Faith-Based Business Mission Trips?
Posted by Andreas on Feb 28, 2011 at 12:49 am
Christianity Today has this Faith in the Workplace site with a number of different articles, interviews and other links for people interested in the intersections of faith, work, and business.
One of their recent interviews was with Bob Larson, the President of Reynolds Food Packaging, who recently participated in a Business as Mission trip, done through an organization called Five Talents International. An interesting concept, the idea was to impart business skills to entrepreneurs in Uganda and Kenya within a seminar format.
Reynolds answers a number of questions, and describes the Business as Mission Trip:
People who have some level of expertise in business can share those skills and experience with people who are trying to come out of poverty. It aims to teach people the entrepreneurial skills they need to start a business. That’s what attracted me to it. I describe it sometimes like Doctors Without Borders. In a medical crisis, physicians will volunteer to go in and treat people and train doctors in underdeveloped parts of the world. In some respects, that’s what Business as Mission does for people. We go into places of economic crisis and give people a better shot at succeeding. We help them build out a business plan that exponentially increases their odds of success.
We like to promote enterprise-based solutions to poverty here at Faith and Prosperity. What do you think of the efforts that Five Talents International and the Business as Mission trips are making?
Could Christpreneurship Be the Next Move of God? | Michael Holmes
[...] rise of faith based mission trips: where Christ-preneurs are sent into impoverished areas to teach business skills to other [...]
Kevin R. Johnson
We are in process of changing the way we are responding to what we understand to be our blessing and our opportunity. We know we are blessed by God with custody of a tremendous natural resource, but we are still searching on just what we are supposed to do or be doing with it. While we do have some vision of our direction, we struggle with how we are to put or collect all this together.
So- we want/need to communicate with others of similar interests. What do you think might be the best way to employ a resource with value of over $8B? Our thoughts are to leverage the collateral value for financial support of faith-based and sustainable businesses and, particularly, for foundation support of our personal vision of offering water systems to third-world communities?
What do you think?
andreasw
Kevin,
You write “our blessing and our opportunity” – I love your approach.
For me to give you specific feedback, I’ll need a bit more context, so I’ll send you my email on that.
In general, would use a good chunk of the money to invest or loan rather than “give away.” That will not only increase the impact of your financial investment but also have a strong effect on the local culture. Too often, a culture of dependency (and co-dependency) is the result of well meaning charity in economic development efforts.
-Andreas