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Doing Business with
The Lord Martin Clarke, a global businessman based in London, and an international director of the Full Gospel Businessmen's Fellowship International, shares how his Christian faith has made a difference to his priorities in life and the way he does business.
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 I
was born in the rough part Chelsea but I went to the Brompton Oratory
school and serve Mass every day as a boy. Once I left school, however,
I never went back to church. I still believed in God and knew what was
right and wrong but I had no idea that you could have a relationship
with Jesus.
I didn't get the grades to go to university, so I joined the Prudential and qualified as a chartered surveyor. I was always overdrawn and soon realised that you couldn't make money working for someone else, so I struck out on my own when I was 24. I decided to go into property. I had no capital to start off but I knew how to go about things. By the age of 28 I had made several million pounds I started making a lot of money and by the age of 28 I had made several million pounds. As time went on, however, I lost my innocence, as it's a very hard world out there and I became much less open in my dealings. It became an increasingly downward slope in the 80s. You would find even the established companies and institutions would be lying and not above board. The whole climate in which business operated changed. It became the survival of the fittest, almost a macho thing. You became determined that no one would get one over you. I got sucked into it all - and the whole lifestyle bit. It was all about where you lived, where you went on holiday, even your security system. You were measured as a person by what you achieved financially, which meant that you never had enough. What little faith I had, totally disappeared. Instead I got involved in fortune telling and numerology. Everything started to go wrong Then in 1991 everything started going wrong. My wife had a very public affair and I lost a lot of face. We divorced and I decided to leave the country. I went to China - which was beginning to open up and I went into the property business there and later into wine production. On a visit back to London I became friendly with a guy I met in a café. He turned out to be a well known photographer, Terence Donovan and we used to hang out a lot together. One time we were down in Southall looking for a curry when we were invited into a Salvation Army meeting by a very pretty girl. Everyone was singing and dancing and I was struck by how happy they all looked. Three weeks later Terence out of the blue committed suicide. I was devastated as I had never suspected that anything was wrong. Some time later the girl from the Salvation Army and two men came to my office and told me that I needed Jesus in my life. I told them I was a businessman and wasn't interested, but they started quoting the scripture from Jeremiah 29:11 telling me "the Lord plans to prosper you and not harm you.." I found myself listening and I was intrigued that such a pretty girl could really believe all this stuff. The girl, Shaneen, who's now my wife, was ultimately responsible for leading me the Lord. She encouraged me to go to a Full Gospel Businessmen's meeting in West London. The speaker was Charles Duke, the astronaut. He started talking about Jesus Christ and sharing his pictures of the moon. At the end he called me out of the audience and prayed with me, and I found myself praying in tongues and filled with the Holy Spirit. I went to Holy Trinity Brompton Church (an Anglican Church in Knightsbridge, Central London) and did an Alpha course and started attending there. I found my personal life began to gradually change as the Holy Spirit began to convict me about my lifestyle. I stopped sleeping around, and smoking and drinking too much and gave up visits to the horse races and gambling. Instead I started spending my time doing other things. Church without walls I met a man called Kurt Erikson, who is a pastor in Bethnal Green, and who has a "Church without walls" on Saturday mornings outside Westminster Cathedral, where he preaches the gospel and feeds the homeless. I reckoned this is what Jesus would be doing if he was around, so I joined him in his work in 1997-8 and got others I knew to help out too. There's real mixture of us from all kinds of backgrounds and anything from 30 to 150 guys on the streets come. We give people a cup of tea from the urn and few bits to eat and then we give the word. There are two circles of people. Those in the outer ring and those that are close. Over time you see people moving from the outer ring to the inner one, where they can hear better and receive prayer. Just meeting them helps me to get my life in perspective and I try not to miss it. To me this gathering is my real church. In the beginning a lot of my friends thought I had gone wacky because I stopped going to the casino and the race track and didn't want to get drunk or sleep around any more. But things have come full circle now and when they are in trouble they come round to see me for counselling and prayer. When you are in business you have all kinds of temptations Funnily enough when I became a Christian my business got worse. I'm sure it was the devil having a go at me. It was a real test of faith, but I know God allowed it, to see what my priorities were. When you are in business, you have all kinds of temptations and you need support if you are going to try and live the way Jesus wants us to. The Full Gospel Businessmen's Fellowship International organise evangelistic dinners but in Mayfair, through the FGBFI chapter I belong to, I decided to organise a more ongoing sharing group for businessmen. A year ago we began our monthly Monday evening meetings. Someone gives a talk on an issue and then we talk about it. Topics we look at cover things like pornography, honesty and integrity in business, and being faithful in marriage. Not everyone who comes is even a Christian, but they must get something from it because the numbers are going up. One guy even comes from Dublin to attend. The men are very open, particularly the young guys. They are so honest that they touch the hearts of the older men. We have all ages - from 23 to 75. Part of our discussion is also about what's happening in the business world and what as Christians we are being called to do. One man for example told us that his company were cooking the books and he didn't know what to do about it. It's important to trust God in everything I personally believe you should always make a stand in these kind of situations, even if it means losing your job, because God might be using this situation to move you on to something better. It is always so important to trust God in everything and believe He wants the best for you, whatever is going on around you. This can be very difficult, as it can get very rocky in business. I remember one time it was a Thursday and I needed £368,000 by the following Tuesday and there seemed to be no way I could get it. That weekend I really prayed and surrendered the whole thing to God, as there would have been a lot of very serious consequences if the deal hadn't gone through. On the Tuesday itself I received £376,000 - £8000 more than I needed, until I realised I'd forgotten to budget for the lawyer's fee, which was £8000. Little incidents like that help me to realise that God is in charge. I believe God has provided for me many times. But I believe it is also my responsibility not to do anything unworthy of God and I have taken business losses rather than do something that I consider not right. I am always very encouraged by the story in Exodus when the Israelites were being pursued by Pharaoh's chariots and found themselves at the Red Sea, with no way forward and no way back. They were facing death. It was the end. But God found a way out. And I have found that to be true in my life, if stand on the Word and on God's promises. Sometimes you can delude yourself Sometimes though you can delude yourself. I remember once asking God whether I should sign this contract for £22million or not. I felt the Lord say to me "I am with you", so I signed. It turned out to be the wrong thing, but when I thought about it afterwards, God hadn't said "this is a good deal", he had just said, "I am with you", which he was, and if I'm honest, it was my fl esh that wanted to sign the contract. I really do my best to go to God with all my decisions, however, and I always pray before I go to bed. Often I fi nd when I go to sleep with a problem, I wake up with the solution. I talk to God all day and although it sounds crazy I am always asking him what to do and I share my plans with him. In Proverbs 3.5 it says "Trust in the Lord and do not lean on your own understanding. Acknowledge him in all your ways and he will direct your paths." I have a heart for the underdog I do believe God has called me to be a businessman and to make money so I can support God's work, and I can only give away what I have got. Everything in the Church needs financing so you can't escape the issue of money. But you also have to give yourself to people too, which is why I enjoy being with the homeless. For me, the Church is here. I suppose I have a heart for the underdog because maybe I should have gone to prison for some of the things I've done in my life, and if I hadn't had the breaks I had, it could be me in their situation. When I gave my life to the Lord and got involved with FGBMI my mother thought I had joined a cult, and that I had turned my back on my Catholic background. It's only recently that I was given a book about the Catholic Charismatic Renewal and I realised that what I've experienced is part of the Catholic Church too and I don't have to reject my past to be a Christian. It's all a process and I will have to see where God leads me now.
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