I've been reflecting further of my previous post regarding the role of the entrepreneur in the church. I think that entrepreneurs are vital for the present and the future of the church - We've always had them always will. Am I one? I don't know?
I also been reading about this years GB theme 'Heaven in Ordinary' and found this quote from John Davies quite helpful.
'Christians get allured by the extraordinary: in mission, ministry, and witness the pull seems to be away from the ordinary towards the new, the exciting and the innovative. But maybe the real challenge of our times is to learn to affirm the ordinary things very deeply, doing our church and our theology and our praying whilst deeply engaged with these basic building blocks of life. This is a call for us to deal with the mundane things in our lives, but it is not a calling to dullness - it's about discovering new possibilities of being creative, with the ordinary things of life.'
I think his is the real challenge for the entrepreneur, not to get drawn off into the exciting, risky, extraordinary, but to develop an entrepreneurial spirit in the ordinary. This may go against the spirit of the entrepreneur, but if the entrepreneurial vocation is to become the vocation of the whole church, as i believe it should, then it must begin with the ordinary - developing the extraordinary within the ordinary. If it does not the entrepreneur can easily be dismissed as 'an interesting extraordinary experiment' - this can be damaging both to the entrepreneur and to the vocation of the church catholic.
I think that is why i am challenged by the entrepreneur, I have worked over the years to connect Sanctus1 to the ordinary everyday life of the church in Mcr. Sometimes that is hard work, sometimes it's mundane, often it's frustrating but to have an entrepreneurial global church then the extraordinary churches must become ordinary. The entrepreneurial churches must stay connected to the church catholic, or the potential danger is that the entrepreneurial churches become to focused on empire rather than kingdom.
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