Church Archives - Ministry Incubators

Matt Overton: Why I started a social enterprise at my church

October 12, 2017 by Matt Overton

This article was first published in Faith & Leadership on April 18th. You can find the original article here.

This week’s post comes from our friend Matt Overton, associate pastor for youth and family ministry at Columbia Presbyterian Church in Vancouver, Washington and founder of Mowtown Teen Lawn Care and Columbia Teen Enterprises. In this article, he talks about why he started a social enterprise in his church. You can find more of his thoughts on his Entrepreneurial Youth Ministry website and blog.

Many people who learn about the social enterprises at our church ask me why I started them.

The simple answer: I was tired.

Mostly, I was tired of doing ministry in the same old ways. I was tired of pretending that our programs were accomplishing what they claimed to when so many of them seemed hollow. (Any youth pastor who has ever come crashing down from the post-mission-trip high can attest to this.)

I was tired of reading books by experts that framed the problem but offered no solutions beyond theological generalities, slight adjustments to existing techniques or ideas feasible only for wealthy congregations.

I saw that social enterprise — essentially, a business with a social good in mind — represented a new kind of experiment that offered a truly new way forward in ministry. The church needs more of those.

My experiments focused on jobs training with enterprises called Mowtown Teen Lawn Care and The Columbia Future Forge,(link is external) as well as Youth Ministry Innovators, a website and blog designed for writing about the church as a vehicle for social enterprise.

But a church could try any number of business models.

There’s more to it, of course.

When I arrived at my church seven years ago, I knew that the gospel was about risk. I knew that if the American church was ever going to be born again in the 21st century, it would need people willing to risk everything for kingdom ideas that were worth their very blood, sweat and tears. The church needed to start swinging for the fences.

So I started a social enterprise, first, because I wanted to attempt something great — something risky — for God.

The gospel is, at its core, a risky proposition by God in behalf of human beings. It promises no security, despite our best attempts to deify security and regularity in our worshipping communities.

I wanted to find a way to give myself more fully to the gospel and justice of Jesus Christ — something more than doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. I wanted something bolder than the staid mainline missions efforts I had grown up with.

Second, I started a social enterprise because I was tired of perpetuating disengaged faith. I wanted to help my congregation — both youth and adults — figure out what their Sunday faith has to do with their Monday life.

Social enterprise allows participants to engage a myriad of life gifts and professional gifts every time they show up. To be a part of a social enterprise-based ministry, participants must be fully engaged in whatever the enterprise is. They are essential to the success or failure of the mission.

Too often, our churches make people passive recipients of ministry and even of faith itself. When they don’t get a call from anyone at church when they haven’t been there in four months, they think the show simply goes on without them. They feel excluded or ancillary to the mission of God. They think their presence, passion, talents and dollars aren’t really needed. I wanted my congregation to discover the value of each member’s engagement.

Third, I started a social enterprise because I was tired of our acts of charity and mission taking away people’s dignity. So many of our charitable works place us in positions of power and influence over those we serve.

I had been offering the typical camperships and canned-food drives to the low-income youth in my group so they could be part of our middle-class model — only to see those students drift away, weary or embarrassed of being the focus of our love and charity. I wanted them to be a part of a ministry where they were full, vital participants.

People hear the Jesus story and want to be involved. They don’t want simply to be helped.

We need ministries that actually enable people to move forward with their lives. Social enterprise allows us to do that in creative ways.

At our church, we offer job skills, training and experience. We talk about faith and about people coming fully alive (John 10:10), but we don’t give our participants much of anything. Their dignity remains intact, and they are given a chance to move forward.

Finally, I started a social enterprise because I was tired of losing our middle- and upper-class youth and families to outside activities.

I didn’t blame them. In the current culture, parents are afraid for their children’s economic future and feel pressured to enroll them in activities they believe will enhance that future.

It’s hard for a low-accountability and low-participation youth ministry model to compete with a state robotics tournament or a soccer club in which a family has invested thousands of dollars and hours.

But I was convinced that the church could compete. What we needed was something that the kids wanted to be a part of. Something that would engage their passions and invigorate their faith.

I figured that if we used employment as our model, kids from a variety of backgrounds might actually show up. I was right.

In addition, this model required heavy adult commitment and involvement. Social enterprise gave my adults an essential role in our youth ministry. They weren’t consuming church. Kingdom work began to consume them. It was enlivening dry bones and scratching itches they didn’t know they had.

We have adults investing unbelievable amounts of time and energy and their personal gifts. We think it might be the zephyr of God, and I am gobsmacked with emotion every time I think about what I am seeing.

Social enterprises have to compete in the agora at marketplace speed. They demand risk taking, commitment, empowerment and passion. People want something to lay down their lives for. If we want to compete for people’s precious time, we are going to need to give them that.

That’s why I started a social enterprise.

Project Funding Within the United Methodist Church

October 5, 2017 by Ministry Incubators

For the last couple of weeks, we have been talking quite a bit about finding funding for your project. If you missed those posts, we talked about a couple different sources of funding. You can find those posts here and here.

If you weren’t already aware, Ministry Incubators’ cofounder and Permissionary Kenda Creasy Dean, is an ordained United Methodist minister and has tons of experience helping organizations navigate the institutional landscape of the UMC. When asked out funding for burgeoning organizations in the UMC, she acknowledges that it can oftentimes be difficult to find the right person to talk to. In her words, “it’s super capricious!” But, if you are in the UMC, her advise is to first talk with your conference office. There should be someone in charge of developing new churches, new ministries, and/or new disciples. National programs can be a possibility as well, but they tend to come and go.

If you need further help, feel free to let us know!

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The Three Phases of Launching a Church-based Social Enterprise

August 10, 2017 by Matt Overton

This article was first published in Faith & Leadership on June 13th. You can fine the original article here.

This article is the last in our summer blog series aimed at those who are either starting a missional enterprise or thinking about starting one. During this series, we have looked at theological and practical concerns of missional entrepreneurs.

This week’s post comes from our friend Matt Overton, associate pastor for youth and family ministry at Columbia Presbyterian Church in Vancouver, Washington and founder of Mowtown Teen Lawn Care and Columbia Teen Enterprises. In this article, he talks about the various phases of launching a social enterprise through a church. You can find more of his thoughts on his Entrepreneurial Youth Ministry website and blog.

The Three Phases of Launching a Church-based Social Enterprise

Starting a Christian social enterprise is difficult and passion-filled work. It comes with a ton of setbacks and self-doubt. And a ton of excitement.

I believe that social enterprise — a business with a social good in mind — can offer a new way forward for the church.

But I realize as I evangelize about this new model that people will have questions about how to get started. How can a local congregation or minister launch a social enterprise that maximizes missional impact in a community?

I have identified three initial phases for this work: habitation and discernment; consulting with the community; and testing.

The advice here is aimed at ministers and congregations interested in starting a small-scale enterprise that has a relatively low bar for entry into the marketplace. Launching a large-scale idea for social innovation requires much more capital and risk.

Habitation and discernment

As Christians, we have an obligation to prayerfully inhabit a place in order to do this work in ways that honor God and neighbor.

I have participated in several programs that help launch social enterprises, and one problem I’ve seen is that they often encourage people to ideate quickly.

This worries me. We Christians have a long history of doing things to others in unhealthy and wasteful ways. I think we have a theological obligation to take the time to inhabit a place, to listen well and to pray, and only then, after a period of discernment, to come up with an idea.

Ideally, I think would-be social entrepreneurs should live in a community at least three and a half years to discern the context and to build up leadership capital and trust within the local church before formulating ideas. That time is also important for discerning whether the needs of the context and the specifics of a potential enterprise line up with a leader’s God-given gifts.

I happen to love physical labor and mentoring teens, and I know something about lawn care. So launching a teen landscaping company made sense for me. It was also something that our state’s highly restrictive teen labor law would allow.

It’s critical for churches preparing to launch a social enterprise to understand the social needs and marketplace of their particular community. And since the purpose of social enterprise is to place the mission ahead of the profit, it is crucial to think about the mission thoroughly.

Consulting with the community

The next step is to look at the cloud of witnesses.

One of my favorite lines in the book of Acts is when the apostles and the elders at the Jerusalem Council, trying to discern how Jewish and Gentile converts are to interact with one another and the standards of faith, arrive at their answers and say, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us …” (Acts 15:28 NIV).

The idea here, at least in my Reformed mind, is that the discernment of God’s will seems to have been a group, rather than an individual, process. This is an important ethic in starting a Christian social enterprise.

That’s why I began by talking with the leadership at my church.

My initial conversation was with my head of staff. I made sure he understood why I was trying to do this and what the potential implications were in time, energy and dollars.

I also shared a couple of books to help explain the concepts behind my project, such as asset-based community development and social enterprise in general.

What was critical, in my case, was that my head of staff understood missional theology, allowed the staff a good deal of autonomy and was not opposed to marketplace-based thinking. We also had trust in each other.

My next step was to inform our Session, which is our church’s governing body. I worried that they would find my idea confusing or frightening, so I prepared a presentation on my own ministry journey, my idea for the enterprise, the financial implications for them and a critical FAQ.

I wanted to make clear that I wasn’t proposing to detonate their existing youth ministry. I also was not planning to leave the church. I made sure to help them understand how my idea linked directly to my job reaching out to teens in our county.

I also framed it as a six- to 12-month experiment and asked for four to eight hours per week to work on it during the initial phase.

To my utter amazement, they really liked the idea and thought it fit well with the stated mission and vision of our church.

I gathered eight key people on an informal team. I invited people who had run their own businesses, people who would be good mentors and people who were trusted by the church. I also consulted with folks who had legal and tax experience.

For a church that doesn’t have folks with particular experience, I’d recommend exploring congregants’ connections to people in the community who support the idea and consulting with the local community foundation.

Testing

The last phase is experimentation and testing.

I started small. I hooked up my V-6 to a church trailer and mowed a few clients’ properties each week. I also shadowed a local landscaping company’s crews and paid close attention to people I saw out working.

The point is to start with a manageable volume of business to see whether the ministry leader is cut out for the work. This also provides a glimpse of what the actual market looks like in the area — sort of like an informal market survey.

But most importantly, this phase offers a test of what ministry looks like in this setting.

Is it possible to do effective ministry within the context of this business? What is the actual potential of kingdom impact on customer and employee? This is essential.

At the heart of Christian social enterprise is the mission. Whatever shape it may take, the mission must be the focus in a church-based business.

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Registration Open for Taste and See in DC!

August 1, 2017 by Ministry Incubators

Registration is now open for the Taste and See event in Washington DC on September 23, 2017! This event is designed to give you a taste of what is possible when you think about ministry outside the box. Our own Kenda Creasy Dean will be there, along with Shannon Hopkins, the Founder of Matryoshka Haus and Raimon Jackson, a musician, producer, church planter and mentor to many young adults. You can find out more and register for the event here!

Find Your Team! Wisdom from a Fellow Missional Entrepreneur

July 25, 2017 by Jessica Winderweedle

We are continuing our summer blog series aimed at those who are either starting a missional enterprise or thinking about starting one. During this series, we will look at theological and practical concerns of missional entrepreneurs.

This week’s post comes from Jessica Winderweedle with The Feed Truck in Kingston, NJ, with encouragement to incorporate teamwork into your missional plans!

Find Your Team and Get to Work

In the series finale of Parks and Rec, in a final toast to her compatriots in public service, Leslie Knope raises her glass to this refrain:

Teddy Roosevelt once said, “Far and away, the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.” And I would add that what makes “work worth doing” is getting to do it with people that you love.

A few frames later, she references the same quote during a commencement speech at Indiana University, and then leaves the bright-eyed grads before her with this charge:

Now find your team and get to work.

At The Feed Truck, our philosophical pillars are food, work and neighbor. Through the service of local, well-crafted food and the meaningful work of radical hospitality, our aim is to foster spiritual engagement and a love of neighbor within our community. As with any entrepreneurial ministry, particularly within its first 5 years, the work portion of things can seem disproportionate to the payoff at times. Positive change can seem too incremental, risk can seem too high, and burnout can feel too imminent. But I’m with Leslie Knope – knowing that it’s work worth doing (i.e. having what we might call a “calling”) and doing the work alongside a team of people you love (and that love you!) are key components to keeping you sane in the first tumultuous, exciting, unpredictable years of a missional enterprise.

Find Your Team

It may go without saying, but just for fun, I’ll say it anyway: missional entrepreneurship should not be played as an individual event – it is a team sport. In an enterprise’s initial phases, entrepreneurs often wear all of the hats. They do everything for their organization from business planning to capital fundraising to running around sourcing products or making copies (or, in my case, making raspberry-habanero jam by the bucketful.) Wearing that many hats makes the head weary, and an entrepreneur who finds themselves leaning toward that scenario should make finding their team priority number one.

Your potential teammates are all around you. If your missional enterprise is based in a local church, like ours, the most likely suspects are going to be your lay leadership within the congregation. When The Feed Truck was still just a gleam in my eye, I worked with our lead pastor to put together an exploratory group (who ended up in large part becoming my board of trustees). These individuals all had an interest in the project but came to it with different energies and priorities. One member was a graduate student at the university where we hoped to have our primary outreach, who happened to have worked in their family restaurant as a teenager and helped develop our menu. One member was a municipal foreman and expert on all things mechanical, whose vested interest was making sure his family’s church didn’t literally go up in flames. One member is a serial entrepreneur himself who has served on numerous other boards in our community. They all brought unique experience and wisdom to the project, but more than that, they were emotionally and communally invested in its success.

As the ministry grows, we have found it essential to grow our circle of leadership to include those with more of an outsider’s view to the project, in order to prevent tunnel vision and stagnation. Board members and staff that come to us from outside our congregation, especially from partner organizations and churches, offer fresh perspectives and are able to ask critical questions that those of us who have had our boots on the ground the longest sometimes miss.

Know Your Own Gifts

In addition to finding people who are passionate about your project, being honest with yourself about your own gifts is a great next step as you think about finding your team.

Whether you are assembling a board of directors, finding a business partner, or putting together an operations staff, it’s important to (1) accept the fact that you are not good at everything (and you don’t have to be!), and (2) find people who have all of the things to offer that you don’t.

Be honest with yourself about the things that give you life and the things that are most soul-sucking to you, and find a team that will fill in the gaps around your own vocational calling and gifts for the sake of the project as a whole.

Do you love to be the one up front, giving an elevator pitch and passionately telling the story of your project to supporters? Does bean counting give you hives? Find someone – and find them now – whose happy place is at a desk with a calculator and a stack of spreadsheets. (They’re out there, and they are Godsends to those of us without those tendencies.) Or maybe your natural proclivities are that of a manager more than a visionary pitchperson. Find someone else who believes in the story of your enterprise and can paint the picture for supporters while you’re laying the operational groundwork to keep the story going.

Besides knowing your tactical gifts, tools like the Enneagram or StrengthsFinder are super helpful in facilitating conversation around the driving forces and anxieties that you and your teammates possess. This can help grease the wheels of communication and understanding when conflict and stress inevitably arise.

Every entrepreneur finds that they have to perform as a jack- or jane-of-all-trades to some extent, but the faster you can delegate to others, the better off you’ll be in terms of your own well-being and the health of your project.

Delegate Roles, Not Tasks

Finding your team doesn’t just mean having other people to dump your tasks on. It means finding the people with whom you will be in cahoots – the people who, like you, wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night thinking about how to develop and grow the project, how to help it thrive and make it scalable. In order to find folks who are willing to walk alongside you in this way and have ownership of the project, you can’t just hand over tasks to complete; you have to empower teammates to fully embody roles. It’s the difference between babysitting and parenting. Asking someone to feed the baby or change the baby, or even watch the baby for a bit while you step out for a break – none of that is the same as asking someone to co-parent a baby. Sure, a babysitter will keep your kiddo safe and clean and fed, but they’re probably not going to be thinking about braces or college funds or what the kid’s therapist is going to hear about someday. A co-parent is invested in an entirely different way than a babysitter. And in entrepreneurship, single parenting of your project is burnout waiting to happen – for you, and for your enterprise.

Handing a role over to someone is an exercise in trust, and it isn’t always easy. It’s important that you’ve done everything you can to set the person up for success before you hand over the reigns. But once you have given them the necessary tools and information, made yourself available for ongoing check-ins, and agreed upon your goals, plan and timeline, it’s time to take the leap – step away and let them at it. Give your team the space to do the work. No one likes a micromanager (so I’m told…) and helicopter-parenting over a co-parent only cultivates discouragement and discord.

Get to Work

Missional entrepreneurship is a rollercoaster ride. The tedious pre-planning stages, the thrill of launch, the necessary failures, the steep learning curves – it can be exciting, overwhelming, disheartening, and Spirit-filled… sometimes all in the same day! If you believe you’re called to such work, you’d better believe others are, too. Find the team that will love you well throughout the whole ride, and that you can love back – and get to work. When you forget, the right team will remind you – it’s work worth doing.

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