Jason Heinritz on Faith, the Marketplace, and Bold Christian Witness
Most Christian business content celebrates the wins. Jason Heinritz is here to talk about what it costs when the wins become your god. A Hall of Fame direct sales manager with 21 years at Cutco Cutlery and now Leader Impact Director at Life Church Northwest in Kirkland, Washington, Jason spent his twenties building his own kingdom before realizing what he was actually building it for. This episode of Faith Ventures asks the questions Christian professionals don’t always want to sit with.
The Questions Christian Professionals Need to Ask About Work, Faith, and Identity
How do I know if I’ve made work an idol?
Jason offers a personal diagnostic that’s more useful than most: ask yourself why you’re working this hard. If the honest answer involves needing to be number one to feel loved, needing the accolades to feel like enough, or using “mission field” language to justify never being present anywhere else — that’s not ambition, it’s an idol with a Christian veneer. Jason traces his own workaholism to childhood bullying and the wound it left: a belief that performance was the price of being lovable. When he finally addressed that in 2023, the result was peace and joy he hadn’t experienced before. If you can’t slow down without anxiety, the problem may not be your schedule. It may be what you’re asking your schedule to do for your soul.
Can I genuinely treat my workplace as a mission field, or is that just an excuse to overwork?
Both, depending on the motivation behind it. Jason did both, at different points, and knows the difference from the inside. The counterfeit version uses mission field language as theological permission to spend your whole life at work and call it service. The genuine version is what Jason now practices as Leader Impact Director: showing up with excellence, building real relationships over time, and letting the quality of your presence create conversations that matter. Asking a coworker to come to church. Being honest about faith on social media in a way that’s inviting rather than preachy. Playing Christian music in the car when a coworker is riding along. These things require actual courage. The counterfeit version doesn’t require courage — it just requires staying busy.
What did it actually look like to stop making work an idol?
For Jason, it had an external marker: a voluntary demotion. He walked into his manager’s office and asked to step back down from division manager — the role he had spent years working toward — to district manager. Less territory, less income, less prestige. The stress had become unsustainable, the damage to his marriage was real, and no compensation justified continuing. His manager agreed. Jason describes the decision as “a demotion in the world for a promotion for his kingdom.” He didn’t leave his company or abandon direct sales as a vocation. He stopped letting the org chart tell him what he was worth.
What is the “sacred start” and why does it matter for Christians in business?
Since fall 2012, Jason has protected the window between 5am and 7am every morning for what he calls his sacred start: journaling, exercise, Bible time, prayer, and Scripture affirmations, in sequence, daily. By the time his sons wake up at 7:15, he’s already filled. The principle is straightforward — you can’t give what you don’t have — but the application is countercultural. Most people try to do their most important personal work at the end of the day, when there’s nothing left. Jason’s sacred start reverses that order. His book Wake Up, Jesus People is built around this framework, extending it to the courage required to be a bold witness in the marketplace as well as a disciplined one in private.
How do I witness at work without being the person everyone dreads talking to?
By leading with excellence and presence rather than proclamation. Jason references the classic Franciscan principle — preach the gospel, and if necessary use words — as the operating mode. You build credibility through the quality of your work, the integrity of your relationships, and the consistency of your character over time. Then when someone is going through something hard, you’re the person they come to — not because you’ve been handing out tracts, but because you’ve shown up. Jason gives concrete examples: playing Christian music in the car with a coworker, posting something honest about how faith has changed your life, simply asking someone if they have a church community. None of these require a sermon. All of them require a little courage and a long track record of being trustworthy.
Why does Jason keep coming back to the local church?
Because loneliness is the condition that makes everything else worse, and the church is the specific remedy God designed for it. Jason’s parting word is direct: if you’re not in a local church, find one. If you’re in one, get more involved. He credits the community he had through the hard seasons of his working life — the friends, the life group, the people who knew his name and his struggle — with being essential to his survival and growth. The marketplace is a mission field, but it’s not your community. The local church is. And the Christian entrepreneur who tries to do the work of faith without that community is, in Jason’s framing, exactly where the enemy wants them: isolated, confused, and carrying everything alone.
Conclusion: Wake Up, Jesus People — Work Hard, Witness Well, Build God’s Kingdom
Jason Heinritz’s testimony is the kind that rarely makes it into Christian business content: a winner who had to be honest about what he was winning for. The work was real. The idol was real. The cost to his family and his soul was real. And the peace on the other side of letting go — the demotion, the morning routine, the decision to stop performing for approval and start working for God — is, by his account, more than worth what it took to find it.
Wake up, Jesus people. Your work matters. So does knowing why.
Civilly, individuals are prohibited from intiating aggression against others. Non-aggressive immorality may be addressed by non-civil entities such as the church.
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Christians aren't disobeying 1 Tim 6:10 so long as they aren't pursuing money as an end in itself. It's the love of money that's prohibited, not the mere accumulation of it.
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Christians aren't disobeying 1 Tim 6:10 so long as they aren't pursuing money as an end in itself. It's the love of money that's prohibited, not the mere accumulation of it.
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Historically libertarians have not been settled on the abortion issue, and we argue that abortion is a violation of the non-aggression principle and therefore anti-libertarian.
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God has provided people the tools that we need to face these challenges, starting with the first garments he fashioned for Adam and Eve from animal skins (Gen. 3:21)
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