Building an Interest

Common interest matters for building bridges across difference.

This weekend I delivered a sermon at the church where I pastor. I touched on a personal mission statement that I defined for myself back in 2015. It’s short: “Building an interest in people.”

Find my September 6, 2025 sermon here.

I’d drafted several statements over the years leading up to 2015, but none stuck like this one. It stuck because, while all of my statements had something to do with care for people, they never quite solved the problem of incentives. I could talk all I wanted about love and generosity, but it frustrated me how optional it all felt. The incentives weren’t aligned. But that’s what “building an interest” changed.

When you have an interest in someone, it means that you are tied in with their well-being. If they succeed, you succeed. If they hurt, you hurt. Working to build that interest, then, means taking practical steps to align your incentives with the people around you—and specifically with the people with whom you might otherwise share the fewest incentives.

Practically, what does this look like?

In my twenties I spent almost four years in Southeast Asia. Close to three in Cambodia. When I first arrived there, I quickly discovered that the wages I was receiving were about five times the wages of the Cambodian staff that I worked with. This is often standard practice in multinational organizations. People get paid based on their home country standards, plus or minus a cost of living adjustment.

The problem was, in Cambodia, everyone knows what people make. It’s not rude to ask, like it is in the States. In fact it was sometimes one of the first questions people asked when they met me. And when they heard my answer, they knew why. “He’s white.” “He’s American.”

Back then I had just come up with this mission statement of building an interest, and so this disparity was heavy on my mind. What could I do? Could I donate some of my salary? I hired someone, temporarily, to work on special projects for me. But every attempt felt unfair.

In the end, I decided to cut my salary by 80%. I spoke with my employer and they granted the cut. I could no longer afford to live in my apartment, so my roommate and I moved to a smaller and simpler place.

What was the impact of this? It didn't result in systemic change. I didn’t negotiate raises for anyone. It really didn’t make much difference at all. But it did help me do my work with a clean conscience. And when people asked, it built a bridge instead of setting up a disparity.

In the end, the interest I built was limited. I only stayed for a few years. I moved back to the States and took a normal American salary. And I don’t know that I would make that same decision again now. It wasn’t a universal solution. But it did achieve the mission I was committed to. It built an interest. And that interest drastically changed my life, for a few years.

Now I’m considering what it means to build an interest in Washington, D.C. in 2025. The first thing it meant for me, as a pastor, was to live in the community I was pastoring. So I live across the street from my church. A common geography is an interest.

But I’ve been here for six months now and I’m wondering what’s next? How else can I build an interest in my neighborhood? And how else can I build an interest in my city and country? Now, as it always has and as it always will, common interest matters for building bridges across difference.