"Money makes the world go round", or at least that's how
the saying goes.
But for many Christians, the subject of finance can be
a challenging topic, or even taboo altogether.
Well, today we're tackling it head on as we explore
what the Bible says about wealth and meet Christians
who are harnessing the power of money for good.
Welcome to Songs Of Praise.
Coming up, I meet a Christian businessman who found financial
success beyond his wildest dreams before a life-changing encounter
caused him to rethink everything.
They took me to the largest slum in Asia.
And I'm thinking, what world am I in? It just shocked me.
The Apprentice meets Dragons' Den as we join a faith-based
training programme that invests in Christian entrepreneurs.
I don't believe in any way that God has created us to play small.
I think that, if God has given us a dream,
that we have a responsibility to do something with that.
And we have music that presents an offering of praise to God
from across the UK.
As we explore this tricky subject of faith and money,
our music today reminds us that, in every season of our life,
all good gifts come from God.
We begin in Edinburgh with Blessed Be Your Name.
The Bible has some pretty strong things to say about money.
Some have become common sayings.
When it comes to material wealth, the church can be quite divided.
I've come here to Imperial Business School in London
to meet a Christian who spent his whole life
reconciling faith and finance.
Ram Gidoomal is a hugely successful businessman
and a committed follower of Christ.
Thank you, driver.
Ah, Ram. Hey. Great to meet you. Good to see you too.
How are you? How nice to see you. Let's go, let's go. Yeah.
Well, Ram, I didn't expect you to be getting a bus here.
I'll tell you something, Sean.
This is a commitment I made a long time ago - public transport.
And even today, I don't have a car.
Well, we'll talk a bit more about that in a moment.
But here, where we are now, this is where it all began.
Man, what memories come back to me. Huge. This is so, so emotional.
Shall we go in?
Ram won a highly-prized business scholarship
to study here at Imperial, having arrived in Britain as
a refugee at the age of 16.
After graduating from the university, he went on to work
for his family's trading company, where he soon began
to demonstrate his aptitude for business.
It seems like a rude question, so forgive me for asking it,
but how much were you making?
I was helping run a company that was turning over $200 million,
that was employing 7,000 people in 15 countries. Oh, phenomenal.
We were very, very generously bonused until it got to a point
where I was actually offered now the job
to be the group Chief Executive.
Lots of zeros. It was a seven-figure sum, plus.
And this is... So that's millions. This is in the '80s.
Millions, yeah. Wow.
But Ram had also become a Christian while studying here
and, as he went on to achieve success in the financial world,
he began to question what it meant for his new-found faith.
It was at this point that a business trip to India changed everything.
They took me to the largest slum in Asia,
Dharavi, where Slumdog Millionaire was shot.
You enter there - cardboard boxes.
I then see a little kid, couldn't have been more than five -
my son was five - and I said, "Where does he sleep?"
They showed me this water pipe. I said, "Can I go there?"
They said, "Don't even go near that.
"The smell, the stench and the hygiene will kill you."
And I'm thinking, what world am I in?
It just shocked me.
They took me to my flight and, as I enter first class,
"To the left, sir." Caviar, champagne... I couldn't take it.
My... I was sick.
And then the flight took off and I broke down.
So my wife and I, we were asking ourselves this question -
why are we working when we can't spend the interest
of what we're earning?
She said, "Go ahead, resign."
And I spoke to my family and they were devastated.
I was making millions for them. I really was.
So we thought about it - children in public school,
they'll go to state school.
Private medical insurance - we can afford to live without it.
We can go into a smaller house.
We have two cars - I'll get rid of my fancy
Mercedes 300-whatever SE it was.
Compelled by a new sense of calling, Ram realised that, by utilising his
business skills and connections, he could raise millions more
for charity than he would ever have been able to give.
Over the last 40 years, he has worked with over
100 charities and social enterprises,
helping to raise billions of pounds in the process.
Many Christians see wealth as something to avoid,
but you don't see it that way.
Absolutely not. I think it is there for a purpose.
But if we see the purpose as helping those
who are disadvantaged, others who are not as well off,
what is done with it is the most important point.
What Jesus did for me is pay for my sins.
Nothing else can ever do that in life or in the world.
It's what he did - his sacrifice paid for that.
All I can do now is do what I do as an expression of my thanksgiving
for what he has done. You can't buy that.
Now, Ram, is there a hymn that kind of sums up your life?
The one I really love is Beauty For Brokenness.
And it's simple - the title says it.
I went to that slum, I saw a broken world.
What Jesus does is give beauty for brokenness,
and he uses us to try and achieve that and help with that promise
in all we do.
Beauty For Brokenness.
Now, you may have seen Dragons' Den, where aspiring entrepreneurs face
a panel of wealthy and fearsome investors.
Well, there's now a group of faith-based funders in town,
and they're putting Christian entrepreneurs
through their paces in the Lions' Lair.
The Lions is a business training programme with a difference -
driven not by profit, but by prayer.
It's a ten-month course that culminates
with delegates pitching to win £10,000
of seed funding for their business ideas.
Shell Perris, a former delegate herself,
is now the programme's director.
Sometimes, as a Christian entrepreneur,
you can feel like people don't always get you.
That's why the Lions exists.
Our whole thing is about releasing possibility
in people and their projects so they'll come to us with an idea,
and we basically help them to take it to the next level.
51 people applied for the programme this year,
and you are the 20 that have been chosen.
I don't believe in any way that God has created us to play small.
I think that, if God has given us a dream,
that we have a responsibility to do something with that.
We're going to pray, and then I'm going to hand over
to Andrew and Gary.
Lord Jesus, I want to thank you so much for this weekend together,
our first weekend of Lions 2026.
The whole Lions programme is funded by Christian businesspeople
who want to invest some of their profits into
expanding God's kingdom.
We believe in you.
Unlike Dragons' Den, we don't want to share in anything.
We're here to walk alongside you, cheer you on
and be a springboard for actually what God's put in your heart, yeah?
As it's the first weekend of this year's course,
there's a new cohort of eager delegates
and a host of new business ideas.
I run a not-for-profit arts academy, so we run secular
and Christian workshops alongside each other.
As a Christian entrepreneur myself, you kind of...
It's really core to what you do, so it's really hard.
You have that balance all the time of, am I doing this
because God's called me to do this or is this a good idea
because this is what the business world says?
And, actually, to have a place that you can kind of
ask those questions and wrestle with those ideas is really good.
My idea is essentially to have an online Christian book shop
where all the titles are sold on a buy one, give one free principle.
And selling them to the general public in the UK would fund
the spare book going into prison chaplaincies.
Essentially, since I've become a Christian,
I do want to reframe everything - my life around God
and my business around God.
A security company is my business idea.
So being part of this course is amazing.
It's making me think in completely different ways.
We're going to pair up in groups of two.
One of you will be the entrepreneur, the other one will be
the millionaire.
The entrepreneur - you have 60 seconds.
We teach them everything they need to know
to run a successful business.
All we ask for is that it has an element of being able
to impact God's kingdom.
We have a time of worship every Sunday morning
on our Lions weekends, and one of my favourite songs
that we sing is Gratitude cos it talks about
"come on, my soul, don't you get shy on me
"cos you've got a lion inside of those lungs."
And I sing it over myself, over our delegates
and over every single person who's got a dream, an idea,
and wants to do something amazing for God.
CHEERS AND APPLAUSE
Our next hymn was written 150 years ago by Frances Ridley Havergal.
It's said her life was characterised by wholehearted devotion to God,
something reflected in this, perhaps her best known work -
Take My Life And Let It Be Consecrated, Lord, To Thee.
Knowing how to be generous with your money
is a nice problem to have.
But for many people in the UK, it's just not a reality of life.
With a growing cost of living crisis, it's harder than ever
for those weighed down by the burden of debt.
One Christian charity, though, is stepping in to help.
Christians Against Poverty have been supporting people
in financial difficulty since 1996.
Over the last 30 years, they've helped over
35,000 people become debt-free.
Stewart McCulloch is CAP's CEO, and I've come to meet him here -
at one of their debt centres in Peckham.
Hi, great to meet you. Great to meet you.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I mean, this... This doesn't seem like
a financial institution. It's a... It's a church.
Yeah, and, indeed, it is a church.
We work with 1,045 churches across the whole of the UK.
They look after the people.
We do all the sort of technical debt advice
in our centre in Bradford, and together we provide
world-class debt advice, just as you would
from a financial institution.
Up to now, the charity have helped around 80,000 people
and cleared over half a billion pounds' worth of debt.
Is there a great need for this?
There's an absolutely enormous need for this.
14 million people in this country are in poverty.
And if you look at the working age, adult population
of about 33 million people, 9 million - nearly a third -
are in financial crisis levels of debt.
That's shocking in what we would think of as a wealthy country,
that almost one in three people are in that situation.
Oh, absolutely.
Are you inspired to do this work because of your faith?
Oh, 100%. If you go right back to the beginning of...
..to Jesus teaching and the beginning of the church,
from the very get-go, the church has helped the poor,
and now we're doing the same thing today.
One volunteer who knows all too well what it's like to be caught
in a spiral of debt is Sharon.
So, Sharon, how did you get involved with CAP?
I had six children, I had one on the way,
so trying to provide for them, to feed them, to clothe them...
The partner that I was with used to take my money.
I just got myself into such a mess.
I was in so much debt that...there was no way of ever clearing it.
Me hiding in a room one day and the bailiffs was taking
the stuff out of my children's hands - their toys, their games...
Really bad. Sharon, this is awful.
I... So you were terrified of people coming to the door.
Yeah, of debts and stuff like this because I've done so many debts.
And, of course, when I got permanent accommodation,
they started to land on my doorstep.
So I just looked at them and put them in a bag.
Never opened them.
It was at this point, wondering where to possibly turn,
that Sharon received a leaflet about Christians Against Poverty
and gave them a call.
When I opened up the door, just...
..just the smile and the warmth that come off of them.
And they said, "We can help you."
And then, at the end, Catherine said to me,
can we just do one thing before we leave?
And I said, "Well, what's that?" She went, "Can we pray for you?"
I just curled up in my sofa while she was praying for me
and just cried for about half an hour.
Mm, gosh...
And the overwhelming... Or something felt like it's being lifted. Mm-hm.
With CAP's help, Sharon officially became debt-free in 2014.
Wanting to help others in her position,
she started to volunteer herself and now helps run
a drop-in centre in Sutton.
Doing the journey with CAP, it gives me such a purpose
and I love being in that place.
I used to go around with big hoods on
so nobody could actually talk to me, or because I felt ashamed of myself.
That was the shame of the debt. That was the shame of the debt,
the shame of what the past has done to the family
because of it and other things.
So you're debt-free and you have faith.
What difference has faith made in your life?
I've got something to grip on to. I hold on to Him so much.
Erm... And it's so nice seeing my eldest daughter.
She comes with me to church with her children
and seeing them come through church... Wow.
He's there beside me. He guides me.
I'm sitting here today because of the Lord.
Is there a particular hymn that really sums up
your journey and really chimes with you?
Well, it's got to be Amazing Grace because He saved me,
and He saved... He uses me. "A wretch like me."
The things that I've done and the things
that has happened in my life.
Why would He want someone like me in His...in His kingdom?
Each time He's saved me. So, yeah, that's why, yeah.
I believe in Him so much.
Next time, as we begin Holy Week, Kate Bottley meets Christians
exploring the deeper meaning of the Last Supper.
But now a prayer from some of those we've met today.
Heavenly Father, everything in Heaven and on Earth belongs to You.
We thank You for Your incredible generosity to us,
something we could never repay.
May we have eyes to see Your Kingdom come in the world around us
as we seek to use our gifts and talents for Your glory.
And help us to give back generously as You have given to us.
In Jesus' name, Amen.
It's not always easy to talk about money,
but I've been inspired and challenged
by the conversations I've had today.
We end with a song which calls us to give thanks to God,
in whom we can find true riches.
Until next time. Goodbye.