I worked in the mail room at Word Records when I was in college. I was a student at Belmont University, ground level for a lot of starry-eyed artists looking to break into the Nashville music scene. This mail room gig gave me a chance to rub shoulders with some...
The day of my accident began normally, with the early morning sun poking holes through the makeshift shade my husband rigged up the night before. Daylight came early in Honduras so no alarm clock was needed to get us up and going. Our missions team had come to...
This is a story of a Business as Mission (BAM) practitioner on the field using business as a mechanism for planting the church in areas of the world where you can’t do that with traditional missionary methods. In order to protect the work being done we will not...
It’s August in Indiana and that means corn around every corner. Where the modern world has not yet stomped in to plop down a strip mall or housing addition, there grows corn taller than most men. The farmers rejoice because 2018 has been a bumper year for the...
I was a musician in a prior life. A music pastor actually. It was a beautiful season of life, a season where I was able to leverage gifts for the piano, music composition, and arranging that I had been cultivating since I was a little boy. It was also a season...
This is a story of a Business as Mission (BAM) practitioner on the field using business as a mechanism for planting the church in areas of the world where you can’t do that with traditional missionary methods. In order to protect the work being done we will not...
I went looking for happiness, but she’s hard to chase down. I pursued her through hidden corridors and back alleys, occasionally catching the faint gleam of her beautiful hair blowing in the early morning light. But to no avail. She was there and then she was...
Hundreds of millions of believers around the world find time to spend time with God every day. Pretty cool to think about right? Devotional time, devos, quiet time, abiding time, Jesus time, alone time, or whatever we else call it in the church is a dedicated...
The Gospel is going to the unreached places, to places we are taught to fear and cultures we often shun. There is a true awakening taking place amongst Muslims! They are coming to Jesus like never before, quite literally by the thousands. But it isn’t without...
Have you noticed who the villains are in the majority of movies and TV shows today? The Lego Movie was terrorized by Lord Business, who longs to destroy lego world by gluing all the pieces together. Wall Street introduced us to Gordon Gecko, who coined the...
And at The Stone Table, we define BAM this way: Business as mission is the intentional integration of business and ministry to create a sustainable, missional presence of the kingdom of God in a particular community. Across the globe, all kinds of marketplace work is being embraced as a Great Commission opportunity to take the Gospel to every ethnos. We have missionary entrepreneurs that are starting sustainable farms, tourism companies, CrossFit gyms, and coffee shops in areas devoid of Gospel witness. We have gig economy workers like graphic designers and book editors that are moving their base of operations to strategic missions’ outposts. We have take-a-job missionaries that are partnering with local church planting teams and are embedding in local corporations that are moving them to unreached parts of the world. We have business owners that are franchising their models to missionary teams that could take the Gospel into places that traditional missionaries cannot go. And missionary investors are underwriting the risky startup costs of these strategic BAM projects through grant and investment dollars. And they’re embracing this multiple bottom-line definition of success and Great Commission returns.
So, what is the Great Commission? Do you know? The Great Commission is Jesus’ last instructions to his disciples as he ascended into heaven. These instructions weren’t just for professional pastors and missionaries. Jesus’ words were aimed at all of us who call him “Lord,” including those of us with marketplace jobs. Look at Matthew 28:19. It says, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.” It says “go,” to move out, to train up followers of all nations. And the Greek word here is actually ethnos. It’s ethnos or a people joined by similar customs or culture. We can better translate this word, not as geo-political nation states, but as people groups. And Jesus said to go make disciples of all of them. But the Joshua Project estimates there as many as 7,400 unreached people groups in the world today. These 7,400 people groups total 3.1 billion people or 42% of the global population. And for many of these people, were not just talking about a general disinterest in Christianity, we’re talking no access to the Gospel. If you are born into this 42%, there is a good chance that you will live and die without ever as much as meeting a Christian let alone hearing the life-giving message of Jesus. And this should disturb all of us. See, if you belong to Jesus, the Great Commission belongs to you.
That’s why two recent Barna surveys on global missions and evangelism really shocked and troubled me. Maybe you saw these. According to Barna, over half of all churchgoers, 51%, are completely unfamiliar with the concept of the Great Commission. But I think even more disturbing, they found almost half of practicing Christian millennials believe that evangelism is wrong. And perhaps these responses reflect a rejection of some historical missions’ missteps that were rooted more in western colonialism than the gospels full redemptive work. Perhaps, but I fear something worse. I fear God’s people may actually be losing God’s heart for the nations. I fear we’ve turned the Great Commission into more of a great suggestion. If we really love people, won’t we move heaven and earth to tell them how their sins can be forgiven, how they can find union with their heavenly father, and how they can function in the fullness of the resurrection power of Jesus Christ. The answer is yes, and we passionately believe that mobilizing entrepreneurship, business, and the marketplace is a vital part of that Great Commission calling.