Who could predict the longevity of a pink frosted donut with sprinkles? A tradition that began when our son was four continues today with his four-year-old daughter. A weekly trip to Dunkin’ Donuts was a highlight in the late 80’s when donuts were made on-site. The...
Why is Business As Mission (BAM) so important today within your community and in your culture? BAM is a great fit in our context. We can’t enter our country on a religious visa so BAM provides us the means to enter and remain in our country. BAM has provided us a...
The holy triad of faith, hope, and love is found multiple times in the New Testament. Many people the world over are familiar with 1 Corinthians 13:13, “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” (NIV) Other...
I hated my food touching when I was a kid. Ok, perhaps I should be completely forthright. I [currently, right now, as a grown adult] still hate [active, present tense] when my food touches on my plate. You know, like when the juice from your green beans seeps into...
We love to share stories of our missionary partners on the field in a business context. We believe business is a beautiful mechanism for the gospel to flow because business, at its core, is about meeting a need and serving people. As we intentionally add value to...
Her tag read Emily, MD but she looked like Jesus. At our first meeting she sat down right next to me, she looked me in the eyes and said start from the beginning. I’m pretty sure my mouth fell open because she was at the long list of physicians I had seen in 12 months...
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 be...
Last year, we interviewed Dave Cooper, founding member of The Stone Table and President of our sister company CRF Affordable Housing, about his personal journey and the genesis of these business as mission organizations that have been impacting the Kingdom of God for...
Nick was born into a well-to-do family in Torún, Poland. His father was a very successful business man, but he passed away unexpectedly when Nick was just 10 years old. So Nick was sent to live with his uncle, an Episcopalian Bishop, who saw to his education and...
I was still struggling to grasp my surroundings as we slipped off our shoes and walked into the expansive, open-air, marbled courtyard. There were dozens of students pacing the floors, kneeling in prayer, and sitting in study groups amongst the roman pillars...
You know when we talk about the gospel, we often think about something kind of ethereal and in over here. It deals with our spiritual life and so, when we go to work every day, when we engage in the realities of our everyday life, it’s like we know those two things go together but kind of you know the gospel is more spiritual. It’s over in this realm and you know then I gotta deal with my business, I gotta deal with my work and strategy and marketing and finance and all of those different kinds of things. And we don’t really connect to those things, but I was reading in Romans one this morning. In Romans one there’s this famous verse says, “I am not ashamed of the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ. For it is the power of God.” The gospel is the power of God. I just got to thinking about that within the context of our everyday lives, including our everyday work. You know the gospel is not just some other good moral philosophy, it’s not just another interesting religious story. The gospel is literally power. The gospel is power. The gospel actually does something in us and around us and through us. The gospel is intended to be fuel for everyday living, our faith, our work, our home lives, our finances. The gospel is power; the gospel is not just another interesting moral philosophy. The gospel is power. So, I just want to encourage you with that this week, to think about how you can tap into the gospel. The power of God. It is there as a gift for you, it is not just some spiritual aspect of your life to be relegated to the spiritual or ethereal realm. It is the power of God for real everyday living. You can tap into it; your work can tap into it. It is the power of God unto salvation for everyone who believes.
One of the most powerful tools you can add to your business arsenal this year is prayer. Prayer changes everything. Prayer aligns our hearts with the heart of God and makes us a safe place for Him to deposit His creativity and His ideas and His blessing. There’s this great scene from the Magicians Nephew in The Chronicles of Narnia series that I think illustrates why prayer is so vital. And I’m just going to read it to you, I’m just going to read right out of, right out of this great book. If you haven’t read The Chronicles of Narnia series, I highly recommend it, but the Magicians Nephew, there’s this great scene when Aslan has sent young Digory on a journey to accomplish something for him with one of his friends and they’ve gone on a flying horse together.
A mentor once told me that the two most vulnerable moments for any leader are after a great failure or after a great success. And it’s those moments of success that I want to talk about today. I think it’s when God has breathed on something that we are involved in; When God has done something more than we could have ever asked or expected. We tend to want to take more ownership of those things than we should. And it’s not that we don’t have a role to play, but I think in those moments of success when God has just multiplied something beyond our wildest imaginations, we can tend to pat ourselves on the back. Maybe begin to arrogantly think we were more of the causation for that than we actually were. And there’s going to be moments in any leadership journey of failure, but there’s also gonna be these moments where things just work. Where you look back and you realized, “Oh my gosh, look what has happened in and around me.” And it’s in those moments that we need to humbly fall on our knees and remember that we have a role to play. We are stewards. We function in obedience and response to God but the work, and ultimately the glory, for any success, in any endeavor, goes to God alone. And so, I want to encourage you, in those moments of success, to stay close to the heart of God. Cause there’s gonna be moments where God just miraculously breathes on something and it’s in those moments, we should be grateful that He allowed us to be a part of that journey.