A recent Wall Street Journal article tells the story of several church planting organizations that operate like start-up business accelerators, offering grants and guidance in exchange for a percentage of future church revenue. These networks define themselves as entrepreneurial in the face of dying traditional churches, often relying significantly on capitalist principles. “Church planting is pioneering something new” a network representative says, including “deploy[ing] marketing, branding, and social media strategies akin to other franchise businesses.”¹Francis Rocca, Arian Campo-Flores, and Adolfo Flores, “God Inc. — Church Startups Spread Franchise Model Across U.S.” Wall Street Journal, May 19, 2024. This is part of a broader trend suggesting entrepreneurship and innovation are crucial to the church’s mission in an age of declining religious affiliation. After all, some contend, Jesus was an entrepreneur.

In our attempts to do something new, we need to practice careful discernment so that we do not make Jesus into our own image. While there is no prize for ignoring something new for the sake of upholding tradition, it is also important to recognize the ways in which the theological traditions of the global and historic church can act as both an anchor and a jumping off point to explore new ideas. In this article I will investigate our culture’s obsession with entrepreneurship, critique some ways that it can deform us as leaders, and suggest an alternative theological value: incarnation.

The Gospel of Entrepreneurship

The suggestion that Christian leaders should be more entrepreneurial springs from the well of contemporary capitalism. Since the early 1980s, politicians and economists have largely focused on creating markets and competition in all areas of the economy. It is believed that human well-being is best achieved by freeing individual entrepreneurial efforts combined with a free market economy.This economic approach is often referred to as neoliberalism. In the process, other social institutions and community or government safety nets have increasingly disappeared so that everything we need in life is up to us as individuals. While this economic ideology is being contested and challenged recently, we are very much still living in its wake. 

In this neoliberal, capitalistic environment, human beings must become entrepreneurs of the self, competing and investing in ourselves to be sellable in the marketplace. Human beings become constant projects as we invest in ourselves as capital — or what makes future income possible. We invest in education, training, and other experiences. We must be flexible and willing to move to take advantage of new opportunities, while simultaneously having the time to devote toward self-improvement activities, all for the purpose of maximizing our productivity in a world where it’s ultimately up to us. Zygmunt Bauman writes, “Becoming and remaining a sellable commodity becomes of ultimate importance.” He continues, “Let us note, making oneself, not just becoming, is the challenge and the task.”²Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life, 57.

Regardless of how one personally feels about this economic reality, entrepreneurship and innovation are the main keys to success under capitalism’s system today. What is much less understood, in particular for Christian leaders, is what undergirds this worldview: As cultural systems train us in this way of being, we can easily import it into the church, thinking this is the key to success.

Is this really what we signed up for as Christian leaders? I think not.

In our attempts to do something new, we need to practice careful discernment so that we do not make Jesus into our own image. The theological traditions of the historic church can act as an anchor while exploring new ideas. Share on X

Is It All Up To Us?

Theologian Andrew Root cautions, “We fail to recognize that linking arms with innovation inside neoliberal capitalism, if not taken through a cruciform process, can over-inflate the self and work against the formation where the self is lost (and then re-found and transformed) in Christ.”³Andrew Root, The Church After Innovation, 159. Root adds that as entrepreneurship is glorified in a design and consumer focused environment, humans begin to feel the need to be utterly unique: “From a society of singularities, we get selves who fear being basic and yearn to be extra.”⁴Ibid., Root, 161. In fact, the word basic is a slang term of derision for Generation Z, referring to someone who is perceived as dull, mainstream, or unoriginal!

This creates an attitude where we’re constantly looking inward, wondering if we are innovative enough, good enough, or even worthy of attention at all. As church leaders, we constantly feel pressure that our congregations must find their own new and unique expression. We dread being seen as outdated or traditional. Doing new and unique things can be a way to generate purpose in a group, and yet Root explains that without careful theological exploration, “it nevertheless induces an unhealthy concern for the performance of the self, a competitive drive (mixed with anxiety) that the self must be uniquely singular…even demand[ing] a creativity-induced ‘incurvatus in se’ (turning in on oneself).”⁵Ibid., Root, 185. 

By contrast, for millennia, Christians have confessed that life is not up to us. As Paul writes in Galatians 1:4, “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father.” The Reformer Martin Luther famously argued that we need to pay attention to the pronouns in Scripture in this verse, remembering that Christ gave himself for our sins. 

Luther doesn’t mean that our faith is individualistic, as this may initially sound to us as 21st century Western Christians, but rather that God’s action in Christ and through the Spirit are not abstract ideas but are actually true for us. Therefore, Luther suggests that when we confess “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth” in the Nicene Creed, we actually confess a powerful reality about our lives: God sustains us in every single way.

Martin Luther continues his argument, writing in the Small Catechism:

I believe that God has created me together with all that exists. God has given me and still preserves my body and soul: eyes, ears, and all limbs and senses; reason and all mental faculties. In addition, God daily and abundantly provides shoes and clothing, food and drink, house and farm, spouse and children, fields, livestock, and all property — along with all the necessities and nourishment for this body and life. God protects me against all danger and shields and preserves me from all evil. And all this is done out of pure, fatherly, and divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness of mine at all.⁶Martin Luther, The Small Catechism. Emphasis added. [/mfn]

As ministry leaders, this is true not only for us as individuals, but for our churches as well. God creates and sustains our churches, and the Spirit is at work carrying out God’s mission of making all things new. We don’t possess the mission, we are being taken up into it. It’s not up to us.

As entrepreneurship is glorified in a design and consumer focused environment, humans can begin to feel the need to be utterly unique. (1/2) Share on X

God creates and sustains our churches, and the Spirit is at work carrying out God’s mission of making all things new. We don’t possess the mission, we are being taken up into it. It’s not up to us. (2/2) Share on X

Being Christ for Others

Rather than focusing on the necessity of entrepreneurship for Christian leaders, I want to suggest that a better focus is on incarnation. I do not wish to say we can’t learn anything from entrepreneurship, nor that we should never try to be innovative in our ministry. But we ought to be on the lookout for attitudes and practices of power and self-reliance that produce anxiety and the feeling that it’s all up to us. This feeling is anathema to the Way of Christ. We must resist its siren call as Christian leaders.

As we become united with Christ who is for us, we become Christ for others wherever we live. In Ephesians 2:10, Paul writes that “We are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (NIV). The Greek word for handiwork is poiēma. So perhaps we might say we are God’s artwork, poem, or masterpiece. God is creating us, God’s people. We are one of wonderful works of God about which the psalmist speaks. What is required of us as Christian leaders is to go out and do the works God has prepared in advance, that Christ is busy with in the concrete details of our daily existence. 

Christ is living out his resurrection in the church. And as we act as Christ’s body in unique contexts, new things will emerge. This newness does not spring from our marketplace principles or strategies but from the Spirit’s work among unique people with gifts in their own specific contexts. It will be risky as God calls us into new places, giving up our power to be with and for others. But we are freed from thinking it’s up to us, and open to participate with all that God is up to.

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As we become united with Christ who is for us, we become Christ for others wherever we live. (1/2) Share on X

What is required of us as Christian leaders is to go out and do the works God has prepared in advance, that Christ is busy with in the concrete details of our daily existence. (2/2) Share on X

*Editorial Note: Emily’s subversive critique of dominant business leadership paradigms, and it’s pervasive impact on how we perceive Christian leaders, is part of an ongoing series of pieces on unhelpful leadership metaphors she is developing for an upcoming book release. Stay tuned for more later this year! ~CK