When pastors speak the language of the entrepreneur

Entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes, with growing numbers all around your church, but most churches don’t yet speak their language.

They’re a much broader group than just those doing tech start-ups or those with businesses they are building up a venture to exit through a sale. They range from the food entrepreneur who is delivering fresh tastes that launch in the farmers market or food truck, to the business owner who is building a brand that will become a family legacy across a region, to the big-scale thinkers who are solving category problems for an entire industry. Across many industries and diverse business structures, they all have one thing in common. Entrepreneurs have a unique language that is the key to activating them for Kingdom purposes.

The entrepreneur's language of the heart

Like a subculture with its own language and idioms, entrepreneurs and business owners have a language of their own. But it’s not the technical language of investment, lean start-up, or technology. It’s a language of the heart that is deeply wired into the way they see the world and approach everything. When pastoral leaders understand this language and make space for it, entrepreneurs engage with all of their passion and resources with faith that is activated to extend ministry into brand new places.

Anyone can pick up a book on business strategy, but the entrepreneur's heart language doesn’t come from the words they use to secure capital or build a tech stack to operate their venture. It comes from a deeper place, the uniquely created grace that they carry as one of God’s people. This grace is described in Ephesians Chapter 4 as something given to every believer, and shapes a unique heart wiring that is found in every believing business owner and entrepreneur. 

When you understand the heart wiring of the entrepreneur, you can speak in a language they can hear.

We describe these voices based on the work of Allan Hirsch, author and founder of 5Q Central, and Richard Newton of MPACT. Three distinct entrepreneurial voices can be found in the growing number of millennial and Gen Z believers, as well as the older business owners who are all around every local church. The entrepreneurs' language is that of Pioneering, Aligning, and Championing; a heart language that pastors can learn to activate in the local church.

->Learn more about the growing number of entrepreneurs among Gen Z and Millennials

Resonating with the language of the pioneer

Many entrepreneurs and business owners are graced with the heart of a pioneer. In Ephesians 4 language, we’d call this apostolic, but we prefer the term pioneer because it is transferable into the marketplace. Pioneering leaders see the world through the lens of mission, expansion, and growth. As the term pioneer suggests, they break new trails, establish new opportunities, and are driven forward by important opportunities around which they build support and operations that get things done.

I once explained this concept to a retired Marine captain as “they aren’t good order takers.” While that was a hard pill for a military officer to swallow, it’s reality. In a military setting, the pioneer would be far more motivated when presented with a big problem that they were tasked to analyze and create a solution. Pioneers are moved by the opportunity to create a new path to solve a problem or take an organization into new territory.

In a care and content-oriented church, the idea that we’d be engaging people who aren’t good order takers can sound risky. Being a pioneer doesn’t mean being willful or unwilling to work cooperatively, but it does mean giving voice to someone who is deeply wired to solve big problems and move the organization into new places.

It's not the language of program

When churches primarily speak the language of program, in which leaders execute something that someone else has already defined and scripted, it doesn’t speak the language of the pioneer. They hear, “Here’s a program to operate, please color inside the lines.” What they need to hear is, “We’ve noticed that there’s a big population of people who are engaged in youth sports on Sundays, and we need to find a way to reach them, because our current church format leaves them out.” Or, “Our city is building all kinds of new houses on the eastern edge of town, and it's too far for them to meaningfully engage with our church. We think it’s a big mission opportunity.”

Pioneers are stubbornly devoted, self-starters. They thrive when they are wrestling with creating solutions that move the mission forward. That flies in the face of much of what the American church has offered in the form of pre-formed programmatic opportunities. And it’s also why the people who are attracted to help start a new church leave within 2 to 3 years after it starts - the big problem has been solved.

Think of pioneers as the faith-filled spies that Moses sent out to survey the promised land. When they saw giants and fortified cities, they didn't see a barrier; they saw an opportunity.  The pioneer thrives on big, hard challenges in which they can help create a solution.

Why would a church want to attract and unleash pioneers? They'd seek to activate these leaders if the church has a heart for its city and wants to see the Kingdom expand into groups and networks that are far from Christ and beyond the current reach of the church.  Many pioneers will come already equipped with community relationships, networks, and resources that touch on Kingdom opportunities.

How do you know that a business owner or entrepreneur is a pioneer? Ask them about the things that they've built and established, and what they are doing now. You'll quickly see a pattern of taking on challenges and establishing new ground in their business ventures. Most of them will be actively doing that right now in some new way.

Instead of handing out solutions and programs, try sharing heart burdens and challenges to see how you are able to speak to this fierce capacity found in the pioneer. You'll find that once engaged, their unique grace will begin to build bridges into territory that you've never been able to reach before.

(Coming in Article Two: Speaking the language of Entrepreneurs who are Champions and Alignors.)

->MPACT training is provided for churches participating in the Founder's Table Grant Program