Business as Mission Adresses the Big Issues Facing the Church

In Tim Keller’s latest blog post, he points out five big issues facing the Western Church. They are:

1. The opportunity for extensive culture-making in the U.S.
2. The rise of Islam.
3. The new non-western Global Christianity.
4. The growing cultural remoteness of the gospel.
5. The end of prosperity?

I recommend you head over to the Redeemer City to City website and read what Keller has to say about these issues. It helps to focus on these shifts in the evangelistic landscape of the West. Doing so will help us to anticipate new opportunities and threats to our efforts to achieving our goals as Kingdom strategists.

One thing I am encouraged by as I read these is that in many ways the Western Church has already begun to address these issues. In particular, the Business as Mission movement exists primarily either in response to these changes or as a means of addressing them.

For example, Keller addresses “The opportunity for extensive culture-making in the U.S.” by referring to an interview with sociologist Peter Berger. In the interview Berger notes that the make-up of U.S. evangelicals is shifting from mainly blue-collar and is more represented by people who have a college education.

Berger anticipates that these evangelicals, as they engage in professional careers (like the arts or medicine), will do one of three things:

His question is–will Christians going into the arts, business, government, the media, and film a) assimilate to the existing baseline cultural narratives so they become in their views and values the same as other secular professionals and elites, or b) will they seal off and privatize their faith from their work so that, effectively, they do not do their work in any distinctive way, or c) will they do enough new Christian ‘culture-making’ in their fields to change things?

My Business as Mission research has shown that the leaders of the Business as Mission movement have resoundingly chosen the third option and are intentionally seeking to change the culture of global business through their entrepreneurial efforts. Not only that, but Business as Mission represents a worldview where the first two responses (assimilation and isolation) aren’t even options.

I am encouraged that the men and women who engage in Business as Mission have been so transformed by the Gospel and so inspired by the call of Jesus in their life that they are aggressively seeking to be on mission in the cross-cultural context of global and local business, facilitated by the authenticity that their knowledge, training, and experience creates.

The Church needs creative strategies (like Business as Mission) as it seeks to be agents and servants of the kingdom of God.

Read Keller’s full post here.