A Christian founder is not merely an employer of labor but an under-shepherd of people — accountable to the Chief Shepherd for how every hire was made, developed, corrected, and, when necessary, released. Scripture permits dismissing an employee; it never permits doing so carelessly, deceptively, or without dignity. This article gives founders a full shepherding arc for the employment relationship: hiring with truth, developing with intention, and terminating with justice — including why severance is a matter of righteousness, not generosity.
Key Takeaways
- Ephesians 6:9 commands masters to deal with workers knowing “he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no partiality with him” — the founder will give an account for staff treatment, not just staff output.
- Christian ethicists agree that firing is not inherently sinful or a poor witness, but careless firing — without warning, documentation, or dignity — indicts the employer (1)(2).
- A bad hire is partly the employer’s failure: three in four small-business employers admit hiring the wrong person, at an average cost of roughly $17,000 per bad hire — and overpromising in recruitment is a leading cause (5).
- East African labor law encodes much of what Scripture calls justice: Kenya’s Employment Act 2007 sets severance at 15 days’ pay per year served for redundancy and requires procedural fairness; Uganda’s Employment Act requires written notice scaled to tenure and severance negotiation for qualifying employees (3)(4).
- In East Africa, where one salary often feeds a household and educates several children, every termination is a pastoral event with village-wide consequences — founders need categories beyond HR compliance.
- The Shepherd’s Arc — Call, Cultivate, Correct, Conclude — gives founders one covenant framework for the whole employment relationship, so that termination, when it comes, is the last act of shepherding rather than the first act of war.
I have sat on both sides of the desk. I have hired in faith and fired in tears, and I have spent more pastoral hours than I can count with men and women who were dismissed — some justly, most cruelly. Here is what those hours have taught me: almost no one remembers the wording of their termination letter, but everyone remembers whether they were treated as a person or as a problem to be disposed of. The dismissal conversations people replay for decades are the ones where their dignity was the first casualty.
That is why this subject belongs to theology before it belongs to human resources. The founder who employs five people holds a small but real share of God’s own authority — and authority in Scripture has exactly one approved shape.
Why Is a Founder an Under-Shepherd and Not Just a Boss?
Scripture’s ruling image for authority is the shepherd. Kings are shepherds (2 Samuel 5:2), and the kings who fed themselves rather than the flock are condemned in the fiercest oracle in Ezekiel: “Woe to the shepherds of Israel who have been feeding themselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep?” (Ezekiel 34:2). Elders are under-shepherds who will answer to “the chief Shepherd” for the flock allotted to them (1 Peter 5:2–4). And employers are explicitly placed in this accountability structure: “Masters, do the same to them, and stop your threatening, knowing that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven” (Ephesians 6:9). James 5:4 goes further, warning that withheld wages “cry out” against the employer and that “the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts.”
Notice what this does and does not mean. It does not mean the founder is the staff’s pastor in the ecclesial sense — the business is not a church, employment is not membership, and confusing the two creates its own abuses. It means the founder’s authority is shepherd-shaped: exercised for the flourishing of the people under it, accountable to a higher Shepherd, and incapable of treating people as mere inputs. An employment contract is signed between two image-bearers under covenant witness. You can end the contract. You can never stop owing the person truth, dignity, and a just wage to the last day.
In East Africa this carries extra weight. Your bookkeeper may be a member of your church. Your driver’s salary may be the only formal income in a compound of eleven people. When employees are kin, congregants, or a household’s sole earner, hiring and firing decisions ripple through real villages. This is not a reason to avoid hard decisions — shepherds cull as well as feed — but it is a reason to make them the way a shepherd would.
The framework I teach founders is the Shepherd’s Arc: four movements — Call, Cultivate, Correct, Conclude — that treat the employment relationship as one continuous act of stewardship. Most termination disasters are not termination failures. They are failures in the first three movements that finally surface in the fourth.
How Do You Hire With Truth Instead of Overpromising?
Movement one: Call. Hiring is the covenant-making moment, and the besetting sin of small-company hiring is false witness — usually the optimistic kind. The founder, desperate for talent he cannot yet afford, oversells: the salary “will grow soon,” the role “will become a leadership position,” the company “is about to close a round.” The candidate, desperate for work, oversells back. Two exaggerations shake hands, and a relationship is founded on mutual fiction.
The data says this is not a minor vice. Three in four small-business employers admit to hiring the wrong person for a position, and the average cost of a bad hire runs around $17,000 once recruiting, training, and lost productivity are counted (5) — a sum that can sink a seed-stage East African company outright. And recruitment researchers consistently identify vague role definitions and inflated promises as core drivers: when employers lack a concrete picture of responsibilities and pay, candidates accept jobs that do not exist as described, and the unraveling begins on day one (5).
Hiring with truth means four disciplines. Describe the real job — including the unglamorous sixty percent, the actual hours, the actual resources. Name the real money — current salary, honest review timelines, and no promises contingent on funding you have not secured; a promise you cannot fund is a lie with a delay on it. Test for the real work — a paid trial task tells the truth better than three interviews. Check character as hard as competence — because in a five-person company, character failures in early hires are structural failures, and you are choosing not just a worker but a culture.
One more truth-telling discipline, peculiar to our context: clarity about kin. If you hire a relative — and many of us will — write the same contract, the same targets, and the same dismissal terms you would for a stranger, and say aloud at hiring that the job is held by performance, not blood. The founder who cannot say this should not make the hire, because unmanaged family claims on a business are among its deadliest cash leaks, and an unsackable cousin is a kin tax with a desk.
What Does Developing People Have to Do With Firing Them?
Movement two: Cultivate. Everything. Here is the uncomfortable principle the Christian management writers keep landing on: a significant share of every firing is the employer’s failure (6). The hire was rushed, the expectations were never written, the feedback was never given, the training never happened — and then the employee was executed for the founder’s omissions.
Shepherds feed before they cull. Cultivation means written expectations (the job as actually evolved, reviewed when it changes), honest regular feedback (Proverbs 27:5 — “Better is open rebuke than hidden love”), real investment in skill, and documented reviews where weaknesses are named while they are still fixable. Documentation is not corporate cowardice; it is testimony — the written record that protects both parties from revisionist memory, which is why guidance from The Gospel Coalition insists weaknesses be recorded in reviews so that termination is never a surprise (2).
Movement three: Correct. When performance or conduct fails, the shepherding founder corrects before he concludes — and here the church-discipline parallel earns its place, carefully. Matthew 18:15–17 is about sin between brothers in the church, not performance management, and founders who weaponize it to spiritualize their HR decisions abuse the text. But its shape — private conversation first, escalation with witnesses, a defined process, restoration as the goal — is simply what justice looks like in any covenant community, and it maps cleanly onto good practice: a private, specific conversation; a written improvement plan with resources and a timeline; a witnessed review of progress. The goal of correction, like the goal of discipline, is to win your brother — to never need movement four. Many of your best long-term people will be the ones who were corrected well in year two. And often the failure correction reveals is the founder’s own system: if three successive hires fail in the same seat, the seat is broken, not the people — usually for want of documented processes that let ordinary people succeed.
What correction is not: hint-dropping, salary delays as punishment, public humiliation, or the silent dossier-building of a founder who has already decided and is merely collecting evidence. If you have decided, say so. Slow-motion termination disguised as coaching is a lie told over months.
How Do You Terminate Someone With Dignity?
Movement four: Conclude. Sometimes correction fails. Sometimes the business itself contracts and good people must go. Christian ethics is clear that termination is not inherently sin — stewardship of the enterprise, the other employees’ livelihoods, and the mission may require it (1). The sin is in the how. Three obligations govern the conclusion: truth, dignity, and justice.
Truth. The reason given must be the real reason. Not “restructuring” when it is performance; not “performance” when it is cash flow; not silence when the person asks why. If movements two and three were done, the truth will not be a surprise — TGC’s counsel that dismissal should never come “out of the blue” is simply the harvest of earlier honesty (2). Lying in a termination letter to soften the blow or dodge legal exposure is false witness at the precise moment your witness matters most.
Dignity. Terminate in person, privately, briefly, without rehearsing the person’s failures to others. Let them resign first where appropriate. Guard their name afterward — the exit conversation is the last sermon your company preaches to this person, and Jesus’ standard stands: do unto them as you would be done unto (Matthew 7:12; 1). Plan the practicalities that preserve honor: how belongings are collected, what colleagues are told (agree the wording with the person), whether a fair reference will be given. The aim, as one Christian business writer puts it, is that even the person you dismiss should be able to say they were treated with perfect courtesy (1).
Justice — which is where severance lives. Severance is not charity; in most cases it is debt. Two arguments. First, the law of the land: Kenya’s Employment Act 2007 mandates severance of fifteen days’ basic pay per completed year of service in redundancy, one month’s written notice, consultation, and fair selection criteria — with unfair-termination compensation of up to twelve months’ salary for employers who shortcut the process (3). Uganda’s Employment Act requires written notice scaled to tenure (two weeks under a year of service, rising to three months beyond ten years) and severance negotiation for qualifying employees with six months’ continuous service (4). Romans 13 makes compliance a floor, not a ceiling, for the believer. Second, the deeper biblical logic: Deuteronomy 15:13–14 commanded that a released servant not be sent away “empty-handed” — “you shall furnish him liberally out of your flock” — because the servant’s years built your house, and a portion of the increase is owed at parting. The employer’s question is not “what is the least I can legally pay?” but “what does this person’s service justly claim, and what will carry their household to the next provision?” Where cash allows, that means severance above the statutory floor, a bridge of weeks not days, a truthful reference, and practical help toward the next job (2). Where cash truly does not allow, it means saying so plainly and giving what you can with both hands — including your time and your network.
And when the person being concluded is also a brother or sister in your congregation: separate the rooms explicitly. They lose a job, not a church. Say it out loud — “your employment here is ending; your place in the body is not” — and then prove it by how you greet them on Sunday.
What About Layoffs You Did Not Cause?
A word to the founder forced into redundancies by a lost contract or a funding winter. The shepherding obligations do not relax; they intensify, because the people leaving did nothing wrong. Tell the truth early — staff usually know the ship is leaning long before the announcement, and rumor is crueler than candor. Cut deep enough once rather than thrice shallowly, take visible pain at the top first, follow the legal process to the letter (consultation, notice, selection criteria, statutory severance), and shepherd the survivors, who carry both grief and fear. A founder who handles a layoff with Deuteronomy 15 hands will hire half those people back in better days — and they will come.
The Shepherd’s Arc ends where it began: at the account. “And there is no partiality with him” (Ephesians 6:9). The Chief Shepherd will not ask whether your company grew. He will ask how the sheep fared in your hands — the ones you kept, and the ones you released. Make sure both groups can testify that they met, in you, an under-shepherd.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it unchristian to fire an employee?
No. Christian ethicists broadly agree termination is not inherently sinful — stewardship of the business and other employees’ livelihoods can require it (1). What Scripture forbids is the careless version: dismissal without prior honesty, documentation, due process, dignity, or just settlement. The “how” carries the moral weight, not the act itself.
What severance does the law require in Kenya and Uganda?
Kenya’s Employment Act 2007 mandates fifteen days’ basic pay per completed year of service for redundancy, plus one month’s notice and consultation (3). Uganda requires written notice scaled to tenure — two weeks to three months — and negotiated severance for qualifying employees (4). Scripture treats these as floors, not ceilings.
Should I apply Matthew 18 church discipline at work?
Not directly — Matthew 18 governs sin within the church, and importing it wholesale spiritualizes ordinary management. But its shape is transferable justice: private conversation first, escalation with witnesses, documented process, restoration as the goal. Performance issues deserve that pattern; actual sin issues involving church members also belong with elders.
How do I fire a relative without destroying the family?
Prevent it at hiring: same contract, same targets, same dismissal terms as any employee, stated aloud. At termination, separate the rooms — end the employment in the office with documentation and just severance, then visit as family. Involve a respected elder early. Pay every shilling owed; disputed money fuels decades of grievance.
What if I cannot afford statutory severance when laying people off?
Insolvency does not erase the obligation; it reorders it. Tell affected staff the truth early, document what is owed, agree written payment plans, and prioritize wage and severance debts above almost everything — James 5:4 puts withheld wages in the gravest category. Give non-cash help liberally: references, introductions, time.
Related Reading
- Your First Five Hires: Competence, Character, and the Culture You Cannot Undo
- SOPs and Delegation in Low-Formality Markets
- The Kin Tax: Family Claims on Business Cash
- No Bribes, No Shortcuts: Integrity as Competitive Strategy
Sources and Evidence
- Bible and Business — “Is There a ‘Christian’ Way to Fire an Employee?” — sustained biblical-ethics treatment arguing termination is permissible but careless termination indicts the employer; dignity and courtesy standards.
- The Gospel Coalition — “How to Dismiss an Employee in a Church or Ministry” — practitioner guidance on documentation, improvement plans, no-surprise terminations, severance, and references; see also TGC’s “How to Lay Off Someone Like Jesus Would”.
- Kenya Employment Act 2007 (Cap 226), with practitioner commentary from K&A Advocates LLP on redundancy law — primary statute: Section 40 redundancy procedure, 15-days-per-year severance, Section 45 unfair termination, up-to-12-months compensation. Full Act text.
- WageIndicator / Africapay — Notice and Severance Rules in Uganda — labor-law database summarizing Uganda Employment Act 2006 notice scales (two weeks to three months by tenure) and negotiated severance for employees with six months’ continuous service.
- CareerBuilder — “3 in 4 Small Business Employers Have Hired the Wrong Person” — large-sample employer survey; ~$17,000 average bad-hire cost; supplemented by Business.com on small-business hiring mistakes including overpromising and vague role definition.
- CBN Finance — “A Christian Approach to Firing” — older but widely circulated framework arguing a bad hire is partly the employer’s failure, with transition-help obligations.