Just 24 years old, Luke Hart is supervising older men in a fast-growing custom furniture factory in Indianapolis. Some call him Brother Luke. Nobody calls him the boss.

Purposeful Design in Indianapolis is more like a brotherhood than a traditional furniture manufacturing business. Teamwork is more important than hierarchy and organizational charts. The work-day starts with prayer and a short Bible commentary.

Purposeful Design was started by businessman David Palmer, who led Bible studies at a local rescue mission and wanted to find the men jobs after they had come to salvation and were growing in Christ.

Luke Hart, a member of Southside (Indianapolis, Ind.) RPC, wound up as a supervisor after working for Danny Cox in custom cabinet work. He would attribute his promotion to the grace of God, since he did not have previous management experience and never took a business class in supervision during his year at Purdue University. Cox recruited him to Purposeful Design.

It has not been a baptism by fire, though, as the men at Purposeful Design have been forgiven much and are thankful for recovery from addiction through Christ.

“I love figuring things out, and I like to solve problems,” Luke said. “I had thought of running a business, but I did not really think of getting into management before I came here.”

One year at Purdue University left him uncertain of his calling, as mechanical engineering was different than he had envisioned. “I thought it was working with people on the floor, working on machines,” he said. “It turned out to mean working at a computer all day, or meetings and emails.”

Construction work helped prepare him for Purposeful Design, where he appreciates the Christian fellowship as well as the chance to see men working with their hands on custom furniture orders.

Purposeful Design is different than his previous construction work. “If people make mistakes here, it’s treated much differently than where I worked before,” he said. “You skip the angry part. We don’t yell at each other. We made a mistake. Where did we go wrong? What can we learn? How can we improve?”

Purposeful Design grew out of the Indianapolis Wheeler Mission, where board member and businessman David Palmer spent several years in Bible study with men at the mission. He would rejoice as they grew in Christian faith, developing good habits to replace bad ones. Sometimes a breakthrough came when a man saw that his addiction to alcohol or drugs was a crutch, or even an idol that needed to be replaced with worship of the true God. One of the biggest challenges was helping them find jobs. Sometimes an arrest record closed an employment door. Sometimes disciplined work habits were missing. Palmer launched Purposeful Design in 2013, starting with a few men to fill custom furniture orders.

Sales jumped from $36,000 in 2014 to $1.5 million last year, despite the Covid-19 pandemic. The company comes close to breaking even, with 16 employees. About half the revenue goes to men’s salaries, and the rest to administration, materials, supplies, and delivery of orders. Purposeful Design is legally a limited liability company, or a business, but it is under the ownership of the non-profit Sagamore Institute in Indianapolis. Sagamore has pioneered in guiding investors to social impact businesses, which seek smaller profits with a focus on other purposes.

Palmer is pleased to almost break even, but he keeps an eye on another important bottom line—men free of opioid abuse, growing in faith, working, and sometimes rebuilding marriages and families. Those goals are harder to measure on a balance sheet, but they add to the appeal of doing business with Purposeful Design. Large Indianapolis companies such as SalesForce or the Lilly pharmaceutical company have bought their products. They appreciate the quality furniture as well as a common grace application of Jeremiah 29:7, seeking the welfare of the city.

Purposeful Design has expanded out of a small old church building to a larger warehouse on the city’s east side, adding a program to train more men in woodworking skills along with the core business of making custom furniture. The plan is to have a more permanent work force. Then, in the School of Woodworking and Discipleship, skills training could open up to 50–100 men who can go on to other jobs.

“We started as an experiment, and the result has exceeded our sales expectations,” said Palmer. “Customers believe in the mission, being part of the rescue operation. They also love the quality of the furniture, and the sales price is right.”

The organization has several Reformed Presbyterian connections, along with Luke Hart. David Palmer’s mother-in-law is Marty Wilson, a member of Second (Indianapolis, Ind.) RPC and Wheeler Mission volunteer. David’s wife, Cindy, launched a similar ministry for women, Heart Change, where volunteers help women come to salvation, grow in Christ, and build skills for the workplace. Volunteers come from many churches, including Second RPC and Southside RPC.

David and Cindy Palmer have moved from the suburbs into an older, inner-city neighborhood where many of the Purposeful Design men and Heart Change ladies live. The ministry includes Covenant Housing, which provides homes for women and their children with a commitment to a Christian lifestyle, offering more stability so their children can stay in one school over several years.

Several of the children of the Heart Change families are attending Oaks Academy, a classical Christian school with a commitment to racial and economic diversity. The school now has three locations in the inner city, with several teachers and students from Reformed Presbyterian families.

The Purposeful Design and Heart Change opportunity offers a new application of an older doctrine of Christ’s kingship. The doctrine reminds us that Christ is our priest in His atonement as well as our king in His rule over the world. The doctrine was developed by Augustine, Wycliffe, and John Calvin, and came to special fruition in the life and ministry of William Symington, the Scottish pas-tor who wrote Messiah the Prince.

With these ministries, we see a great illustration of Christ’s near relationship to His people; in this case, people afflicted with big life challenges. The move of several servant families into the nearby neighborhood shows another side of near relationship, as the families want to live closer to the people in whose lives they are ministering. The ministries also show the unlimited extent of Christ’s lordship over all areas of life. No social problem, such as addiction, is too much for Christ to demonstrate victory as king over all things.

The lordship of Christ over all of life is exciting in the daily workplace because Christians can begin to see and feel that they are working for an employer and ought to do good work, based on Colossians 3:22–24 and other passages. Yet, in a business such as Purposeful Design, workers contribute to a more intentional kingdom objective and a spiritually stronger bottom line—gospel transformation. A monotonous task may still be monotonous in the short term, but it can become more exciting as we see that we are part of a larger kingdom advancement.