Tag Archive for: ecosystem

BAM Featured in an International Business Magazine: Mats Tunehag Interview

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An Interview with Mats Tunehag


Business as mission has been recently featured in an international business magazine; in three languages. Mats Tunehag was interviewed for the Destake News Business Magazine, you can read the full original version in English, French or Portuguese here or read an excerpt below.

 

Vision & Purpose

You often say that business can be a response to the world’s greatest challenges. What does Business as Mission, BAM mean in practice?

Business is God’s gift to transform the world, and we need to be good stewards of that gift. It means developing businesses so they honor God, and contribute to the total wellbeing of people and societies.

Drug and human trafficking are also businesses, and if business is primarily about making money why not do these things? Well, they are dehumanizing and against values we hold dear, and do not align with biblical principles.

Businesses run according to biblical values can become an impactful response to challenges such as poverty, unemployment, human trafficking, environmental degradation, and lack of hope.

 

At what point in your life did you realize that business could be an expression of faith and mission?

This realization emerged gradually in the early 1990s, when I was working in the Soviet Union and Central Asia, before and after the collapse of communism.

Societies were facing massive unemployment, social breakdown, and loss of dignity. Without meaningful work and economic opportunity, people and nations can not flourish.

At the same time, businesses were entering these regions rapidly, but often without ethical considerations. That contrast helped me see that business itself should be an expression of faith, by proposing a better way of doing business, grounded in biblical values,  service, and long-term value creation.

 

Where does your passion for connecting business with social and spiritual transformation come from?

It is deeply rooted in my faith and Judeo-Christian values. It comes from a conviction that human beings are holistic. We are economic, social, physical and spiritual beings. When we compartmentalize these dimensions too sharply, we misunderstand both people and markets.

 

Global Journey

Was there a particular encounter or project that changed your perspective on mission through business?

There are many. One example comes from the Middle East, where a manufacturing company intentionally employed women with disabilities—a group often marginalized twice over, both socially and economically.

One woman, who had little prospect of ever finding work, was treated with dignity, offered meaningful employment, and became part of a healthy workplace community. Her life changed—economically, socially, and personally. Families and the wider community were impacted as well.

She later asked herself why this workplace was so different. Knowing that the founder was a follower of Jesus, she concluded: If this is what following Jesus looks like, I want to follow him too. It was a costly and risky decision in her context.

What drew her was not a religious program, but a job with dignity, professional excellence, ethical leadership, and human resource management shaped by biblical values — underpinned by prayer. Ultimately, it was God’s work, not a mere business strategy. Lives were changed—holistically—through a God-inspired business.

 

What cultural differences most influence how purpose-driven business is practiced in different regions?

Cultural context matters greatly. In some regions, business is viewed with suspicion because of historical or contemporary exploitation. In others, entrepreneurship may be admired, but is disconnected from social responsibility and long term thinking.

Purpose-driven business must always listen carefully to local realities. While expressions differ across nations, cultures and industries, the core principles remain the same. Effective Business as Mission adapts without compromising biblical values. It is about serving people, aligning with God’s purposes, being good stewards of the planet, and making a profit. With a special focus of countries and regions with dire needs.

 

Challenges and Realities of BAM

What is the biggest misconception people have about Business as Mission?

One misconception is that it is about using business to merely push religious beliefs. It is not. Business as Mission is about offering a coherent value proposition that integrates economic excellence with ethical, social, environmental, and spiritual responsibility. It is about seeking the welfare – the shalom, the total wellbeing of people and societies as we do business.

A global study by McKinsey showed clearly that the vast majority of people around the world consider spiritual health as very important. That was regardless of age, gender, socio-economic status, culture and faith. So, we make God a part of our value proposition, not an imposition.

 

What challenges do Christian entrepreneurs face today in maintaining ethics and sustainability in business?

There are both external and internal issues. External, things we face running a business. Short-term pressure related to sales and cash flow can be a great challenge, and a temptation to compromise with values. Entrepreneurs also face complex environments when corruption is normalized.

But there are also internal issues, like support systems to help us manage business decisions, and maneuver in a tough marketplace. It can be a lack of understanding that business is a godly calling, and a God given gift to transform the world. Thus, we need to affirm Christian entrepreneurs in their calling, equip and deploy them to serve God and people in the marketplace.

 

The Future of the BAM Movement

What has the experience of the pandemic and recent global crises taught the BAM ecosystem?

The importance of staying mission true, and plan flexible. We all learned that during the Covid pandemic. So, we need to be clear about the purpose of our business. What is our mission and our timeless core values?

This needs to be translated into continuity planning, which is more than succession planning. Our mission and values need to continuously be imparted into the organization. Staff come and go, management may change, and we may move from a founder CEO to a second-generation company. But will the mission continue, and will the values survive changes?

 

What advice would you give to young professionals who want to integrate purpose and work?

Be intentional. Learn. Ask questions. Read. Watch videos. Find a mentor. Keep learning, and applying. BAM Global has developed pathways for those who want to integrate purpose, work and business.

Connect with others. Don’t journey alone. BAM Global is providing an interactive global ecosystem map where people can connect with others around the globe and in different spheres of the BAM ecosystem.

You can find the BAM Pathways and the BAM Ecosystem Map at businessasmission.com.

 

>> Read full interview here

English, French and Portuguese versions available.


Mats Tunehag is the Chairman of BAM Global, and he is a global thought leader on Business as Mission, BAM. Since the 1990’s he has created numerous networks of leaders from business, church, missions and academia from all continents. He has served as an advisor to groups involved in business, investment, freedom businesses, research and partnership development. He is the chief architect of the ‘Business as Mission Manifesto’ and the ‘Wealth Creation Manifesto’, which is a conceptual framework for the global BAM movement. See: matstunehag.com/about/ for more about Mats.

 

 

 

Photo by BETZY AROSEMENA on Unsplash

 

 

Moving the Needle: Why We’re Thankful for Exponential BAM Growth

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by the BAM Global Executive Team

 

In this season of thanksgiving and expectant waiting, we reflect on how we’ve seen the ‘needle move’ for the BAM movement in the past two decades and longer, adapted from our opening message in our last annual report.

By God’s grace we have seen an exponential growth of the global business as mission movement in the last twenty five years. A movement, per definition, consists of many organizations and initiatives, which are independent but choose to be interdependent. The nature of a movement means that no one but God has the exact figures of the growth, but the trends are clear and even the approximate numbers are astonishing.

Twenty five years ago, we talked about BAM businesses in the dozens, often micro to small size businesses. Today there are thousands, mainly in the SME sector, but also large companies. Twenty five years ago, there were no BAM incubators or accelerators, but today they exist in about 20 countries. Two decades ago we were talking about investments in BAM companies in thousands of dollars, today in tens of millions of dollars.

Twenty five years ago, churches and denominations had not embraced BAM and only a handful of mission organizations had started to include it in their strategies. Today, most of the oldest, major evangelical mission agencies and all kinds of churches and denominations are engaged in business as mission.

Twenty five years ago, there were no BAM networks. Today there are 30+ BAM networks, most related to a country or a region, but others focusing on an issue, industry or constituency.

 

João Mordomo (Executive Director), Jo Plummer (Creative Director), Mats Tunehag (Chairman)

Leading the BAM Issue Network at The Fourth Lausanne Congress 2024

 

Mats, Jo and João editing the Lausanne Occasional Paper on BAM in 2004

 

How did the needle move?

Business as mission is clearly a move of the Holy Spirit. Interest and engagement in BAM has been rising up on all continents, not orchestrated by one group or initiative. However, movements grow with shared mission, values, and principles, through communication and collaboration. BAM Global has taken a central role in convening, catalyzing, and aggregating to this end.

Twenty five years ago we initiated the first global think tank on BAM. Since then, we’ve convened around 40 global consultations resulting in over 30 white papers on BAM, thousands of relational connections and scores of new initiatives.

Twenty five years ago, there were around a dozen BAM resources. When we relaunched the BAM Resource Centre in 2024, there were almost 1000 blogs and Resource Library entries aggregated on businessasmission.com alone.

God is good, and He is at work. We are joining in what He is doing through BAM and we are in great anticipation for what He will continue to do through the global BAM movement.

In Christ,

Mats, Jo, and João

BAM Global Executive Team

 

Our Mission is to Accelerate the Business as Mission Movement Globally. Business is a gift from God to transform the world. Yet, Christian entrepreneurs often lack affirmation in their calling. We empower Christian businesswomen and businessmen to grasp God’s redemptive plan at work through enterprise. Our initiatives equip and connect the global business as mission (BAM) community, enabling greater impact for God’s kingdom.

Our Vision is a Movement of Businesses Transforming People and Nations for God’s Glory. Business as mission is an essential strategy for global mission today. We’re championing the power of business to respond to the world’s most pressing needs. Discover more about how your generous support can make a difference in the BAM Global Impact Report. Explore how you can partner with us to shape the future of the business as mission movement.

 

 

 

 

Photo by Getty Images on Unsplash

 

 

 

Business is Not a Silver Bullet: The BAM Movement is an Ecosystem

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by Jo Plummer

 

Business is obviously at the heart of business as mission! A major part of the international BAM community is made up of businesses and business people. This is business as mission and at its core it involves for-profit companies. But, as Mats Tunehag says in the video below, business is not a silver bullet!

Business as mission is a movement and that movement is made up of four major constituencies—including leaders from business, mission, church and academia—plus others. 

BAM companies and business people will not thrive outside of a healthy ecosystem made up of many types of individuals, skills, perspectives, and institutions. We will not see macro impact through business as mission unless our business constituency is connected to and supported by a much broader network.

Introducing the Four Major BAM Constituencies

For business as mission to be fruitful, we need the involvement of entrepreneurs and business professionals of all kinds, in a diverse range of roles—plus churches, mission agencies and NGOs, academic institutions, researchers, and others. The BAM community is certainly made up of many different people from many different constituencies, but over the years, we have identified the four major ones, as follows:

The Four Major Constituencies in the BAM Movement

BAM thought-leader Peter Shaukat expresses this same idea as the 4 As: 1

  • Academy: scholars and educational institutions
  • Agency: mission agencies, yes, but also other kinds of entities with specialist functions
  • Assembly: local churches and congregations
  • Actualizers: the business people who run business as mission enterprises

 

Here is a brief introduction to each of these four constituencies:

Business People

As well as entrepreneurs that start BAM enterprises, there are also many other types of business professionals (involved in management and specialist roles) that help develop and scale a company towards stability and longevity. The BAM movement revolves around these business starters and professionals—the business operators that are involved directly in running BAM companies. But we also need other kinds of business people to surround and support the operators, including investors, mentors, coaches, incubators, trainers and others—often called capacity builders for the BAM movement.

Church Leaders

The Church with a big C–i.e. the global body of Christ—is made up of people from all vocations, including business. The church with a small c—i.e. local churches and denominations—have business people and other professionals sitting in their pews each time they are the ‘gathered church’. It is the role of the clergy or church leader to serve the laity and equip them for works of service as the ‘scattered church’ in their daily vocational lives (Ephesians 4:12). Therefore, the BAM movement also needs Church leaders and staff who recognise BAM as an effective ministry strategy and are looking to resource and mobilise the business people in their congregations or denomination. Read more about BAM and the Church.

Academics

Christian academics and researchers are uniquely positioned to add value to the BAM movement by driving research into critical business as mission issues and being a frontline catalyst for student engagement. Scholarship and education are engines for business as mission, helping to equip the next generation and ensuring that vital issues for BAM practitioners are undergirded by robust research. The BAM movement needs academics looking to inspire their students for BAM, educators / trainers to develop curriculum, and researchers that connect their study with real BAM practice. Explore the Academics Pathway Toolbox.

Mission Leaders and NGOs

Those sent out to do BAM with an agency affiliation have been among the pioneers of business as mission and continue to be engaged at the frontlines—although now that many more business people are getting engaged the relative numbers are going down. Mission leaders and NGOs staff have filled key supporting roles in the BAM ecosystem, with many areas of expertise that can fruitfully contribute, such as: pastoral care, counselling, mission mobilisation, cross-cultural communication, language learning, training in specific mission strategies and focus areas, community development expertise, and so on. The BAM movement needs agency and NGO leaders that see how business as mission aligns with the strategic goals of their organisation, that can effectively oversee and care for the BAM company leaders associated with them, and that can form fruitful partnerships to enrich the whole BAM ecosystem. Read more about BAM and Mission Agencies.

Watch this episode from the Lausanne Global Classroom on Business as Mission to learn more:

 

 

 

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. 

 

 

[1] Peter Shaukat in Appendix D: Transformational SME – Business Incubation Process and Lessons Learned, p44 of the BAM Incubation Issue Report.

A couple of sections of this article have been adapted from an older post.

 

Photo by Emma Henderson on Unsplash

 

 

 

Creating the Map: Exploring Categories in the BAM Ecosystem

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by Jon B, with Jo Plummer

 

In Part 1 of this two part series, we introduced the new BAM Ecosystem map developed in partnership by The Stone Table and BAM Global, with input from other partners in the business as mission community.

In our first post, we outlined our motivation and hopes for this new tool. In this second post, we will briefly share our approach to adding entities to the map and then discuss in turn each of the five main categories, including notable sources, resources and observations.

Mapping the Ecosystem

The business as mission community is broad and diverse, with a wide range of entities associated with it from across the world. Some are solely focused on BAM and would label themselves as such. Whereas, others do not primarily identify with a “BAM label” but are like-minded in terms of goals and/or may have an association with BAM activities.

The BAM Ecosystem Map recognises that BAM overlaps, in terms of vision and activities, with several other movements that have their own growing ecosystems. For this reason, we have not put hard boundaries around what constitutes “BAM” when it comes to inclusion on the Map; we have not limited ourselves to those who self-identify as BAM entities or who operate only within our definition of business as mission.

Instead, we have asked ourselves whether an entity has resources and activities that would be of interest to current and would-be BAM practitioners. We have also looked at the degree of alignment in terms of vision, i.e. a shared goal to multiply business solutions to the world’s pressing global issues in response to God’s missional call on His people. And we have looked at historic and relational connections between the entity and those active in practicing or resourcing BAM.

An exception to this approach is in the Networking, Events and Prayer category, where we have included only networking and convening entities that are more specifically focused on BAM, plus a few significant like-minded networks. This is because we could not include the vast number of “marketplace ministry” networks around the world that share our theology of work foundations but do not have an overt BAM application. There are other directories for such organizations for different countries of the world and our intention is that the BAM Ecosystem Map will stay more focused on helping people discover specifically BAM-centred networks, events and prayer initiatives.

Read more

The Business as Mission Ecosystem Map: A New Interactive Tool

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by Jon B, with Jo Plummer

 

Business as mission is a growing movement around the world. It is not our movement but the move of God through His people.

In 2004, the first global consultation on business as mission took place under the auspices of the Lausanne Forum. Around ninety people took part altogether and we estimate that at the time there were around 10 BAM-related books and approximately 20 articles, plus a couple dozen entities in early stages of developing BAM networking or resourcing. Twenty years later, there are almost 1000 resources and blogs here in the latest version of the BAM Resource Centre website. In September 2024, at the fourth Lausanne Congress, 2,400 people (nearly half of the total attendees) reported that they were interested in a workplace track.

Today our opportunities in business as mission include: a growing awareness and acceptance of BAM as a strategy in the global Church, a greater breadth and depth of expertise in the business as mission ecosystem with more specialisation and functionality, and growing communication and collaboration between respective parts.

Yet, there is still a dissonance between the God-given potential of business for His kingdom purposes and the way that many Christians perceive business as inherently evil or corrupt. Businesses and business people remain a relatively untapped resource for intentional mission impact.

Our barriers remain: ongoing scepticism, outstanding resource siloes, lack of resources in critical regions and languages, and lack of easy access to existing resources.

If we are going to leverage the opportunities before us and overcome these barriers to BAM growth, we cannot waste an ounce of energy in pride or division. Christ has called us all as a global body, and He has commissioned us to redeem culture, to free the captives, to bless the nations, and to see the good news of the gospel proclaimed to the ends of the earth (see for example, Colossians 1:19-20, Luke 4:18-19, Genesis 12:2-3, Matthew 28:19-20).

Howard Hendricks once described church ministry as a football game with, “Twenty-two men in need of rest and forty thousand people in the stands in need of exercise.”

We need everyone in the game. We need a diverse range of expertise and experience in the BAM ecosystem and better ways for people to collaborate with one another. There is work to be done to mobilise new people, companies and entities—and to enable them to make their vital contribution and connections. That’s the “why” at the heart of the new BAM Ecosystem Map.

Introducing the BAM Ecosystem Map

We are delighted to announce the launch of a new interactive tool for the business as mission community, the BAM Ecosystem Map. Click the image to explore: Read more

Helping Entrepreneurs Thrive: The Power of Entrepreneurial Ecosystems

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If you have been in the entrepreneurial world for very long, you have likely heard the words “Entrepreneurial Ecosystems” pop up more and more in the last few years. And for good reason! Ecosystem theory has begun to change the way we think about entrepreneurship in general with the Kauffman Foundation, CoStarters, InBia, and others leading the way in the US. Ecosystem thinking is also transforming the way we do BAM, in that the development of entrepreneurial ecosystems is understood more and more as a powerful way to foster local business ownership, impact economic development, and expand the influence of the Kingdom in the marketplace of local communities around the world.

So, what is an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem?

Generally an ecosystem is an interconnected, interdependent network of elements, living and nonliving, that make up a supportive environment for a particular type of creature or entity. The word “ecosystem” is a biological term, originally used to describe the environment of a type of animal (or group of animals) that enables it to thrive. So a prairie could be an ecosystem for foxes because it provides other foxes, prey like mice, food for the prey like seeds, water, predators that inspire defensive behaviors, a favorable temperature, sunlight, a place to live, etc..

Outside of biology, the word ecosystem has been very fluid in its meaning. It can apply to a lot of different kinds of networks, such as networks of similar organizations, political environments, or ministry connections. Even the term “entrepreneurial ecosystems” is sometimes used to describe global networks across particular industries, networks of BAM practitioners, or networks of entrepreneurs in a local context.

For our purposes, and the purposes of this discussion, we will use the term “entrepreneurial ecosystem” to refer to the local networks of entrepreneurs, business leaders, local investors, and mentors in a single community or local area. For most entrepreneurs, most of the emotional support, resources, and customers come from such a local environment. It is the elements in that local environment that, when interconnected and supportive of entrepreneurs, allow entrepreneurs to thrive. Elements of that ecosystem can include resources like knowledge capital, other entrepreneurs, established businesses, places to operate like co-working spaces, markets, and even cultural attitudes.

“Building” an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

So if entrepreneurial ecosystems are our focus, we may rightly ask how one “builds” an ecosystem? In reality, ecosystems are never really created. Every community has some kind of environment or “ecosystem” for entrepreneurs, just not always one that is conducive for thriving. Debilitating competition from big business, resistance from banks and other lenders to lend, lack of knowledge resources on how to start a business, and a culture against risk-taking or profit-making can all conspire to make entrepreneurship difficult. As a result, a potential entrepreneur, even if he/she had a great idea, may never attempt to start a business, not because they lack ideas, but because they don’t know how, don’t know how to find resources, and (perhaps worst of all) feel all alone. When conditions fail to support entrepreneurs in an area, great ideas die untried, and solvable problems remain unsolved.  Read more