What we mean by "impact" — Christians for Impact

CFI wants to help Christians find high-impact careers. This article explains what we mean by impact (and four common misconceptions).

1. Impact is about good outcomes

The impact of any choice (including a career choice) is the change that choice makes to the world. Positive changes are those that conform to God’s standard of goodness and His plan to renew all things.

Therefore, we summarize “impact" or “kingdom impact” as:

A concrete change that conforms with God’s redemptive plans to renew our fallen world.

2. Scripture shows God’s impact vision

The Bible has a lot to say about the kind of world God longs to see. Rather than rely on a simple metric of impact, we consider a range of outcomes that scripture affirms are good:

Examples of impact

Justice for the poor 🫴
God condemns economic injustice and wants us to help those living in poverty. There are over 2,000 Bible verses about poverty. Working to reduce global poverty and treat preventable diseases follows God’s care for the poor and for their suffering.

Faith in God🙌
God does not desire that any should perish but that all would receive eternal life through repentance and belief in Christ (2 Peter 3; Rom 10:9; Luke 15:7). Working to support strategic mission efforts follows from the desire to promote faith in God, even as faith itself is a gift from God (1 Cor 3:6).
Peace on Earth🌏
God wants humanity to live in peace. CFI is especially interested in directing people toward preventing nuclear conflict because this could create unprecedented violence and devastation.
Flourishing of God’s creation🐑
God cares about all of creation, including animals. Ending cruel treatment of animals and mitigating the effects of climate change are impactful ways we can prevent needless suffering and exercise loving dominion.

3. Impact is about well-being

We think a common thread in the above is God’s concern for the well-being of people and animals (we mostly focus on people, but there are scriptural reasons to believe God cares about animals, too.)

Well-being is about what’s ultimately good for someone.

To get the best possible picture of this, we turn to scripture, reason, and evidence. Read here for more about our framework.

4. The more impact, the better

An action is more impactful if it helps more people or helps the same amount of people more. All else being equal, if one action helps one person and another action helps two, we can say the second one is twice as impactful as the first.

Impact = Number of people helped x Amount of help

This can be represented visually:

Things are rarely this simple in the real world—but the basic principle holds. Mathematically, you could say that impact is the number of people helped times the amount of help. We think impact can be measured, or at least estimated. We can try to choose actions that help more.

What impact is not:

1) Impact is not wealth, strength, or influence☄️

It is common to hear “impact” conflated with wealth, strength, or influence. But these are merely tools that can unlock positive or negative impacts when applied in contexts that affect well-being.

A person who possesses tens of millions of dollars, but never uses it and “buries it in the ground” is exceedingly wealthy but not impactful.

When we recommend considering factors like prestige, career capital, or money, we do so not because these things matter in themselves; rather, these are tools for impact.

2) Impact is not output or what you produce

Career output ≠ Career impact

Outputs are what is produced from your work. Impacts are the changes to the world relative to how it otherwise would have been.

Even high-output careers can have a low direct impact.

For example, imagine you are considering becoming a doctor in the US.

You estimate you give care to 150 patients a week, including life-saving care to one of them. Because your direct output is saving one life per week, you conclude your job is impactful.

This reasoning is mistaken since it does not consider whether that person would have been saved if you had not become a doctor.

Indeed, research suggests that the additional US doctor probably does not have a massive impact measured in the total number of lives directly saved. This is because the US has readily available healthcare, regardless of whether or not you become a doctor. This is in contrast to doctors in countries with very few doctors, like Niger, where the marginal doctor saves dozens to hundreds of times as many lives.

This is a simplified example, but the general point holds in the real world as well: output does not always equal impact.

**3) Impact is usually not certain**

If you start to think deeply about the true, counterfactually relevant impact of different choices, you will notice that it can get very complicated. Adding to this, it is very difficult to ascertain when and how God might intervene.

Even as we cannot be perfectly sure what the most impactful path is, we can still aim for it. Our job is to trust in God and try our best, relying on Him and His grace.

4) Impact is not the only thing that matters

CFI’s stance is not that impact is all that matters. We discourage any paths for impact that require lying, neglecting key relationships, breaking God’s law, or refusing to honor God.

Some other considerations for whether actions (or agents) are good besides expected impact include:

Virtue, intentions and honesty.
Family, including one’s spouse and parents, to whom one may have special obligations.
God’s commandments and glory.

CFI focuses on providing information on the impactfulness of career choices because there is much less guidance available for this compared to other considerations. We aim to glorify God by seeking the greatest possible impact for His kingdom.

For more about CFI’s framework, read here.

What we mean by “impact”