BAM Community: How We Stay Mission True and Continue to Bear Fruit in the Next 10 Years

BAM Global is celebrating its ten year anniversary in 2024, having been formally founded in 2014 on the foundation of earlier network-building efforts. This month BAM Global leaders are looking back, taking stock, and then looking forward – exploring how the worldwide business as mission community has been flourishing and continues to grow. Read Part 1 and Part 2.

by Jo Plummer

 

BAM Community,

Look what God has done! Look what He is doing!

About 25 years ago the term business as mission was coined to try and capture something that God had already been stirring among His people – business people, mission agency people, church people, educators and others. Small clusters of those people began talking to each other about what they were seeing: the potential of business to help solve the pressing mission issues they were working on. The intention to leverage the intrinsic God-designed power of business to do good in the world and bring glory to Him has only increased from there. Those clusters have become a global movement.

My friends and co-leaders, João and Mats, started this series of posts by looking back (part 1) and looking at what we are doing now, and why (part 2). My message to you in part 3 is forward-looking. How can we continue to grow and bear fruit as a movement? How do we avoid mission drift and stay mission-true?

Staying Mission True

In my view, one of the most important things we can do to stay mission true is to intentionally and vocally keep the Great Commission central to our messaging and engagement in business as mission.

Let me unpack what I mean by that.

Mission is central to God’s identity. As God’s image-bearers and co-creators, it is also central to the identity of His Church and every Christ-follower in it. Whatever our vocation, we are all participants (ministers) in God’s missio Dei (the mission of God). [1]

The implication is that we who follow Jesus are all ‘on mission’ every day in all our vocations – family, work, and stewarding creation. In an article for Missio Nexus, Greg Wilton calls this ‘missionhood’ which describes the centrality of mission in Christian identity:

Missionhood – all Christians must know and be convinced of their identity in God’s universal call to his missio Dei.

Within that, business people should know God’s design for business, and therefore be convinced of their unique identity and role as business people in the mission of God.

Commissionaries

When Jesus said, ‘Go and make disciples…’, many scholars agree that he did not mean primarily ‘go elsewhere and make disciples’, but instead ‘as you are going, make disciples’.

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.  Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,  and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” – Matthew 28: 18-20

‘Go’ is not the operative word in the Great Commission, ‘making disciples’ is. We are all disciples of Jesus and we make disciples in all our daily contexts. Or, as Greg Wilton goes on to say, we are all ‘commissionaries’.

Commissionary – all Christians must know, understand, and practice the Great Commission in their daily life.

The first reason we need to keep the Great Commission central is because it reminds entrepreneurs and business professionals who follow Jesus that they too are ‘commissionaries’.

And it reminds the Church that it should affirm the vocation of business and equip business people to be disciples and disciple-makers out in the world and in their working contexts.

Working in the Gaps

Jesus included ‘… to all nations’ or  ‘…to the ends of the earth’ (Acts 1:8) in His commission. That is to say, make disciples of everyone, everywhere.

The second reason we need to keep the Great Commission central is because we need to be intentional about the ‘everyone, everywhere’ part.

We are called work in the gaps, to take the gospel, the good news of the Kingdom, to where it has not yet reached. And this gospel includes good news for the poor, freedom for the prisoners, recovery of sight for the blind and release for the oppressed (Luke 4: 18). It involves a special attention on serving ‘the least of these’ (Matt 25: 34-45) and loving our neighbour as ourselves (Mark 12: 31). In other words, fighting injustice and addressing the needs of the whole person, and doing that everywhere.

The Lausanne Movement summed this up when they called ‘the whole church, to take the whole gospel, to the whole world’.

Keeping the Great Commission central in BAM will remind us that if the Church is fully engaged in missio Dei then some of us will have to ‘go’.*

Or, as the definition of BAM puts it, be concerned about the world’s poorest and least evangelized peoples.

In his opening address at The Fourth Lausanne Congress last week, Michael Oh, Director of the Lausanne Movement, first affirmed the role of Christians in the marketplace in the mission of God and in the Great Commission. He then shared a startling fact,

“Be faithful where you are, but please know that every Christian being faithful where they are will not be enough to see the Great Commission fulfilled…  86% of all Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims do not know a single Christian.”

People farthest from Christianity receive the least attention and the fewest resources directed at sharing the gospel with them. [2]

* ‘Go’ may mean literally going across geographical boundaries. Or it may mean focusing more intentionally on same or near-cultures, or on under served, vulnerable, or unreached communities close to home. The important thing is that we are attentive to the way God is leading us.

We’ve come to the conviction that answering the call of God is as pertinent for the business professional as it is for the Pastor. To follow Jesus means that in whatever He has made you good at, you should do that well for the Glory of God and somewhere strategic for the mission of God. – Pastor J.D. Greear

The Great Commission will help us stay mission true because it reminds us that business as mission is both integrated and intentional.

 

A Clarion Call

The ‘as mission’ in ‘business as mission’ is there for two specific reasons:

1) To provide a rallying point for this idea or concept. The distinct label helps likeminded people find each other. It helps them to be better equipped, to share resources and fruitful practices with others doing similar kinds of business, facing similar challenges and opportunities.

2) To give a clarion call towards intentionality and point towards the gaps. We want to activate business people to intentionally leverage the power of their businesses in God’s mission to His world. Business has a special power to bring creative market solutions to problems, to aid human flourishing, to lift people out of poverty, to free captives, to help us be good stewards of the planet, to fight economic injustice and to create dignified jobs. It provides the ideal context to share and show the gospel of Christ every day. Those are the gaps we need to be working in.

However, while we are issuing that call to leverage the unique potential of business to take the whole gospel to the whole world, we shouldn’t forget that it rests on the foundation that business is God’s idea. And that doing business with excellence, as Christ followers in the marketplace, is already part of missio Dei – that all business people are commissionaries.

Abiding

Finally, dear BAM Community, let’s intentionally keep drawing ourselves and each other back to abiding in Jesus.

I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. John 15:5

We talk a lot in BAM about scalable business models and scalable impact. This is good. We need those people who know how to scale organisations and companies. We need the investors who are looking for scalable business models in order to see a return on their investment. Some of the gaps that we face will require us to work at a large scale. However, others will require us to work at small and medium scale, or the tiny scale of the mustard seed.

As we grow as a movement, we need to be careful not to conflate our concepts of scalable impact (as good they might be) with what Jesus means by bearing fruit. Jesus said that we can’t bear any fruit unless we are grafted into the vine and abiding in Him. And it won’t all be ‘up and to the right’ because He’s going to need to prune us.

Our spiritual life and mission are integrated. If we are to bear fruit, we must abide in Jesus. If we are to make disciples, we must be disciples. If we have aspirations to bring transformation to people, communities and nations, that transformation will start with us.

Look what God might do in the next 10 years, as we remain in Him!

 

>> Read Part 1 by João Mordomo

>> Read Part 2 by Mats Tunehag

The BAM Review Blog is an initiative of BAM Global.

 

[1] I recommend this brief introduction to the topic of identity, vocation and the mission of God by John Mark Hicks if this idea is new to you.

[2] The statistic Michael Oh used comes from the World Christian Encyclopedia. Its Editor, Todd Johnson, identified the problem that today most non-Christians have little or no personal contact with Christians and that peoples farthest from Christianity receive the least attention (among seven other challenges) in a presentation entitled ‘The Future of the Gospel is for All Peoples and from All Peoples’. Read it here.

Celebrating 10 Years of BAM Global

 

Help us accelerate the global business as mission movement in the next decade,
give a once off financial gift or join the BAM Global Patron’s Team of monthly supporters

 

 

 Jo Plummer is the Creative Director & Co-Founder of BAM Global and the co-editor of the Lausanne Occasional Paper on Business as Mission. She has been developing resources for BAM since 2001 and currently serves as Editor of the Business as Mission website and The BAM Review Blog. 

 

 

 

Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash