Nobody boards an airplane thinking about the fasteners. They sit buried where no passenger will ever see them, and they keep the wing on.
RC Fasteners supplies those parts for aerospace, electronics, industrial, commercial, and construction work. Owner Rick Johnson describes the company another way: "a ministry working undercover as a fastener company." This month's featured video follows one Christian business owner who stopped chasing profit, started putting people first, and watched what God grew once he did.
Rick calls the first thirty or so years of his Christian life casual. He was saved. He prayed now and then, opened his Bible once in a while, and made it to church once or twice a month.
"There's so much more to it," he says now. "It's a relationship that I didn't have, that I didn't realize until I had lost everything."
Walking out of the warehouse one day, he asked: Lord, what do you want me to do? The answer came closer to home than a mission field. "Now we're going to use RC Fasteners for my glory." Rick answered honestly: "I don't know how to do that. But I need your help." That, he says, is when everything changed.
For his first eleven years running the company, Rick had it backward. He was chasing the fruit, and he names it plainly: success and money.
Everything turned when he reversed the order. "If we take care of the root, which is people," he says, "then God will take care of the fruit." At RC Fasteners, people means everyone the business touches, from employees and customers to vendors and suppliers.
People before profit is simple to say. It is much harder to live the week payroll is due.
"But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you." — Matthew 6:33 (ESV)
Jesus spoke those words to people anxious about food and clothing. The promise is about the Father's care for his children, and it guarantees nothing about revenue. Seeking first means the kingdom sets the order of your week, while your provision stays in his hands.
What Rick celebrates in the video is men God is growing who carry that growth home to their families and neighbors. "You can make all the money in the world," he says, "but nothing compares to that."
Scripture defines fruit the same way.
"But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law." — Galatians 5:22-23 (ESV)
None of that shows up on a balance sheet. Biblical fruit is changed character and changed lives, and only God produces it.
"I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth." — 1 Corinthians 3:6-7 (ESV)
Paul was writing to a church, but the pattern holds on a warehouse floor. You plant and water by showing up and loving the person in front of you. The growth is God's work, on God's timeline.
Inside a business, Rick is right that people are where the effort belongs. Scripture goes one layer deeper. What changed Rick was never a management philosophy. It was the relationship with Christ he had gone thirty years without.
"I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing." — John 15:5 (ESV)
Loving employees and customers well flows out of abiding in Jesus. Cut off from him, "people first" becomes one more technique, and techniques run out of strength by Thursday afternoon.
RC Fasteners started with prayer on Monday. "Then God will put something else in your heart," Rick says, and soon Wednesday and Friday had something too. "Before you know it, it's a lifestyle. Everything we do is led by the Lord."
Today the week holds a Friday morning Bible study that has met since 2013, a Monday devotion, and a short prayer together every morning. Verses hang on the warehouse walls where everyone can read them.
"And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, 'Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?' Then I said, 'Here I am! Send me.'" — Isaiah 6:8 (ESV)
"That's what you're doing," Rick says. "You're saying, 'Here I am, Lord. Use me.'"
"A lot of these guys didn't have good parents or good fathers," Rick says, "and God brings them in." Invest in them, and a different man emerges over time. Rick points to Marcos as one example.
One associate, nearly nine years with the company, says he felt the presence of God the first time he walked through the door. He had been praying for a place to work while Rick was praying for an employee, and he calls the way they found each other a miracle.
Before RC Fasteners, he says, he didn't feel loved "by anything or anybody." Being loved there "saved my life."
"God settles the solitary in a home." — Psalm 68:6 (ESV)
Another voice in the video explains why the work gets done well: "I don't see my bosses as bosses. I see them as family." He adds, "I'll work harder for my brother than I will my boss."
"Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ." — Colossians 3:23-24 (ESV)
Rick's advice to owners who want to go all in for God at work is two words: start somewhere.
Rick closes the video by reaching for Paul.
"But, as it is written, 'What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him.'" — 1 Corinthians 2:9 (ESV)
His job, as he sees it, is to love God and love his neighbor. What grows from that belongs to God, and most of it will never fit in a quarterly report: a man who finally feels loved, a father bringing something new home to his kids.
Watch Rick Johnson's full RC Fasteners story, and if you want stories like this one arriving in your week, join the mission.
Tend the root. Leave the fruit to the One who gives the growth.
