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...
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,...
I looked for him everywhere. Our church meets in a high school, and he’s not usually hard to find. I gave up the search and walked into the auditorium to pray before our next service started. I glanced up at the balcony where our production team works the magic...
Hey, I’m Hayden. For this season of my life, God has called me into the tech field. I work as a UX designer for Shopify in Canada. By studying the Bible, I’ve learned how beautiful work can be when we do it for God's glory! Here’s a truth to sink your teeth...
In the Arab World, terrorist attacks, the Islamic State, and fundamentalist Islam are combining with a sovereign move of the Holy Spirit to move more and more Muslims away from Islam and toward Jesus. The Gospel is getting traction among Muslims in ways you...
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.