Entrepreneurship and Ministry

If you take the time to think about it, entrepreneurship and ministry have a lot in common. Both entrepreneurship and ministry revolve around the purpose of helping others. While entrepreneurs focus on fixing a physical need that a person might have, ministry focuses on a spiritual need that a person has. Therefore, many traits that an entrepreneur has can be seen in those who do ministry. I recently read a book called Making Faith Magnetic by Dan Strange. In that book he talks about as Christians we are not trying to sell people on the idea of Christianity as a whole; we are trying to sell the who, and the who is Christ. Strange talks about the idea of connecting and confronting. In ministry that means to really connect with the person and build a relationship with someone (like Paul in Acts) and then confront them with the person of Christ and how their need can be filled by Christ alone. The same thing goes for an entrepreneur. They have to connect with people, discover what they want, and find the pain or area of need. The entrepreneur then confronts the person with a product or service that can help the person. I have taken these strategies into my own life. I am involved with the ministry Younglife where I reach out to high schoolers and help teach them about God. We do what is called contact work where we build the connection with them and then we are able to confront them with the Gospel. All in all, through taking many different entrepreneurship classes and being involved in a ministry like Younglife, I have seen many similarities between the two. If you are a really good entrepreneur than you have the ability to do great work in ministry and vice versa.