Ask a man in Gulu or Kisii who owns the land he farms and you will often get an answer that confuses a bank but would not have confused Moses. He may say it is his, and mean something entirely different from what the...
Ask a man in Gulu or Kisii who owns the land he farms and you will often get an answer that confuses a bank but would not have confused Moses. He may say it is his, and mean something entirely different from what the title deed means. The land came from his father, who had it from his father, and it is going to his sons and to sons not yet named. He is standing in the middle of a river and calling the water his. He knows better. His language just has not caught up with his theology.
A Nigerian chief put it to the West African Lands Committee in 1912 in words that have been quoted ever since: land belongs to a vast family of which many are dead, few are living, and countless members are still unborn. That sentence was offered as a description of customary tenure. I want to argue it is also the most accurate definition of family wealth ever spoken, and that the best modern research on long-lasting family enterprises has spent a hundred interviews and twenty countries arriving at the same place the chief started from.
Dennis Jaffe is a family enterprise researcher who set out to answer a narrow question with a large study: what do families whose businesses and fortunes survive a century actually do differently? His team interviewed more than one hundred families across roughly twenty countries, each with a shared enterprise at least three generations old, and published the findings as Borrowed From Your Grandchildren (Wiley, 2020).
The title comes from the book's epigraph, a saying Jaffe kept meeting in different accents on different continents: you do not inherit a family business. You borrow it from your grandchildren.
Sit with the grammar of that. Inheritance points backward. It makes the current generation the endpoint, the beneficiary, the one for whom all the sacrifice was made. Borrowing points forward. It makes the current generation the middle, the trustee, the one holding an asset that already has a rightful owner who happens not to have been born yet. Everything about how you treat a thing changes with that one preposition. You maintain a borrowed car differently than an inherited one. You return it fueled.
Jaffe's central finding is that the families who last are what he calls generative families. They do not merely preserve what they were given. Every generation is expected to add value in every form the family recognizes: financial value, yes, but also new capabilities, renewed relationships, refreshed purpose, and a business model their parents would not recognize but their grandparents would bless. The families that treated the fortune as a museum piece to be guarded tended to die with the third generation, usually politely, in a lawyer's office. The families that lasted treated it as a loan with interest due. Preservation, it turns out, is not preserved by preserving. It is preserved by generating.
One more of Jaffe's observations deserves its own paragraph. The hundred-year families talk about themselves constantly. They tell origin stories at weddings. They hold assemblies where teenagers hear how close the business came to ruin in some past decade and what it cost to save. The narrative is maintained as deliberately as the balance sheet, because the narrative is what recruits each new generation of borrowers. A loan nobody remembers taking out is a loan nobody feels obliged to repay.
Now bring this home to Scripture, because the borrowing frame is not a modern consulting insight wearing old clothes. It is the Bible's opening position on human work.
The Hebrew word avodah appears in Genesis 2:15, where God places the man in the garden to work it and keep it. The same word is used in Exodus for the worship Israel offers God, and again for the service the Levites render in the tabernacle. One word, three English translations: work, worship, service. The language itself refuses to separate what we do at the shop from what we do at the altar. Your maize business, rightly held, is liturgy.
But notice the setting of that first avodah. Adam is put to work in a garden he did not plant, which he does not own, which he is explicitly told to keep for purposes beyond his own appetite. The first job description in history is a stewardship of borrowed ground. "The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it" (Psalm 24:1) is not a poetic flourish. It is the title deed, and every human holding since Eden has been leasehold.
This is why the borrowed-from-your-grandchildren saying should feel familiar to a Christian rather than novel. Leviticus 25 builds an entire economy on it. Land in Israel could not be sold permanently, "because the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers." The Jubilee returned every field to its family line each fiftieth year, a legal mechanism whose whole purpose was to prevent any generation from behaving like an owner instead of a borrower. Naboth understood this when he refused Ahab's cash offer for his vineyard with the words "The Lord forbid that I should give you the inheritance of my ancestors" (1 Kings 21:3). He was not being sentimental about grapes. He was declining to sell something he did not consider his to sell, at any price, to any king. It cost him his life, and the Bible records it as faithfulness, not stubbornness.
So when a Luo elder says the ancestral land is held for the clan, or a Ghanaian stool holds land in trust for the living and the unborn, this is not a quaint custom awaiting modernization. It is a theology of property that the richest families in Jaffe's study spent generations relearning at great expense. Africa did not miss the lesson. Africa is the lesson. Our danger is the opposite one: that in the rush to individual title deeds and quick liquidity we unlearn what our grandmothers knew, precisely when Wiley is publishing books teaching it back to the wealthy of Geneva and Singapore.
If wealth is borrowed from grandchildren, then the planning horizon must be long enough for the lender to appear in it. James E. Hughes Jr., the estate lawyer whose thinking reshaped this whole field, argues that a family should plan across one hundred to one hundred and fifty years, a span he defines with a phrase I find quietly staggering: long enough for the third generation to be born and die.
Most financial planning in Nairobi, Lagos, or London runs on a horizon of one retirement. Ask the average professional what their money is for and the honest answer is: my old age, then whatever is left, split among the children. That is a thirty-year plan with a distribution clause. Hughes is proposing something five times longer, and the difference is not merely arithmetic. A thirty-year plan optimizes for accumulation and safe drawdown. A hundred-and-fifty-year plan is forced to optimize for the things that actually survive that long, which money alone never does. It has to invest in the competence of people not yet born, which means investing now in the parents who will raise them and the stories that will form them.
Here is the test I give families. Name the decision you made this year that only makes sense if your great-grandchildren are real. Not imagined fondly. Real, in the sense that their interests altered an actual choice: a plot you refused to subdivide, a business you kept boring and durable instead of exciting and fragile, a debt you declined because the collateral was the family's ground. If no decision changes, the grandchildren are not yet stakeholders in your plan. They are just an audience you assume will applaud.
Psalm 78 gives the horizon its purpose: we will tell the next generation the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord, "so the next generation would know them, even the children yet to be born, and they in turn would tell their children." Four generations in one verse, and what travels down the line is not property. It is knowledge of God, carried in stories, with property as the pack animal.
Let me make this concrete, because a frame that changes nothing is a decoration.
A borrower maintains. The man who believes he owns the rental units defers the roof repairs, because the loss lands on someone abstract. The man who believes he is borrowing them from his granddaughter fixes the roof, because now the deferred repair has a face.
A borrower documents. Owners keep records for the taxman. Borrowers keep records for the next steward: where the title deeds are, which boundary the neighbor disputes, why the family never sells the plot by the river, what the business owes and to whom. If your family's knowledge lives only in your head, you are not holding wealth. You are holding a demolition charge with your own heartbeat as the timer.
A borrower resists consumption disguised as ownership. Selling inherited land to fund a wedding feels like using what is yours. Under the borrowing frame it is spending a minor's trust fund on a party, and it feels like what it is.
And a borrower is, surprisingly, freer. This is the part people miss. Ownership is anxious, because owners can lose. A steward holding borrowed goods for a faithful Lender can hold them with open hands, take sabbaths, give generously, and sleep. "Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain" (Psalm 127:1) is addressed precisely to the man who thinks the whole edifice rests on his shoulders. It does not. He is middle management in a family firm whose Owner does not slumber.
The man in the middle of the river does not own the water. But he is not nothing. He is the one standing there now, the only generation currently alive, the only hands the dead and the unborn have. The dead entrusted; the unborn are owed; the living decide. That is not a diminished role. It is the whole drama of stewardship compressed into one lifetime, and Scripture's word for playing it well is faithfulness: "it is required of stewards that they be found faithful" (1 Corinthians 4:2).
Jaffe's hundred families, the chief of 1912, Naboth in his vineyard, and the elder in Gulu are all telling you the same thing in different registers. What you hold was advanced to you. The lender is patient but has a long memory, and some of the lenders are children who will one day ask what you did with their inheritance while it was in your keeping. Blessed is the one who can answer without looking away.
Choose one asset you hold, a plot, a business, a house, a portfolio, even a family name, and formally reclassify it in your own mind and on paper as borrowed. Write a single sentence naming the asset and the person or generation you are borrowing it from: "The Karen plot is borrowed from my granddaughter and her children." Put the sentence where you will see it, in your journal, your family records, or taped inside the file that holds the title deed. Then let the sentence start auditing your decisions. It will.