Businessman or missionary?

Oct 30, 2012

35 years ago, I had a dream.  To help shape tomorrow’s world by helping students live Jesus-centred lives today.  Sixty people financed me to move around the fringes of university life – the public spaces, smokey back rooms and social networks.  They didn’t just give money, they also prayed, listened and encouraged.  Together we touched the lives of thousands.

Seven years ago, I moved into the public spaces, bars, cafés and restaurants of Birmingham City Centre.  Where were those students years later?  Most seemed to expect to find Jesus on the fringes of work life too, though a bold few expected more.  I connected and collaborated with the bold, and found some surprising hospitality towards Jesus in the world of business education and leadership development, as well as some lonely rebels in the rarified and dispiriting atmosphere of high level public sector management.

Given that schools and universities were beginning to pay me to teach “leadership of self” including forgiveness and servant leadership, I began to wonder whether I should be relieving my support team of the financial burden which was me.  But a remark by an MBA Director back in February stuck in my mind.  “There’s no such thing as a free lunch”, he said, and I badly needed to say to him “Oh but there is – really there is”.  Since then I have found myself in several negotiations in which I have needed to make it clear that I am not in this for what I can get, but for what I can give.  Unconditional grace and generosity are fundamental to what Jesus stood for, and my mission is to bring that prophetic word into the heart of the workplace.

I have come to see afresh that I need an income which is independent of my activity, to freely turn down requests to teach which are not strategic to my mission, and to model grace and generosity through all my negotiations.  I love the fact that I am presently talking to an IT company about the right wording to invite their leaders into a training process that I will deliver, and we have barely discussed how much it will cost.  That will in time be worked out, but there is high trust in this particular relationship, and money’s a detail.

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I will certainly use the income from such courses to pay for some of my staff, coaches and outreach activity to Broad Street and to the marginalised, but I need an income myself which is robustly independent.  I need to freely receive so that I can freely give.  If you are already part of that particular chain of grace and generosity, I thank God for you.  I need you.  If you’d like to join in or make some changes, you can do it here, with my grateful thanks.