The daylong symposium was about “social entrepreneurship,” a relatively new idea in business education but a well-established phenomenon. The concept focuses on people who undertake innovations in the social sector””addressing problems in society and advancing a particular social mission to serve a larger good. We Christians have long had people who fulfilled this role””indeed, they founded many of the institutions we now take for granted.
I was struck by the response of one of the leaders when I asked about the origins of the social entrepreneurship movement. He said that while many of the most important social institutions in the United States were started out of faith-inspired motivation by churches and denominations, these organizations had lost their steam in the last few decades. Today, he said, much of the energy for social entrepreneurship is emerging in secular contexts.
He mentioned faith-inspired organizations””the Salvation Army, Goodwill, hospitals and many colleges and universities that denominations founded in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But then he began talking about Teach for America, a secular organization that has emerged over the past decade and now has a significant scale and scope of mission.
Good article.
He mentions ‘President Bush’s faith-based initiatives program’ – now I may be misremembering, but was it not President George W Bush who said that he thought the problem with the French economy was that there was not a word in French for ‘entrepreneur’…?
Setting aside governmental definitions of “faith-based organizations” for the moment, I am not sure how we know if something is a faith-based initiative except by its fruits. A corporation is a legal fiction given life by its people and not by its by-laws. If those people who are fed at the table and then sent into the world to gatherings whose by-laws know nothing of faith but whose mission is to reconcile through actions which are the content of love, then it seems that the Spirit is acting through such gatherings. Secular is a word that today is posed in opposition to faith, but that is not at all the way Luther used it in speaking of the vocation of the baker, the teacher, the butcher, and the farmer. I share Dean Jones’ hope for a church that re-learns the skills of and re-discovers its passion for social entrepreneurship. That example is perhaps one of Wesley’s greatest contributions to Anglicanism (and I note that the commenter just before me, Graham Kings, is an excellent example of such Wesleyan social entrepreneurship!). I would add what I think Dean Jones would be quick to say: that multiplying and equipping persons engaged in ministry through organizations like Teach for America or the Gates Foundation and those it funds, in spite of the claims of their by-laws with regard to their secularity, can be an excellent way for the church to engage in Christ’s reconciling ministry. As Graham’s example at St. Mary’s Islington shows, the dichotomy between the work of the church and that of the secular that we in the U.S. embrace in our language without thinking too much about it, is and ought to be a false one, with respect to our focus on being the hands and feet of Christ as he re-gathers God’s people.