Little Jobs and the Big Job
The day after the meeting in Santee, Calif., Dr. Bob and I spent a blessed two days getting to know Tom Cantor, who runs his biotechnology company for the glory of God. Tom’s company, Scantibodies Laboratory, is the largest employer in Santee and manufactures antibody-based products which save lives—but this is the “little job.” To Tom and his son, David (see “Being the Best We Can Be”), the big job is to see souls saved, and everything about the company is orchestrated to enable the big job. A tour of any of the multiple buildings in the Santee industrial park headquarters will confront visitors with numerous passages of Scripture in bronze. Tom treats his employees and his clients as people for whom Christ died, and the result is a company touted as a model of “social awareness.”
In 2006 Scantibodies opened a large manufacturing facility in Tecate, Mexico, where the First Response and Answer pregnancy tests (the world’s leading tests) are produced at the rate of over three million test kits per month. Dr. Bob, Bob Jorgensen and I went to Tecate to experience what Tom Cantor calls the “Gospel Tour.” We crossed the border on foot and in less than 60 seconds were whisked away in an SUV with bullet-proof glass, hundreds of pounds of armor and tires that can’t be shot out. (Tecate can be a dangerous place these days.) Tom takes company clients on a two-hour tour of the facility for what is mostly an extended presentation of the Gospel punctuated with some biotechnology. Those clients are definitely a captive audience—since they need Tom and his armored SUV to get back to the border! As one client said in a blog last fall, “I joked with some friends that he could hold me hostage unless I succumbed to his evangelizing efforts—and got one man to promise to rescue me.” After the tour the same client said, “I’m still sorting this out in my own mind—whether my host, the founder Tom Cantor, was candidly baring his soul or was about the most effective evangelical the world has ever known. Actually, it was both.”
Scantibodies is now in the process of building a facility in Ethiopia like the one in Tecate for the purpose of evangelizing Muslims. There have been many challenges in trying to build a modern biotechnology facility in a poor country with little infrastructure, but Tom Cantor believes this is part of the “big job” for which God has raised up his company.
Mike Gray
Director of SITS
Bob Jones University