What are Missional Ventures?
Reimagining Mission for the 21st Century.
One of the dreams in our heart when we started Missional Labs was to become a “greenhouse” for a new generation of ministries and ventures, and help churches and ministries start their own greenhouses, as well.
We’re in a cultural transition in the west, and we believe it’s a ripe moment for renewal and new growth, and that there are amazing new opportunities to translate the Gospel into our modern moment in credible, beautiful ways.
We think that the ideas that will shape the future of the Church haven’t been built yet. So we’ve been building a 21st-century venture ecosystem for strategic Kingdom projects, which we call our Venture Lab.
But first, some definitions.
What are Missional Ventures?
We think of missional ventures as:
“specialized endeavors that thoughtfully leverage available means (technology, media, networks, etc) for missional ends, like evangelism, discipleship, leadership formation, and church planting, in ways that are contextualized and invite people into a credible encounter with the Gospel.”
We’re leaning on a few key concepts here as our foundations for this idea:
One is on the idea of the “apostolic” function. The apostolic function is where entrepreneurship lives in the body of Christ. Missiologist Alan Hirsch has written about this extensively. The operation of this gift in the church expresses itself as a pioneering spirit, and is fundamental to risk, innovation, growth, and renewal. It shows up most in moments like ours. We have to nurture it. This is why we say we’re for the “new pioneers.”
The second is the history and legacy of specialized ministries. In the 1970’s, another missiologist named Ralph Winter wrote a seminal paper on the “Two Structures of God’s Redemptive Mission” where he argued that in history, the apostolic impulse has organized for mission in forms that can specialize and scale around a ministry goal, adjacent to local churches. He calls these sodalities. We call them “para-church” ministries, but that’s a bit of a misnomer, because they are core to the missio dei. We have to freely empower new forms and structures of scalable ministry, in tandem with local churches, so that our collective entrepreneurial imagination can flourish.
Third is the strategic importance of “dense networks” as critical to catalyzing renewal, sparking innovation, and amplifying good ideas. We’ve written before on the idea of dense, creative networks as being foundational to innovation. As Walter Isaacson says in The Innovators, "The key actor in history is not individual genius, but rather the network, and the new institutions that are created out of those networks.” We believe that in a global, digital age, it’s going to be dense, interdisciplinary, passionate cohorts of ministry friends that create the future. We have to build a community of pioneers.
Finally, we see ourselves in the larger missions tradition that goes back from the Lausanne gatherings, to the post-war missions movement, the 1910 Edinburgh conference, the Victorian-era missionary societies, and even back to previous eras of missionary organization. The primary goal here is the mobilization of missionary leaders to the frontiers of the age, and the ends of the earth, for the sake of the Gospel encounter and renewal.
Why Missional Ventures?
We think there is a gap, and an opportunity, here, for new structures for 21st century mission. We think the reason we haven’t seen much missional innovation recently is due to a number of converging trends. Here are a few:
The “aging” of the 20th century missions movement. Many of the specialized organizations that we reference today were started in a post-war boom era, and grew rapidly as they served in parts of the world that were seeing major growth of the Church. We still mostly reference ministries that are 40+ years old when we talk about “missions” organizations (think YWAM, Cru, etc), and many of them have origin stories in the growth years of churches in the east or south (i.e., post-war Russia, Latin America or African pentecostalism, etc), rather than the modern moment. What’s more, the postmodern / postcolonial mood has led to a western Christianity that has been decidedly “local,” and much more content to focus on the contemplative spirituality and reaching the neighborhood, than going to the ends of the earth.
Copy and Paste Church Models. One of the realities, and challenges of a consumer-oriented cultural framework in the West is the copying of ecclesiological models from one place to another place. This looks like “franchising,” with usually an influential church or leader as the source of the innovation. The challenge of this is that as the world changes, and contexts or generational cohorts evolve, the opportunity to reimagine and design new forms of ministry based on their needs and questions gets lost, because of the existing commitment to a model. We need to instead think of ministry in terms of how to “design” it specifically for a people and a place.
Hyper-focus on church planting. As a result of these, the entrepreneurial energy of the last 20 years (and Gen-X as a cohort) has gone into planting local churches. This is an apostolic task to be sure, but it is focused exclusively on replicating new congregations (often with a fixed model) rather than imaginative pioneering of diverse types of ministry in new contexts. This also creates a very narrow lane for “pioneering” types. Many pioneers that aren’t typical “church planters,” end up having to create separate structures around their core gifting, because churches and denominations don’t have the ability to contain them operationally - which is why we often see “evangelists,” “prophets,” and the like with their own independent and itinerant organizations around them. This isn’t bad, but isn’t fully optimized or balanced.
The secularization of the charitable sector. Historically, much of the work of missionary societies was aimed at mercy, justice, and charity, along with evangelism and church work. In our time, most charitable activity in the public square has shifted into primarily secular paradigms, which can limit the scope of their mission, funding, or how religious they can be. The move toward social enterprise has been an innovation, but it often has to aim at broad kingdom ends (“human flourishing”) with secular assumptions and limits. Many Christians still serve well in this space, but it creates a fundamental tension in how they organize, and limits some of the Christian talent pool.
The rise of the entrepreneurial and creator economy. More optimistically, it’s never been easier to build a product, start a business, or gather a community than it is today. Entrepreneurialism is everywhere, and the venture ecosystems that support it seem to be multiplying rapidly (see below). New organizational forms are emerging in real time. Most entrepreneurial “talent,” even among Christians, is more likely to find its way into the private sector than into vocational ministry, because the pathways and incentives don’t really exist. But, the global church is a huge opportunity for social innovation - it’s never been a better time to start something, and even Silicon Valley is starting to notice.
Building a Missional Venture Lab
We’re aiming to put our venture lab into this space, as a way to find new pioneers, help them clarify their big ideas and calling, and help them with strategy, venture design, program development, experience design, and more, with theological and practical contextualization built in at the core - for the sake of a new generation of churches, ministries, and movements built for the 21st century.