BAM! Business As Mission and mission as business

The social enterprise movement is primarily a secular phenomenon, at least in its prototypical rhetoric and associative networks. But like so much of modern charity, hybridizing business and public benefit is a practice that has deep religious roots as well as parallel religious tracks.

Example #1: BAM, the Business As Mission movement. This has close parallels with the wing of the social enterprise movement that is trying to infuse profit-seeking business with charitable values, whether through cause-marketing, corporate social responsibility, a socially beneficial purpose or the dedication of profits to a charitable cause. Does any of this sound familiar?

The phenomenon has many labels: "kingdom business," "kingdom companies," "for-profit missions," "marketplace missions," and "Great Commission companies," to name a few. But observers agree the movement is already huge and growing quickly. BAM "is the big trend now, and everyone wants to say they're doing it," says Steve Rundle, associate professor of economics at Biola University. Rundle authored Great Commission Companies (2003) and has an upcoming book, An Overview of Business as Mission, written with fellow BAM scholar Neal Johnson.

The BAM model affirms that business is a Christian calling; that free-market profit is rooted in the cultural mandate; and that rightly done, "kingdom businesses" offer economic, social, and spiritual help to employees, customers, and nations. Big start-ups are often financed by wealthy Christians who expect financial rewards and ministry results. Small start-ups, called microenterprises, use small loans to achieve more modest ministry and profit goals. Some efforts, like Yeager Kenya Group, Inc., fall somewhere in between.

Example #2: Entrepreneurial megachurches

An analysis by The New York Times of the online public records of just over 1,300 of these giant churches shows that their business interests are as varied as basketball schools, aviation subsidiaries, investment partnerships and a limousine service.

Indeed, some huge churches, already politically influential, are becoming catalysts for local economic development, challenging a conventional view that churches drain a town financially by generating lower-paid jobs, taking land off the property-tax rolls and increasing traffic.

But the entrepreneurial activities of churches pose questions for their communities that do not arise with secular development.

These enterprises, whose sponsoring churches benefit from a variety of tax breaks and regulatory exemptions given to religious organizations in this country, sometimes provoke complaints from for-profit businesses with which they compete . . . .