I had a recent conversation with a graduate student at Indiana University that really got me thinking. He is a friend of my daughter and part of the vibrant Chi Alpha campus ministry that is discipling hundreds of IU students each year.
This kid is incredibly gifted, a graduate assistant that oversees and mentors a few hundred underclassman, and will earn both his undergraduate and MBA diplomas in only 5 years as part of the Kelly School of Business 3+2 program. He started getting recruited by Big 4 accounting firms his junior year and has had his coveted post-graduate job lined up for almost 18 months now. His future business success is just waiting to be realized.
But then the Lord started messing with him in all the right ways.
He asked to speak with me because of The Stone Table’s connection to both the marketplace and global missions. Over the last few months, he began sensing that the Lord was asking him postpone the start of his career and give at least one year to missions.
“What about my business skills? What about all this education and opportunity? I’m really good at business. Would the Lord really be asking me to give all that up to go into full-time missions work?” he asked.
First of all – yes, maybe. The Lord asks us to lay down all kinds of important things to follow Him. But what if the answer is not either/or but both/and?
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If you’ve been around The Stone Table for any length of time, you know we adamantly believe that marketplace skills are missionary skills.
Maybe you’re an entrepreneur that could start a business to fund strategic Great Commission projects around the world.
Maybe you’ve got business skills in a particular marketplace sector. There are corporations in Gospel-needy parts of the world where ex-pats can take jobs, embed with a local church planting team, and take the gospel to an unreached people group.
Maybe you can take it a step further and join a Business as Mission missionary team. BAM teams need marketplace skills as they standup these “tip of the spear” BAM efforts in some of the hardest to reach places around the globe.
Just because you graduated from business school, have a marketplace job, or own your own business doesn’t mean you’re not equipped for the mission field. In fact, you might be exactly who God is calling to go.
What’s the Lord saying to you? Click here for more.
Accelerating the Great Commission through the Marketplace,
Erik Cooper | The Stone Table
