Last year’s Praxis Community Letter introduced the concept of redemptive quests. These are invitations to re-risk our God-given personal and organizational capacities on behalf of others, especially as we achieve success or favor that increases our “player level,” our ability to attract resources—for to whom much is given, much is required (Luke 12:48).

At Praxis, we continue to organize around our own redemptive quest to reawaken the Church’s creative and prophetic contribution on the major issues of our time, leaning on our list of Opportunities for Redemptive Imagination (ORIs) as a creative agenda for the our community.

As for those major issues, this past year has been one for the record books: future-altering innovations full of possibility and peril, as well as conflicts over geopolitical territory and national identity—all against the backdrop of substantial shifts of the Overton Window, as previously “Unthinkable” cultural and social conversations enter the “Acceptable” range as we think about our collective future.

We are told we’re living in the late-stage “already but not yet” of the technological realm. AI-related headlines predict everything from a glorious age of unlimited knowledge to the end of civilization as we know it—while at present AI is most useful as a chatbot and imaginative tool for the next wave of startups.

At a much smaller installed base, the same could be said about the Apple Vision Pro. This transformative device from the largest technology firm in history offers the promise of broad transformative applications for learning, working, playing, and relating; yet for the moment it’s “just” a stunning, immersive (and prohibitively expensive) entertainment device. In both cases, the wider effects on the world will come faster than we expect, for better and worse.

Behind all technology is a worldview reflecting an anthropology and an eschatology: an understanding of humanity connected to a desired vision for the future. The year 2023 gave rise to the worldview of “e/acc” (effective accelerationism), passionately articulated by venture capitalist titan Marc Andreesen in “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” This view rejects the so-called “safetyists” who want to stop the momentum of capitalism, the free markets, and the geopolitical structures that uphold them.

These ideological conflicts are unfolding even within the very networks that created the technologies, most famously the OpenAI conflict between Sam Altman, his co-founder and board members, and ultimately Elon Musk, in what felt like a Hollywood drama that our children will watch in 2040.

Moreover, a decade-long discourse around social media, devices, and what author Jonathan Haidt has termed “the anxious generation” has bloomed into wide-reaching conversations around generations of youth, the black box of algorithms, government regulation, school policy, and (in cases like video company Bytedance and its ownership and intent around the TikTok platform) even geopolitical dynamics.

At that level, in Russia and Ukraine, in Israel and Palestine, and possibly in China and Taiwan, we are faced with deep tragedy along border conflicts that may ultimately re-sort global alliances and domestic politics for decades to come. Regarding the crossing of borders, the migrant crisis in the US today is real, with image-bearers often treated as pawns to score political points. No matter your position on border and immigration practices, one can agree that individuals with substantial needs are cascading into unprepared cities, which can only bring greater suffering.

Further, much of the promising openness, learning, and positive dialogue around racial inequalities in the US have re-splintered into new battlegrounds from the marketplace to higher education, including highly-contested DEI policies and affirmative action rulings that may have wide-sweeping consequences. This domain of racial justice—where we must obviously see dark spiritual forces at work throughout history—continues to take three steps forward with two (lamentably, sometimes four) steps back. Even Harvard University has found its own reputation and value under attack in many more quarters than before, another stunning shift that previously felt unthinkable but is now acceptable or even popular.

In the midst of this sense of widespread institutional instability, we’re about to face a rerun of our 2020 elections in the US. The mood is dark enough that prescient filmmaker Alex Garland (28 Days Later, Ex Machina) has secured a $50M production budget and a wide release for Civil War, a sci-fi film about nationwide risk and the role of American journalism. Again, this idea would likely have been unthinkable (and therefore unbankable) 10 years ago, but today it is not uncommon to hear that we are “headed toward civil war.” The prospect has moved from the realm of sci-fi into worst-case scenario.

As these dynamics play out at a scale most of us have little to no influence over, even those with high player levels are tempted to withdraw into safety. Ultimately, what can we do about Big Tech’s large language model (LLM) decisions when Sam Altman calls for $7T for AI infrastructure? Is there anything we can ultimately do about Vladmir Putin’s decision to invade or the crisis in the Middle East?

We know we don’t want to chase bad quests that profit from the chaos, but it’s no wonder that we opt to pursue good, easy quests that protect and grow what we have. We might even choose to run a business, nonprofit, or campaign with a “shadow calling” that talks about an issue but doesn’t truly get in the game.

Rightfully, we read the headlines and pray earnestly about the culture wars (and shooting wars) of our world—yet when it comes to our social and financial capital, we naturally internalize these threats as reasons for a conservative, risk-management approach to stewarding our lives and resources. Rather than withdrawal into safety, I propose that our response as redemptive entrepreneurs is to build with hope and meaningful risk.

A case for hope

Entrepreneurship and capital are at the center of all these high-stakes conversations, from what gets funded and started, to who gets hired, to what regulation is formed, to what corporate structures are best, to who controls what—for example, see Musk’s engagement in war through his Starlink platform. For over a decade, we have been talking about the importance of the worldview of entrepreneurs and how they shape culture. If it was true then, it is only more true today.

For over a decade, we have been talking about the importance of the worldview of entrepreneurs and how they shape culture. If it was true then, it is only more true today.

There’s an axiom that seasons of economic crisis are especially creative and generative times. Entrepreneurial people lose jobs, have to create income, can’t readily raise money, and are forced to find practical, innovative solutions with healthy business models at unusual speed. Might this effect be possible, among our community, for these other kinds of crisis in the world? We believe so: that under the pressure of all we face as a society, we can be jolted out of our traditional mindsets and practices to pursue creative approaches to our problems before we are too late to head off greater calamity.

Praxis Partner for Theology & Culture Andy Crouch has recently reminded our team of the mathematical reality that inflection points are not the moments where changes in the curve are most visible. They’re actually the ones where the underlying trajectory begins to turn, well in advance of observable evidence. In culture as in calculus, the most consequential change comes from subtle shifts while the curve is still downward. Although things continue to decline for a time, there are forces at work shaping a future that ultimately follows a long arc toward something more beautiful, just, and redemptive. This is the pattern of the kingdom of God.

Although things continue to decline for a time, there are forces at work shaping a future that ultimately follows a long arc toward something more beautiful, just, and redemptive. This is the pattern of the kingdom of God.

I write this year in the hope that we are drawing near to an as-yet-invisible inflection point of multi-generational redemptive possibility. And we draw hope from all the activity that we see underway in this relatively small community.

Redemptive Responses to Crisis

At Praxis, we have long discussed the idea of creative response, linked with the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s idea of becoming a “creative minority”—the idea that we can stay engaged with the world while maintaining our own faithful distinctiveness.

My greatest hope for our community is that we would be creative peacemakers and assertive culture shapers to both society and souls, bringing faith, hope, and love to a world full of doubt, anxiety, and bitterness.

My greatest hope for our community is that we would be creative peacemakers and assertive culture shapers to both society and souls, bringing faith, hope, and love to a world full of doubt, anxiety, and bitterness.

While this is work worth doing no matter our context or player level, we should not underestimate our redemptive potential. Sam Altman, the aforementioned Open AI CEO who re-risked from high-profile role as President & CEO of Y Combinator, wrote only a few years ago: “A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time—most people don’t even try, and just accept that things are the way that they are.”

Perhaps instead, we might aim to participate with God as he bends the world—and us—to his will. With this opportunity in mind, I encourage us to adopt three approaches for creative, redemptive response in our present moment.

Work with a thesis-driven methodology

We usually think about our work in thematic terms. It’s common to say “I want to work in business” or “I’m called to nonprofit work,” or more specifically, “I’m fascinated by technology startups” or “my heart breaks for the homeless.” These are all helpful starting points and shorthand descriptions. I propose that a (rare and powerful) next step is to move beyond a theme to a thesis about the future of your focus. This shift is critical for any quest.

While none of us can predict the future, we can intentionally build a view about what is unfolding, and (this is the hard part) what we want to help unfold in the world. Many of the best investors build this kind of thesis to allocate capital. They see it as a method to anticipate what the future will look like, as well as to usher that future into being to capture financial returns. Here’s how Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, seed investor in Kickstarter, Etsy, Twitter, and Coinbase, explains it:

Thesis-driven investing involves drawing a picture of where your particular area of focus is going. I like to take a five- to ten-year view. And once you have mapped out that picture, it becomes your thesis. And you evaluate every investment you make in the context of that thesis.

Using these same principles, a redemptive thesis should seek areas of opportunity to encourage positive trends while also disrupting negative trends with transformative, gospel-minded ventures. What would the area we are working toward look like if the kingdom of heaven broke through? What change, what outcomes, what signs would we be praying for in a given area if we were pursuing “on earth as it is in heaven”?

To build a thesis for our work, we take inventory of where things are going and then decide how we might contribute to bending that future to create more flourishing for more people. I love what Kevin Vanhoozer says in his book Everyday Theology:

A multiperspectival cultural [interpretation] uses a variety of academic disciplines and approaches to illumine what is going on in cultural discourse. To get light from various sources we must be light on our feet, prepared to move between history, economics, psychology, sociology, film studies, marketing, and of course theology.

While we benefit from researching widely and wisely on our topics of interest, I believe that this vision of investing our lives in thesis-driven culture-making is also a call to relationship: to work among a community of people with different backgrounds and abilities that enrich our imagination.

This year, we’re thrilled to be working with two Entrepreneurs-in-Residence (EIRs) taking this posture with their redemptive quests. Mark Sears, a 2014 Praxis Fellow with CloudFactory, has been working on the leading edge of technology all his life. Given recent developments in LLMs, he dug into the technology stack and observed the widespread approach of using these powerful new tools to replace—rather than facilitate—relationships. In response, he’s now building Sprout AI Studio, a venture that starts ventures with an alternative imagination for a redemptive future of AI.

Dan Vogel, Founder & CEO of Flourish Fund, is another current EIR, and he’s re-risking from a comfortable and successful career building and leading Boston Consulting Group’s North American Foundation. He’s developed a macro thesis about the opportunity and need for large-scale faith-based philanthropy to shape the major issues of our time—with the conviction that there needs to be a clear thesis and investment strategy aimed at each issue. Beginning his quest with the well-being of at-risk children and families before and inside the foster care system, he’s motivated to activate the body of Christ toward the protection of the most vulnerable.

Because culture today is always the product of someone’s vision decades ago, we need a cascade of entrepreneurs like Dan and Mark: thesis-driven founders betting on how we can care for those in the wake of all that is to come.

Embrace lament as a generative resource

Praxis community member Terry Looper has often told me how he has seen God use our pain and suffering to point us to things that need fixing. Rick Warren, recently writing on the idea of redemptive suffering, articulated this practically:

Who is better qualified to minister to a parent grieving the loss of a child than another parent who has experienced such grief? Who is better qualified to help someone with an addiction than someone who has also battled an addiction? Who is better qualified to walk with someone through a cancer diagnosis than someone who has fought their own cancer?

As entrepreneurs given to building, our personal pain gives us the opportunity to walk alongside suffering individuals and build ventures that help facilitate redemptive presence at scale.

Indeed, grief and lament are an “inverted lever” of sorts. We encounter some form of pain and use that experience to design solutions that allow others to bear, or even avoid, the same things. (At one level, the venture world understands this intuitively, though “solving pain points” in startup language is often little more than a glib reference to using technology to address minor inconveniences.)

Here, I cannot help but think of Jessica Kim, Co-Founder & CEO of ianacare (Studio 2019). I had the immense privilege of walking alongside Jessica in a season of deep pain and grief, as she cared for her mother in her last years on earth. Jessica’s frustrations with the complexities of caregiving—coordinating support, feeling alone, learning fast, facing loss—led her to ask if this painful time in her life might signal where God was calling her into a new venture. As a serial founder with a high player level, she’s staked this season of her vocation on building a business with nearly $15M in funding, serving over 42,000 caregivers and building a national caregiver alliance in the venture’s first few years.

Often, creative lament comes from firsthand experience that also connects to our learning about historical and present-day challenges. Family history prompted Praxis Fellow Jasmin Shupper (Nonprofit 2024) to build a deep understanding of the racial wealth gap created through segregation-driven redlining. She responded by founding Greenline Housing Foundation, a brilliantly thesis-driven venture that offers pathways to African-American homeownership.

As Frederick Buechner said, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” How do we reconcile lament with gladness? Perhaps for many of us, the deepest wells of joy come from knowing that other people will be able to avoid the pain and suffering that we have known all too well.

Invest in the proximate

Finally, when the forces of the broader culture seem so magnified and complicated, we would do well to remind ourselves of Stephen Covey’s construct of circles of influence and concern. In his influential book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People he contrasts proactive people (who expand their influence by focusing their energy on what they can do) with reactive people (who diminish their influence by spending energy on concerns beyond their control). Applying this idea to our entrepreneurial work, we should invest our capacity in hard problems within our realm of proximity—areas where God has placed or called us, not simply to the story that dominates the headlines or social feed.

For many of us, where we live offers proximity and opportunity to connect with our biblical mandate to love our neighbors. Mike Bontrager (Praxis Mentor and Board member, Capital Fellowship 2023) has invested several decades in the flourishing of the one square mile of Kennett Square in Chester County, Pennsylvania. He’s planting the seeds for a multi-generation vision in a county population of just over 500,000.

Others find themselves proximate to certain communities in non-geographic ways. Charlie Meyer (Capital Fellowship 2024) runs Threefold, a permanent-capital private equity holding company invested in property service companies and real estate. He is gripped by the way his ventures are deeply implicated (through their employees) in “America’s migrant highway.” He’s now building toward a vision of a $1B firm to be a practical blessing (at scale) to people who are exposed to so much vulnerability.

Amid all the challenges we face, I offer these words of encouragement: First, take heart in the faithful, fruitful work of your co-laborers in the Praxis community; this letter only reports on a small portion of it.

At the same time, we can rest in the fact that our work neither begins nor ends with us. As Bishop Ken Untener offers through a helpful prayer we’ve previously highlighted in our Redemptive Nonprofit playbook, we can remember that we are “ministers, not messiahs.”

It helps now and then to step back and take a long view.

The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.

Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us.

No statement says all that could be said.

No prayer fully expresses our faith.

No confession brings perfection, no pastoral visit brings wholeness.

No program accomplishes the Church’s mission.

No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about.

We plant the seeds that one day will grow.

We water the seeds already planted knowing that they hold future promise.

We lay foundations that will need further development.

We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing this.

This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.

It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders.

We are ministers, not messiahs.

We are prophets of a future not our own.

We define a redemptive quest as good, hard work pursued in love that calls us to re-risk to the fullness of our talent and resources. So, as we undertake these quests, our role is “merely” to show up faithfully, with all our creativity and imagination, all our rigor and skill, and lay them at God’s feet.

We understand the times to become culturally astute, yet unshakable by the world’s pragmatism and compromise. We train ourselves to unmask Mammon’s lure to accept exploitative norms as progress and advancement.

We build prophetically—demonstrating through our work the upside-down way of God’s kingdom. Best of all, we are free to leave the outcome up to the Lord, on his time horizon, at whatever scale he allows.

This is now my tenth letter to our Praxis community—an annual opportunity to write to a growing group of friends working around the world on the major issues of our time. Each year, I find myself drawn into a sort of “chaos in review.”

Our world is full of exploitation, and we have no shortage of leaders around the globe who choose to wreak havoc on those around them in different ways, through everything from war to wages. And somehow each year seems to confound more than the year prior.

At the same time, because the world is also full of promise, each year I’m privileged to give a “reason for hope,” in the form of a view into the Praxis community—a creative minority, compounding its influence through a redemptive way of working in the world.

While the data increasingly suggests that faith may be on the rise in the next generation, our hope is less in some form of cultural ascendance or even confidence that we are at an inflection point, but that, in the words of Bono, we might continue to “[make] the light a bit brighter; maybe just tear off a corner of the darkness.” May we encourage each other to keep going, knowing there is no shortage of redemptive leaders ready to unleash beauty on the world through their work.

Using the language of the Redemptive Frame, this is Why We Build. We do so not to pursue power or accumulate a war chest for change, but out of love for God and our neighbor, and a desire to be a demonstrated apologetic of the kingdom of God. We want our work to make a compelling case for faith modeled after the life of Jesus, in a confusing time for Christians and non-Christians alike.

This is of course connected to our imagination for What We Build as members of this community. We extend an invitation to a shared redemptive quest: “to awaken the Church’s creative and prophetic contribution on the major issues of our time.” To this end, our list of Opportunities for Redemptive Imagination (ORIs) provides a menu of issue- and industry-based theses for our community’s work in cultural renewal, reflecting the visionary leadership of so many of you while inviting others into a wider set of possibilities.

I hope one major differentiator of our community is that we identify the major issues of our time as distinct from the major issues of the moment. We live in an age of accelerated cultural tides, always seeking a new “current thing” to care about at the expense of a “recent thing” that has lost favor. Movement leaders who sense shifts across their idea’s Overton Window move quickly to consolidate resources and power, often generating social stigma and practical consequences for those not in line with what the tide demands.

In this way, they simply exploit circumstances in the same way they were previously exploited by their opponents. Even as followers of Jesus, we are tempted to react to currents of cultural favor in this way, privately or publicly gloating about our wins or exploding in anger at the “other side” when we feel we are losing. And so go the so-called culture wars.

Instead, we are called to identify what is on God’s heart and creatively respond for the long term. We need only look over the past year to see substantial shifts, including within the Church, in conversations around race, globalization, foreign aid, war, and more.

To be sure, thoughtful, compassionate Christians will have different perspectives on the best approaches to such high-stakes issues, but there is no doubt that God cares about the protection of the vulnerable, the pursuit of justice and peace, and the restoration of flourishing for all his image-bearers.

So we take this up as our calling, our responsibility, our joyful response: to train our attention on the heart of God. To truly be thoughtful, compassionate, creative, and committed whatever the tides may be. This is why we are so intent on being a community known for advancing redemptive quests: forming thesis-driven founders and funders aiming for a “long obedience in the same direction.”

Community as Moral Ecology; Moral Ecology As A Response to the Moment

Of course, alongside What We Build and Why We Build on the Redemptive Frame is How We Build. Over fourteen years of Praxis, it has become apparent that the way we build as a community is perhaps our strongest charism, and if sustained, may be our most lasting contribution to the Church and the world.

We view this redemptive way of building as of equal importance to our more visible venture-building output. Ultimately, I believe we’re building more than just a community, but a moral ecology that requires our collective care, especially as we grow in size and reach. Consider the words of David Brooks, from The Second Mountain:

We’ve heard from many of you facing organizational crises over the past few months due to the political and cultural changes unfolding on a seemingly weekly basis. While there are necessary, practical answers to the question of “what should we do” when revenue is lost or supply chains are disrupted, the essential answer is to keep moving forward in redemptive practice and pursuit.

Keep stepping into brokenness with creative restoration and sacrifice. Don’t allow your heart, mind, soul, and strength to change. Communities like ours can and should grow stronger in times of challenge: we see each other’s needs more vividly, and our prayerful imagination should be made for the moment.

In reflecting on this idea of Praxis-as-moral-ecology, I want to share eight traits that I think comprise our “community culture”—our distinctive norms, assumptions, beliefs, and habits of behavior:

01 // The community is an embodiment of the Redemptive Frame.

We’re actively working on the major issues of our time with a big imagination for renewal; we seek to bless each other while we do it; and we aim for a humble, holy ambition. We don’t simply have shared language, but are committed to practicing what we preach. We’re actually interested in loving God and loving our neighbors as ourselves, knowing that when we sacrifice, we gain as a community.

02 // Our dominant identity is citizenship in the kingdom of God.

We see each other first and foremost as made in the image of God, amidst a world that encourages competitive identities that divide the body of Christ—through achievements, family background, class, or other tribes and affiliations. We hold an expansive view of our neighbor and delight in the diversity of the people of Christ.

03 // We embrace and encourage meaningful risk.

We’re an avid source of encouragement for people with creative and prophetic imagination who pursue redemptive quests. As adventurous contemplatives in action, we cheer on the Spirit-led re-risking of resources, reputation, and comfort when considered discerningly and for the good of the world. We pay respect and offer second chances to builders who have faithfully failed at a worthy project.

04 // We’re “eternal” optimists, working with the long view in mind.

We fight off resignation, pessimism, and cynicism, choosing to focus on the light of each other’s work and lives in the never-ending story of the global Church. And though we long for more of the kingdom on earth, we are comfortable as a creative minority. We know we are not messiahs nor do we need to be, and we need not exchange our witness for greater power, money, or impact.

05 // We value people over projects.

We believe that trust-filled relationships are far more effective than utility-driven partnerships aimed at fast, forceful impact. In our interactions, we hold high expectations for both excellence and grace, speaking the truth in love and investing in reconciliation. We believe real friendship involves honesty and vulnerability, traits not often valued in entrepreneurial life.

06 // We are givers before we are takers.

With each other and with the world, we major in unreasonable hospitality and multi-faceted generosity, asking how we can help others on their quests and in their lives, instead of how we can personally “win.’’ At our best, each of us acts as a pillar for the community, holding it up, rather than using the community as a platform for our ambition.

07 // We have a bias to action, not argument.

Instead of declaring intellectual superiority, we provide intellectual hospitality, listening with curiosity to each other’s perspectives while being confidently grounded in orthodoxy. On the major issues of our time, we act through the hard work of venture-building, rather than speak through attention-seeking hot takes. Where we cannot reconcile or find common ground, we bless, even as we part ways.

08 // Our ultimate operating model is the fruit of the Spirit.

Encounters among us should be marked by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. We’re professionals, but we love to pray, laugh, sing, and cry together. The community curates itself to this end, referring and refining itself not towards the world’s definition of success but towards a dense network of friends in pursuit of union with Christ and true faith in action.

Back to the quote from Brooks, notice that he doesn’t say that healthy moral ecologies are the style of a collective response to the problems of any moment—they are the collective response.

Many of the most pressing problems of our moment are as much about “How We Build” as “What We Build”: exploitative and tribalized leadership, consolidation and preservation of power, short-term mindsets, a cynical disregard for persons and truth, brutal take-downs, and a steady decline of the fruit of the Spirit in society overall.

We can be, should be, and are a growing case for a different way to the world around us. These characteristics not only represent how people encounter and experience us, but they also empower the way our mission and vision are advanced.

In Growth, Depth

As we continue to grow as a community, I hope our embodiment of the Frame is not only deepened by our practice but also experienced more and more by those in the world who may be discouraged, frustrated, or disillusioned. David Brooks says that “the most substantial thing someone can leave behind is a moral ecology—a system of belief and behavior that outlives them.” We hope and believe that could be true for each of you, and all of us together.

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Fifteen years into our work, I am thankful for what God has done among us and through us; I cannot imagine a more encouraging community. From our early days, we’ve talked about a 30-year vision for our work, and halfway into that, this year’s letter looks back and forward as we think strategically about the years ahead.

When Praxis was founded in 2011, the world was a lot different—technologically, economically, socially, and politically.

We stood in line for the iPhone 4, and the App Store was all the rage. Facebook added the timeline format following the release of Instagram the year before. Netflix shifted to focus on streaming while still sending DVDs by mail. Spotify came over from Europe and launched in the US with its “revolutionary” music subscription model.

WeWork began renting its first location. UberCab became Uber and expanded to its second city—New York. Kenya’s M-PESA surpassed Western Union in daily cash transfers. WhatsApp hit 10 million users, and Tencent launched WeChat.

The “algorithm” wasn’t in our vernacular, and we were optimistic about technology and social media. All of this in 2011—the same year Marc Andreessen told us software was “eating the world” in the Wall Street Journal.

Geopolitically, it felt like terrorism had been conquered: Osama Bin Laden was found, the Arab Spring emerged in the Middle East, and the US had exited Iraq, however imperfectly. Many in China were coming out of poverty as the country grew to the world’s second largest economy. Barack Obama had become America’s first Black president, and regardless of one’s political persuasions, there was a sense that this milestone represented hope for racial healing and progress.

All this to say, when we founded Praxis, the world felt a lot more hopeful. But while the past 15 years have led to a lot of wonderful things inside Praxis, it’s turned out to be far from “on earth as it is in heaven” out there. Consider David Brooks’s comments in his farewell column in the New York Times earlier this year, which summarize some of what we’ve felt in the US:

When I think about how the world has changed since I joined The Times (2003), the master trend has been Americans’ collective loss of faith—not only religious faith but many other kinds. We have become a sadder, meaner and more pessimistic country. Large majorities say our country is in decline, that experts are not to be trusted, that elites don’t care about regular people. Only 13 percent of young adults believe America is heading in the right direction. Loss of faith produces a belief in nothing. The most grievous cultural wound has been the loss of a shared moral order…the crucial question facing America is: How can we reverse this pervasive loss of faith in one another, in our future and in our shared ideals?

Amid so much change, the last 15 years did offer an opportunity to design an ethical and even redemptive future through new technology, media, politics, and more. Instead, the world’s leading founders, funders, innovators, and culture makers—along with their masses of followers—made different choices. And sadly, Christians have participated in, and sometimes led the way, in this ends-justify-the-means approach to cultural engagement.

We’ve experienced nothing short of a historic social disruption of trust, identity, and optimism. Losing this shared moral order has also blurred our sense of identity as American evangelicals, our labels co-opted for culture-warring strategies over Christ-like love.

As society loses faith in each other and institutions, what does it even mean to be known as a Christian? Those of us who strive to seriously apprentice ourselves to Jesus can feel pretty misunderstood.

From One Disruption to the Next

Over the next 15 years, we’re looking at a cascade of anticipated disruption from artificial intelligence. With each new LLM model, some part of what we thought we could uniquely do slips away. And so we face another existential question: What does it even mean to be human?

We’re told a set of paradoxes: We’ll be able to do more than ever before, and we may not have a job at all. We’ll become more creative, or the machines will turn into our tastemakers and storytellers. The next generation of AI-natives will build a whole new world, or maybe they’ll just suffer within it. We’re not sure what’s coming, and what we’re told is both potentially exciting and terrifying.

So what do we do?

Our default response may be to protect what’s ours. How can we preserve our jobs, industries, and enterprises, our cash flows and capital? How can we maintain our affluence? How can we ensure our kids’ security? During times of uncertainty, plenty of us instinctively de-risk to manage our fears.

Another response is more adventurous but still self-serving. Rather than being overwhelmed, we look for ways to capitalize on the moment. We can become almost manic in our pursuits, striving at the gold rush in front of us. Along the way, pride takes over. We marvel at the superhuman scale and pace made possible with our capable co-pilots and agents.

In contrast, it can seem noble and reasonable to simply pursue the ethical. How can we scale our organization with AI? How can we ensure that our firms and their supply chains work in a new geopolitical landscape? But we ought to be careful not to make this the primary lens through which we think about the future. We should not come to an event like this asking, “How can I be ready for the AI revolution?”

To quote Ronald Rolheiser, “Deep down we know that we’re capable of more, that God is inviting us to more, but that we are fixated at a certain level of mediocrity. Simply put, there are still too many compensations, addictions, and accommodations to comfort in our lives. As well, there is the fear of moving beyond what disrupts our lives. We live faith, hope, and charity, to a point, and there was a time when that point was enough, was what God was asking of us. Now, however, we sense a deeper call and know that we are being asked to let go of many of the things, both good and bad, to which we are clinging for comfort and stability.”

Indeed, we need to continue to surrender and cultivate our own redemptive imagination. We need to ask: How might we be most prepared to care for the world in a time of social and economic disruption and overall cultural anxiety?

The world does not need common approaches from followers of Jesus; it needs us to re-risk for the good of others when everyone else is out for themselves.

Developing a Cultural Strategy in Historic Disruption

Moments of historic disruption like what we are stepping into are by their very nature rare; they are named as revolutions. Our job is not to survive them; we have the opportunity to re-shape our world in unprecedented ways if we move with intent and strength instead of waiting to see what unfolds or “hedging our bets.” Putting redemptive imagination into action with our full culture-making capacity gives us hope that the next 15 years might go differently than the last.

We at Praxis don’t just need a high-growth, practical organizational vision and strategy for this moment but a thoughtful and ambitious cultural vision and strategy. Harvard Business School authors Douglas Holt and Douglas Cameron show us a way to think about this in their 2010 book Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands. They write:

For most innovation experts, future opportunities mean one thing—the commercialization of new technologies. Cultural entrepreneurs [play] an entirely different game. Ideological opportunities are produced by major historical changes that shake up cultural conventions of the category, what we call a social disruption. Since cultural innovation is about locating a specific historic opportunity and then responding to this opportunity with specific cultural content, cultural strategy must be tailored to these more specific historical and contextual goals.

Nike succeeded with innovative cultural expressions, not with innovative products. Nike proposed that a particular sports myth about performing beyond all expectations provided a powerfully motivating metaphor for the ideological anxieties Americans faced as globalization hit the American job market. This economic and ideological collapse led many Americans to search for alternative ideological moorings that would allow them to realize their American Dreams, a search that would go on for over a decade, until the country had once again securely established its political and economic leadership in the world.

While the authors focus on business management for economic opportunity (studying iconic brands from Nike to Marlboro to Patagonia), we can apply their method toward redemptive ends: changing the cultural narrative and shifting the Overton window on the major issues of our time.

Holt and Cameron highlight a clear framework:

1. Identify Cultural Orthodoxy: Over time, industries and organizations get locked into a way of doing things that looks familiar—what they call a “cultural orthodoxy.”

2. Identify Disruptions: When tectonic shifts happen in society, they locate new “ideological opportunities,” which create demand for new expressions that the old orthodoxy can’t deliver on.

3. Locate “Source Material” in Vibrant Subcultures: Emergent communities (often dense networks) and social movements become the source material for change.

4. Pursue “Cultural Innovation” through Storytelling: The ideas, stories, and “codes” of the subculture’s community create a new imagination.

5. Organize to Cross the Chasm: They advocate for building a “cultural studio” model to move ideas from subcultural appeal to the mass market.

We’ve seen a recent example of this with Jonathan Haidt’s breakout work around youth and technology—which our own Partner for Theology and Culture Andy Crouch has taken part in. Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation sits at the crescendo of a movement pushing back on Big Tech’s harmful effects on kids.

Within just a few years, the “social media is cool” orthodoxy began to fray. Parents began to decry the corresponding mental health crises and unplugged, dumbphone subcultures emerged—source material demonstrating a different way forward. Backed by media, advocacy, and public policy, it’s become a mass market norm for us to interrogate youth engagement with screentime and social media.

This is not easy work, but it is incredibly fruitful. Holt and Cameron’s approach relies on highly creative, entrepreneurial teams building from “deep cultural immersion.” As Dallas Willard once said, “Understanding is the basis of care … whether for a petunia or a nation.”

We should follow this model, while acknowledging that for us at Praxis developing a redemptive cultural strategy draws from God’s design for human flourishing—connecting cultural strategy into our community’s classic combination of theology, culture, and entrepreneurship. This creates a repeatable method for creative and prophetic contribution on the major issues of our time.

Imagine, for example, if Christians became known for ushering in a presence economy in the age of AI. First, we’d need to commit to immersion, not avoidance, on the breakthrough technologies of our time. We’d be the ones to match a capacity to build at the highest level with Christ-like care for the world.

We could design AI applications that encourage people to get together in person (Sprout AI Studio, Mark Sears). We could invest in building companies that demand human-led experiences around caregiving (Ianacare, Jessica Kim) and building the “next hometowns” in global markets (Hometown Equity, Brett Hagler).

In response to the rise of remote work and AI “companions,” we can design the hybrid workplace for flourishing, maximizing in-office connection (Kadence, Dan Bladen). Our nonprofits could help the local church deliver inclusive “high care, high community” models even in megachurch settings, knowing people will need personal attention more than ever (Portfolio ventures Sanctuary Mental Health Ministries, Settled, With Ministries, Every Mother’s Advocate, and many more).

With the right commitments and approaches, two of the major social disruptions of our time—our Christian identity and our human identity—could turn into opportunities for us to offer a powerful new vision to the world. And the great news is that the starter work of everything I’ve mentioned is already underway in the Praxis venture Portfolio.

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A Cultural Strategy for Praxis

And that makes for a good transition into Praxis’s organizational cultural strategy. Holt and Cameron write that “historical changes in society create demand for new culture—ideological opportunities that upend this orthodoxy. Cultural innovations repurpose cultural content lurking in subcultures to respond to this emerging demand, leapfrogging entrenched incumbents.”

What if redemptive imagination were the cultural innovation lurking in the subculture of this community? After 10 years of hosting our Redemptive Imagination Summit, I’ve heard over and over something like this: “I wish that more people could be in this room, so they could actually be encouraged about what Christians are doing in the world.” New Accelerator Fellows, attendees at Regional Gatherings, and Summit guests often tell us they feel like they have stepped into a different world—away from the cynicism, divisiveness, and disillusionment that wants to steal our joy on a day-to-day basis.

There is a growing discontent with the status quo, and I believe that the antidote is inside our community. Despite 15 years of what has often felt like a divergence from the broader culture, the redemptive way—the gospel embodied in people and projects—remains a singular path toward healing and hope.

So here is a cultural strategy: Together and in humility, let’s distribute the moral ecology of our community around the world—a system of belief and behavior that points to a new way forward: a communal, redemptive, culture-making way in a time that knows only loneliness, exploitation, and culture warring.

We need a leapfrogging of those cultural incumbents; we need to reach more with this way of being—across the globe and into the pews. We need to rapidly expand the ethos of the Summit room. Indeed, I was so encouraged to discover that in the final strategic documents of the late great pastor and author Tim Keller, one of his top ideas was what he deemed “Praxis on steroids”—calling for the “major new funding and expansion” of a community such as ours as part of one of five major moves for renewal in the church.

Imagine if this came true: If Christians could move from being known as culture warriors to culture makers, known not for what they fight against but for what they build out of love for the world. Imagine if the Church were the largest social force combatting loneliness, demonstrating what it is like to live adventurous, risk-filled lives together to love our neighbor. And imagine if we rejected the two-wrongs-make-a-right exploitation of “the other” and met the challenges of the world with redemptive action—creative restoration through sacrifice.

We have to have the audacity to ask: Can the ethos of redemptive imagination become the spirit of the age?

Even the most optimistic of us may have a difficult time believing that’s possible. But we’ve seen it in history: The aftermath of the Gin Craze in England (1720-1751) gave way to the social disruptions of the Industrial Revolution (1760-1840), when the Clapham Circle (1790-1830) and their overlapping business and financial networks deployed their missional, entrepreneurial pursuits.

As William Wilberforce famously said, the Lord had put two things before him: the abolition of the slave trade and the “reformation of manners,” or what we today would call the renewal of culture. If you’ve been in our community for a while, you’ve heard how their biographer said that “the ethos of Clapham became the spirit of the age,” acknowledging their success, at least in their generation, against all odds.

This sort of cultural change—in our time or theirs—does not just depend on more extraordinary entrepreneurs or funders. It calls for an awakening of redemptive imagination among all of God’s people. Back to David Brooks, who asks:

Where do people and nations go to find new things to believe in, new values to orient their lives around? They find these things in the realm of culture. In my reading of history, cultural change precedes political and social change. You need a shift in thinking before you can have a shift in direction. You need a different spiritual climate.

I mean “culture” in the broadest sense—a shared way of life, a set of habits and rituals, popular songs and stories, conversations about ideas big and small. When I use the word “culture,” I mean everything that forms the subjective parts of a person: perceptions, values, emotions, opinions, loves, enchantments, goals and desires. I mean everything that shapes the spirit of the age, the moral and intellectual moment, which constitutes the shared water in which we swim. In this definition, every member of society has a role in shaping the culture. We all create a moral ecology around ourselves, one that either elevates the people we touch or degrades them.”

With this in mind, Praxis is making a subtle but meaningful shift, turning outward to invite everyone to discover their redemptive calling for their life and work.​ We’re not leaving behind redemptive entrepreneurship; we’re building on it. We believe every follower of Jesus is a culture maker, whether in boardrooms or break rooms, kitchens or clinics, study halls or city halls. We believe it is our ultimate responsibility—as an organization, as founders, as a community—to awaken redemptive imagination.

We’ve seen this sort of organizational evolution succeed before. Consider Ashoka, founded by Bill Drayton, who pioneered the term “social entrepreneurship” in 1972. At the time, it was a novel idea that entrepreneurship could be applied to social problems. Ashoka began investing in social entrepreneurs to influence systems through a global fellowship program. After two decades, they realized that they needed to reach a broader audience to truly work on cultural change and shifted their language to “change makers.” The move allowed them to expand from programmatic work with fellows to initiatives on youth development, education, business, and more.

A decade later, their tagline “Everyone a Changemaker” invited all of society into collaborative problem-solving. They didn’t leave behind their roots—today, Ashoka has nearly 4,000 fellows transforming systems through social entrepreneurship as they continue to lead a global conversation around social change. As their audience widened, so did their organization and the broader movement: Ashoka is now a $42M nonprofit, and social entrepreneurship has grown from niche to normalized across the globe.

In this spirit, perhaps our boldest re-risk of this next season is setting out to activate the redemptive potential of all of God’s people. Under the leadership of Paul Martin, our Managing Partner for Praxis Media, we’ve begun to create formational resources for leaders and their enterprises, churches, ministries, and communities.

We’re excited to beta release the Praxis Course 2.0 at Summit, with a full rollout in the fall. This course has been a labor of love for many, most substantially from Praxis’s longtime Partner for Content Scott Kauffmann (who has moved into a Venture Partner role after 10 incredible years shaping our mission). The Course integrates the biggest ideas this community has developed and lived out, and we hope to “cross the chasm” to share them with a much broader audience.

If you think about the modern toolkit for Christians, Alpha has become a clear leader in evangelism. Groups like Bible Project help build theological depth. More recently, groups like Practicing the Way aim to build congregations committed to discipleship through apprenticeship to Jesus. But there appears to be a gap where no organization or set of ideas has emerged at scale to help Christians think about redemptive mission beyond standard faith and work programming. Our hope and design is to fill that void.

In addition, we are platforming more of the redemptive work we’ve seen in our community, sharing leaders’ moments of conviction and calling through our Redemptive Imagination Stories series. We’ll re-release the Praxis Podcast, going deep into ideas of the Praxis Course and speaking at length with Redemptive Quest exemplars. We’re also introducing a new hub for ideas and stories on Substack called the Praxis Press (welcome!), a resource to share your imagination and work with the broader world.

At the same time, our work continues to expand as Praxis grows into a truly global ecosystem for redemptive entrepreneurship. In January, we were in Singapore and Nairobi to launch our very first global accelerator cohorts, representing Asia Pacific and Africa. Combined with our US Accelerators, we saw over 600 new ventures apply this year.

We believe more than ever in the compounding work of building a global venture portfolio with a community around it. Year over year, our mentors, founders, and funders work together to create a true demonstration of redemptive imagination.

It’s a great joy to celebrate over 300 active businesses and nonprofits, with $897M in annual revenue and 14,575 employees across 113 countries. Their relational attention and financial backing has helped 92% of ventures in our accelerators survive and thrive, with the Praxis community providing over $185M in early-stage investment and philanthropic capital. On top of this, after four years, we now have 66 Capital Fellows deploying billions of dollars across investing and philanthropy through a redemptive lens.

As the flywheel turns, this year, we’ll host over 1,000 community members in person across our Summit, Regional Gatherings, and other high-touch programming. And at the foundation of this global work are the trained ecosystem builders across 115 global markets who are advancing redemptive ideas in a variety of ways, from sharing the redemptive frame over dinners and talks to hosting over 70 Labs—venture-focused mentoring retreats that have influenced 600 founders around the world.

As our community continues to grow, organizing focused sub-networks is critical for even more specific applications of redemptive opportunity. This year, under the leadership of new Praxis Partner Evan Feinberg, we are launching the Redemptive Imagination Project to advance our Opportunities for Redemptive Imagination (ORIs) to the next level. Since their first release in 2021, our ORIs have begun to anchor our community—organizing our annual Summit dinners, connecting ventures and capital, shaping our Accelerator selection, and bringing world-class leaders into our work.

As a next and much more substantial step forward, the Redemptive Imagination Project will serve as a “cultural studio” working to shift innovation paradigms on the major issues of our time. We are teaming up with 24 new Praxis Venture Partners leading 18 ORIs to develop networks, ideas, and projects that transform the narrative—and the reality—of how Christ followers work for the good of our neighbors. Together, we are setting out to craft a robust cultural strategy across ventures, media, capital, and whatever is necessary to creatively make change.

To us at Praxis, you’ve provided friendship, encouragement, vision, action, and most recently, substantial growth resources. In 2025, we were blown away to complete a $25M Quest Fund, part of what is now $75M this community has committed to Praxis over the past 15 years. For all of this, we thank you deeply. We’ve gotten to do this meaningful work with wind behind our sails.

We’ve seen this as a virtuous cycle within Praxis so far: When we hear of each other’s pursuits, we awaken a redemptive imagination in each other, which allows for more demonstration, which leads to more awakening, and so on.

Historically, the word “awakening” has been used to name periods of spiritual revival in the Church. While we long for revival in the traditional sense—repentance, new believers, baptisms, and a broader culture responding to a mysterious presence of the Spirit—we also see an awakening of faith in action stirring. In 2026, the Church needs a revival of not only our hearts but our hands and minds.

With our imaginations redemptively awakened, we become even more compelled by love to care for the needs of the world. This way of life is what Jesus called us to. It is a way that says: With all I have, I exist for the redemptive possibility of the other.

An awakening of this kind, at a broad scale, could not be contained—it would not only reshape the next 15 years but the generations to come. We would do well to together remember the axiom, “We greatly overestimate what we can accomplish in a year, but greatly underestimate what is possible in ten.” May we go with God in all of this.

Dave Blanchard
Co-Founder & CEO

The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love. - Galatians 5:6

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