Leveraging the God-given Power of Business [Video]
by João Mordomo
João Mordomo introduces the concept of business as mission at the Fourth Lausanne Congress Workplace Track in September 2024.
Transcript:
Good afternoon to everybody or good morning or good evening depending on what your body clock is telling you. I’m glad to be here with you this afternoon. That’s what my body clock is almost telling me now.
I’m João Mordomo and I’m the [Lausanne] Catalyst for Business as Mission together with my colleague Jo Plummer who’s around here somewhere. And I’ve been asked to talk to you about business as mission.
Dallas Willard once said that, “Business is a primary moving force for the love of God in human history.” Business when it’s done well is glorifying to God and has enormous potential to do good in society.
Business has an innate God-given power to create dignified jobs, to multiply resources, to provide for families and communities, to spur innovation and development, and to solve pressing human problems. In the global marketplace today, we have a huge opportunity to leverage this God-given power of business to address some of the world’s most pressing spiritual and social and economic and environmental issues.
We call this BAM. It’s business as mission.
It’s a movement of business professionals called to use their gifts, their expertise in entrepreneurship and good management to bring creative long-term sustainable solutions to challenges such as the evils of human trafficking or the task of reaching the world’s remaining unreached people groups with the gospel or the problems of societal injustice, environmental degradation, dire poverty, just to name a few.
When we’re thinking about the mission of the church, we need to remember what Michael Oh said on the opening night [of this Congress] that even if we equip every believer in the workplace to be an effective witness for Christ, we still won’t reach the world with the holistic gospel. Because 86% of the world’s Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus, not to mention atheists, do not have access to the gospel—they don’t know a Christian.
And, we still won’t have the solutions to the world’s most pressing problems. Business provides these solutions.
Business as mission is a distinct category different from tent making, different from workplace ministry. Business as mission is the strategic use of authentic business activities that create authentic ministry opportunities that bring spiritual and social and economic and environmental transformation to marginalized people and unreached peoples.
In other words, BAM simultaneously fulfills the great mandate to steward creation well, the great commandment to love God and love our neighbors, and the great commission to make disciples of all nations.
Enter the Lausanne Business as Mission Issue Network. Together with an organization called BAM Global, we exist to invigorate the global BAM movement by building intellectual and social capital for the global BAM ecosystem. We produce global BAM reports. We facilitate global BAM consultations and events. And we nurture regional, activity-based, and industry-based partner networks. There are over 45 networks all around the world and growing.
Business as mission is the strategic use of authentic business activities that create authentic ministry opportunities that bring spiritual and social and economic and environmental transformation to marginalized people and unreached peoples.
We got our start—Joseph mentioned this earlier and I will say something about it—we got our start in the lead up to the 2004 Lausanne Forum that took place in Thailand exactly 20 years ago to this week. Over 70 of us from all around the world worked together for over a year addressing issues related to God’s purposes for work and business and the role of business people in church and missions and the needs of the world and the potential response from business. Most of us came from business backgrounds but there were also people from church and mission. There were educators, theologians, economists, lawyers, researchers. The collaboration process included 60 papers, 25 case studies, several national and regional BAM consultations and email-based discussions culminating in a week of face-to-face dialogue and a whole lot of work. Somebody asked me when I got back, “What was Thailand like?” I said, “I have no idea. I never left the hotel. We worked non-stop for a week.” The result was the groundbreaking 85 page Lausanne Occasional paper on Business as Mission and the accompanying one-page BAM Manifesto.
That Manifesto includes affirmations and recommendations and here are several of them:
- We believe that God has created all men and women in his image with the ability to create good things for themselves and others and that includes business.
- We believe in emulating Jesus who constantly met the needs of people he encountered daily, including in their workplaces.
- We believe that the Holy Spirit empowers all members of the body of Christ to meet the spiritual and physical needs of others, including through business.
- We believe that God has called and equipped business people and entrepreneurs to cause holistic gospel transformation of individuals and communities and societies and nations and peoples in and through their businesses.
- We recognize the fact that poverty and unemployment are often rampant in areas where the name of Jesus is rarely or never heard or understood.
- We recognize that there is a need for job creation and for multiplication of businesses all over the world focused on the four-fold bottom line of spiritual, economic, social, and environmental transformation.
- We recognize the fact that the church has a huge and largely untapped resource in the Christian business community to bring global glory to God by way of business.
Therefore, number one:
We call upon the church worldwide to identify, affirm, pray for, commission, and release business people and entrepreneurs to exercise their gifts and callings as business people in the world among our peoples to the ends of the earth.
And number two:
We call upon business people globally to receive this affirmation and to prayerfully consider how their gifts and expertise and experience might be used to help create solutions for the world’s most pressing spiritual and physical needs through business as mission.
Is God calling you to join us? Is God calling you to join in this movement of business people and entrepreneurs who are serving God in and through the workplace and intentionally shaping their business for God’s glory, the work of the gospel, and the global common good?
I hope so. And if so, check out lausanne.org, bamglobal.org, and businessmission.com to start the journey with us.
Thank you.
Access more videos, transcripts and study materials from the Lausanne Congress Workplace Track here.
Dr. João Mordomo loves to help start and lead anything — mission agencies, churches, businesses, networks — that helps fulfill the Great Commission. He is a founding board member and Executive Director of BAM Global, and Catalyst for Business as Mission at the Lausanne Movement. João serves variously as owner, managing director and board member of several BAM companies, and designs and teaches BAM and other courses at several universities.
Photo by Josh Olalde on Unsplash
