My Business, My Mission - Current themes for the Marketplace Movement
Doug
Seebeck is a man with some stories to tell! After more than 16 years of
frontline involvement in cross-cultural business partnerships, he has some wonderful
tales about the transformation he has seen through business right around the
world. Last year he and co-author
Timothy Stoner published some of these stories in My Business, My Mission, one
of the most vivid books on business as mission to date.
I
had the privilege of chatting with Doug Seebeck about some of the themes that
he writes about and that resonate in the wider marketplace ministry and
business as mission movement:
The ongoing need for affirmation and
mobilisation
My
Business, My Mission tells the stories of business people from diverse
backgrounds, from Asia, Africa and the Americas, and over and over again there
is a breakthrough moment. Doug Seebeck describes it this way “When business
people ‘get it’ – that God wants them to be the way they are, to be these
entrepreneurs, that God wired them to be the way they are and that they are
exactly where he wants them to be – it’s like a celebration and they begin to
live differently and they do their business differently”.
Doug
helped found Partners Worldwide because of the message he was hearing from
business people, “Show us how we can make a difference”, “Surely there is more
for us to contribute to mission than writing another check”, “How can we get
involved?”
I
asked Doug whether 16 years on this is still the message he is hearing? He
shares: “I am constantly surprised… I have shared the stories of those early
business guys over and over, and I worry that it’s not really fresh...
But then I’ll meet a new person and they are dealing with this right now in
their local church. These are business people with tremendous experience, they
want to get involved, but nothing in the church is engaging their skills. In too many places business people are still
not being affirmed, they are not commissioned and they are not told that they
are marketplace ministers and that what they are doing is really the church on
the front-lines. I think we’ve made some progress, but I think affirmation is
still a very real need. So yes, our role is still to give this affirming
message and then to help with tangible ways of getting involved.”.
The effectiveness of true partnerships
One
story in My Business, My Mission concerns Roberto and Rosa Espinoza, a young
Nicaraguan couple who, after starting their own businesses, gathered together
27 Christian business owners to form the ‘Network of Nicaraguan Professionals’.
This group meets for mutual encouragement and support and this is something
that is highlighted as a key for success, not only for this particular group but
for the whole Partners movement. If you look closely, relationships are at the
bottom of each success story - between business people within nations, but also
across cultures.
The
ethos of facilitating partnerships rather than running programs is at the core
of Partners Worldwide. Doug Seebeck shares: “As we have become more involved in
situations it is tempting to want to jump in and run a program, instead of
doing the work of nurturing partnerships and then stepping back. We could
just go in and run a program and call it ‘business development services’… but
we would be in danger of losing the global connections. What we have found is
that it is no longer ‘US to the rest’… we have affiliates in the USA learning
from affiliates in Nicaragua and elsewhere, helping us make a difference in our
own communities. We don’t want to lose that dynamic.’
I
asked Doug what he thought some of the keys to fostering true partnerships
were: “Well we can’t go with the attitude ‘we’ll come in and make it better’,
we really have to go and listen. When we go in for an exploratory trip and make
connections on the ground, we let the local Christian business people develop
the agenda. The local business people come up with the plan, what to focus on
and how to organise it locally, based on all their connections. The heart of it
is really listening, not jumping in with our ideas. Another key is
servant leadership, to come with an attitude of ‘how can I serve’. Then as you
serve in that way, people open up and trust builds. Then you can get under the
veneer to the underlying issues of poverty… good things start to happen.”
A movement of Kingdom entrepreneurs
As
Roberto and Rosa’s story unfolds, their biggest dream is revealed, ‘Their aim
is nothing less than a nation of businesspeople on their knees before
God’. This is something particularly exciting that comes up again and
again in Doug’s stories – the focus on empowering national entrepreneurs to be
the real change-agents in their own communities.
Long-term
transformation through business will happen in nations largely through national
Christian entrepreneurs. Therefore the posture of ‘outsiders’ should be that of
catalysts, enablers and encouragers, just as it should ideally be in all
mission and development work. Going cross-culturally to places where these is
the most need is still a great need in itself - but it shouldn’t be the
end. God is stirring up this passion for
mission in the marketplace in entrepreneurs all around the world.
Doug
shared what he sees happening on the ground, “Yes absolutely the multiplication
is happening locally, we are seeing it. A challenge for us is to be
willing to come in with the least baggage possible. We have learned this in
church planting, to ask what really is the essence of the gospel, how do we
communicate that and then leave a group to self-replicate and put their own
forms in place. One guy in Uganda read a Partners Worldwide fund brochure he
picked up from a friend in church and as an SME owner himself he started
mentoring 130 other entrepreneurs in a micro-enterprise program, all from
simply reading that message. It may look messy to us, not quite the
way we are used to doing things, but we are asking ‘how do we help nurture this
movement without stifling?’ We now have way more business mentors from
other countries than we have from the USA. We have understood that if we have
1000 mentors who really get it, they will replicate that 10,000 times locally
and that is what is happening.”
Transformation starts with me...
In
one of the final chapters of the book, Doug Seebeck pulls out an important
truth: ‘What we have learned is that if we wish to impact the world, we must be
impacted ourselves. We must live the change we wish to see.’ In many of the stories, business people
started off with a passion to bring transformation ‘over there’, or ‘here in my
community’, but what they experience is transformation in themselves.
I
asked Doug about the multiple impacts of business as ministry that he sees. “As
business people really start to understand that their sphere of influence is
their primary arena of ministry, they live their lives differently, they run
their business differently, they treat their employees differently… and the
effect of that just rolls on itself. The transformation starts with them,
then all of a sudden they are concerned with community issues that they never
saw before… then more initiatives start happening. I’ve seen social change,
economic change through business growth and job creation and I’ve seen churches
planted. Spiritual change happens with the individual and it spreads from
there.”
God
is concerned about the whole of life: our physical circumstances, our
stewardship of creation, our society and issues of justice, the corporate and
the individual, what is on our tongue, what is in our hearts. I think that is
what excites me about business as mission, kingdom business, business for
transformation… or whatever you want to call it! In the end it is just
business. It is business done by people who are dedicating themselves to God
and allowing Him to bring change in their own lives… and as they do that the
ethics of a small company might be changed, or the tax policy of a nation… the
faith of a person might be transformed, or the worship of a people.
Jo is the editor of www.businessasmission.com in
conversation with Doug Seebeck, Executive Director of Partners Worldwide and
co-author of My Business, My Mission. All quotes from “My Business, My Mission:
Fighting Poverty Through Partnerships" by Doug Seebeck and Timothy Stoner
(Faith Alive 2009) used with kind permission.
Labels: Doug Seebeck, Josie Plummer, Partners Worldwide
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Meshing Sunday and Monday - New guest series with Larry Peabody
Guest Post by Larry Peabody - A month or so ago I wrote that reports from the front lines offered one way to close the gap between Sunday and Monday. In this and the next several posts, we'll explore more ways to bridge that chasm. If you're a church leader, you can readily incorporate some of these ideas into the DNA of your church. If you're a believer with a job, you can encourage your church to connect the weekend service with the way you serve on weekdays.
Gaps can hurt or gaps can help. If a flood washes a gully through a highway, the gap can damage cars and people. On the other hand, to ignite the fuel, a spark plug needs a gap. Something of a gap will always separate Sunday and Monday. But just as a spark plug won't work with too much gap, the church can't do its work when Sunday and Monday get too "gappy.” According to the Avodah Institute, "Studies show that even the most committed church members experience a gap between their Sunday worship experience and their Monday workplace reality.”
The Sunday-Monday gap widened long ago. Narrowing it will require us to state a clear strategy, identify effective tactics, and then stick to them stubbornly. This week, I'll suggest a strategy. In the weeks to come, we'll consider specific tactics to carry it out.
Hebrews 10:24 and 25 point us to a strategy: "And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” This verse relates to the church in its two modes: gathered and scattered. Believers meeting together—that's thegathered ("Sunday”) mode. Acts of love and good deeds—those will mostly take place in the scattered("Monday”) mode.
Taking the cue from these verses, suppose your church were to adopt a strategy something like this:
To equip workplace-ready disciples, we will mesh Sunday with weekdays by:
(1) Making scattered-church concerns a major part of gathered-church services, and
(2) Encouraging believers to gather even when scattered.
The members of Christ's body invest far more time in the scattered than in the gathered mode. They're called to do the bulk of their serving "out there.” So it only makes sense that we practice gathering in ways that prepare us for effective service when we scatter. Notice the word "mesh” in the strategy statement. Unless two gears mesh, they have no effect on each other. When they do mesh, each remains what it is. To mesh is not to morph. But for gears to carry out their purpose, the teeth of each must extend into the other.
That's the idea behind this strategy—to extend the concerns of the weekday workplace into the weekend gathering. And to extend the gathering benefits into what believers experience while scattered in their workplaces. In other words, planning ways to let Monday break through into Sunday and to let Sunday permeate Monday.
In the weeks to come, we'll discuss a number of tactics for carrying out both parts of this strategy. Along the way, please tell us your ideas on tactics for closing the Sunday-Monday gap. And let us know if you have examples of churches that are already doing so.
Labels: Larry Peabody, Meshing Sunday and Monday, Sacred and Secular Divide
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Open Expo Coming to Atlanta January 20-22nd
Do you desire to use your business skills in reaching the unreached?
Would you like to be actively involved in helping transform a remote area of the world?
“Do you believe there should be new ways of doing mission?”
Are you frustrated with missionaries who are failing at doing business?
Are you willing to share your work expertise via email coaching?
Are you seeking to export your goods or services overseas? Or import goods?
Would you like to hear personal testimonies of workers who have planted churches among Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists via business?
If you answered YES to any of the above questions, then you need to participate in the
OPEN Expo January 20-22, 2011 in Atlanta Georgia.
OPEN is a network of 330+ tentmakers and BAMers working in various businesses throughout the 10/40 Window to reach the unreached. OPEN has 3 objectives in hosting this Expo:
1. Link business people with overseas workers & teams who desire coaching.
2. Model how business leads to transforming Muslim and Hindu communities.
3. Explore new models of doing mission.
The OPEN Expo is designed to educate business people on the changes that are taking place in missions seeking to do BAM (business as mission), and practical ‘how to’ steps will be explained for business people to get involved using their skills to assist our people on the field. At the Expo people will be able to link with OPEN workers who could use their coaching or mentoring expertise.
The presenters are overseas workers who have established businesses among Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus that are employing locals, turning a profit, and winning people to Jesus. For more information go towww.OPENExpoUSA.com or contact Laura at 14Laura14@gmail.com . The password to register is openB4T.
Labels: Events and Conferences, OPEN Network
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Customer Service Manager Job Opening with Barrington leather factory in China
Customer Service Manager Job Description
The Barrington Barrington Barrington
Responsibilities will
include:
- Overseeing our Chinese customer service
staff and ensuring optimum cooperation with our customers.
- Part-time International Purchasing
duties include purchasing leather and other components from international
suppliers in Europe,
- Marketing. Leading the customer service
department to not only respond to customer requests, but also to
proactively engage and find new customers.
- Other key responsibilities to be shared
amongst the management team include research and development, improving
manufacturing efficiency, overseeing facilities, and more.
- And other tasks as needed. He/she will
be part of a team and some of these duties will also be shared with other
team members, but his/her skills, hard work and assistance will be crucial
to the success of
Required character qualities include:
- Responsibility: Knowing and doing what
is expected of me
- Initiative: recognizing and doing what needs to be
done before I am asked to do it
- Thoroughness: knowing what factors will
diminish the effectiveness of my work or words if neglected
- Discernment: Understanding the deeper
reasons why things happen
- Joyfulness: Maintaining a good attitude, even when faced with unpleasant conditions
Required skills include:
- Strong
Manderine Chinese communication ability
- Strong team cooperation attitude
- At least 2-3 years of work experience;
10+ years preferred.
Fax: +86-592-5709459, Tel: +86-13906005640.
Labels: Barrington, Recruitment and Job Opportunities
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