Undercover for The King

Business can open doors closed to the Gospel.  Read this story to find out how…

Brian’s Story:

My entry into Azerbaijan (Muslim country) was through a secular organization called the *****. The ***** is probably best described as the Peace Corps of grads, as I only received living and housing stipends and no actually salary. I was assigned to work on a US AID funded project to help boost the agribusiness industry in the country by working with small to medium sized businesses to develop them and help them become more competitive. Additionally, I also organized two business case competitions for MBA grads, I assisted several missionaries in developing / improving / growing their businesses, and I eventually obtained employment with a consulting firm (which allowed me to continue living in Azerbaijan, but required me to travel outside of the country often).

During my time in Azerbaijan, I connected with a team from Frontiers and joined them in their house church planting endeavors. Our team partnered with 3 other missionary organizations that had a similar vision regarding planting house churches in Azerbaijan. The various house churches planted by each organization led to the establishment of a network of house churches. My ministry focus within this effort was primarily in working with young men, as my work (e.g. MBA business case competition) put me in contact with several young people. My wife, which I met in Azerbaijan through one of the partner missionary organizations, was engaged in women’s ministry, which eventually produced a leader
within the network of house churches movement.

Sharing at Work

Third in our series on Marketplace Ministry stories…

Dale’s Story:

Since May 2006 I have been involved in the workplace ministry starting with a group called BizLife that I helped to co-lead out of Shady Grove Church in Grand Prairie. God gave us a vision to see workplace believers fully equipped and empowered to share their faith at work via lunch meetings.

Then in Fall 2006 I met Vicki Warren at EDS who I found out had a women’s bible study group in EDS Plano location. She had been doing this type of ministry since Aug. 2002. I wanted to find out how she organized her meetings and what kind of problems she might have had before starting my own group.

I had been working at EDS on the 7-Eleven account and I started a small bible study of about 6 men and women. We had a great bible teacher and we met at lunch time in 7-Eleven’s conference room. We felt like by starting with a core group of believers we could then reach out from this base to the lost of 7-Eleven/EDS.

Taking Care of Little Ones

This is the second story in a series we’re publishing about how people seek God at work.  Many of us seek jobs that allow us to do good while we earn a living, like this story:

Kyle’s Story:

I never thought of a distinction between service for the Lord and secular work. Paul said to do all mightily as unto the Lord and to do all for the glory of God. That said, I do feel we are placed here to care for others.

It is much better to have an occupation that serves others than working in front of a computer screen. But that’s just my understanding. The only way I can see a believer going “full time” into ministry is that the call and burden from the Lord is so great that one’s time is totally occupied with service for the Lord that there is no time for anything else. In such cases, one’s monetary needs will be supplied by the Lord.

It seems for the very vast majority of believers the best thing is to have an occupation that directly deals with people. There are so many professions in health care, social services, and education that serve humanity. Believers are lights, luminaries in the world shining and giving grace to all we meet as we abide in Christ. Twenty years ago, I left a very lucrative job in electronics to go into teaching immigrant children in an inner city high school. My pay dropped dramatically, but it was worth it. I have never regretted the change. Each day I am surrounded by eager young people whom I care for and love. I talk about the Lord all the time and have done so for twenty years. I do not proselytize, but I am who I am. The Lord is always present. The public school setting is so much more open that folks usually think. It is filled with needy children whom the Lord loves. The Lord said that as we receive and take care of the little ones, we are taking care of Him.

So as a teacher, my encouragement is to go into teaching–grin. But if you really want to have children that are the most precious to teach, go into English as a Second Language and teach the immigrant and refugee children.

Rocky Road to The Promised Land

Over the next few days, we’ll be sharing first hand accounts of people we know who are seeking the Kingdom in business in some way.  Here’s the first of that series.

Mark’s Story:

My story is one of discovering latent giftings for the marketplace that I never knew I had. Growing up, I never had any interest in business and majored in English Literature for my undergraduate degree at UCLA and later got a MA in Marriage and Family Counseling from Fuller Seminary. I had initially planned to work on staff at a church but later decided against it after interning at my church and becoming disillusioned with the inner workings of a church institution. I decided to pursue secular employment in a field like human resources, where I felt that my graduate degree could assist me in procuring work.

As God in His severe mercy will do at times in our lives, He brought me into a season of extreme  wilderness where every door to normal employment was shut to me for nearly two years. I ended up working as a bottom of the rung laborer on a construction site, working alongside some truly scary people. Despite all my efforts at obtaining white collar work, no doors were opened and I was forced to work for many about a year and a half as a day laborer, without any security of long term employment. At one point, I even worked with illegal Central American refugees. As hard as it was, the nearly two years of
wilderness brought forth some very good fruit in my life, especially in releasing me from the fear of risk and failure. I learned that even though I was only making $500 a month, that God was still sustaining
me. The things I felt I needed, economic security and a good job, now began to lose their influence on my life. I learned to be content with daily bread and not a cupboard full of bread.

But, every season comes to an end and God brought mine to a quick conclusion in May of 1987. Within a year of May 1987, I launched out and started my own general contracting firm, (after working for 9 months as a project engineer with a small general contractor). Through many leaps of faith and hard business lessons, God allowed me to lead this fledging company to a place of prosperity and success. Within three years of starting the company in May 1988, I was working part time in my business and making an excess of over 100.000 a year. God had literally taught me how to run a business since I had no practical experience nor educational training. This company ended up completing nearly 30 million dollars of construction projects from 1988-1996.

The ensuing years have seen many ups and downs and a ton of more life learning, including planting and pastoring an institutional church full time for nearly a dozen years. In 2005, our institutional church
transitioned into a house church network and I went back into construction. The road has not been easy after being out of the industry for such a long time and God saw fit to walk my wife and I through another rigorous wilderness season in several areas of our lives. Yet, even in the midst of the difficult journey, God has not only sustained us but given both vision and opportunity for the future. Leaving Egypt is never easy but a destiny of frutifulness in the land of the Lord’s Promise is worth it!

Purposed Session Design

This past week I met in Austin with the track facilitators (Tony, Jim, and David), their wives (Felicity, Cathy, and Christine, respectively), and seminary student Lucas Land (blogger: What Would Jesus Eat, My Four Walls).  We hammered out a tentative plan for the 3 1.5 hour sessions in the track.  Please take a look at these notes and tell us what you think in the comments section.

First, we’ve been talking a lot about wanting to maximize collaboration, networking, and cross-pollination as much as possible.  We’d like to avoid the “talking head syndrome” that often dominates conferences: first, because we admit there are no experts at seeking the Kingdom in the marketplace — just pilgrims and pioneers, and second, because the greatest strength and value comes from disciples seeking the mission in community.  Please understand our efforts at design below are intended to facilitate this kind of interaction with the humble acknowledgment that unless God has the freedom to do what he wants among us, our efforts are useless.

Green Manufacturing Expo

Thanks to frequent commenter and track facilitator David Underwood for this tip.

I think many people in Missional Business will be very interested in ways of doing business that take care of the earth and the people who live there.  While some evangelicals have resisted anything “green” with comments like “it’s all going to burn anyway”, some Jesus-radicals have seen the evironment as a justice issue and a way of following God’s will.  After all, if we believe God designed the family in a certain way, and that it works best when we cooperate with that design, wouldn’t we also want to work in a way that cooperates with God’s will as built into his design of nature?

If you’re interested, take a look at the Expo Website.  It will be in major US cities in Fall 2008 through early Summer 2009.  I might be at the to June expo in NYC.  Even though I’m not in manufacturing, this would be good to connect to on behalf of my organizational clients.

Hope for the Marketplace

Here are a couple of quotes about what’s currently happening in the marketplace. I hope they encourage you.

Today, a spiritual revival is sweeping across Corporate America as people of all stripes are mixing mysticism into their management, importing into office corridors the lessons usually dolled out in churches, temples, and mosques. Gone is the old taboo against talking about God at work. –BusinessWeek Magazine, November 1999

Ten years ago we could identity only 25 national or international workplace ministries; today we can identify more than 900. –Mike McLoughlin, YWAM Marketplace Mission

If you have other quotes about ministry in the workplace that encourage you, please post them in the comments.

Into the Wildness

True faith is not expressed or experienced by those who remain in the safety of the temple courts, but by those that charge into the wildness of humanity armed only with the Cross of Peace.

While I was journaling with Dad today, he gave me the tidbit above. While there are many practical reasons why many of us are seeking a future in the business world, the persistent call of the Mission of God remains the brightest and purest motivator. It is easy to trust God in the temple courts and remain there where everything is already ordered according to the Kingdom of Heaven (well, at least we wish it were). It’s also easy to leave our faith in God in the temple courts while we trust in ourselves and the systems of man “in the real world”. But the Gospel of the Kingdom demands that we trust God to lead us into the marketplaces where the Kingdom has not yet come as ambassadors, establishing outposts of the King until he comes to bring his Reality in all its fullness.

I hope this encourages you today not to turn from the Great Journey for an easier road and to know the value of active trust is so much greater than passive belief.

Three Types of Journeyers

As we’ve listened to the stories and questions of people interested in marketplace ministry with the simple church movement, three groups of people or three types of journeyers have come to the surface:

1. Many people, who have come from full-time ministry in other forms of church or directly from seminary where they have been trained for professional ministry, face a dilemma when they want to enter simple church: How will I make a living if I’m not supported by the church? In some cases, this person may have few marketable skills and little business experience. In other cases, they need guidance in how to make a living that will still allow the time and energy necessary for them to follow their calling.
2. There are many business people in the simple church movement whose journey in this incarnational approach to Jesus-following has drawn up questions about how they can reform their careers and businesses for the sake of the King. This would also include entrepreneurs who are attracted to the pioneering nature of simple church because it aligned with their personal passions and who want to reform existing careers or businesses to serve the Kingdom they’ve come to love and serve.
3. We’ve also heard that some people are just sick of their current job because it isn’t the vibrant life they are now used to in Christ or because it limits mission and sane living in some way. They are asking questions about better ways to make a living by reforming their careers or starting up businesses of their own.

Which one are you? Let us know if you think there are other categories. We’re trying to get a bit of an idea about who and how many people are interested in each conversation/journey. Tell us a little bit of your story and what you hope to do with marketplace ministry in the future.

Three Areas/Themes of Marketplace Ministry

Tony and Felicity Dale

A couple of days ago, I was on a conference call with Tony and Felicity Dale, David Underwood, and Jim Mellon – all people with a huge heart for the simple church movement and all business people who are paving the way for those who are asking questions about self-funded ministry and mission and how to make a marketplace impact (Tony, David, and Jim and I will be facilitating the Marketplace Ministry track at the H2H2008 conference while Felicity will be working with John White in the House Church Basics track).

While on the call, the Dales told the story about a new direction in their ministry and perhaps in the lives of many in the movement. Since sometime around last Christmas, the Dales have felt God urging them to support and serve people who want to do Godly business within the movement, so they brought in their good friends and long-time collaborators Jim and David (who played a significant role in founding House2House). These four have been listening to people far and wide as they ask questions about surviving and thriving in the new paradigm with few professional Christians and blurring boundaries between the spheres of family, faith, and work.