In historical terms, it is only recently that water has been safe to drink. To stay healthy, most people once drank beer. Mansfield opens with a short history of beer’s significant role in church history before turning his attention to the Guinness family.

Arthur Guinness was deeply influenced by the preaching of John Wesley. He established the first Sunday schools in Ireland, fought against dueling, and chaired the board of a hospital for the poor.

Mansfield notes: “What distinguishes the Arthur Guinness story is not that he brewed a good beer and sold great amounts of it. What distinguishes his story is that he understood his success as forming a kind of mandate, a kind of calling to a purpose of God beyond himself and his family to the broader good of the world.”

The family that followed him sought to integrate their Christian faith into their business practice. They saw both their customers and their employees as worthy of the best treatment. A Guinness worker in the 1920s enjoyed full medical and dental care, massage services, reading rooms, subsidised meals, a company funded pension, subsidies for funeral expenses, education benefits, sport facilities, free concerts, lectures and entertainment, and two pints of Guinness a day.

The family produced visionary business leaders who took the company worldwide, and visionary Christian leaders who took the Christian faith just as far. One of the Guinness daughters married Hudson Taylor. Henry Grattan Guinness, Arthur’s grandson, was a Christian leader of such impact that he was ranked with Dwight L. Moody and Charles Spurgeon in his day. He has been called the Billy Graham of the 19th century, and he wrote best-selling books that not only predicted the end of the Ottoman control of Jerusalem, which occurred in 1917, and the restoration of Israel, which happened in 1948. This heritage continues today in the person of well-known Christian author Os Guinness.

This is a fascinating book that reminds us that God can use and bless people dedicated to him, whatever their calling.

By Stephen Mansfield
Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville 2009
ISBN 13: 9781595552693 
ISBN 10: 1595552693

– David McLeod-Jones