The Motherload!
As a Doctoral student, I am always on the lookout for references or contacts which will aid in my research… Yesterday was a good day.
As you all know, my area of interest and study is ministry through business. One of the concerns I have had in my studies is that while there seemed to be great interest in these ideas from a theological perspective, I was having trouble finding any solid research, and almost no leads outside of a very small group of ministers, authors, and speakers.
About 15 years ago I wrote a business plan for an entrepreneurship course in college using the term “Businestry” to describe my ideas. Over the years I gathered the rights to the term. You will note that Businestry.Org, Businestry.Net, etc. all lead to my company’s Web site. However, someone else owned the rights to Businestry.Com, but had never used the site. For about the past two years I attempted to contact the owner of the site, hoping they would let me use it or buy it. I never got any response.
Finally, I managed to glean a person’s name and company name from the registration of the Web address. Mr. Jose Gomez of ChurchForce Inc. I did a Google search on the company name and… wallah! There were several Web sites run by Mr. Gomez. To my astonishment, it appeared Mr. Gomez shared at least part of my vision for the intersection of business and ministry. I sent an e-mail introducing myself, and surely hope we can work together somehow. Check these sites out:
Following a link from one of Mr. Gomez’s sites, I stumbled across a site which discussed “tentmaking”, named of course after the apostle Paul’s tendency to fund his missionary journeys through his tentmaking business. These “tentmakers” are full-time missionaries who support themselves with secular work. Sometimes these business people can get access to place missionaries can’t. Check out:
http://www.globalopps.org/faq/index.htm
This site then lead me to discover Dr. Steve Rundle, who wrote a book entitled “Great Commission Companies”. Dr. Rundle is an economist who apparently studied “tentmaking” operations which set up in strategic locations then used their businesses for physical and spiritual ministry. You can find this book for sale on Amazon.Com (I just ordered a copy).
The tentmaking site also lead me to other sites which discuss this idea of tentmaking and “business as mission”. Check these sites out:
http://www.businessasmission.com/
http://www.businessasmissionnetwork.com/
Needless to say, finding all of this was very exciting. It has given me many new avenues to pursue in my research. Dr. Rundle is the first real academic I have encountered who is studying the issue.
Meanwhile, I am now taking courses in statistical research methods and business ethics. Here’s an ethics question for you: Is it OK for a business to impose religious values on its employees? If not, what if the business simply has values grounded in faith, and uses them as guidelines to judge behavior and performance?
