George Greene III embraces opportunities to serve others: His inspiring legacy and message of hope for those in despair
- cdavis884
- 5 days ago
- 6 min read
By Charleston Mercury Staff
We had a good idea of what we might hear, but George Greene III, the keynote speaker at the Charleston Leadership Foundation’s Nov. 20 prayer breakfast, had something vastly more important to say than our team expected. Water Mission is no mystery to most of us, but there is a flood of fodder for the soul that comes from hearing the wisdom of Dr. Greene. Among other choice morsels, he provided the only sustainable remedy to the holiday blues that attack so many of us: It is not about you, which is only part of the message.
A deeper dive into one’s spiritual understandings can change a life, so what do we have to lose by opening our minds a bit? After all, where else will you get the remedy? The world has a lot to offer, and choices galore are there for us. Click here; click there. Indeed, the mass media has “all the answers” in pitches for this and that; however, there is no pill or potion to find one’s way out of the “dark night of the soul.”
Before the talk began, we conversed with Jackie Morfesis, our gifted spiritual writer, about the nature of the speakers we had heard at CLF for many years, and we agreed that all of them had something in common: a willingness to show how they were transformed through brokenness, which is thematic in Dr. George Greene III’s life.
Background
George, originally from central Florida, met Molly — soon to be Mrs. Greene — in New Orleans more than five decades ago. She was from Tupelo, Mississippi, but the newly married couple built their early life together in New Jersey, where they soon had a young family and where George was working for Exxon at the top of his field. Life was good, and they found that their spiritual lives were growing. George eventually had a prayerful notion that they needed to make a change, hearing that from a voice above. He told Molly, and they prayed about what they would do and then decided to leave, find a new home — happened to be in Charleston — and start what became General Engineering Laboratories. They lived on savings and grew the company with a focus on taking care of their employees as the company grew at an exponential rate.
Then, in 1984, their third child — John Christian — drowned in a tidal estuary in front of their home, and George’s world went dark. The Greenes were deeply involved at St. Philip’s and surrounded by faithful friends who helped them through this extremely difficult time. We can see a pattern at work and what sustains George.
Indeed, Dr. Greene is one of those rare figures who transformed professional excellence into a lifelong ministry. After building General Engineering Laboratories into one of the nation’s largest private environmental labs, he and his wife, Molly, were confronted with the devastation of Hurricane Mitch in 1998. Answering a plea by email to send water treatment systems to Honduras, they saw firsthand the true scale of the global water crisis — and it changed the course of their lives, knowing that more than two billion people on the planet do not have access to safe water. George put his entrepreneurial and engineering skills to the test and created a system that would clean contaminated water for those in need.
The Greenes sold their business, stepped out in faith and founded Water Mission — a Christian engineering nonprofit rooted in the conviction that every person deserves safe water and the chance to encounter God’s love. This change was not by coincidence, as Molly and George prayerfully heard God direct them to focus on bringing life-giving water to His people in the model of Jesus and the woman at the well; they stepped up in 2001 and answered the call. As with GEL, Water Mission grew by leaps and bounds, but in a way where faith was intertwined deeply in every step.
Another ‘dark night of the soul’
As Water Mission grew, George IV became more and more involved and eventually took the helm of the operation. Grandchildren grew in number; trips to the Bahamas were precious times to count their blessings. Then, tragedy struck in 2019 when Molly drowned after 49 years of marriage when an undertow swept her away. George experienced yet another “dark night of the soul,” but friends encouraged him. He began thinking less of his loss and more about how 2,000 people a day die because of a lack of access to clean water.
This calling in a time of testing expanded into the Global Water Center, where Dr. Greene now serves as executive chair, equipping leaders around the world to pursue sustainable, scalable solutions with the same quiet resolve that has marked his entire career. He works knowing that the water that took his son and wife is also filled with the biblical symbolism of both Noah and the rite of baptism. We can choose how we view water, and George understands that God chose the race he needed to run. Those at the prayer breakfast watched a video, and the voice was Molly’s; George continues to honor what he loves.
A faithful member of St. Philip’s Church, a family man and an aviator in his free hours, Dr. Greene has received numerous honors — including an honorary doctorate from Charleston Southern University, the Order of the Palmetto, Rotary International’s Service Above Self Award and induction into the South Carolina Business Hall of Fame — fitting recognition for a man who has spent decades turning compassion into infrastructure.
Accolades are simply a mark of time on the way, but the CLF speaker wants anyone willing to listen to know that there are much bigger things that we all need to do, but we have to say yes. What Dr. Greene impressed upon the room at the end, what he wished to say but could only gesture toward before time ran out, is that we are living in an angry country — plain and simple. The temperature of our politics seems to rise by the week, and the headlines offer a grim litany of brutality: the senseless slaying of a father in front of his children, a young woman attacked on public transit, students stabbed on school grounds, churches assaulted in broad daylight.
Whether the violence comes from sheer “left-hand path” ideological fervor, spiritual confusion or simple hatred, the message is unavoidable: something is deeply wrong in the American soul. Our government, sprawling, centralized and increasingly abstracted from ordinary life, swollen into a modern federal leviathan, now postures as an all-providing, mother-Gaia nanny state, yet even such a behemoth cannot mend what is, at heart, a spiritual crisis.
Governments can pass laws and bureaucracies can churn, but none of these can heal the wounded interior life of an entire country. In the vacuum created by our modern dependency on the state, our collective, reflexive belief that Washington can or should “fix” everything, we have forgotten the ancient and enduring truth that the church, the neighbor and the private individual conscience are the rightful first responders of a healthy civilization. Greene’s point that “where government cannot help but the church can,” is refreshingly not political; it’s deeply theological and raises the issue of “taking the opportunity,” as Dr. Greene put it.
Citizens who expect Caesar to calm their fears will be forever disappointed; however, those who reclaim the quiet, daily work of mercy — sweeping around their own back doors, binding the wounds of those near at hand — will rediscover the only power capable of stabilizing our society: grace in action, forgiveness, prayer and understanding. In a recent opinion piece for The Post and Courier, Jackie Morfesis reminded us that “our times at the foot of the mountain are the greatest opportunity to be remade, remolded, reformed and ultimately positioned to be people to positively impact our world”; few know this better than George Greene. A world in a water crisis benefits, and the rest of us have an example to follow.
