– by Jake Thomsen

Yesterday I shared the motivation that I discovered in the four-part gospel as I wrestled with why my work mattered to God. Today I touch on how that vision applies to the faith-driven entrepreneur, and I try to make it a bit more actionable.

Why does the four-part gospel matter for the faith-driven entrepreneur? Because the framework charges us to reflect the world as it should be, and business has the power to shape the world in meaningful ways. Tech startups in particular—marked by creativity, innovation, and scalability, and currently with an outsized influence on culture—can solve problems, grow quickly, and touch countless lives. Think of the biggest tech companies you know. How did their products, culture, monetization strategies, and other elements make the world more or less like it should be, especially as those companies scaled and touched millions of people? Founders who catch the four-part gospel vision have a humbling yet motivating awareness that their companies are effective tools for contributing to human flourishing in big and small ways.

The four-part gospel also gives creative license for how our companies embody our faith. We don’t have to sneak the name of Jesus into a supplier phone call, put a Bible verse on a product, or slip a tract into a Christmas bonus in hopes of pleasing God. If I treat my supplier with dignity because she’s made in the image of God, if my product meets a real need at a fair price, and if I create a work culture where people feel like they belong, I reflect the world as it should be. I resist the fallenness of the world, which could otherwise reduce stakeholder relationships to utilitarian transactions, encourage us to make products that earn a quick profit but lack excellence, or have my culture contribute to the epidemic of loneliness. The four-part gospel gives room for creativity by recognizing how our companies can help renew all things.

This discussion begins to highlight how the four-part gospel can translate into action. We can ask ourselves, “where do I have even a small influence to make the world into what it was meant to be?” This question may not immediately reveal specifics, but it provides a structure for discerning action. Mike Metzger, a mentor to entrepreneurs, reframes the four-part gospel into an actionable version called “ought-is-can-will”:

1. How ought something to be?

2. How is it now, likely short of human flourishing?

3. How can it be, considering our influence and ability?

4. How will it be if we commit to changing it?

We can use ought-is-can-will to break down almost every element of a company then chart an actionable course. For instance, the frame can apply to launching an entire company. I think of Blake Smith, an entrepreneur we’re privileged to partner with at Sovereign’s Capital. He started Cladwell to appeal to an ought that he saw in the fashion industry:

• Clothes and fashion ought to help people express themselves and feel confident in their skin, as consumers love their global neighbors by buying the work of their hands.

• Instead the fashion industry is built on convincing us that we need certain clothes and styles to be adequate; garments are often made in unjust work environments; and items go to waste in overflowing closets—“too many clothes and nothing to wear.”

• Blake realized he can use his quant background, the capsule wardrobe movement, and our smart phone culture to create a SaaS app that ingests wardrobe data to help people find outfits already in their closets. Users donate lots of items, and they buy a few new ones from companies that treat workers with dignity. They receive daily outfit recommendations based on closets with fewer but better clothes, all while finding a style uniquely and enduringly theirs.

• As Blake expands beyond his tens of thousands of users, more customers will reverse their stressful, comparison-based, and wasteful relationship with their closets. Fashion will serve customers rather than represent a promise of self-worth pushed further away with each new season.

Most people have a sense that something is deeply broken in the world, and they want to help make it right. One benefit of ought-is-can-will is that its inclusive language appeals to this shared human experience, equally at home in a sermon on human flourishing as in a scrum master’s charge to ship an update to improve a product. Using the framework in our companies can therefore give us an onramp to invite colleagues from all faith perspectives into the conversation with integrity. While reflecting the world as it should be honors God even when the language isn’t faith-based, Metzger observes that ought-is-can-will conversations often turn to the topic of faith. That’s because teams have found such resonance in the framework that they ask about its origins. Then, from the context of common ground and shared mission, entrepreneurs have winsomely shared that the structure reflects the core of the Christian story. That beats an awkward candy cane spiel any day.

The four-part gospel—with its vision for joining God’s work, and its guidance toward action—was the piece missing for me when I knew (in theory) that my work mattered to God. But even with a fuller perspective, I swing wildly between pride and fear when I forget two important points. First, I don’t accomplish the results. While we should work with excellence and with the goal in mind, in one of Jesus’s most striking promises (John 15), He assures us that we do nothing of value if we don’t abide in Him and let Him do the work that he sees fit.

Second, I earn nothing from God through my work. In The Burden is Light, Jon Tyson observes that Jesus didn’t live a perfect life, lead a successful ministry, and rise from the grave to then be told “this is my Son in whom I am well pleased.” Rather, the Father declared His pleasure at Jesus’s baptism, when Jesus’s only “accomplishment” had been intimacy with the Father. From this foundation of acceptance and relationship, Jesus accomplished His work. May we accomplish our own work as a continuation of His, with the same openhanded confidence that God will use our lives and our companies as He makes all things new.

Jake Thomsen is a Principal with Sovereign’s Capital, a venture fund that invests in faith-driven entrepreneurs in the U.S. and Southeast Asia. 

Photo by Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash

by Jake Thomsen

Faith-and-work content consistently beats the drum of affirming that marketplace vocations are as important to God as professional ministry. That message is crucial, as resources like this one give those of us with non-church giftings the confidence to pursue our callings. But we can’t stop there. Even if all believers in the marketplace one day know that our vocations matter, we still need to understand why. Otherwise we may run successful businesses guilt-free, but miss the motivation and focus that come from knowing our place in God’s story. Simon Sinek convinced us to “start with why” in our companies, since the what by itself is uninspiring. But we often lack the why behind our faith at work. This is where I found myself a decade ago, and the vision and direction of something called the four-part gospel brought everything into focus for me.

After college I joined a commercial bank. Four years into my career I was running a small region—overseeing sales, operations, and local marketing for my team of 25. I was convinced that my work mattered to God, but if you asked me why, I’d have stumbled through a nebulous answer about bringing Him glory. Looking back, I now know the problem was this: I knew I didn’t need to be a pastor or evangelist in the church for God to use me, but I thought I needed to be a pastor or evangelist in the walls of my company. So I was the guy starting meetings the week of Christmas with holiday fun facts, occasionally slipping in something like the original symbolism of the candy cane. I explained the shape of the shepherd staff, and the red and white stripes of Jesus’s blood and cleansing, and I hoped someone would want to know more. If there weren’t tangible results in the form of conversations and spiritual commitments, I wondered if I was failing.

Then one day Steve—the husband of one of my sales reps, Laura—approached me to say thank you. Steve explained that for the three years before I joined the team, Laura came home almost every night crying. The bank had put a major focus on front-line sales, and Laura felt ill-equipped for the goals that took central focus. She chose a career in banking thirty years earlier to serve clients, and she now felt ingenuous pushing products, like a failure when she didn’t meet her goals, and hopeless when she imagined finding a new job. She fell into depression. Steve explained that the pattern started to change a few months after I arrived. I wouldn’t let us push products to hit our numbers. Instead I coached everyone to find their natural style, and I reframed the goal from trying to sell products, to building relationships with clients and confidently pitching solutions when we identified needs. My charge wasn’t insightful, but it was genuine and gritty. It was also based on what I believed was the God-honoring way to expand the business. A consistent focus on doing the work to achieve excellence with a human focus eventually changed our sales culture. Steve explained that as our culture nurtured each rep’s style, built camaraderie, and led to our rise to become a top-ranked office, Laura came home each day with a renewed sense of purpose. She gradually emerged from depression, and their family was thriving for the first time in years.

That experience hit me hard. It felt so much more natural and powerful than my candy cane spiel, and like it was impact that I uniquely could have. But did the experience matter if it didn’t contribute to “saving souls” at work? That question put me on a path to better understand why my work mattered, and I soon discovered a framework where work finally made sense to me: the four-part gospel. In Surprised by Hope, N.T. Wright explained why I struggled with what success looked like–because I lived under an incomplete view of the Christian story in which personal salvation was all that mattered. I bought into what’s called the “two-part gospel”:

• Part 1: We are flawed and sinful people.

• Part 2: Jesus came to save us and make us right with God.

Amen! But incomplete. If the two-part gospel were the whole story, the goal of our faith couldn’t be anything more than to find God through Jesus, help others meet him, then wait for the afterlife. The whole goal would be to “go to heaven when I die.” But if I believe that, then I don’t have an others-facing purpose in life beyond saving souls. I can love my neighbor, care for the widow, and give to the poor, but I do so only to find an opportunity to share the gospel in a calculating way. None of it makes any sense otherwise. So under the two-part gospel where I had been living, my work mattered only because it was my arena for evangelism.

Wright argues that the scriptural and historical version of the gospel is the four-part gospel, which sandwiches the above steps between how the world began and where it’s ultimately headed:

• Part 1: God created the world and declared it good. It brought God pleasure.

• Part 2. The world was broken through the Fall. We became flawed and sinful people.

• Part 3. Jesus came to save us and make us right with God. He enlists us for God’s work.

• Part 4. God is actively working to make all things new again. His work will culminate in the arrival of the New Heavens and New Earth as described in Revelation.

The two added parts make all the difference for how we understand what God is doing. In the four-part gospel, we don’t escape to heaven in the end. Rather, heaven comes to earth, and God’s people physically resurrect to enjoy the renewed world with him for eternity. This world is and always has been the focal point of God’s plan. As we wait for the New Earth, Christ’s work and the Holy Spirit guide us into the active restoration of creation. We resist the fallenness of the world as we work toward the in-breaking of heaven here and now, which foreshadows what’s coming. The Kingdom of Heaven is upon us, as Jesus said. N.T. Wright calls this “setting the world to right”. It’s what God is doing, and using his people for, at this moment in history.

What does a world set to right look like? It has to include individual salvation so that people become who they are meant to be—like Christ. We know we won’t fully be like Christ until God completes that work at our resurrection, but He is faithful to complete it. I knew this part of the story in the two-part gospel. But in the four-part gospel, there’s more. Setting things to right must also touch every other aspect of life—relationships, families, communities, businesses, and cultures. As God’s ambassadors, we shape our spheres of influence, however big or small, to contribute to human flourishing and to reflect the world as it should be and one day will be. That work also won’t be done until God completes it with the New Earth, but reflecting the coming reality now is worship that pleases God as we make his presence known. So while I accidentally fell into it, God used my work with Laura to help her family flourish and reflect the world as it should be, at least in some ways, in our little corner of the company. My work indeed mattered.

The four-part gospel is a big vision that needs to be made more tangible. But it’s a good place to start because it represents why our marketplace vocations are as important as professional ministry—because God is using His people to make all things new, and those of us in the marketplace touch areas of the fallen world that no one else will. If we’re starting with the why of faith and work, the four-part gospel is it.

Tomorrow I’ll reflect on why I think the framework is especially important for faith-driven entrepreneurs, and share a reframed version that can help translate our why into more tangible strategies and activities.

Jake Thomsen is a Principal with Sovereign’s Capital, a venture fund that invests in faith-driven entrepreneurs in the U.S. and Southeast Asia. 

 Photo by Joshua Rawson-Harris on Unsplash

by Henry Kaestner

In my experience we often look in life to the wrong type of hero.  As we get older, we know enough to know that the rock star or the comedian or the basketball MVP isn’t the type of hero that we should be modelling our life after (though sometimes they are….ok I’m a Warriors fan and love the influence that Steph Curry has on my boys), but too often times I think we find ourselves lifting up the wrong type of hero in the faith and business world.

I’ve been to a fair number of gatherings where very successful businessmen who go to church are lifted up as role models for others to emulate within the larger Christian community because they’re recognized by the world as being successful in business.  And yet, I’ve known several of these people who have been chosen to talk at faith and work events who’ve shared with me that they’ve never actually talked about their faith in the workplace. I’ve been told by some that they believe that what happens in their private Spiritual lives, are just that….private.   We aren’t to judge….I need to be very careful here. But I do think that it’s hard to have an encounter with the real, living God that gave us the gift of life now and for evermore and not share that good news with others we’ve been in relationship with for months and years….even (maybe especially?) those we work with.

To be clear, we’re to share our faith with gentleness and respect, but how can we expect people to follow us when they don’t know what our motivation is, what our personal story is, particularly the most important part?  How can we love people really well in the office if we can’t ask if we can pray with them when they are going through hard times?

We’ve all come across people in the workplace that are excellent at their job, and love the Lord in a way that’s winsome.  They may not be the Unicorn CEOs, they may not be the ones with the huge sales achievements, or the ones with the obvious trappings of success, but they are heroes nonetheless.  Maybe they are our Controller, maybe they are a VP of Marketing, maybe they are our office cleaner, maybe they are our CEO. Look for those who do their jobs with excellence and clearly know and love the Lord.  Let’s lift these men and women up. These are our heroes.

This short, 75 second video hopefully gets at that concept a bit.  Special thanks to the great folks at Gospel Patrons for the great work that they do in advancing the Biblical Message of Generosity and for having produced this.

Photo by Joey Nicotra on Unsplash

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by Rusty Rueff, Henry Kaestner and William Norvell

There’s some small chance for those reading our blog over the past week that you don’t know that we have a podcast too.  Well we do :). You’ll see that we have 3 episodes loaded up on iTunes.  We’d love for you to check them out.   We’d love your feedback and questions, and of course, if you like them, and know someone who might be encouraged by them, we hope that you’ll share them.

An important thing to note about both the podcast and the blog….and well, really the whole site, is that we aim to serve entrepreneurs of all shapes and sizes NOT just the technology entrepreneur.  We may live in Silicon Valley and a number of our contributors may be venture capitalists, but we, of course, see God at work through every business owner.  We like, the God whose image we were made in, create, innovate, lead and serve in a way that can become a blessing to our partners, vendors, customers and employees.  This is most assuredly not just the domain of the tech entrepreneur.  I want to point this out because I fear that if I didn’t do so, you’d listen to this particular episode and wonder a bit if it was for you……and yet I think it is. I hope you’ll agree.

In this episode we’ll talk about projections.  At first listen, this seems to be a little more relevant for companies that are after venture financing as we talk about the three year projections and the modeling that entrepreneurs show to venture capitalists etc., but I hope that you’ll find a lot more here than advice in working with a VC.

William, Rusty and I talk about plain old business planning, and the modelling we talk about doesn’t need to have a thing to do with raising money.  It talks about the common mistakes made by business owners in planning for growth and how to avoid them.

It then goes a bit deeper and we have a brief conversation about one of the struggles many business owners experience….at least one we had:  the propensity to exaggerate. We talk about how to think about growing a business, and our faith and our reliance on God to provide, not just the work of our hands.  We hope you’ll enjoy it. Please let us know if you do. Please let us know if you don’t. And as always, please let us know the questions that you’d like to see us answer on the podcast.

Subscribe on ITunes or Other

In this episode we’ll talk about projections.  At first listen, this seems to be a little more relevant for companies that are after venture financing as we talk about the three year projections and the modeling that entrepreneurs show to venture capitalists etc., but I hope that you’ll find a lot more here than advice in working with a VC.

William, Rusty and I talk about plain old business planning, and the modelling we talk about doesn’t need to have a thing to do with raising money.  It talks about the common mistakes made by business owners in planning for growth and how to avoid them.

Show Notes for Episode 3

by Henry Kaestner

For those of you who don’t yet know Praxis, the organization that Josh Kwan (the author of today’s highlighted content) and Dave Blanchard co-founded 6 years ago:  Praxis is focused on advancing redemptive entrepreneurship in society. They do it under the inspiration of the Clapham Group of mid 19th century London who looked to transform society through business and charitable organizations, and then did it very well.  150 years on, Praxis, in turn, is also doing it very well. We’ll have a chance to check in with Praxis many times over the course of this blog, so that’s all that we’ll talk about them now, but they are very, very much worth checking out if you’re an entrepreneur all the way from college students up to business owners with redemptive values.

I’ve known Josh for a decade now.  We met over the phone and then spent several hours frantically driving from a Hope International (another great org that we’ll highlight this year with time) Board meeting in Lancaster PA to catch our flight in Philly. I love the man. He is surprisingly witty for such a quiet and often unassuming person.  He’s famous for the greatest introductions of all time and he has a heart for the entrepreneur and their impact to shape culture that comes across clearly in this piece he posted earlier this year.

His heart, his spirit and his mind come across clearly in this blog and betray a former life as a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News.  Their loss is the world of entrepreneurship’s gain.

Please click here to see Josh’s piece on the Praxis Journal and to learn more about Praxis itself.