The Minister as Entrepreneur: Leading and Growing the Church in an Age of Rapid Change

By Michael Volland

A compelling case for an entrepreneurial approach to ministry and mission, exploring its biblical basis and potential benefits. Based on extensive interviews with entrepreneurial ministers from a range of denominations. Draws on examples of 'entrepreneurs' from the Bible and Christian history to help readers imagine how such an approach could work in their own context. Addresses the problems some have with the word 'entrepreneur' and sets out a positive and informed alternative understanding. Full of informative and inspiring case-studies of entrepreneurial ministry in action. Building on his own experiences as a priest and an entrepreneur, Volland argues that the concept of entrepreneurship offers churches a helpful lens through which to view Christian ministry and mission, and an understanding and approach to ministry that is well fitted for the mission task in a rapidly changing world. He shows how an entrepreneurial approach is consistent with understandings of leadership in the major denominations and in the new churches. He also argues that such an approach is consistent both with the nature of God and with human collaboration with God's activity in the world. His conclusions are based on extensive interviews with entrepreneurial ministers (Justin Welby and Steven Croft were among the interviewees), and his findings result in practical suggestions for those seeking to be more entrepreneurial in their ministries as well as in recommendations for strategic change that will encourage sustainable church growth and vitality in the years ahead.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SPCK
• Release date: Apr 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9780281071838

Book preview

Michael Volland has been Director of Mission at Cranmer Hall, Durham, since 2009. Since 2014, he has combined this role with serving as Missioner to nine parishes in the East Durham Mission Project. Michael holds a commission in the Royal Army Chaplain’s Department and serves as chaplain to the Durham Army Cadet Force. He trained for ordained ministry at Ridley Hall, Cambridge and undertook his doctoral studies at Durham University. Michael has published a number of books, chapters and articles, including Fresh! An Introduction to Fresh Expressions and Pioneer Ministry (SCM Press, 2012); Through the Pilgrim Door (Survivor, 2009) and God on the Beach (Survivor, 2005). Michael is married and he and his wife have three children.

First published in Great Britain in 2015

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ISBN 978–0–281–07182–1

eBook ISBN 978–0–281–07183–8

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Contents

Introduction: Why ‘entrepreneur’?

Part 1

ENTREPRENEURS: WHAT? WHO? WHY NOW …?

1 Dragons’ Den? Towards a positive understanding of the entrepreneur

2 Definitions of the entrepreneur

3 An entrepreneurial God?

Part 2

DREAMING DREAMS, BUILDING REALITY: ENTREPRENEURIAL MINISTERS IN THEIR OWN WORDS

4 Facets of the entrepreneur

5 Feeling positive about entrepreneurs in Christian ministry

6 Church buildings can be a resource

7 Teamwork and partnering with others

8 What factors help entrepreneurship to happen?

9 What hinders entrepreneurship?

10 The impact of senior leadership on entrepreneurship in the local church

Conclusion: What has been said and what do we do next?

Appendix 1 Suggestions for group discussion

Appendix 2 Suggested essay questions

Appendix 3 Avenues for further research

Notes

Bibliography and further reading

Search terms

Introduction: Why ‘entrepreneur’?

I am a Christian minister. I am also an entrepreneur. Being an entrepreneur has rarely made me any money and in the context of this book, that is precisely the point. Here I shall instead be using the term ‘entrepreneur’ to refer to a way of being in the world that is characterized by a relentless and energetic pursuit of opportunities to do things in new ways in order to bring about improvements for everyone involved.

Of course, some entrepreneurs act in this way in order to generate financial capital, but the work of the entrepreneur is not limited to the world of commerce. Entrepreneurs use their gifts in diverse environments including schools, hospitals and churches, and their efforts generate social, artistic and spiritual capital. My own entrepreneurial nature has found various expressions as an undergraduate art student, parish youth worker, budding author, mission-team member, ordained Anglican priest, lecturer in a theological college and missioner to a group of former mining villages in County Durham.

Being an entrepreneur is a fundamental aspect of my personality. I was never taught to be an entrepreneur but through establishing and running secret clubs and playground swap-shops at primary school, persuading a leading computer manufacturer to deliver a lorry-load of free equipment to my secondary school and establishing and running a successful club night as a young adult, I recognized my entrepreneurial flair, experimented with it, learnt from my mistakes and grew in entrepreneurial confidence. And once I was ordained in the Church of England it was natural to apply this ‘way of being’ to my approach to public ministry.

I did not mention entrepreneurship overtly during my selection process for ordained ministry, college training or deployment. However, my way of approaching the Christian life has always been innately entrepreneurial and I have tried to find creative and innovative ways to engage in loving service as a minister of the gospel in the communities in which I have served. My experience of being an entrepreneurial minister (both lay and ordained) has been one of the key drivers for this book.

A second, intimately related driver has been my understanding of the nature of the mission context in which Christians are currently seeking to engage in faithful witness and loving service. Many years of involvement in, and reflection on, mission and ministry have led me to believe that today, the Church’s faithful and effective response to Jesus’ Great Commission requires the contribution of entrepreneurs.

How do you feel about entrepreneurs?

Consider the word ‘entrepreneur’, and note the sorts of images that come to mind. Is it a word you are comfortable with? Perhaps it is a word you instinctively recoil from. Maybe you are content for the word to be used in the world of commerce but the idea of its employment in relation to Christian ministry and mission raises all sorts of problems.

While the instinctive reaction of some Christians might be to steer clear of the word and its apparently worldly connotations, it is nevertheless true that we see many of the characteristics associated with entrepreneurship displayed in Christians who help to bring about imaginative change in communities and churches. I believe that entrepreneurship is a gift of God to his Church and that the Church and the communities it seeks to serve would gain a great deal if this gift were better understood and indeed encouraged. Not all Christians are natural entrepreneurs but many more than we imagine have the potential to be entrepreneurs, and when this potential is recognized, nurtured and given space to breathe, an innovative approach to mission and ministry is often the result.

A working definition of the entrepreneur

A few years ago I set about trying to find a definition of the entrepreneur that would provoke constructive discussion. It transpires that there is no widely accepted definition in the literature! What I noticed, however, as I read about entrepreneurs was the recurrence of words such as ‘creative’, ‘innovative’, ‘energetic’, ‘focused’, ‘visionary’, ‘opportunity’, ‘partnership’ and ‘collaboration’ – in short, all things that we might hope to see in those involved in Christian mission. With these concepts in mind, and drawing on the work of many others, I came up with the following definition of the entrepreneur:

A visionary who, in partnership with God and others, challenges the status quo by energetically creating and innovating in order to shape something of kingdom value.

Visionaries are often able to see what might be, as well as what is. And, if they have wisdom and the ability to build trust and to communicate effectively, they may be able to share this vision with others and work in partnership to see it realized. Entrepreneurs’ energy is often directed at moving beyond the status quo, or the apparent limits of the way things are. This can make them quite annoying to the rest of us! But for Christians, Jesus provides an example of someone who was prepared to disturb individuals and institutions where apathy and the love of comfort had crept in. Perhaps reflecting on Jesus’ entrepreneurial approach to ministry may help us to recognize and celebrate the gift of entrepreneurship in our Christian communities. Considering entrepreneurship in the light of the definition set out above offers us a way of thinking about the task of mission to which God calls all of us and the kind of approach that some Christians might take towards it. I shall consider this definition in more depth in Chapter 2.

The aim of this book

This book aims to make a contribution to the emergence of a culture in which entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship are properly understood and recognized as gifts of God to his Church. As such a culture emerges, I hope Christians will feel more confident about acting out their God-given entrepreneurial potential and try out a whole range of experiments and innovations in local churches and communities.

Entrepreneurs have always been found among the people of God. Men and women with entrepreneurial gifts are present in the Bible and throughout church history. In predictable times, when the Church appears to be strong and affluent (never a great thing for the Church), the particular set of gifts possessed by the entrepreneurs in our midst are all too often ignored, discouraged or even repressed. During such times entrepreneurs appear to fade into the background. But in a challenging and unpredictable age like our own, it is important that the entrepreneurs among the people of God are given every encouragement to minister out of their God-given gifts. Part of the fruit of this will be that the rest of us are helped to step towards all that God intends and the unchanging message of the coming kingdom will be faithfully proclaimed in ways that allow it to be heard afresh in our generation.

This book is intended to be accessible to readers with a variety of needs and agendas, including lay and ordained ministers, church groups seeking resources to develop a more entrepreneurial approach to ministry, theological students studying entrepreneurial approaches to ministry and academics engaged in research.

Ministers and ministry

All Christians, by virtue of their baptism into the body of Christ, are called to be ministers of the gospel. Together, ours is a ministry of praise and worship, faithful witness, loving service, healing and reconciliation. Ministry involves working with one another to sustain and build up the body of Christ, while at the same time witnessing to the world in word and deed in order that others may have the opportunity to encounter the risen and ascended Jesus and be transformed by his love.

In the first instance, when I write about the ‘minister’, I am referring to all who have chosen to follow Jesus, and not only those who serve in leadership, teaching or sacramental roles. In using the word ‘ministry’, I am referring to a vast tapestry of activity that baptized Christians undertake in the name of Jesus and on behalf of his Church and not just to the narrower set of tasks undertaken by those in leadership roles. When I write about ‘entrepreneurial ministers’, then, I am first of all referring to Christians, whether in leadership roles or not, whose particular attributes we can recognize as being entrepreneurial and whose way of being in the world means that all manner of things happen that perhaps wouldn’t have happened had God not placed them in our midst. Throughout the book I also make specific reference to ‘lay’ or ‘ordained’ entrepreneurial ministers. In Part 2 I focus specifically on ordained entrepreneurial ministers, as this has been the main focus of my own recent research.

Quality research requires a clear focus and this means imposing limitations on the scope of any particular project. As an Anglican involved in training men and women for ordained ministry, it made sense for me to focus in my research on ordained Anglicans exercising an entrepreneurial approach to ministry rather than those with leadership roles in other denominations. However, if the Church is to be blessed and encouraged by the ministries of all the entrepreneurs in our midst, of course we must identify, encourage and support entrepreneurial lay people. Among the myriad reasons for this is that those with entrepreneurial ability will often not be ordained clergy but lay ministers. Ordained ministers who understand the importance of creating an atmosphere in which entrepreneurial Christians can emerge and flourish will need to understand how to provide those Christians with appropriate support and guidance.

In his book, Being Church, Doing Life, Michael Moynagh highlights the important contribution that non-entrepreneurial pastors can make to facilitating the emergence of an entrepreneurial approach to ministry:

You do not have to be an innovator yourself. You can be a pastor to those who are … You don’t need to be a gifted change agent. Nor do you have to be gifted in up-front leadership to encourage these communities [and experiments].¹

There is a great deal of work to be done on researching the contribution of lay entrepreneurs within the ministry of the Church and local communities and I hope that some readers will be able to engage in this much-needed task.

Why ‘entrepreneur’?

I was talking about entrepreneurship at a conference and somebody asked me why I seemed to be hung up on using the word ‘entrepreneur’ rather than a term with less apparent baggage: something like ‘innovator’, ‘creative person’ or ‘pioneer’. I explained that the word ‘entrepreneur’ catches up a whole range of qualities that no other word quite can.

An effective entrepreneur may well be an innovator, but is also likely to be creative, energetic, a visionary, a collaborator and so on. ‘Pioneer’ doesn’t quite capture the essence of the word ‘entrepreneur’ either. Although some pioneers have entrepreneurial qualities, not all pioneers are entrepreneurs. Some will blaze a trail once or even twice but may then stop pioneering and settle into other tasks. Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, do what they do again and again. Their approach to life and ministry is habitual and they can’t help themselves. Doing new things in new ways is at the heart of their way of being in the world and they will go on seeing new or refreshed possibilities for people, places and things for the rest of their lives, and probably in the age to come! So the term ‘entrepreneur’ offers us a combination of qualities and gifts that no other word does.

‘Entrepreneur’ is also a word that appeared in direct relation to Christian ministry in a best-selling church report. In February 2004, the General Synod of the Church of England approved and