I am convinced that the next wave of missions (at least coming from the Western World) is going to happen on the wings of business. This has a strong biblical and historical precedent. We know for a fact that the gospel got to Rome quicker via business than apostles (Acts 8:1, 28:7). As Steven Neill notes in his classic History of Christian Missions that of the three great church planting centers in the ancient world (Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome) not one of them was founded by an apostle.
In the same way, the places most untouched by the gospel today are the places that ‘apostolic’ (sent) missionaries have great difficulty getting into but ‘merchants’ are able to access with relative ease.
Our church has done a great deal of thinking (though we’re still in the beginning stages of this) about what this looks like, and how to be a catalyst within the movement. So far, we’ve identified four different types of people who can be especially effective: (When people talk about business as mission there is a lot of excitement and good intentions, but in many cases the good intentions do not seem to be turning into viable platforms and effective effort.) So here they are:
1 . The gifted entrepreneur:
This would be a man or woman with a proven track record of starting new companies in the United States and decides to do this overseas in an unreached area. This is extremely difficult to do because just to succeed in business in the 1st place is difficult. After all, many talented entrepreneurs who intend to start businesses in their home context fail!
Conducting business overseas exponentially multiplies this difficulty. What we don’t need are a bunch of seminary students with no business training and no real entrepreneurial ability thinking they can simply move to an unreached people group and start a new business. This will end up being even more of a drain on the church finances than traditional missionary approaches, because no longer are we merely having to support a couple on the field but we’re pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into a non-profit making businesses.
But there are some who have the capacity and the skill proven by what they’ve been able to do here. We should encourage them to think about how they could leverage that skill into places where the gospel is not known. We also need investors who can spot good profit-making potential and invest in these businesses that will carry the gospel into unreached places. I know of a couple guys who have done this successfully overseas.
2. The kingdom-minded business owner:
This is a successful company that is led by somebody who gets the vision and is able to expand their existing business into an unreached area. Again, the numbers of people in our church who would fit this criteria is very small-either because their product doesn’t have an international market or they are not in a position to direct their company to pursue such international endeavors. But there are some, and they need to be given vision for this; a support network of other people who are doing it; and, investors who will seed their ideas. We have one guy at our church who has done this successfully. We need more of him.
3. Kingdom-minded people who work for a large multi-national company:
This is the man or woman who works for a large company. Think Sara Lee, IBM and Coca-Cola. This business person is able to pursue overseas transfer for the purpose of living missionaly in an unreached area. My father is one who pursued this option. After he retired he was hired back by his company to lead a project to help establish a factory in a very unreached part of the world. From that position he was able to present the gospel and lead people to Christ that traditional missionaries may never have been able to get close to. These people do not need funding. They need vision and training about how to effectively and ethically pursue kingdom interests while they are on assignment from their company.
4. College graduates seeking jobs in unreached places:
This is a variation of model number 3, except here you have someone who is not yet established well in their career. A recent graduate simply says, ‘I need to get a job somewhere. Why not try to find a job where my church is involved in church planting efforts already, or in the midst of an unreached people?’ If your church does not have a work within an unreached group, sites like Living Social and Groupon are unbelievable in what they offer for things like this. There are jobs literally in almost every unreached country.
We have a lot of college students in our church pursuing this very option and we are trying to connect them with the right people.
What we need to preach to our people is a two-fold vision: do your job well to the glory of God; do it somewhere strategic.
Again, I suspect this is the future of missions to unreached people groups. And I hope that we can bend our missions paradigm to tap into what is arguably the greatest potential mission force in the world.
