Is it possible to combine entrepreneurship and missions?
Anna and I heard another great sermon today at our church, The Summit. We had a guest speaker today: Dr. Akin, the president of Southeastern Baptist Seminary, who preached about missions. However, the ideas that went through my mind had to do with my passions of entrepreneurship and missions. Is it possible to combine the two succesfully? Here are my thoughts:
Have a network of companies whose operating philosophy is, be good; who blow apart the false dichotomy of profit/nonprofit. (I like the russian phrase благотворительные организации (organizations who do good), because these can be either for profit or non-profit).
- complete transparency: basically everything is opensource, but that’s ok, because everything is built on opensource. The business model? Great customer service, continuous innovation, etc.
- Being good to the customers/users: make something people want.
- Being good to employees: 6-hour workdays, happiness-creation engines.
- The companies in this network can be located anywhere from Silicon Valley to Sahara Desert.
The specific companies might be:
- A company making possible the next generation of textbooks that anyone with a computer can access / use to learn for free.
- A company selling automatic gardens (just hook it up to water and electricity, and add the required minerals when alerted to do so), and making the knowledge of how to do so manually free.
- A company distributing personal factories for the cost of the materials; having local branches of the company which have localized communities for making useful things.
On a more practical level, the companies could be restaurants, stores, car (donkey?) washes, etc.I want to limit these thoughts/ideas to what is more “scalable” than just local businesses.- Update: more world-changing business ideas from WorldChanging, and Ycombinator.
The founders of these companies would be tentmaker missionaries, also preaching the Gospel in the area where the company is based.
