I’m not much of a beer drinker — I haven’t been since a still infamous 21st birthday celebration in college that we shall not mention any more. But if I decided to hoist a pint again, I think my mug might be filled with Guinness. Mind you, they’re not paying me to say this. And Guinness might taste like Kentucky Blue Grass, for all I know. But still, I like their style.
I had the pleasure of hearing Os Guinness, a member of the famed brewing family and now a popular Christian author and speaker, and I found him to be quite intelligent and witty — enough so that I walked out of the lecture thinking, “you know, Christianity needs more ambassadors like this guy.”
Turns out, Os is just the latest of a long line of Christian ambassadors from the family Guinness — at least according to this column in USA Today written by Stephen Mansfield. Guinness, an Irish brewery founded 250 years ago by Arthur Guinness, was a brewery built — perhaps paradoxically for some — on Christian values.
“The values Arthur Guinness envisioned for his company were first honed in a life of devotion to God,” Mansfield writes. “He was beloved throughout Ireland for his defense of Roman Catholic rights, for example, an astonishing stand for a Protestant in his day. He criticized the material excesses of the upper class and sat on the board of a hospital for the poor. He was also the founder of the first Sunday schools in Ireland. When he died in 1803, the Dublin Evening Post declared that Arthur Guinness’s life was ‘useful and benevolent and virtuous.’ It was true.” And Mansfield goes on:
There are many tales that could be told: Of the Guinness heir who received millions of dollars as a wedding gift but then moved his new bride into the slums to draw attention to the plight of the poor. Or of how the Guinness company promised all of its employees who fought in World War I that their jobs would be waiting for them when they returned, and then paid their families half wages until they did.
The lesson is clear: Guinness strove to improve the lives of its employees with the same intensity as it strove to sell its beer.
I don’t know if Guinness is still such a great place to work or still serves as such a strong example of corporate charity. But it seems to me that, if more corporations held firm to the same spirit Guinness has, the world would be much improved.



















