entrepreneurial enterprise, a little neighborhood project called “Dirt Cheap Lawn Care.”

After their ninth grade summer, they were both over it, but for different reasons.

Alex saw his work as a necessary evil, little more than a means to score some cash to go to the arcade, see the occasional movie, and upgrade his wardrobe from his mom’s unrelenting poor choices.

The term salesmanship often conjures up sleazy connotations. Its trademark cliche is the used car salesman—the living embodiment of lies, coercion and manipulation.

Salesmanship should be nothing like this. Christian businesses rely on sales, and sales rely on salesmanship. So I’d like to help you take the idea of salesmanship captive to obey Christ by putting it into a biblical category.

I go into this in depth in my book Copywriting for Christians: How to sell without selling your soul. But here, I’d like to give you the central idea. It can be summarized in just three words…

I get this question a lot; “What does it mean to build a business upon your Christian values?”

Christian small business people often wrestle with how to integrate their faith life into their business life. With nearly every endeavor, we encounter all sorts of people and circumstances that may seem to blur the lines between our Christian faith walk and the ways of the world.