Discipleship of the Balance Sheet

Host Justin Forman sits down with Aimee Minnich, Co-Founder of Impact Foundation, for a conversation that traces the shift from writing checks to deploying capital as an act of discipleship.

Aimee Minnich says the donor-advised fund era taught a generation of Christians how to give money away. It didn't teach them how to invest it. Nearly two decades into building one of the fastest-growing platforms for faith-driven capital, she's convinced the next chapter of generosity isn't about writing bigger checks — it's about learning a whole new language.

Aimee co-founded Impact Foundation with her husband Jeff, a platform that lets donor-advised fund holders move beyond grants and deploy capital into impact investments — from foster care housing initiatives to entrepreneurs across the developing world. Trained as a lawyer with a philosophy degree, she has spent nearly two decades at the intersection of faith, generosity, and capital markets, helping shape the modern infrastructure of Christian giving.

Key Topics:

• The founding story of Impact Foundation and the "three customers" test that shaped it
  
  
• Why $1.4 trillion sitting in donor-advised funds and private foundations represents an untapped opportunity
  
  
• The "ring around the neck" — why deployed-but-undeployed capital creates spiritual tension
  
  
• Cross-cultural investing and why proximity changes how we steward capital
  
  
• A foster care housing initiative blending public, private, and nonprofit capital
  
  
• Why institutional-scale capital, not just individual deals, is the next frontier
  
  
• The call for a modern "discipleship of the balance sheet"
  
  
  

For investors who've mastered the discipline of giving but feel stuck when it comes to deploying capital with purpose, this conversation offers both a framework and an invitation to think differently about the whole balance sheet, not just the checkbook.

Watch the full episode on YouTube or continue to stream audio on your favorite podcast platform.

What Comes After You Win

Scott Highmark has spent two decades watching high achievers reach the very top of their field — competitively great, by any definition — and arrive there lonely. That question sits underneath this month's Marks on the Market, too: what does a market pricing in near-5% rates, a resilient jobs report, and an AI-fueled earnings boom actually ask of the people stewarding capital through it?

Hosts Richard Cunningham and Luke Roush sit down with Scott Highmark, Co-Founder, President & Principal of Mosaic Family Wealth in St. Louis, for a conversation that moves from Fed policy and AI valuations to the framework behind his new book, The Significance Pyramid — out September 16th.

Key Topics:

• Whether "higher for longer" rates are a new normal or just a return to historical normal
• Reading the August jobs report and earnings data for signs of real economic resilience
• The AI investment cycle — "pricing in magic," and whether we're in the third inning or the seventh
• Overlooked risks behind the AI boom: grid capacity, commodity shocks, and geopolitical black swans
• Why the financial advisor's role is shifting from information access to emotional and spiritual guidance
• Scott Highmark's new book, The Significance Pyramid, and the four dimensions of true wealth
• Ephesians 2:10 and what it means to align time, talent, and treasure with a meaningful pursuit

For investors trying to make sense of a market that feels both historically normal and unusually uncertain, this conversation offers something rarer than a hot take — a way to hold market discipline and soul-level purpose in the same hand.

When Dr. Ola Brown's 12-year-old sister needed emergency care in Nigeria, the nearest air ambulance was seven hours away, in South Africa. The family lost her. Dr. Brown made a promise to God that day — and kept it, building an air ambulance service that would go on to serve over 40 African countries and fly more than 5,000 emergency requests a year.

Dr. Ola Brown is a British-Nigerian medical doctor turned investor, and the Founder of HealthCap Africa, a venture capital and infrastructure fund investing in healthtech and fintech across the continent. After founding and scaling Flying Doctors Nigeria, she moved into investing — raising her first fund from 12 Nigerian families before launching HealthCap in 2020, with MasterCard anchoring the fund's first close. She now sits at the intersection of medicine, finance, and faith, building a thesis around two sectors she believes are central to Africa's future: healthcare and financial services.

Key Topics:

• The origin story behind Flying Doctors Nigeria — and the personal loss that started it
• Why healthcare is one of the most inflation-resistant, counter-cyclical sectors to invest in
• Nigeria's population trajectory and what it means for global investors
• Portfolio spotlights: MDaaS Diagnostics and InstantRad's AI-powered radiology
• Reframing "health and wealth" away from prosperity-gospel connotations
• What Jesus's healing ministry teaches about business as a tool for the gospel
• Why West African entrepreneurial culture may be closer to America's than Europe's

For investors weighing whether God might be calling them into African markets, this conversation offers something rare: a data-backed macro case paired with a deeply personal, faith-rooted why. Dr. Brown makes the case that comparative advantage, population growth, and Kingdom impact aren't competing priorities — they're the same opportunity.

Watch the full episode on YouTube or continue to stream audio on your favorite podcast platform.

Host Henry Kaestner sits down with Matthew Rohrs, leader of Synapis, to explore one of the most overlooked opportunities in frontier-market investing: the "missing middle" — businesses too large for microfinance but too small (or too early) to attract private equity and venture capital. Matthew shares how Synapis has spent over a decade training and accelerating entrepreneurs across Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda, and why this segment drives up to 70% of job creation in emerging economies.

This episode digs into Synapis's Kingdom Business Framework — a three-part model built around relationship with God, stewardship, and impact — and unpacks why African entrepreneurs are often more naturally integrated in their faith and business than their Western counterparts. Matthew and Henry also discuss the concept of "evangelical Gnosticism," the sacred-secular divide that shapes how Christians in the West think about work versus how it's lived out in markets like Kenya, where 72% of Synapis alumni report at least one employee coming to faith through their company.

Listeners will hear real stories of scale and impact, including Kickwetu Flowers — a 30-acre flower export business near Mount Kenya that has funded clean water boreholes, a soccer program for at-risk youth, and a weekly kitchen feeding 300 people — all funded from business profits, not donations.

Key Topics:

• Defining the "missing middle": the investment gap between microfinance and institutional capital
• Synapis's Kingdom Business Framework: relationship, stewardship, and impact
• Why 72% of Synapis alumni have seen an employee come to faith through their business
• "Evangelical Gnosticism" and the sacred-secular divide in Western business thinking
• Case study: Kickwetu Flowers and community-funded clean water, youth programs, and feeding initiatives
• The Forge Network: a global collaborative of entrepreneurs, accelerators, and investors

Notable Quotes:

"We serve gazelles more commonly than seeking unicorns." - Matthew Rohrs

"72% of our alumni report that at least one person's come to faith in Christ through their company." - Matthew Rohrs

"Business is part of the kingdom of God. It's the most scalable way to solve these problems." - Matthew Rohrs

Record Highs, Negative Gas Prices, and the Discipline Dividend

Host Richard Cunningham sits down with co-host Luke Roush and returning guest Jordan Strebeck of Fortress Energy Partners for a conversation that starts at the S&P 500's all-time high and ends at a Permian Basin wellhead where operators are paying to get rid of their own natural gas.

The numbers alone are worth the listen: four hyperscalers on pace for more than $700 billion in AI infrastructure spending this year, an IPO market that just absorbed the world's largest offering, and a global oil supply chain that's quietly burned through 400 million barrels of inventory since February. Jordan brings the view from the ground in Midland, Texas — where the domestic shale industry is showing more capital discipline than anyone expected, even as Middle East conflict keeps rewriting the energy math in real time.

Key Topics:

• Markets hitting record highs despite tariffs, an unresolved Middle East conflict, and zero rate cuts in 2026
• The AI CapEx arms race: how Wall Street is starting to separate real cash-flow return from spend for spend's sake
• What SpaceX's blockbuster IPO signals for Anthropic and the rest of the 2026 IPO pipeline
• 1,500 unicorns and counting — why so many private companies are stuck waiting to go public
• Inside the Permian Basin: negative natural gas prices, the AI power crunch, and why the U.S. needs more of everything — nuclear, gas, solar, and wind
• What 400 million barrels of drawn-down global oil inventory means for prices over the next five years
• A closing word on presence, parenting, and what it means to steward the time we're given

This episode is a masterclass in reading past the headline number — whether that's an index level, an IPO valuation, or a barrel price — to the stewardship question underneath it. For faith-driven investors trying to separate signal from noise in a genuinely strange market, this is a conversation worth sitting with.

Watch the full episode on YouTube or continue to stream audio on your favorite podcast platform.

Host Richard Cunningham welcomes co-host John Coleman for July's Marks on the Market, joined by two veteran venture investors: Phil Jung, who helps lead the venture investing business at Sovereign's Capital, and Mark Phillips, co-founder and managing partner at Eleven Tribes Ventures. The panel digs into a historic first half of 2026 for venture capital, the "barbell" strategy reshaping early-stage investing, and why faith-driven investors need to understand both the opportunity and the constraints of the AI boom.

Phil and Mark bring an early-stage, seed-focused lens shaped by operator-led, vertically focused founders — from wire harnessing to waste management — while John Coleman zooms out to the macro picture: record public market concentration, a $725 billion capex commitment from the hyperscalers, and the possibility that this technological shift could be ten times bigger and ten times faster than the Industrial Revolution. The conversation closes, as always, with reflections on Scripture and what it means to build — and rest — under God's sovereignty in the middle of historic disruption.

Key Topics:

• A record-breaking first half of 2026: $412 billion invested in venture capital, more than all of 2025 combined
• The "barbell" approach to early-stage investing: mega AI valuations on one end, capital-efficient vertical AI solutions on the other
• Why physical products, deep tech, and hard tech are back in vogue after years out of favor
• Constraints on the AI boom investors should watch: capital expenditure limits, energy demands, and regulatory fragmentation
• Token costs, open-source models, and who ultimately controls the data
• Closing reflections from Psalm 127 and John 4 on surrender, weariness, and calling

Notable Quotes:

"It really is an unprecedented venture market in the moment that we have never seen before." - Phil Jung

"Increasingly your software platform, your product is no longer the moat... it's distribution... and then it's integration." - Mark Phillips

"We serve a God who's in control, who's unchanging, who created a universe far more complex than anything we're talking about here." - John Coleman

What if the most freeing financial decision you could make had nothing to do with your portfolio returns?

In this episode, host Justin Forman sits down with John Cortines, co-author of God and Money and True Riches and a generosity leader at the Maclellan Foundation, for a practical, spiritually grounding conversation about generosity, stewardship, and freedom.

John shares how his journey began at Harvard Business School with a banking password that read "retire@40!" and how God used a men's Bible study, serious biblical research, and interviews with radically generous Harvard MBA alumni to completely reframe his understanding of wealth. What emerged wasn't just a new giving percentage. It was a transformation of the heart.

Key Topics Discussed:

• The wrong question most Christian investors ask about money, and the right one
• Financial finish lines: how pre-defining your lifestyle and net worth guardrails creates freedom instead of limiting it
• The four heart conditions that keep investors from true generosity (pride, coveting, anxiety, and indifference) and the gospel transformation for each
• Why effective altruism produces joyless giving, and what makes Christian generosity categorically different
• The rise of professionally managed giving funds, and why John believes they'll become as normal as index funds
• Practical steps for faith-driven investors to move from obligation-based to joy-driven stewardship

Direct Quotes from John Cortines:

"The right question isn't how much do we need to give? It's how much do I really need to keep." — John Cortines

"Giving is actually a source of joy and freedom and purpose in the Christian walk. And it's God's invitation where I can step into playing on his team to accomplish his purposes in the world." — John Cortines

"What if 10, 20, 30 years from now, it was as normal to think about professionally managed giving funds as it is to think about an index fund for stocks today." — John Cortines

Episode Description

John Cortines started his career in oil and gas with a banking password that literally read "retire@40!", a saver's dream encoded into every login. Then Harvard Business School, a men's Bible study, and a deep dive into Scripture dismantled his framework entirely. What he and co-author Greg Baumer uncovered changed not just how much he gave, but why, and the freedom that came with it.

In this episode, John walks through the framework from his books God and Money and True Riches, including the concept of financial finish lines that set guardrails for lifestyle and net worth, and the four heart transformations every steward must navigate: pride to gratitude, coveting to contentment, anxiety to trust, and indifference to love. These aren't abstract theological ideas. They're the architecture behind how faith-driven investors actually hold and deploy capital with joy.

John also shares his vision for the future of generosity: professionally managed giving funds that work alongside traditional portfolio management, bringing the same rigor, governance, and reporting to Kingdom capital that investors already expect from their financial advisors. Recorded live at Kingdom Advisors, this conversation is a call to bring generosity out of the shadows and into the boardroom, and the family table.

In this America 250 special edition of Marks on the Market, Richard Cunningham and Luke Roush sit down with Donna Harris — founder and CEO of Builders and Backers, venture investor, and co-author of the redemptive investing playbook at Praxis — for a wide-ranging conversation on the state of American entrepreneurship, the limits and promise of venture capital, and how the AI revolution is democratizing who gets to build.

As the country approaches its 250th birthday, Donna brings a decade of venture investing experience and a conviction that America's greatest competitive advantage isn't its capital markets — it's its people. Builders and Backers has helped launch nearly 800 companies, backing nurses, bartenders, dog breeders, and disability attorneys who are using AI to bring ideas to life that would have required $35,000 MVPs just a year ago.

Key Topics:

• Why venture capital is a "solid tool for a specific use case" — and why it's the single most expensive capital a startup can take
• The real entrepreneurship data: startups are creating a third fewer jobs per company than 15 years ago, and 62% of Americans have an entrepreneurial dream but less than 2% act on it
• How AI is democratizing startup formation — from a $35K MVP to a $20 Claude Pro subscription
• Donna's investment thesis for the AI era: stop asking which AI model wins and start asking which people are uniquely positioned to create value with it
• The concept of "re-risking" from a faith perspective — and why prosperity itself can become the greatest obstacle to obedience
• Scripture at the close: Donna on God's broken heroes, and Luke on the woman with the alabaster jar and the boy with five loaves

Notable Quotes:

"There has never ever in history been a greater moment to become an entrepreneur." — Donna Harris

"The best investors aren't just investing in AI companies. They're investing in smart people who will use the tool well and solve meaningful problems in sustainable ways." — Donna Harris

"We need to aggressively re-risk, otherwise we get lulled into this stupor of prosperity and comfort and building bigger barns." — Luke Roush