How innovative business practices can strengthen your ministry and transform your community.
August 6th, 2024 | Ashley Hendrickson
Seasoned field workers and young leaders looking to invest their time in meaningful change will likely come across the idea of using business to strengthen their work overseas. Some people might have doubts about combining business with ministry, while others might be excited to explore the possibilities. This article will look at how social entrepreneurship can be a practical way for cross-cultural workers and their partners to use business in ministry. Social entrepreneurship can be used to build relationships, create sustainable impact, and effectively support ministry goals.
Defining Social Entrepreneurship in Ministry
Social entrepreneurship is the practice of generating and implementing innovative solutions to social issues. Social entrepreneurs create and run businesses that address real needs and drive lasting change in a community. In a missional context, social entrepreneurship involves integrating innovative business practices into cross-cultural engagement in transformative and people-focused ways.
Social entrepreneurship is transformative in that it actively pursues lasting change within a community by identifying relevant challenges and implementing working solutions to those challenges. This is different from both social activism, which influences others to address challenges, and social service provision, which improves the outcomes of existing solutions.
Social entrepreneurship is people-focused in that it acts in response to social, cultural, and communal needs. It sees business as an objective good in the service of others, part of the holistic love that helps people experience life in Jesus’ kingdom.
Social entrepreneurship differentiates itself from other models that primarily use business as a platform to achieve separate ministry goals. Such models use business as a means to an end. For example, the business provides resources like visas, money, or relationships, and these byproducts are then used to do what is perceived as the real work of ministry. In contrast, social entrepreneurship makes business itself a core part of ministry, seeing it as a transformational tool to address community needs and serve others.
“Those of us who at the core believe that business itself can minister to the world and create lasting change - we don’t want to separate business from the transformation itself, we want to integrate it into the transformation. Social entrepreneurship is a fabric woven into our work, not just a platform for it.”
Social Entrepreneurship Opens Doors for Kingdom-Minded Investment
Social entrepreneurship is an attractive approach for anyone aiming to steward their resources towards lasting change. In particular, it offers the powerful ability to see and address the needs of the most marginalized communities. Traditional business models incentivize investors to focus on more economically promising markets, which limits the reach of even the most well-intentioned investors. Social entrepreneurship, however, has the capacity to see value where others might not. By strengthening communities and expanding opportunity, social entrepreneurship can create sustainable business models in even the most challenging markets. This unique perspective aligns with God’s heart for the marginalized and opens doors to see, invest in, and serve people with the eyes of Jesus.
The people-focused nature of social entrepreneurship provides legitimate opportunities for investors by activating intangible resources that narrow financial methodologies would not recognize. It has a relational (rather than transactional) focus that values empowering local leaders and facilitating local ownership of business endeavors. This generates invaluable long-standing relationships of trust - the kinds of assets which cannot be bought and ultimately increase long-term sustainability. Consider, for example, a difficult environment prone to economic downturns, political instability, or natural disasters which would be the demise of traditional business models. Empowered local leaders have a greater ability than international workers to weather these kinds of environments. They can uniquely maintain the viability of innovative projects in challenging contexts and keep them moving forward over time.
Likewise, the transformative nature of social entrepreneurship creates the opportunity for catalytic capital. In the nonprofit sector, catalytic capital is charitable investment that mobilizes the movement of other resources, dollars, ideas, or people that would otherwise be inaccessible. Catalytic capital is willing to be more flexible and take on greater economic risk in order to activate local resources and create social impact. This kind of investment pairs well with social entrepreneurship because it strengthens communities and fuels innovation.
In a podcast where he shared about One Collective’s approach to social entrepreneurship, Brandon Weidman illustrated the power of catalytic capital when investing in local leaders:
“Imagine a person who’s in the community, who’s most likely lived there their whole life. They have a passion to see their community transformed. They’ve got connections, but they lack resources and training. In our model, we come alongside these local leaders, invest in them, help them grow, and learn from them. Then, we begin the process of bringing them together with other resources that exist in that community. This catalyzes the holistic, collaborative, and sustainable approach that we desire.”
Social Entrepreneurship Honors and Strengthens Ministry Priorities:
One concern of those seeking to integrate business into their ministry context may be that doing so would take time away from their primary goal of introducing people to Jesus. However, those using social entrepreneurship should find that it enriches their work by allowing them to more naturally walk alongside their neighbors. Traditional ministry approaches can be either episodic, meaning that the worker only sees the people they are caring for every so often, or programmatic, meaning that interactions only happen in predetermined, created contexts. Social entrepreneurship provides a way to walk through daily life with people - engaging and empowering them in their regular occupations. Mutual trust and respect are built up, and missional relationships can be baked into daily activities, leading to more organic, authentic, and comprehensive discipleship. Social entrepreneurs are able to remain undivided in their relationships, time, and attention to community needs. Their priorities in service are integrated, not split between maintaining a business platform and still finding space for separate ministry opportunities.
How Can I Implement Social Entrepreneurship Practices in My Work?
The world of social entrepreneurship can seem intimidating, but there are simple steps that anyone can take to integrate the approach into their work. Here are some practical ways to get started:
Develop a Culture of Innovation: Organizational leaders can foster an environment that encourages creativity. This involves being open to new ideas and demonstrating a healthy appreciation of risk.
Build Diverse Teams: Field leaders can bring business-minded people onto their teams and welcome workers with diverse skill sets to serve the community.
Leverage Local Resources: Cross-cultural workers can find local change-makers in their host communities to invest in and learn from.
Practice Humility: Anyone can approach social entrepreneurship opportunities with curiosity, openness, teachability, and a desire to understand. These are the same cross-cultural skills needed to engage any new people group or service opportunity.
Form Partnerships: If you are a reader with experience in social entrepreneurship or interested in investing in transformative innovation around the world, consider setting up a meeting with One Collective’s global partnerships facilitator, who connects churches, businesses, universities, and individuals to communities around the world for lasting impact.
There is great power and beauty of witness that can be found in missional social entrepreneurship. Here’s what one leader said:
“The willingness to get out on the leading edge, be innovative, take risks, do what nobody else is doing - whether that’s in the global mission space, or in the investment world - and be in places that are hard, doing things that traditionally wouldn’t work, is showing the world that, of course, with Jesus, this is still possible.”
Listen to the Full Interview with Brandon and Scott
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