7 Fruitful Practices for BAM and Church Planting

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BAM companies are usually very diverse, each business with its own unique features. However, through research into real experiences of BAM and Church Planting, some shared commonalities emerged in the following fruitful practices:

1. Contact

Make sure that the business provides regular contact with the focus people.

Intentionally create a business that provides regular contact with those with whom you are hoping to share the gospel – whether they are employees, customers, suppliers or others. A bakery business owner estimates that they have a chance to meet an average of 100 people a day. Christ can be made known to staff, suppliers, and customers through business activities. One employer who hires local women who come from difficult home lives seeks to help those women achieve a greater quality of life. Another BAM company provides business opportunities and income for local Christian leaders, encouraging them to stay and carry on the church planting work rather than moving away for employment to support their families. An agricultural business enables local Christians to do church planting work by training them in an egg production business. In this model they also help the trainees set up the businesses which provides contacts for them, as well as an income. This agriculture business also provides church planting training to the locals as part of their strategy.

Although the business is usually the context in which contacts are made and relationships started, several BAM practitioners (BAMers) mentioned that conversations about spiritual matters typically take place outside of the workplace. However, in other cases BAMers reported that these conversations start naturally through a shared work environment. Read more

What’s My Role in BAM? Discovering Where You Fit in the BAM Movement

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The Business as Mission (BAM) Movement is rapidly gaining momentum. More and more believers are realizing that business is a key avenue God is using to further his Kingdom purposes. Where do you think you fit into the greater picture of BAM? Without a doubt, it takes a whole “ecosystem” of individuals to make a BAM company become reality.

Support Team Members Needed!

Every BAM business will need a support team around them to implement the business strategy and spiritual strategy. Some BAM businesses start only with the entrepreneur but it is advisable to grow your support system from the beginning.

Here are just some of the types of people, skills and support that an BAM startup will need:

A Spiritual Support System

A BAM business uniquely prioritizes spirituality and bringing people closer to knowing Jesus Christ. Therefore, the following are roles needed:  Read more

How Agriculture Ends Poverty: 
3 Discoveries About What Works

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by Roxanne Addink DeGraaf

Growing up in Iowa, the agricultural heartland of the United States, I was surrounded by farms. I remember childhood summers milking cows and “walking beans” (walking between rows of soybeans to pick weeds) on my grandparent’s farm. I saw how the farm put food on the table, as I always enjoyed a cold glass of milk from the dairy after chores.

After college, I began to understand agriculture from the perspective of small-scale farmers in Kenya. I worked for two years alongside women who spent long days in their fields to not only put food on the table, but also to earn an income for their families. Everything from buying school uniforms to medical services relied on their farm’s output.

And this is not unique to Kenya. Traveling the globe with Partners Worldwide, I’ve continued to witness the centrality of agriculture in many countries and communities where we work, from subsistence farmers to thriving cooperatives.

Agriculture: A Primary Occupation of the Poor

While employment in agriculture is declining overall, agriculture is still the primary occupation for one in three people in the world (FAO). For people living in poverty, 70% live in rural areas and the majority are involved in agriculture (World Bank/Gates Foundation).

At Partners Worldwide, these facts are shaping how we work towards our vision to end poverty through business so that all may have abundant life.

We recently launched a pilot initiative focused on supporting and leveraging the resources of our partners in Africa who were already serving the agricultural sector. This pilot has been our learning lab. We’ve had some failed experiments, while other interventions have led to powerfully positive outcomes. Overall, the results affirm the vital role that agriculture plays in ending poverty.  Read more

A Powerful Role: How Business Fights Human Trafficking

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Human trafficking is one of the biggest travesties in our world today. Countless nonprofits, law enforcement units, and governments are taking a stand to address this global humanitarian crisis. Yet, where does business fit into the bigger picture? If you are a business person with a heart to do something to fight human trafficking, you can actually play a much bigger role than you may think.

Not For Sale: “Business Can Change the Tide Against Modern Slavery”

You might have heard of Not For Sale as a frontrunner nonprofit in the fight against human trafficking. What you probably don’t know is that in recent years, cofounder and president, David Batstone, has shifted their focus primarily towards business initiatives and job creation, rather than on humanitarian aid and rehabilitation. Not for Sale sees their contribution in the fight against human trafficking as preventing exploitation before it even happens, and believes business is a powerful tool in that process. Not for Sale partners with businesses to bring trafficking prevention to a whole new level. Their conviction:

“The responsibility to end modern slavery requires us to use our heads, as well as our hearts. We must use our courage to ask a new question, ‘How do you stop this before it happens in the first place?’…We believe business can change the tide against modern slavery because we’ve proven it with our own sweat, tears, and capital. We test our ideas, and help others do what works.”  Read more

5 Ways to Increase Spiritual Impact In and Through Your Business

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A defining characteristic of a BAM company is that it intentionally integrates business with missional purposes. Yet, sometimes it can be challenging to figure out how to do so practically. Here are 5 areas that business owners and leaders can increase spiritual impact in the companies they oversee:

1. Keep God First

“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord…It is the Lord Christ you are serving” (Col. 3:23-24).

  • Establish spiritual principles and values and integrate them into the mission, vision, and objectives of the company. Review how well you are abiding by these principles during all stages of the company’s development.
  • Create a Spiritual Impact Plan that has specific goals for how you run your company with spiritual objectives in mind.
  • Invite accountability to maintain the purpose of your company. Appoint a person or group (often called an advisory board) with the responsibility to assess and evaluate how well various departments and projects are aligned with the stated mission, vision, and values within the company.

Read more

How Enterprise Can Fight Slavery: The Freedom Business Alliance

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We talked to Jennifer Roemhildt Tunehag about the Freedom Business Alliance initiative and the upcoming Freedom Business Forum.

We are hearing the term Freedom Business being used more and more, what is a ‘Freedom Business’? 

It’s a business that exists to fight human trafficking. There are several types of business that fit into this category:  businesses that create jobs for survivors of exploitation would be the most familiar, but we would also include businesses that hire vulnerable people in order to prevent exploitation, as well as the aggregators who take products from these first two to new markets. A fourth category would be businesses that provide services specifically to and for other freedom businesses (ie., communications, logistics support, etc). Finally, there are businesses who have devoted the profit from their companies to fight trafficking. These are also part of the freedom business ecosystem.

We sometimes call freedom business the ‘backwards business’. In a normal business paradigm, an entrepreneur sees an opportunity to create a product or service that meets a need in the market. By gathering a qualified staff, he sets himself up to make a profit. 

In contrast, a freedom business starts with the group of people it intends to employ. In businesses working to prevent human trafficking and exploitation, those people have been made vulnerable by poverty, lack of education, or other challenging variables. For those in business for restoration, the difficulties are greater.  Their employees have already been victimised, and the resulting trauma creates levels of complexity in life and employment. Read more