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...
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...
We love leveraging business and entrepreneurship to fulfill The Great Commission! One of our favorite missions investments over the past few years was a Crossfit Gym that is successfully planting a church in an area of the world where church planting is...
As I young aspiring musician within the church, I was confident in what it looked like for me to integrate my faith and my art. Christian music was a clear-cut path for me to create music and live out my faith. Until the day my life decided to pick me up and...
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. This article was originally published...
Let’s be honest, it’s hard to pray. At least consistently. Daily. Effectively. We can spout all the super-spiritual mantras about prayer that we want. We know it’s vital to Christian living, the health of our daily relationships, our family, the impact of our work,...
Let me tell you what the Gospel is not. The Gospel is not, “I am a Sinner; I work hard to improve myself and God approves me because of my effort.” That is not the Gospel. This is the Gospel: “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”
You know when I was a pastor, my passion was the Gospel; the proclamation of Jesus Christ and the discipleship of people through the local church. That was my job. So, my job was pastor, my passion was the Gospel. But now for the last decade or so, I have been back in the marketplace. And you know what? My passion is still the Gospel. I sit at a different seat now. I’m in a marketplace seat. I’m involved in managing apartments and developing apartments and Realestate but my passion as a believer is still the same. My job is different but my vocation (my vocation or “vocare” from the Latin word “calling”) is still the same; the Gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ. I just do that now from a marketplace seat. So, I want to encourage all of you, whether you work in a church, whether you work in a marketplace, whether you’re on the mission field, the vocation and calling of every believer ultimately is the same. It is to embody the kingdom and to proclaim and glorify the name of Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth. That’s your job, that’s your vocation.
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.