Dan Vogel remembers the first time he introduced himself as the founder and CEO of Flourish Fund.

The group gathered at Praxis’s headquarters in New York City went around the room sharing their names and titles. Until a couple weeks earlier, Vogel had worked at the Boston Consulting Group’s foundation. Now, he was starting something new. Flourish Fund was a way for him to bring strategy from mainstream philanthropy and social impact into the Christian world, and put his own faith at the center of his work.

Sitting at his dinner table that night was Charlee Tchividjian, founder of Every Mother’s Advocate (ĒMA), a nonprofit that had gone through Praxis’s Accelerator in 2022. A pastor’s kid from South Florida, Tchividjian grew up alongside the foster kids her parents took in over about a decade of her childhood as they advocated for Christian involvement in the foster system.

As an adult, she became a foster parent herself, and her view of the system completely shifted when she watched the mother of the boys in her care lose parental rights in court. Once Tchividjian realized just how many kids end up in foster care for preventable reasons, she refocused her work on supporting mothers in crisis and preventing family separation in the first place.

As Vogel talked about his new venture and his vision for bringing catalytic funding around major issues, Tchividjian began thinking of how much help her field needed, and how Christian givers would have a heart for the work ĒMA does around mothers, children, and family unity.

She felt prompted to speak up: “I feel like the Holy Spirit is telling me that your first initiative should be foster care.” Though Tchividjian made the comment tongue in cheek, by the end of the two-day session Vogel did sense the Spirit leading him to focus on the foster system.

Six months later, they were together again for a foster care forum with around a dozen organizations in the field. Praxis leaders had realized that many people working on the same issues knew of each other but “had not collaborated in meaningful ways, and certainly not with a mind toward entrepreneurship and innovation.”

So their collaboration began. Tchividjian pulled together foundational ideas to write a redemptive framework for child welfare, and Vogel grew Flourish Fund as a Praxis entrepreneur in residence. His team conducted deep research to hear from more than 100 leaders in the field. Flourish Fund has gone on to distribute nearly $2 million in grants to innovators working on this issue.

Rather than focusing only on recruiting foster families, as many Christians did early on, both zoomed out to look at how to make what Tchividjian calls “upstream and sustainable” reforms, from supporting biological and kinship families to better equipping foster parents to avoid burnout.

Vogel learned from Tchividjian’s story; her work with ĒMA helped him see the issue “in a whole different way,” he said, especially the church’s potential to keep families together before kids ever enter the system. ĒMA became one of Flourish Fund’s first grantees.

“It’s been very cool to see how it’s played out from that first showing up in that design session, knowing, okay, I’m basically here to work on Flourish Fund, but forging a friendship that’s now [led to] doing some really meaningful work together,” Vogel said.

Praxis has referred to influence as “friendship compounding over time” and challenged leaders to see unreasonable love, generosity, and relationships of blessing as means of bringing about deep change.

“Friendship is deeper than a cause,” Praxis Partner for Theology & Culture Andy Crouch said in a 2023 talk. “You will not sustain commitment to a cause through either failure or success. But the right kind of friends stick it out. They keep going. They just don’t stop calling each other to what they know the other is capable of.”

Anyone who has experienced the sustaining power of friendship, of true partnership, knows this firsthand. Friends sharpen each other’s ideas, extend each other’s capacities, and find purpose they wouldn’t have found alone.

Instead of forcing change by any means, the way of blessing trusts that patient, relational work can lead somewhere better. Crouch points to how Jesus models blessing by seeing people, naming them, and calling them into what’s possible.

“You will never be used by Jesus,” he said. “People say, ‘I want to be used by God.’ But you’ll be seen, named, and called by Jesus.”

This approach stands in contrast to viewing others transactionally, particularly in business and professional settings, where ego, competition, or just the way it’s always been done keeps people from looking for opportunities to bless others.

“You should be, at minimum, ambitious for the blessing of some other person beside you in the world,” Crouch said. “There’s no person for whom there is not someone, if not many people, for whom you are the most important gateway to the life that they’re meant for.”

For Tchividjian, that posture is built into how she sees the foster care system, looking for opportunities to bless parents, workers, and community members alongside the children at its center. It’s also essential to how she works in partnership with fellow organizations and leaders.

“We know that an organization like ĒMA alone could never possibly solve the foster care crisis,” she said. “This is not built on the back of one dynamic leader or vision. Building upon one another’s strengths instead of competing has been massive.”

Vogel describes Flourish Fund’s role as bringing together philanthropy, social innovators, the church, government, and nonprofits—a kind of “divine assembly” that can do more to move the needle than any one actor alone.

The process requires “different people, who have different giftings, different resources, different skills, and some intermediation, somebody who’s helping to put that together,” he said. “You put those pieces together and the Holy Spirit multiplies it, and there’s transformative results that could happen.”

Explore more about the way of friendship and blessing in The Praxis Course.

Spiritual formation doesn’t just happen during our quiet time.

Over her career, Ruth Haley Barton, spiritual director, author, and founder of the Transforming Center, a ministry dedicated to strengthening the souls of Christians in leadership, has seen formation move in concentric circles, “starting at the center in solitude, moving to the community that sustains us in the mystery of our faith, and finally to ministry and mission, where we’re in God for the world.”

That makes formation a leadership question. A community draws from the spiritual formation of its leader, just as a leader is formed and transformed in community.

“Jesus is so clear that the kingdom of God is here now, if we can find ways to open to it and access it,” she says. “To me, that’s what spiritual transformation is: a life of surrender to the reign of God in our lives. It’s much more central than a set of electives or a retreat center somewhere.”

Barton spoke with Praxis about sacrifice, calling, organizational drift, her new book, Leading a Transforming Community, and her upcoming year of jubilee.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

You’ve said the best thing you bring to leadership is your own transforming self. What does that look like to the people being led?

You have a leader who is clearly living sane rhythms of work and rest, including Sabbath. That’s a very public thing. They take a Sabbath, everybody knows when it is, and nobody would consider violating it. Then, based on their own need and experience, they lead their congregation into rhythms of work and rest. A transforming community is by definition a Sabbath community.

I also think that a leader who is connected with their soul is actively discerning. One pastor who came through our Transforming Community experience, he’s a Presbyterian minister, and he began to invite his elders into discernment. It was a 100-year-old church, and they said, “You’re the first pastor who has invited us to discern anything with you.”

And there’s an appropriate kind of vulnerability. There are boundaries for that, but rather than everything being about polish and professionalism, there’s a willingness to be human. That leader is finding themselves fully accepted in God’s presence, and they’re not looking to performance to shore themselves up. So they’re freer to bring their authentic self to those they lead.

What usually moves a leader to seek deeper spiritual support? Does it take burnout?

Burnout or being very tired can contribute to that. But when we are involved in mission and in what God has given us to do, there will inevitably be times when we hit our own human limits or even experience a failure, and we realize we need more interior resources.

In the early part of our lives, we do what we do in response to a loving God, but we also have a lot of our own human effort and activism and energy wrapped up in it. There will come a time for all of us when we hit the limits of that way of doing it. That’s when people come and want to know how to dig a deeper well, or a deeper canal for the presence of God to flow into their lives.

A lot of times failure happens because we’ve gotten disconnected from our souls, from the place where God is present to us. Whether it’s hitting our limits and realizing, “I’ve been doing this in my own strength for so long and I just don’t have any more,” or whether it’s an actual failure, either one produces an awareness that we need more of God than we have right now.

At Praxis, we often describe redemptive work as “creative restoration through sacrifice.” What role should sacrifice play in a Christian leader’s life?

First, we need to be really careful with that idea. I was raised in a pastor’s home, and I know what sacrifice was. I think we sacrificed way more than we should have as a pastor’s family, and I don’t think our dad stood up enough for what we needed. So I feel almost cringey about it.

So how do leaders model sacrifice without setting an expectation that they’ll carry more than they were meant to hold?

Jesus’ life did lead to the ultimate sacrifice, with smaller sacrifices along the way, but Jesus’ life also models self-possession. He didn’t heal everybody who needed healing. He didn’t let himself be crucified any old time. He melted through crowds when they wanted to kill him. He didn’t make that ultimate sacrifice until God told him it was his time, and they wrestled with it. He went up the mountain to pray when he got tired and before important decisions. And he says in John 10, “I lay my life down of my own accord, and I will take it up again.”

We have to be careful not to use victim-type language in subtle ways, or to have an imbalance between our own needs and the needs of others. It’s about attunement to God and to what God is actually asking of us, versus what other people expect of us or what our role expects. Much of that is cultural: the idea that a leader is supposed to be available 24/7 and doesn’t need rest the way other people do. The whole thing, in my mind, is being in tune with God for when God says, “This is a sacrifice I’m asking you to make.”

Some sacrifices are healthy, though, like giving up reputation or productivity to keep a Sabbath. How do you tell the difference?

That’s why discernment is so key. We could sacrifice everything forever, and it still wouldn’t get everything done that needs to be done on this earth. We have to discern, as individuals and as communities, what is ours to do, and what is ours to do within the rhythms of work and rest God has ordained for us.

The Sabbath rhythm is God-ordained. God told us we need it and never took it back, as far as I can see. So I don’t know how so many in Christian service feel like the instruction to Sabbath is something they can kick to the curb, when it’s so clear, both from God and from how Jesus lived his life.

Calling can motivate faithful work, but it can also push us to pursue the work at all costs, even ahead of God. How should leaders think about calling?

How many times have I heard a pastor say, “I’m leaving this church because a larger church has called me”? Our pastoral vocation becomes about succeeding in very external ways, rather than “God has called me to be faithful to this community.” We’re as subject as anyone else to looking for promotions and outward signs that we’re successful.

I think calling has three elements, in this order. First, we’re called to be the person God created us to be uniquely, as God’s creative effort, and not to work against that. Second, we’re called to belong to the One to whom we belong, the One who created us, and to cultivate that relationship of belonging. Only third does calling have anything to do with outward vocation or doing anything. If it goes in that order, there’s a much higher likelihood that we’ll end up doing vocationally what we were created to do, what fits us, and what makes it possible for us to keep cultivating that relationship of belonging with God.

That three-pronged definition of calling is very meaningful to me. It’s all on God: how God creates you, what God brings out of that relationship of belonging, how God calls you in a very personal way. Then the outward measures of success aren’t as meaningful, because you’re not always looking for bigger and better and up and to the right. You’re looking to live as your authentic self in God, responsive to God, with a deep sense of your identity and belonging, and what you do comes out of that.

Over 25 years, have you felt market pressure on your own work: to scale, to reach more people, to grow revenue?

Yes, definitely. My title has been founder and chief essence officer, and part of my role has been to help us stay faithful to our essence amid the other pressures: financial sustainability, taking it to scale. There are always people with ideas about that. There were times when I was younger when I wished we were bigger or more than we were. But every time we tried to move in that direction, we saw that it compromised us on the level of essence, and I would say identity. We talk about mission drift, but I also think there can be identity drift. Who you fundamentally are can drift, and all of a sudden you’re something you never set out to be.

The truth is, I founded this organization to be a community. I never even wanted it to be an organization. So sometimes I get the heebie-jeebies when we talk too much about organizational strategy, because it’s never what I set out to do. I’d already been in big places where we had done all that, and it didn’t hold an attraction for me anymore. I knew how empty it could be at the center of it all.

You have a long sabbatical coming up. I wanted to ask a question I heard from International Justice Mission founder Gary Haugen: How do you attend to your own inspiration?

I think it has to do with being able and willing to be in touch with your deepest desires and longings, and to trust that there’s something in that that is good and that God actually wants for you too. One of the things I encourage leaders to watch for is when you are practicing Sabbath, but then Sabbath isn’t enough and you’re exhausted at the end of Sabbath and don’t want to go back into your life, that means a sabbatical needs to come. That means you need that longer period of time.

I’m actually going to take a year of jubilee. I’ve had the sabbaticals; they’re short compared to what I’m contemplating. But I’ve been in ministry for 50 years, and so I just feel very clear that that’s what God is giving me and wants me to take.

I love the idea of inspiration, but I also really feel that healing is something else that needs to be included in there, because we’re on the front line of spiritual battles all the time. So heading into a sabbatical time, ask: Is there anything in me that needs to be healed? Many Christians just soldier on. Something hard happens to them in one environment and they shove it down and go on to the next opportunity, and they put the brave face on it. But that thing is still there. I like to counsel around: Is there anything in your life that might need a healing touch from God, and what could we put around you for that? Even as we do these great things for God, we’re only human, and we take hits, and we need healing too.

I know many leaders have appreciated your book Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership. How does that fit with your latest release?

Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership was written to help leaders pay attention to their own interiority, to their own life with God, and to understand that the soul is the place where God is present to us and that spiritual leadership is going to originate and emerge from that place. Leading a Transforming Community is the next step. I hope people don’t get them out of order, because only leaders who have done the work internally around their own souls and motivations are going to be prepared to lead a transforming community with positional authority and inner authority.

One of the stakes I drive in the ground in the new book is the relationship between formation and mission. Early in my life in the formation world, there was this idea that if people are encouraged too much in the formation or the discipleship direction, they’ll stop caring about the needs of the world, and so churches began to identify themselves as missional communities.

In this book I attempt to bring those together. Transformation increases our capacity to discern the will of God, which becomes our mission, and we get out there and do the will of God. Then we hit up against limits or even failures, and we’re cast back on God’s mercy and the need for a deeper grounding in God. That’s a cyclical thing, not a static thing. It’s like a bicycle wheel that moves you forward. I’m hoping we could put that to rest once and for all, that division between formation and mission, because I think they’re part of the same process.

Sleeping on the floor of her dad’s apartment felt like a low point.

Stephanie Cummings had climbed the corporate ladder, started her own company, and finally landed a major contract. Then she spent months on an air mattress because she couldn’t afford an apartment in Washington, DC, where her business had just entered a new market.

She and her husband, Rashad, launched the household management service Please Assist Me in 2018, and it was working. They were doing what they set out to do: alleviating stress for clients with a streamlined app to take care of their cleaning, laundry, groceries, and errands.

But the funding wasn’t coming.

“I did not foresee the challenges that I was going to face raising capital,” she said, noting the sexism and racism she encountered as a Black woman. “We lived off of credit cards for two years, and I was going from pitch competition to pitch competition, trying to have enough money to pay our rent and to pay our employees and to continue this amazing thing that we have built.”

Cummings began to meet potential investors who loved the technology she developed, only to have them push back on her business model. Rather than bringing on workers as independent contractors, Please Assist Me hired them as employees, with benefits and paths to promotion. Some investors offered to fund the company if she would reclassify their workers. Even though she and Rashad needed the money, she turned them down.

Cummings was committed to empowering workers—many of them Black and brown women—in a sector where they had historically been “underpaid, overworked and underappreciated,” and where the gig economy threatened to make the work even more exploitative and transactional.

“I knew that it was important that we provided that love, care and just basic human dignity to our employees and classified them and gave them what they needed to be successful,” she said.

The more she listened to her early hires, the more she saw how much fear had built up in their careers in home care. They wondered if they’d be safe in other people’s homes, so Please Assist Me set up a policy that workers (called “PAMs”) would work in twos or threes. They worried about hours, so the company offered W-2 employment with fair pay.

Cummings realized the company she founded to serve professional women could also bless the women doing the work in their homes. That became part of her model and motivation.

As a founder, Cummings was as satisfied to see a client’s relief that she no longer had to worry about her dirty floors as she was to see an employee beam with pride at earning recognition during a team meeting.

Choosing employees over maximum profit came at a cost to the bottom line. But more than the sting of sacrifice, Cummings felt conviction about the company she was building.

Redemptive entrepreneurship, as Praxis calls it, involves creative restoration through sacrifice—a willingness to absorb some amount of cost for the sake of a better outcome for ourselves and for others.

Sometimes that means taking a different pathway with less money or less prestige, according to Dave Blanchard, Co-Founder and CEO of Praxis.

“Most people, if you talk to those who have actually lived this out at the most profound levels, would never say it was sacrifice,” said Blanchard. “They’d say, ‘I guess it was sacrificial, but it hasn’t been a sacrifice in my life. It’s actually been a gift.’ The net effect has been, strangely, never described as ‘I made a sacrifice.’”

Creative restoration through sacrifice is not simply one person losing so another can gain. It means responding to broken places and systems with an eye for a made-better, made-whole solution where “we win,” even when it’s difficult or costly.

In leading Please Assist Me, Cummings saw how her model not only honored her beliefs around work and dignity but resulted in a reliable workforce for her clients, empowered workers themselves, and even blessed the workers’ families, as kids got to take pride in their moms’ careers.

One cost of sacrifice is not knowing the outcome.

“Sacrifice by definition is letting go of something that is of great value and putting it in the hands of God without knowing what will happen,” said Andy Crouch, Partner for Theology & Culture at Praxis.

Cummings didn’t know if her model would work out. In March 2020, right on the brink of COVID, she spent the last of her money to fly to a pitch competition. Four of the five finalists received funding. She didn’t.

“They just did not believe that I could execute on that model and the way to grow and scale,” Cummings said. “And I remember crying, and my mom had to call the hotel and pay for me to have dinner.”

The sacrifice wasn’t only financial. She had to let go of the recognition that comes with startup fundraising.

“I always wanted to be the person who’d say, ‘Oh, I’ve raised this amount of capital,’” she said. “But through prayer, I didn’t allow my pride to stop me from staying focused on the redemptive work that could be done if done well.”

Even at her lowest, she trusted that she was building what God had asked of her.

“We felt like what we were doing was so important that we couldn’t stop,” she said. “And God has been so faithful when we make those sacrifices for him.”

Still, Cummings wouldn’t recommend her path for everyone. Christians in leadership can lionize sacrifice to an unhealthy extent; not all sacrifice is redemptive or restorative.

Ruth Haley Barton, founder of the Transforming Center, has seen how sacrifice can fuel overwork, especially when leaders feel they must be available 24/7 and never need rest. She emphasizes the importance of discernment in the context of sacrifice.

“It’s very much about attunement to God and to what God is actually asking of us, versus what other people might be asking of us or expecting of us,” she said. “We could sacrifice everything forever, and it wouldn’t do everything that needs to be done on this earth. And so that means we have to discern, both as individuals and as communities, what is ours to do.”

As a spiritual director, Barton guides leaders in spiritual practices and reminds them that transformation is not transactional. The change may not look like success in a market or worldly sense.

“We can’t tell people what the outcome is going to be,” said Barton, author of Leading a Transforming Community. “All we can know is that we’re going to be more like Christ than we are now.”

Cummings couldn’t have predicted what came next. Before she left that pitch competition, one of the judges, who was starting a fund, said, “Let’s talk later.” Less than a year later, that investor led the pre-seed and seed rounds and introduced her to Praxis.

Please Assist Me now operates in four states, with more than 100 employees servicing 50,000 residential units under contract. Cummings has seen her business grow and found investors who share her values. The model has paid off.

“By investing in our employees, they stay longer, they thrive, they grow,” Cummings said. “Some of the things that other competitors who have died have struggled with, the constant churn and the quality, we don’t suffer from because we’ve invested in both sides of the equation.”

But it’s still not easy.

“Every day I wake up, I choose sacrifice, I choose to pour into others. But I know that I am doing God’s work,” she said. “It’s not, ‘I sacrifice now so I can then vacation on the island later.’ I sacrifice now because God has empowered me and equipped me with skills to be able to solve a particular problem that can have kingdom impact.”

Explore more about sacrifice and follow Cummings’s story in The Praxis Course.

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Brett Hagler is dreaming of a new house.

Blooming plants greet you on the stoop, where the red tile roof points to a gentle peak. Sunlight beams through tall glass doors into the living room and across the warm-wood kitchen.

Out front, sidewalks stretch on both sides of the street, dotted with kids playing soccer and neighbors strolling into town.

It’s a house worth saving for. Even better, it’s a place worth calling home.

Hagler knows what it’ll take to get there. He’s calculated construction costs and timelines. He’s researched the municipal hurdles around titling and utilities. He’s added up the mortgage estimates and financing fees. This is a life-changing investment.

Only it’s not for him. This is Hagler’s dream for thousands of working-class families stuck in Mexico’s housing crisis, who have never had more buying power or fewer opportunities to buy.

Hagler’s new company, Hometown Equity, launches this month. They aim to build the kind of development the region has never seen done right: entire towns designed for the middle class. It’s a bet that housing can be fairly priced, beautiful, and profitable at once.

If it works, families will feel the difference for generations.

Hagler understands what a good home means to a family. As co-founder of the housing nonprofit New Story, he saw the cascading impact of homeownership in real time. He recalls a grandmother in El Salvador whose home made it possible for her daughter to go to college, secure a corporate job with benefits, and start her own family from a position of stability.

“I became more and more convicted in the power of what a home can do,” Hagler said.

It’s a conviction he shares with his Hometown co-founder, Enrique Mezo Herrera, an entrepreneur with a background in Mexican housing and finance who previously served as managing director of investments at New Story.

“For many families, buying a home is not only the biggest purchase in their life,” Herrera said. “It will be the cornerstone of social mobility for them and for generations to come.”

While others in development focus on healthcare, education, jobs, and justice, Hagler and Herrera are inspired by the transformative power of real estate. Housing, they believe, is what advances families from cycles of poverty to security and social mobility. And hometowns can do that at scale, for hundreds of families and the economies around them. Their goal is 100 hometowns in the next decade, starting with four in the next year.

“I’ve felt called to this hardworking, emerging middle class,” Hagler said. “A lot of charities and churches overlook this demographic because they’re not the poorest, but they’re struggling.”

In Mexico, the middle class is booming, adding 12 million people in the past several years. For the first time, the country’s middle class outnumbers those in poverty. But even with their steady paychecks, these families have been left out of the housing market.

The government moved away from subsidizing real estate developers building affordable housing years ago; private builders now rely on high-dollar urban projects rather than venturing to smaller markets. That leaves the smaller cities where these families live and work with almost no new homes.

“We have had a chance to go across Mexico, across different regions, multiple municipalities, different economic realities, and they all share something,” Herrera said. “There is no one building houses.” New home registrations have dropped by more than half in the past decade, and local efforts to build informally are “insufficient,” he said.

The path to homeownership is long, fragmented, and paved with concrete blocks.

For many small-town buyers, it starts with saving up to buy a plot, sometimes without a legal title, and hiring local masons to build one room at a time. The process takes years. Families live in overcrowded homes with relatives or pay rent on top of funding their build. In the end, they may need high-interest microloans to finish the job. They wait and wait only to end up in lower-quality houses they overpaid for.

Hagler saw a better, simpler path. With Hometown, he envisioned places where the working class could finally put down roots and thrive. That would take more than just a house key. The company had to own the whole process, from titled lots, home builds, and mortgages to neighborhood development.

“It’s way more than the house,” he said. “The house is critical and central, but it’s everything else around it that really shapes how you feel about where you live.”

Not just a home, but a hometown.

Hagler has called a lot of places home. His childhood home in Coral Springs, Florida. His fraternity house at Florida State University. His first place as a young founder in Atlanta, where he met the Christian investor who made him want to go back to church.

From there, he focused his entrepreneurial ambition on making an impact. Hagler began taking mission trips to Haiti and El Salvador. The idea of home felt completely different after he met families huddled in tents with dirt floors or one-room buildings. They were missing even the most basic markers of home. No privacy, no electricity, no clean water, no safety.

“Housing is so much the foundation of how we live our daily life, and it’s easy to take for granted,” Hagler said. “When you don’t have a stable or safe home, it takes away from the big and small moments of life: having dinner with your family, having privacy to study for school, being able to actually sleep at night.”

Hagler began New Story in 2014, and over 12 years as CEO, the organization helped more than 5,000 households secure better places to live. A fresh-faced founder in his mid-20s, Hagler dreamt big and acted boldly. When his nonprofit startup went through Y Combinator in 2015, they crowdfunded 100 homes in 100 days. In 2017, New Story joined the Praxis Accelerator.

“For the right founder, with the right posture, what young and inexperienced translates into is humility and optimism,” said Praxis Co-Founder & CEO Dave Blanchard. Hagler, now 37, “has been able to parlay his learning and confidence and optimism into bigger and bigger challenges.”

A Praxis connection led to New Story’s collaboration with ICON to become the first to 3D print homes for families in poverty, and the org earned Fast Company’s “most innovative” designation four times. The real shift came as the nonprofit adapted their model from philanthropy to market-based solutions to give families access to land and financing.

New Story began financing a local developer to build new communities for these families. In Ahualulco de Mercado, a Mexican town where only 39 affordable homes had sold in the previous five years, the partnership helped 340 families secure land titles and went on to start over 2,300 housing lots.

Along the way, Hagler kept meeting a different kind of family—teachers, drivers, and shopkeepers who saved to buy land and build but had no options where they lived and worked. So he did something he never planned: He left the growing, impactful nonprofit he co-founded and decided to launch something new.

Praxis has partnered with hundreds of founders building ventures in response to major societal issues, and Blanchard has seen many through similar transitions. The longer founders work on one problem, the more they find to work on, and the more willing they are to take a risk and start again.

Hagler, who returned to Praxis as an entrepreneur in residence this year, had “described New Story as an R&D project around global shelter,” Blanchard said. “It is a sort of inevitability, from my perspective, that a market-based, for-profit solution is an opportunity for Brett to step into, as a result of a lot of exploration that needed to be done through philanthropy.”

With Hometown, the company handles everything from titled land to finished homes and financing. Hagler thinks of the whole town as the product. Each master plan centers on a town square with amenities like a health clinic, childcare center, church, and cafes. At about 500 homes, each community is meant to be big enough to support local businesses and a sense of identity, and small enough to feel like home. The goal, Hagler said, is something “beautiful to the customer and beautiful to the town.”

The vision for Hometown is as exciting as it is unthinkable. Some people have told the founders they’re crazy. Why not build condos in Los Cabos or high-rises in Mexico City? “Of course, it would be easier doing condos and hotels and golf courses,” Herrera said.

Mexico’s small towns are used to getting exploited, receiving charity, or being overlooked for development entirely. Blanchard said challenges with corruption and law enforcement have at times kept outside capital away from the region. “It needs sacrificial leaders like Brett to step in and say, ‘I’m going to do this the right way,’” he said. “‘I’m going to bring values-oriented capital, and I’m going to come in with compassion and care, but also in a way that builds the economy.’”

Buyers start with a monthly payment plan for their lot, and that payment history and land ownership turn into credit and collateral for a future mortgage. For informal workers who haven’t opened a bank account or been able to secure loans before, this could become their first step into formal finance. The company’s leaders see a chance to serve as their trusted source of financial services, offering mortgages, small business loans, and insurance.

Hometown prioritizes customer trust and plans to be open about their finances, margins, and interest rates—nothing subsidized, but nothing unfair. “Everyone in Mexico knows someone that has been scammed in real estate,” Herrera said. “The developer never delivered on time, or the quality was bad, or the worst is, they truly never delivered.”

During a housing push in the 1990s and 2000s, large developers built huge subdivisions packed with cheap homes on the far outskirts of major cities, many financed through Infonavit, the national worker housing fund. Today at least 842,000 of those homes have gone unpaid, according to Spanish newspaper El País. Many were too far from jobs, and some were never connected to basic utilities. Families left, homes were stripped to concrete shells, and organized crime took hold in some abandoned developments.

“We are building houses, not cities, and that is one of the causes of the housing problem we face today,” UN-Habitat representative Fernanda Lonardoni told the paper.

Hometown is building differently. The company is targeting smaller cities of 20,000 to 150,000 people, on land within a short ride of existing jobs. Hagler brings experience working alongside municipalities, building the kind of trust with local leaders that many of those earlier developments never had. Herrera said mayors in the north told them, “Guys, you’re welcome. If you’re going to do this, we want to support you, because no one else is doing this.”

The incentives are different, too. The builders before them made their money from home sales, often backed by government loans and subsidies, and moved on. Hometown’s success depends on what happens after families move in. Residents who love where they live keep paying their mortgages, take out loans for a business or a second story, and can vouch for the company’s reputation as they grow into neighboring areas. What’s good for families is good for investors.

A Venn diagram on a slide deck from Hometown places their business in the middle of three circles: “Makes someone’s life better,” “Needed and undersupplied,” and “profitable.” Hagler repeats mantras like “capital and community” and “beauty matters.”

Herrera said the team has to resist imposing their own vision. “We’re going into towns in which we do not live, and we’re not part of their communities,” he said. “We need to be humble, and we need to make sure that what we’re doing is relevant for the people that are going to live there.”

The homes are meant to be desirable and lasting, not just affordable. “I think every human being appreciates design,” Hagler said. The Mexico City-based architecture firm Cuaik CDS developed master plans for the first homes, sharing Hometown’s commitment to “balancing architectural quality and affordability,” according to founder Santiago Cuaik.

For this market, the biggest draw, they found, is room to grow. Homes start small and are built to take a second or third story as a family’s income and needs expand, with “flexible spaces that adapt naturally as families grow,” Cuaik said.

The company is scouting their first hometown locations in the northern states of Coahuila and Chihuahua and central states of Hidalgo and Puebla, evaluating each for location, infrastructure, and local employment. These are regions tied closely to the US economy. “Agricultural products harvested in central Mexico, 18 or 24 hours after, are being presented in a Whole Foods in Manhattan,” Herrera said. Jobs have drawn workers from across the country, “and then there are no houses.”

Backed by a $6.5 million seed round, Hometown plans to break ground on its first communities in the year ahead, each with around 500 homes. Within two years, they aim to launch 10 hometowns and sell a combined 4,000 lots and homes.

The long-term goal goes beyond Mexico to 100 hometowns across Latin America in 10 years, alongside a thriving financial services business for the working class. It’s an ambitious plan for a team of a half-dozen, working out of their new office in Polanco, an upscale neighborhood in Mexico City.

Hagler has likened the business model to Walmart skipping urban centers to build in smaller communities. And former Walmart International CEO Kathryn McLay sees similar opportunities in their strategy.

“Hometown’s purpose to be a company that helps families create ownership, dignity, and long-term value distinguishes it from other organizations that extract a risk-factored premium from the underserved,” said McLay, an investor in the company. “Hometown’s ability to consider risk differently is transformative.”

The vertical integration model, which allows them to control quality and standards, also puts more of the risk back on the company. And the history of Mexican housing shows what’s at stake if they get it wrong.

“It’s not cheap, it’s capital intensive, it takes real risk to try, and you have to go through a lot to create something and make it happen,” Hagler said. “There’s so much that we’re going to do that’s stepping out in faith, trusting that God will bring the people and resources to make it happen.”

This is the attitude Hagler is known for. Ready to go big and try something new. Herrera said he’s the cautious one compared to his co-founder. “This is really difficult. This is precision work,” he said. “But at the same time, if it doesn’t feel risky or uncomfortable, then it’s not worth it.”

Photography by James Fitzgerald III for Praxis. Renderings by Cuaik CDS.

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Jessica Kim thought she knew how callings work.

Growing up, she learned that when God gave you a vision, it was up to you to work hard and make it happen. Her parents would encourage her, asking, “If not you, then who?”

Raised in a Korean American church, Kim’s convictions deepened as she professed faith as a teenager. She went off to college eager to live for God.

With each idea, she knew what to do: Say yes, and go after it with her all.

First it was a baking business, started out of Kim’s dorm room at Brown University back in the mid-1990s. Fueled by Kim’s bold confidence and can-do hustle, Jessica’s Wonders raised $1 million her senior year. The company grew into national distribution, selling banana bread in baskets labeled with John 3:16.

Then came a corporate career and another startup, BabbaCo., which curated activity boxes for kids. Once again, Kim went all in. Sleeping just a few hours a night as a young mom, Kim did whatever it took to hit the metrics, raise the funds, and grow the brand.

“What I felt was this pressure to succeed for God, that all of this was given to me and that I had to be a good steward of it,” she said. “And slowly and very powerfully, my definition of success started getting very blurry.”

Years in, Kim realized she’d been approaching calling all wrong. God wasn’t setting up opportunities to prove that she could achieve something great on her own; he was inviting her to work with him. She released the pent-up stress and expectations and broke down in tears.

Like vocation—derived from the Latin term for voice—the word calling evokes hearing a call, a message summoned by another. The term has referred to everything from calls to pastoral ministry to the search for personal career paths.

People already feel pressure to find a job that brings them financial success and personal fulfillment, and for Christians, the idea of their own individualized calling can add spiritual weight to that pressure.

“The Church has absorbed and assimilated the cultural message about pursuing your passion, following your passion, and fulfilling your dreams,” said Karen Swallow Prior, author of You Have a Calling: Finding Your Vocation in the True, Good, and Beautiful. “When the Church is having these conversations, we have to be very careful that we’re not just repeating what the culture says.”

While Scripture is full of instances of people called to particular professions, places, and roles, a biblical understanding of calling doesn’t depend on career trajectories or personal satisfaction, Prior writes. The primary call for God’s people is more fundamental: to bear the image of the Creator.

Bearing God’s image—and working to restore it in the places in the world that are dark and broken—extends across every area of life, for all of life. And people also have what Andy Crouch calls “contingent callings,” which change based on the settings and circumstances they happen to be in.

“Think of all the big things that are the way they are in our lives. Every one is an invitation. How do I bear the image here?,” asked Crouch, Partner for Theology & Culture at Praxis. “That is, how do I cultivate and create in a way that would honor God with what I’ve got contingently today, and how do I restore the image?”

“What’s broken in the world that I inhabit, which no one else inhabits? No one else is going to be able to do this for me. Only I can play the role I play in my family. Only I have the job I have in my workplace, and there’s some image bearing and some image restoring that only I can do today,” he said.

Jessica Kim’s roles changed dramatically in 2014, when her parents moved from New Jersey to live with her family in Boston while her mother received treatment for pancreatic cancer.

“I ended up quitting my job for the first time ever in my life, in my career, to be her full-time caregiver,” Kim said. “I just couldn’t be up at 1am, 3am, 4am, and taking her to all of her appointments while still working and having three kids that were ages ten, seven, and five.”

The youngest of three, Kim cared for her mom, eventually seeing her through a period of hospice and two grueling months of active dying. This was the calling before her for a season. And it’s one that more Americans also find themselves in, with 10 percent of US adults caring for an aging parent and the vast majority of hospice patients being cared for by a relative at home.

Caretaking ultimately left Kim drained. She felt the weight of her mother’s death, compounded by her anger at a healthcare system that did so little to extend support. The two-time founder never expected that this experience would lead to her next venture. She balked at the idea.

“Are you kidding me? What I went through and what’s happening and what millions of people go through is not a business,” she said. “This is like a cultural issue. Our society is broken. We don’t know how to show up for each other. This is not a product or service, and it is absolutely not a business.”

But Kim kept thinking about it. She dove into research around hospitals, the history of palliative care, and technology in healthcare. She read scholarly journals and poetry by 85-year-old patients.

And once again, an idea stirred. She saw an opportunity, not to optimize or outsource caregiving, but to build caregivers a support system. She named her next venture “I am not alone” care, Ianacare.

Not every difficult season results in a new venture or vocation. But suffering can lead people into callings they never otherwise imagined. In her book on calling, Prior brings up how even though people associate passion with love and excitement, the term itself also means “suffering.”

Calling can come with a sense of ease and reassurance—“I’m doing what I’m meant to do”—but no guarantees of success. In fact, the more people advance in their calling, the more likely they are to face profound brokenness within it, said Crouch. At that point they have to ask themselves whether they will enter further into suffering to help bring about restoration and redemption.

Praxis Co-Founder and CEO Dave Blanchard worked with Kim as she considered developing a caregiving venture as an entrepreneur-in-residence back in 2017. Kim said even though she initially wasn’t interested in a startup around caregiving, Blanchard saw “what was stirring in her heart” and invited her to explore the idea, no pressure. Nine months later, she realized he was right.

Blanchard said, “Some of the most inspiring individuals I’ve had the chance to work with are folks who have said, ‘How can this suffering that I’ve experienced be prevented in some small or large manner for others? Maybe I will step back into this thing that I very much don’t want to be a part of but suffered through, and unlock possibility and freedom for others.’”

Kim approached Ianacare differently than her other ventures. There was no gritting it out, no expert solutions to land for the complexities of caregiving and the surrounding grief. She found herself growing more dependent on God and community. Rather than chasing quick success, she set her eyes on the longer-term impact that could resonate for generations.

Over the past nine years, Ianacare has grown to serve more than 50,000 families and become an approved partner in a new Medicare program supporting dementia caregivers. The company has seen its core belief lived out: Families who are supported in caregiving see better outcomes for both patients and caregivers.

Kim also went from the founder of a resource for caregivers to a caregiver herself once again, as her dad neared the end of his life and died from congestive heart failure two years ago.

“A lot of founders create something that they wish they had in hindsight, and I had this unique opportunity to experience Ianacare as I was caring for my dad,” she said. “Even though I was still physically alone at 2 am or 4 am, caring for him, I didn’t feel emotionally alone and that makes a huge difference. The system is still complex and there was a lot to navigate, but I knew who to call and what to ask.”

What she went through hit hard, further proof of her belief that “caregiving is not something to be solved.” After the loss, things got so dark for Kim that she wondered whether she could continue to lead the company.

She turned to the network she built with Ianacare, people who knew her pain. The only answer, she found, was to lean into the suffering together.

“If we can be a neighbor in pain, that is where the true ministry begins. And that is what we’re called to do,” she said. “God shows us all the time that he calls those in pain to be with others, that he’s with us in that. So that is truly what it means to be not alone is that in your darkest moments, in your most painful moments, that you have someone who understands and who will be just still with you.”

Explore more about calling and follow Kim’s story in The Praxis Course.

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We’ve clocked in at 9-to-5s and checked the boxes. Hustled and worked our way up. Plodded through long weeks and celebrated wins. And still, many people in today’s workforce wonder, is this it?

Last year, Gallup found that workers in the US are more likely to consider themselves “struggling” than “thriving,” and many feel “stuck” in their jobs. A recent Fast Company headline declared, “The New Burnout isn’t about working too much. It’s about working without meaning.”

Something bigger is stirring in this cultural moment. People are longing to do work that matters, and the world around us is full of places in desperate need of repair. It’s time for an awakening of faith in action. The Church needs a revival of not only our hearts but our hands and minds.

Faith in action has been at the heart of our work at Praxis (and the meaning of our name). Our organization has spent the past 15 years supporting founders, funders, and innovators who put their faith in action to address the major issues of our time. We’ve watched these leaders build their ventures as a demonstrated apologetic, a lived-out witness of the love that God has for the world and the love that we’re to have for our neighbors.

“People I never knew existed were doing work and taking risks and building beautiful things that I’d really not heard anybody talk about but that made so much sense of what the Bible said and the Christian account of the world,” said Dave Blanchard, Praxis Co-Founder & CEO. “An alternative imagination came into view, a way to see good ideas not merely as economically good but as culturally good.”

Over time, we realized the formational ideas within our community—on sacrifice, generosity, creativity, mission, and risk—didn’t just apply to early-stage startups. They stemmed from a far more universal calling for the Church.

“It wasn’t just a way to see, but it was a way to live and a way to work,” Blanchard said. “Full risk and imagination and sacrifice and a sort of eternal optimism, maybe even to the point of what the world would call foolishness—I came to believe that these things aren’t just permissible for Christians, they’re vital to life with Christ.”

We made The Praxis Course to bring more people into this way of thinking, where the gospel shapes why we work, how we work, and what we choose to work on. We see our work as a chance to join God in the renewal of all things.

These are big ideas, like God’s-bigger-story big. We need them because we’ve got a lot of baggage around vocation and calling to overcome. Too many of us are burnt out, disengaged, and cynical. We can unwittingly buy into the divide between “sacred” and “secular” work or even feel-good aphorisms like “do what you love.” We can work faithfully and diligently without seeing the potential around us. We can miss the holy invitation God extends to us to create, renew, and restore.

We’re releasing The Praxis Course as a video-based small group course about vocation, calling, and mission. This is Praxis’s biggest production yet, and our widest invitation to the broader church. We’ve seen similar offerings transform church life—things like the Alpha Course for evangelism, the Bible Project for engaging Scripture, and Practicing the Way for spiritual formation. We hope that The Praxis Course can awaken imagination for redemptive action, equipping followers of Jesus to build and renew culture wherever they are.

Formation happens in community, so we designed the Course for groups to take together. Imagination precedes action, so it combines theological teaching and real-life examples, concluding each session with ways to put it into practice. Finally, we believe God guides our quests, so we built in time to listen, pray, and consider what’s next.

We’ve seen the redemptive way—our call to creative restoration through sacrifice—change lives, friendships, and vocations. We believe this reawakened imagination can go on to transform our neighborhoods, communities, workplaces, and world.

In the words of Dave Blanchard, “God’s people have always been at their best, the most on mission, when they’ve been a counterculture for the common good, working faithfully and imaginatively, often in contrast to the spirit of their age, to love their neighbors.”

Before we can change the world, before we can take action, we have to see the opportunities before us, places where our creativity, our sacrifice, could benefit others. That’s what The Praxis Course is for—reshaping your imagination, naming your calling, and taking the next step into the hard and holy work of restoration.

“The world doesn’t just need a few more exceptional entrepreneurs,” Blanchard said. “It needs an awakening among all God’s people, an awakening of what we call redemptive imagination in our ordinary lives and work.”

We’ll be sharing more stories and ideas from The Praxis Course in the coming weeks. You can explore the Course and sign up for free at course.praxis.co.

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We’re sharing some of our favorites from the Praxis archives here on Praxis Press. The following essay is adapted from a plenary talk Andy Crouch, Praxis Partner for Theology & Culture, shared at the 2022 Redemptive Imagination Summit.

An entrepreneur, in essence, is a process innovator with a high tolerance for risk—someone who is willing, or indeed driven, to find a new way to live and work in the world while accepting the possibility or even probability that their new way could fail.

At Praxis, we focus on three dimensions of work. There can be risk-tolerant process innovation in the area of strategy, the goods and services we aim to produce in order to create and capture value, and equally often in the axis of operations, the processes and systems we deploy to see that strategy enacted.

But in many ways, the most fundamental axis is that of leadership, or the deep story by which founders and builders live and make their most important choices. That deep story is at the root of process innovation. So often strategy and operations emerge out of the entrepreneur’s own imagination, rooted in explicit and implicit dreams and assumptions about the direction of our life.

While our society tends to notice and celebrate the innovations in strategy and operations, reshaping our inner story is, in a sense, the ultimate process innovation—and because we generally have very good reasons for holding on to the stories we have been living by, any dramatic change in one’s inner story always involves an element of risk.

Certainly this was true for the character who may be properly seen as the Bible’s Ur-entrepreneur: the scrappy, clever, innovative, and successful nomadic herdsman named Jacob.

Jacob’s ambition, famously, begins even before birth, which gives him his name, “the one who grasps,” as he emerges grasping onto his twin brother’s heel, wrestling for first place. Jacob’s great ambition in life is to gain the birthright that eluded him at the beginning.

He is nothing if not entrepreneurial in his pursuit. As a young man, he’s cooking a stew when his older brother Esau comes into the tent famished from his work in the fields. Jacob makes an Innovation Bargain with him. Now you’ll be able to eat right away, you’ll no longer have to be hungry, at the small price that you’ll no longer be able to exercise your birthright. It’s a bargain that Esau, in his hunger, is willing to take.

At the end of their father Isaac’s life, when Isaac can hardly see, comes the time for the patriarchal blessing. The father’s hand on the son’s head, the words that will set the son’s course toward prosperity. And against the odds, with impressive innovation under pressure, and with a certain utilitarian indifference to justice and the truth, Jacob gets the blessing. He would make a great founder.

Not long ago a venture capitalist said on Twitter, “Elon Musk is divorced. Jeff Bezos is divorced. Bill Gates is divorced. For now on, I’m only investing in people who are getting divorced.” He was joking—I think.

In Jacob’s case, though his ambition does not lead to marital divorce, it does lead to rupture, serious enough that he and his brother decisively part ways. And then comes a day when Jacob realizes that the decades of distance are about to end. The gap is closing. Esau is approaching, with who knows how many men with him.

Jacob, who has amassed his own retinue over the years, starts sending gifts ahead, flocks of sheep and goats, trying to overcome what cannot be undone. Eventually he has sent everything ahead, and he’s left alone by the ford of the Jabbok.

That night, a man comes and wrestles with him. The wrestling match ends at dawn with a blessing and a brief tap on the hip, so that the man who relied on his charm will for the rest of his life walk with a limp.

And with the wrestling match by the Jabbok, something changes in Jacob’s story. He’s given a new name, for one thing. His original name meant “he who grasps”—grasping the heel, going for the brass ring, striving for first place. His new name, Israel, means something like “he who strives with God” or “he wrestles with God”—or, equally possibly, “the one with whom God strives.”

“I have seen God face to face and lived,” Jacob says.

But who is God exactly? How much does Jacob really know of the God of his grandfather Abraham, the Fear of Isaac? This is just Genesis, after all—just the beginning of a very long story that will change everything we might have assumed about the one we call “God.”

If you keep reading Genesis, the conflicts in this story are by no means all wrapped up by the end. Esau and Jacob meet, briefly. They share a strained conversation. And then Esau leaves. The brothers never return to one other. The rupture is not really repaired. Jacob’s own sons will go on to replay his life’s drama, the competition to get into first place, the quest to be the favorite brother, a story with its own fraternal violence and its own uneasy, partial reconciliation at the end.

This story, we now believe, is the beginning of a much longer story than Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jacob’s sons could imagine. This story would culminate in the firstborn of all creation becoming one humbly born, emptying himself, not grasping anything, taking on the form not just of a younger brother but of a slave, humbling himself even to death on a cross.

Who was it that Jacob was wrestling with? Was he wrestling with that very One whose story was going to be the absolute inversion of his story, the untelling of Jacob’s story—the One who, instead of grasping everything, would grasp nothing? Was Jacob wrestling with the One whose obedience unto death would repair all the rupture of the world?

Who are you, God? Is this what you are like? Is this who you are? And if this is who you are, what does that mean for who I am?

One of the great gifts of my life was my friendship with David Sacks, who died of cancer when we were both 45 years old. He was an artist, a creator, a builder, and a very, very good friend.

David, his wife Angie, and their four children were creative, charismatic people whose lives overflowed with opportunity and abundance. Then came David’s diagnosis in 2011. For about a year, medical technology made a real difference, extending David’s life far beyond what we could have initially hoped. But even the best charms wear off.

In April 2013 came the last week of David’s life—also the most amazing week of my life, in some ways, to this very day. Because David and Angie invited my wife, Catherine, me, and just a handful of others into their master bedroom, where David lay in bed, silent and weak. We prayed and waited and sang and waited.

I drove the mile back to our home by myself several nights that week. Some of those nights, I raged at God. I have mostly disciplined myself, I think for good reasons, such that with other human beings I almost never use profanity. But I at certain moments, alone with God, I do.

The last night, however, as I drove home, I suddenly found myself saying aloud, “God, this is blessing. I don’t think I’ve known what blessing was before. I’ve never been this close to suffering and to death. But I’ve also never been this close to blessing.”

I realized that night that all the things we often tag as “blessed” have little or nothing to do with blessing. They’re just charms.

David’s life had been charmed in many ways, a fortunate life, a prosperous life, an enviable life. My life, too, has been charmed, even to this day. But charmed is not the same thing as blessed.

What is our story, charmed or blessed? And if we have been living the wrong story, who will teach us the true one?

There are people who are not charmed—never have been and never will be. We need these people in our lives. There are countless people—among them infants, elders, the very sick, the profoundly disabled—who do not contribute “productively” to our world of money and power.

Anyone who is ethically serious knows that each one of them deserves our love and our help in living as full a life as they possibly can. They are fully human, image bearers. Love requires that we invest anything we can for any such persons, as much as is within our power, so that they may flourish.

But they do not just need our help. We need theirs. It is precisely the uncharmed, the uncharming, and the uncharmable who have something all of us need. At their side and in their presence, there is something that we need, that our communities need, for real health.

One of the most demonic features of any society—I use that word demonic quite intentionally—is to exclude from view and from life those who are visibly dependent, those who are visibly bearing with suffering, as if we somehow could just wish away that level of difficulty and dependence.

It can be difficult to be in the presence of the uncharmed. It’s not efficient. It’s not very useful, sometimes, it seems. But those who have learned to learn from them testify that God is with them.

And if God is with them, perhaps God also will be with us. The charms in our life are, almost by definition, temporary. Youth is a charm. Beauty is a charm. Many things we grasp after, many things we chase with all our might, are charms. But the uncharmed know that there is something on the other side.

Year after year, we experience charmed moments in our lives, only to go back to wrestling. But everything hangs on what kind of wrestling we are doing—striving to grasp the heel to get ahead, or wrestling with the One who wants to give us a limp and a better name. All the energy and capacity of our life will ultimately be channeled in one of these two directions, shaped by the deep story we choose—or, if we are given grace like Jacob, the deep story that chooses us.

We’re sharing some of our favorites from the Praxis archives here on Praxis Press. The following article was written in 2023 by Scott Kauffmann, Venture Partner and former Partner for Content, in collaboration with Andy Crouch and RuthAnn Deveney.

How do you capture a complex set of ideas and practices in a single adjective? The trick is to place an idea at the center that connects to other adjacent ideas in interesting ways. Think about conscious capitalism, impact philanthropy, child-centered education, lifestyle business. We have green dentistry, slow food, fast fashion, guerrilla marketing, and lean startups.

This challenge is notable within the Christian community. Ultimately to be Christian is to share a common center—Christ. But to do strategic work in the world requires clear and compelling differentiation. In our work at Praxis we frequently encounter adjectives like Christ-centered, gospel-centered, kingdom-building, faith-driven, biblical, missional, orthodox, disciple-making, Spirit-filled—and we affirm them all. Put any of these in front of “entrepreneurship,” and we would say without reservation that it describes the aim (and, we hope, the reality) of our community.

The name we’ve given to our mission—redemptive entrepreneurship—draws on all these theologically rich ideas, while bringing particular convictions to the center of attention. Our main goal, of course, is right there in the word “praxis,” the Greek word for “action,” putting ideas into practice. We’ve found that the word redemptive is exceptionally good at helping people put their faith into action in a complex world.

Redemptive does this in at least four ways: It forms, it challenges, it elevates, and it bridges.

Redemptive forms by giving us a pattern to follow in our work.

In God’s great story of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration, Christ’s redemptive work—his creative restoration through sacrifice—is the hinge of it all, the place where the action turns. The Redemptive label helps Christians enter and remember that story and see how we are implicated in every part of it: We can create because God designed us to; we are fallen and have been redeemed in love; and God has done this (in part) so that we can participate with him in the restoration of all things.

By locating our life’s work inside this story, we’re moved and motivated; our reason and imagination are engaged; and we’re led to build habits and practices that help us play our part in the story. Christ’s work to save the world sets a pattern we can follow to serve the world.

To us, this story-pattern captures the essence of our vocation in an even more powerful and actionable way than saying (for example) we seek to “honor God” or “bring the kingdom” in our jobs; or even to “work according to biblical principles” or “integrate our faith and work.” All these formulations are biblical and helpful, but we have found that the Redemptive idea has greater motivational and formative power for us and most people we encounter.

So Redemptive forms us through a pattern containing all these moves: It places our work in a story: God is redeeming all things—in us, for us, and in a limited but real way, through us. It calls out a motivation for our work: we love others because he first loved us.

It gives us a reason for our work: the world is broken and needs repair, and that’s part of our job. It activates our imagination for our work: what might repair look like in this area of the world? It spurs us to action in our work: we create, build, risk, cultivate, sacrifice, restore.

Redemptive challenges beyond the Exploitative and even the Ethical in our work.

Redemptive draws on the story at the heart of the Christian faith; yet being a “Christian leader” is no guarantee of acting redemptively. Indeed, we all know of Christian leaders (and organizations) who fall into Exploitative patterns: seeking their own gain at the expense of others; building a brand or persona of trust while privately and knowingly violating that trust; falling for the “nobility trap” of manipulating people and evading accountability in the name of our rightfully noble aims—all in the name and pursuit of good things, even godly things.

That we can fall into Exploitative patterns is what our theology of sin and human nature would lead us to expect. Selfishness—the hallmark of the Exploitative—is the default human approach to the world. As fallen creatures we seek our own glory, our own will. We turn good things into ultimate things and pursue these idols instead of God, for they easily promise us what we deeply seek: approval, comfort, power, and control. We are all partially blind to these patterns in our lives. So, though no one sets out to operate in an Exploitative way, no one—regardless of their faith commitments—is immune to actually operating that way some of the time.

“Christian”—as the saying goes—is indeed a wonderful noun and an almost meaningless adjective. We need reminding that we will be known for our fruit (Matthew 7:16) and not for our faith label.

When we introduce entrepreneurs and leaders to the Redemptive Frame, the first uncomfortable truth we teach is that we are also implicated in the Exploitative way. In addition to lamenting the brokenness around us, we will have to root out and repent of the places in our own life where we may be taking advantage of others (even unwittingly) by living for ourselves. Redemptive reminds us and challenges us that the Exploitative way is always available to us, lurking in our blind spots to tempt us, no matter what kind of spiritual pedigree we may carry.

Though we all lapse into the Exploitative way, almost all people set out to work in an Ethical way. Christians, certainly, rightly believe that our faith directs us to work with integrity and honesty; to do no harm in our organizational lives; to treat others with respect and fairness; to go above and beyond in work ethic and service; to invest in good causes including ministries; to partner with people we can trust; and to pursue excellence in everything we do.

This high calling to a profoundly Ethical standard is vital for the person of faith. As Tim Keller puts it in Every Good Endeavor,

Redemptive stakes its claim on the idea that our world-story as Christians gives us the resources to work through and beyond the Ethical as an expression and demonstration of the gospel. The Redemptive way is a bet that as we grasp our true identity in Christ, we can trust him enough to tolerate more risk for the sake of others; that we can dare to act not only with respect and kindness, but with grace and even love; that we can operate not only in mutuality and fairness but in generosity and even sacrifice.

To be Redemptive, then, is to be always Ethical—and sometimes noticeably, maybe even radically more than that. We can always make our work a demonstration of the (redemptive) power of the gospel, whether or not it ever involves a literal declaration of that gospel.

Redemptive elevates by addressing all three dimensions of work.

The 3 Dimensions of Work in the Redemptive Frame, as applied to organizations, are:

• Strategy—what we build in the world to create value for stakeholders

• Operations—how we build by organizing people, processes, and resources to deliver the strategy

• Leadership—why we build as leaders, pursuing some “script” for success and identity

Here we focus on the Strategy axis—the cultural impact of our work. Many serious Christians care a good deal about why they work, and about how they work, but many don’t reserve the same kind of attention for what they work on. They want to do things they find interesting and that are not harmful to the world, but that may be the end of their imaginative ambition in this area.

Yet what we work on—and how its effects ripple through the culture—is indeed a great missional opportunity for the church in this cynical and suspicious age. Are the products and services we offer humanizing and lasting, or are they addictive and fleeting? Do our brands and stories appeal to our virtue and hope, or to our fear and desire for status? Do they contribute to delight and contentment, or are they engineered to overdeliver margin and underdeliver value? In the end, do we build cultural products in order to join God in the renewal of all things, or merely to do no greater harm to the world than our competitors?

Yes, these questions of cultural consequences will take on different meanings for an insurance adjuster, a baker, a filmmaker, and a nonprofit worker. But they apply to all those people in some way. Redemptive culture making is not the domain of just the “social entrepreneurs,” artists, and humanitarians. To believe this—and many people today seem to do so by default—is to fall into another form of the old sacred–secular divide where “ministry” work was seen as higher than all other kinds of work. There is ministry in all work—especially if those doing the work are intentional not only in how and why we do our work, but also in what happens to the world because we are at work in this way.

There is a redemptive edge to oilfield services and car washes, just as there is for foster care and workforce development. It just takes an uncommon kind of imagination to see these possibilities.

Redemptive bridges to the story behind our work.

Redemptive is not exclusively for Christians; it also offers an invitation or bridge to those around us.

As Christians in a pluralistic society—in Babylon, not in Jerusalem, we might say—we face a missional paradox. Our ultimate allegiance is not to this world, but we are to pray and work for the peace and prosperity of our “city” (Jeremiah 29:7). We gather in the community of faith for formation, fellowship, and preparation, but then we are sent out to serve and love people who do not share our faith.

It’s natural that our public language should reflect this paradox. Generally “faith language” doesn’t come up often at work. Yet there are many times in our work lives, especially as leaders, when we appeal to a cause, a set of values, an ethical standard. In those moments we have the opportunity to communicate and translate our core commitments—giving a reason for the faith that is within us (1 Peter 3:15) in a way that serves as invitation rather than exclusion.

We are likely to be at our most faithful and effective in our mission when our commitments, practices, and language are both familiar and strange to others.

When we explain our motives, practices, or commitments to a friend or colleague, and we say we’re seeking to drive progress, advance the common good, follow a just cause, do the right thing, or be values-based, those terms are familiar but not strange. They will certainly be the right things to say in many settings, but at other times we may be missing opportunities for transparency and witness.

On the other hand, if we were to define our motives or commitments to those around us using theological terms—for example, that we want to be missional, Christ-centered, or gospel-centered in our work—that language may be appropriate in certain settings. It certainly does the first job of naming, to clearly define our center, but it also creates boundaries in a way that is likely to feel exclusive to those around us. It sounds like we’re saying, “I define my work according to my tribe, which doesn’t include you.” It’s strange but not familiar.

The term “redemptive” strikes us as the ideal combination of familiar and strange. While it may feel vaguely religious to some, it also has vaguely universal appeal. People know they respond to redemptive stories—even though most couldn’t explain what they mean by the term. So using language like “redemptive” to describe our personal or organizational purpose can work as the church is meant to work in the world—as a witness, a demonstration, an invitation to an unseen and life-changing reality.

The point here is not to convince you to use the term “redemptive” in your work. Many people in our community have found it very helpful; others prefer to translate using other words. The key is to consider “familiar yet strange” language that builds a bridge to others in pursuit of purpose. Just that step can itself be a small redemptive act—taking a risk to create new space for trust, so that anyone and everyone can bring their deepest convictions into their work.

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Imagine you are an entrepreneur trying to do a new and hard thing in the world. You encounter an investor who is gifted in their craft, unusually patient with you, and transparent about shared goals. They back you because of your mission and challenge you to build a venture that will bring the change you envision, yet clearly value you as a person through persistent care.

This sort of investor—a redemptive investor—has the power to bring abundant and life-giving innovation into the world.

Investing creative capital in entrepreneurial endeavors has been part of our world for centuries. With every great opportunity for exploration and transformation, a group of entrepreneurs races to bring about the change, and a group of backers vies to finance it. This kind of investing is fundamentally an act of shared risk, as investors partner with builders to bring something new to life.

In contrast with the data-driven world of investing in public equities, investing private capital is a much more relational enterprise, occurring within ecosystems of entrepreneurs, individual and institutional co-investors, and other mediating groups such as alumni associations and accelerators.

Two systems have most shaped this field in our generation: venture capital (VC) and impact investing. The creative placement of entrepreneurial capital, as advanced by these two disciplines, has undoubtedly led to immense innovation, considerable social impact, and economic flourishing for many.

Yet redemptive venture investors can reap and spread these benefits while working resolutely against the errors, excesses, and idols that persist downstream of these movements. The core error, we believe, is an impact/returns reversal that distorts the proper relationships among impact, returns, and the trade-offs and risks we take in pursuit of them.

The purpose of money is to accomplish something (impact), not to make more money (returns). And our sustained ability to accomplish anything lasting through business and investing, at least in human terms, depends on our ability to generate returns. These twin realities affirm that impact and returns are inextricably linked—and that they have a rightful ordering.

But this naturally ordered relationship between purpose and returns gets reversed, as money always finds a way of improperly anchoring itself to the primary place in our imagination, hearts, and self-assessment of success. So for nearly all investors—even for self-proclaimed impact investors—the reigning question is “What impact can we get for the returns we’re seeking?” Instead, the governing question for redemptive investors should be closer to “What returns can we get for the impact we’re seeking?”

For the Christian investor, these distinctions are especially stark, given that we are not capital owners pursuing our purposes but stewards pursuing God’s purposes; that we know a great deal about those purposes, even while he gives us freedom to improvise how to pursue them; that what is required of us is not success but faithful obedience; that we are commanded to fight against the pervasive and seductive power of Mammon in our hearts and practices; and that we are called to love God and neighbor in and through the strategic and tactical realities of investing.

For those who see their venture investing as more than just an asset class with a particular type of financial return, but also as a meaningful act of cultural creation, we offer these 6 commitments of redemptive investing:

1. We define a clear mission to guide our investing, focusing our attention on sectors and issues that activate our curiosity and heart for restoration. Through learning, discernment, and design, we create a set of market and cultural theses to help us direct our resources to the most strategic activities and opportunities. Instead of responding mainly to attractive returns or trusting in our own wisdom, we pray for our work to be the servant of a prophetic imagination, recognizing that God’s plan for the world far exceeds our own vision.

2. We design an investment portfolio aimed at building a redemptive future as expressed in our mission and theses. Instead of seeking a target return profile with a relatively agnostic approach to impact, we invest along a spectrum of meaningful risk/return expectations and across multiple theses for the flourishing of individuals, communities, and creation.

3. We establish deal terms and fund structures that align interests as well as growth and timing expectations with the entrepreneurs we back, avoiding practices that leverage our power solely for our advantage and innovating toward generosity and inclusion in venture economics. Whether in deal-by-deal terms or through new funds and alternative investment approaches, we create mutual clarity regarding the ramifications of the capital on the long-term health of the enterprise and its founders.

4. We develop trusting and generative partnerships with our co-investors, sources of capital, investment team, and others in our sphere of work. Instead of seeking merely to maximize our take, we create shared value and earn deep trust, allowing less powerful players to glean investment opportunities and keeping in view all the persons and relationships involved in a healthy investing ecosystem.

5. We treat entrepreneurs as eternal persons with unconditional worth. Instead of deploying them as instruments to create wealth or even impact, we relate to them from our earliest interactions as image-bearers, seeking to deepen our relationship with them as we become more involved in their ventures. We look for ways to love and serve them irrespective of our financial interest, recognizing that founding a venture is a uniquely vulnerable activity that provides extraordinary opportunities for personal and spiritual growth, as well as real dangers. We help them avoid the exploitative, master the ethical, and pursue the redemptive in their dealings with us and other investors, as well as through their venture as a whole. We accompany them in ways that bring lasting personal transformation for them and for us, whatever the outcome of our investment.

6. ‍We cultivate a sense of worth that is separate from our role, results, and resources as a funder, through the lifelong process of surrendering to God our actual or potential wealth and influence. Rather than measure our value through a financial scorecard, we develop the bedrock assurance that our identity rests in our own redemption—having been “bought with a price.” Over time, as we invest out of a deep sense of our vocation, we aim to be freed from anxiety and hurry, to become more evidently joyful and dependent, and to leave a legacy of love.

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Technology is a major part of the story we are living in and responsible for as redemptive entrepreneurs. Many members of our community work directly in tech ventures, and more broadly, we all depend on technology in our professional and personal lives. And yet technology prompts a great deal of ambivalence even in those who build it and benefit from it.

Many of us sense, at the very least, that we need to be thoughtful and intentional about the devices and systems we are building and adopting—that technology is not in fact “neutral” but can sometimes actively undermine human flourishing, even when in other cases it seems to bring great benefits.

The moment you question any given technological development, though, you run into a powerful implicit idea, an idea whose ability to impede healthy thinking and reflection is matched only by how totally it is taken for granted most of the time. It is the belief that the story of technology fundamentally advances along one single line from “primitive” to “advanced.”

From the basic tools developed early in human history, through the machines, devices, and platforms available to us today, and continuing on into an imagined future, this progression seems like it is going one direction. To call into question what is happening as it occurs seems futile: “the genie is out of the bottle.” There are more genies about to come out of more bottles, and to raise any questions about this proliferation of genies seems to amount to saying that we want to go back to a previous point on a linear timeline of progress.

I think this assumption is mistaken.

Two stories of technology

There is not just one story of technology playing out in the world—there are two.

The first is the ancient story, coextensive with human history, of tools, through which human beings extend our heart-soul-mind-strength capacities in the world. Initially, tools extended our physical strength, but eventually, tools like pencils or typewriters extended our mind through the ability to write down and work out thoughts. We can extend our hearts using musical instruments.

This story has been playing itself out from the very beginning, and continues to play itself out to the present day. We continue to find new ways to extend our heart-soul-mind-strength capabilities.

What is new—at least in some ways—is a second story.

This chart is not to scale, because the first story is tens of thousands of years old, while the second story—borrowing the language of the philosopher Albert Borgmann, the device story—is a very recent development. In software terms, we’d call it a “fork” in our cultural and social operating system, introduced into the collective human repository a mere hundred or so years ago.

What separates tools from devices can be stated plainly: tools require and reward human involvement, while devices bypass and replace it. Human beings use tools, and tools are used by human beings. But devices are distinguished by the fact that as they progress, they require less and less human involvement to operate.

They are built on two great discoveries: sources of autonomous power that do not depend on human or animal bodies (above all hydrocarbons, their latent power channeled initially through steam and then electricity and eventually electronics), and what we broadly call cybernetics, the ability to create self-governing systems that modulate their own action in response to the world around them. By harnessing autonomous power and cybernetics, devices set themselves free of us and start operating on their own. We don’t use devices in the same sense that we use tools.

This story, like the tool story, is also “progressing” in that devices are becoming more and more autonomous, more and more impressive, over time. And this story is playing itself out at the same time as we continue to extend human capabilities directly through tools.

The big difference is that as tools improve and advance, human skill also improves and advances. But as devices improve and advance, human skill becomes less and less required, to the point of atrophy, as the world begins—beautifully and perhaps magically?—to operate on its own.

The Innovation Bargain

Both of these stories involve trade-offs: choices we make about what is good, what is better, and what good things are worth giving up for some better thing.

I propose we call this set of trade-offs the Innovation Bargain. It identifies a set of consequences that come along with almost every tool and device.

We adopt most every innovation on the basis of two basic promises. Now you can . . .do something that you could not do before. And also, quite often, You’ll no longer have to . . . do something that you could not avoid before. You’ll have a new capability, not previously available, and also a new relief from burden.

But innovation is a bargain because there are two further consequences of many things we bring into the world. It turns out quite often that once an innovation has become fully embedded in our world and invested with cultural power, it also becomes the case that you’re no longer able to do some things that you could do before.

Consider the invention of automobile highways. I’ve spent most of my life living in the cities of Boston and Philadelphia and a fair amount of time traveling between them. Our predecessors in this country would have had no problem riding a horse from Boston to Philadelphia. For roughly two centuries that was a fairly normal activity. I dare say that activity is quite impossible today (aside, possibly, from recording some kind of colonial-reenactment reality television program). You are no longer able to ride a horse between these cities. Something that was totally possible has now been closed off by many new tools and devices, from asphalt to automobiles.

And there is a fourth element in the bargain: Now you’ll have to. Certain kinds of compulsion arise that we may or may not have anticipated when we began the process of innovation and adoption.

Humanity’s awareness of this bargain goes back a very long way. Its most famous early articulation comes from Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, composed in the fourth century before Christ, where Socrates tells a story of the invention of writing. The inventor, the Egyptian god Thoth, brings his invention before King Thamus, who admits that Thoth’s invention is impressive and does indeed relieve human beings of having to orally transmit and remember all knowledge. But, Thamus observes, this also means that you’ll no longer be able to transmit or remember hardly anything without writing.

And indeed, the human capability to hear complex discourses and remember them with high fidelity, as documented in Richard Bauckham’s fascinating book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, has been utterly lost today—as you can see at any presentation as the audience holds up their smartphones to capture an image of even the simplest slide that they want to remember.

Writing, insofar as it extends our human capacity for reason, memory, and more, is utterly in the realm of tools, not devices (at least until the latest generation of AI models started being able to produce human-like writing). So the story of Thoth and Thamus reminds us how tools, as well as devices, involve the trade-offs of the Innovation Bargain to some extent. We, as a literate society, have simply made the judgment that the bargain was worthwhile in this case—just as we have in almost every other case.

The path and the highway

In an influential essay called “A Native Hill,” the writer Wendell Berry illustrates an important further dimension to these bargains. With Berry’s help, we can observe that not all innovation involves the same form of the Innovation Bargain.

Berry first identifies, on the one hand, a path, worn by the passage of many human (and perhaps non-human) feet. A path allows us to travel more efficiently than we could before (in the terms of the Innovation Bargain, “Now you can . . .”). And it relieves us of having to bushwhack through difficult terrain (“You’ll no longer have to . . .”). These are real advantages.

But, interestingly, the path imposes very little of the other side of the bargain. When you are walking on a path, what is it that you’re no longer able to do? It’s hard to think of many activities that are foreclosed by the presence of a path through a woodland or meadow. And it doesn’t seem that the path enforces many activities, either. If you want to leave the path, that’s fine. It is not very coercive. It seems to expand our capabilities in the world without making many corresponding demands.

Berry contrasts this with what he calls the road, though for my purposes I will call it the highway (and indeed, the road Berry is dealing with specifically in his essay is I-71, a US Interstate Highway). A highway makes many of the same promises as a path. It also offers efficiency of travel, though it allows for far greater efficiency and speed than any path. And likewise it relieves you of having to wayfind slowly through difficult and perhaps unfamiliar terrain.

But the highway is not as consequence-free as the path. It imposes a steeper bargain on the human beings who pass through the environment it reshapes (and, of course, a steeper bargain on other creatures and the environment itself). Once there is a highway, it is harder to wander and explore on foot.

We may, indeed, set out to explore a new neighborhood in a city or town and find ourselves running up against physical barriers that prevent our crossing them—or, perhaps more often, the emotional barriers of traversing under forbidding elevated structures or trying to make our way across several lanes of fast-moving traffic.

And of course, to take advantage of a highway you have to purchase and maintain an automobile. It does not offer its advantages to all comers, but only to those able to muster the financial resources to join the car-based economy of the modern world.

Both the path and the highway are innovations. But one offers new possibilities while imposing very few trade-offs. The other imposes trade-offs that are quite substantial—though ones that we, as a highway-building society, have collectively decided are worthwhile.

The dream of superpowers

Such trade-offs go back a very long way in the human story, and in the stories we tell to make sense of the world we find ourselves in. Not all of them turn out so well.

Eat the fruit, promises the serpent in Genesis 3, and you’ll be able to know good and evil. Sounds great! Furthermore, you’ll no longer have to depend on God for such knowledge. Indeed, if we could be like God and know good and evil independently, why not? So the bargain is accepted, though it comes with a few previously undisclosed items:

You’ll no longer be able to see the face of God and live. Now, apparently, you’ll have to wear clothes to cover your human shame. And various other terms and conditions apply.*

*Thou shalt work the earth by the sweat of thy brow, in toil shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life, in pain thou shall bring forth children, thou shalt desire thy husband and he shall rule over you, thou shalt return to dust for dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return.

Other than that, a fine bargain.

Genesis 3 tells a story, the paradigmatic story in the Jewish tradition, of a bad bargain. We were dreaming of something that might expand our capabilities, but it turns out, according to the story, that that expansion of capabilities came at a terribly high price, bringing new dimensions of coercion into the world—not just us being coerced to do things we would rather not do, but us coercing one another to survive and make our way through a world made less good for human flourishing.

And this suggests to me that in some ways, the new story of devices is actually a very old story. It traces back to the human desire to do magic—the human desire to have powers beyond (to borrow a phrase from Alan Jacobs) our own “proper powers.” To exceed the place we have been given in the world, to exceed the heart-soul-mind-strength constitution we have been given, to reach beyond and start seeing the world magically operate with effortless power.

This is a very ancient dream—it’s just that we couldn’t actually realize it until roughly one hundred years ago. And this dream has a telos, a direction it is going, which has recently been given a name, a word more and more commonly used in the promotion of the newest digital services. The end state of the dream of magic is superpowers.

Not just ordinary power raised to a greater extent (the kind of extension of human abilities afforded by tools) but the ability to transcend my given limits, to do astonishing things with very little apparent effort.

This is in fact an ancient dream—with some very steep trade-offs attached.

When we see it at its worst, we recognize it for what it is. Not long ago one publication named Pornhub the “third most influential tech company” (after Facebook and Google, but ahead of Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon), and that company is just the largest commercial instance of the many-headed hydra called porn, which offers us a classic case of the Innovation Bargain at its worst.

With porn’s help, now you can have the sensation of erotic intimacy whenever you want, and you’ll no longer have to form and consummate a relationship to experience it. Superpowers, certainly.

Then again, a raft of psychological and social data suggest that once you personally are entrenched in porn and once your society is entrenched in porn, you’ll no longer be able to form and consummate a relationship. And now you’ll have to continually increase the “dosage”—frequency, quantity, intensity—for the same effect.

Other terms and conditions may apply, some of which may be yet unseen and not at all reckoned with. Once this innovation bargain has been made, all kinds of coercion enter the world—new forms of violation and violence that were all but unthinkable before.

And we thought we were just getting a new superpower.

The innovation of instruments

We need to be very cautious indeed with this second story, the ancient dream of magic which leads to the modern reality of devices and the ultimate fantasy of superpowers. Not because all devices are bad in their proper place. They have real contributions to make to human flourishing. But the dream behind them is dangerous—and in any case, there is another, better story, and the fullness of that story is still waiting to be told.

In The Life We’re Looking For, I describe this as the story of tools to instruments. It is indeed about extending human capabilities, but without displacing or replacing people. Instruments—musical instruments, medical instruments, scientific instruments—do not take the person out of the loop. Instead, in more and more powerful ways, through the application of all that we have learned about the world and indeed ourselves, they put the person back into the world—ideally, as nothing less than an image bearer of God.

This story is not finished. This story could have a long way to go. And this story is the proper application of all that we have learned from science, while also helping human beings fulfill our calling to be image bearers rather than the idol makers and image breakers we have become.

In our community at Praxis we already have many entrepreneurs pursuing this kind of innovation. They are subject, of course, to the same Innovation Bargain as all innovations are, but as with the path compared to the highway, the trade-offs are far better for human beings and for the world we inhabit.

The app Lasting, created by a team led by Praxis Fellow Steve Dziedzic (Business 2018), had been selected as one of Apple’s Apps of the Day for Valentine’s Day and has helped 3 million couples to date strengthen their relationship (and, with a more recent companion app, their parenting).

They sign up because of a compelling now you can—increase trust by addressing the hard issues in a marriage, using proven relationship-building strategies—and you’ll no longer have to—pay for expensive couples’ therapy. Ninety-four percent report stronger relationships after using the app—a distinctly instrument-like contribution to genuine human flourishing, in that rather than making hard things “easy,” Lasting helps facilitate the personal and relational growth that makes hard things possible.

And what are the trade-offs to using Lasting, other than its relatively affordable price? Having tried it with my own wife, I suppose it is true that you’ll no longer be able to pretend everything is fine in your marriage—Lasting guides you into the deep waters you need to navigate together. For now you’ll have to, though, I am stumped. I suppose Lasting does make it harder to give up on a marriage altogether. So, now you’ll have to . . . stay married?

As Innovation Bargains go, this is a good one.

There are no superpowers for marriage. There are no superpowers for any of the most important aspects of our lives. The magic we have been chasing actually undermines all of the most important things, all of our highest callings as heart-soul-mind-strength complexes designed for love. Why not build for the real work of being human, rather than the illusion of being superhuman?

And in fact, that is what many in our community at Praxis are doing. Almost invariably, when you examine the tech our community is developing—from new patient-provider interfaces to cutting-edge hydration detection to e-commerce for neighborhood stores, to pick just three examples from our 2022 class of Business Fellows—the focus is on instruments and heart-soul-mind-strength engagement with the world.

We just need far, far more of this.

There are two stories at work in the world. Augustine called them the “city of God” and the “city of man.” We could call the two stories the image bearers and the image breakers. They map onto these two stories, of tools to instruments and of magic to superpowers.

One of them is the story of the Garden to the City, Eden to the New Jerusalem, Genesis 2 to Revelation 21. I would argue it is the truest and most hopeful story, and—at least so Christians believe—it extends into eternity.

The other is the story of two impostor cities, impressively audacious but ultimately deranged and undermined by their detachment from the true human purpose and the nature of the cosmos itself. While it is still going on, it is a story that will assuredly—as even the most secular will admit—come to an end. Very possibly a bad end.

While we still have time to choose, why not build our technology for the story that will last?

The following redemptive framework on disability was authored by Alex Wolf, chief content officer at Hope Heals, and represents the vision of the Praxis team.

Our Reality: Living with Disabilities in a Market-Dominated World

Independence, self-determination, and prosperity are among Western society’s highest values. Each of these is predicated on the unfettered ability to decide, accomplish, and produce—and therefore all are, by definition, to some extent at odds with the experiences and identities of people with disabilities.

This demographic label describes the more than one-quarter of American adults functionally disqualified from full participation in our society’s value system. Exile to the margins of an independence-centered culture has resulted in outsized rates of unemployment, homelessness, divorce, depression, and suicidality among people with disabilities.

Disability is an umbrella term that encompasses a near-limitless collection of physical, intellectual, emotional, and behavioral conditions that limit or alter a person’s participation in the world. Notably, disability is a function of both how atypical one’s body and brain may be and the world one inhabits—including the physical, social, and economic structures of that world.

These two directions of disability—the person being suited or ill-suited for their environment, and the environment being suited or ill-suited for the person—can never be fully disentangled. Suffering, so often linked to disability, is the result of inhabiting systems that are not designed for certain types of brains and bodies.

People whose capabilities align at any given moment with social norms are likely to perceive people with disabilities as a distinct demographic group. The popular category of “special needs” reveals an assumption that people with disabilities have exceptional requirements for living, distinct from the needs of typical people. However, the fundamental needs of people with disabilities—bodily nourishment, safety, self-expression, spiritual enrichment, purpose, and a sense of belonging within relationships—are universal needs, regardless of ability. The needs of people with disabilities are not exceptional, though the ways in which they must meet those needs often are exceptional.

An undue focus on “special needs,” then, tends to distort our understanding of people with disabilities—and it also causes us to overlook their strengths. To be sure, if the only strengths that matter in human beings are those that contribute to market value, earning potential, and spending power, many people with disabilities may indeed be at a disadvantage. This can lead to those with disabilities being accounted for largely as liabilities in the public sector and irrelevant in the marketplace.

Because the marketplace assumes so little earning potential (and consequently so little spending power) from people with disabilities, investment in them can easily be seen as delivering minimal returns, whether the capital being invested is financial, infrastructural, or relational. This “return on investment” mindset has diffused from the marketplace into public services, relational networks, and even faith communities.

In the last three decades, legislation in the United States and many other countries has helped reframe accessibility as a human rights issue. Disability representation has advanced in workplaces, on campuses, and to some extent in popular media. This represents progress in healing the historic and ongoing neglect of those with disabilities. But to the extent that it takes place only within a narrow economic imagination—meaning that its aims are to equip people with disabilities to generate profit, earn wages, and spend more money—such inclusion will never fully address the needs of people with disabilities or fully tap into their strengths.

In fact, people with disabilities have distinct and irreplaceable gifts to offer society beyond their earning power. These gifts revolve around the profound and universal human need for belonging—which is more than merely being included or accommodated. Belonging is relational and reciprocal; to belong is to be simultaneously needful and needed.

Seen this way, disability is not a problem to be solved; it is a prophetic witness to our common humanity.

To be alive is to have needs, and this aspect of humanity is more fully alive in disability—the embodiment of our inescapable needfulness—than in typical or average ability. Living in proximity to disability invites us to acknowledge our common needfulness. The more widely that human needfulness and dependence are accepted, the more people can experience the gentleness and grace of a world built to accommodate need rather than eradicate it.

The reality of disability is an invitation to dismantle our false and narrow value system and reorder it according to the way of love, joy, creativity, contentment, humility, worth apart from achievement, and wholeness. And these truer, deeper values are frequently more readily found in the lives of people experiencing disability than in their typical counterparts. We all need more of what they have.

Valuing people with disabilities as a gift to society depends on fundamental transformation and significant sacrifice in our personal and shared narratives of what it means to build lives worth living. Offering the world as a place of belonging to people with disabilities requires reorienting ourselves within the framework of disability, re-evaluating our concept of the image of God, and reordering our shared value system in the way of love.

A Redemptive Framework

When human needfulness, vulnerability, and dependence are recognized as universal experiences, the story of disability becomes more accessible to everyone. That is not to say that everyone is disabled, but rather that the category of disability is more porous than one might assume.

Disability exists as a spectrum, not a binary, and anyone at any moment could find themselves progressing along that spectrum. A typically abled person is actually a temporarily able person. If a person lives long enough, he or she will become disabled by disease, injury, genetics, or age. Indeed, the only alternative to eventual disability, in some form, is a premature and sudden death.

Fully reckoning with this reality should cure us of considering people with disabilities as a niche outgroup, as does the consideration that every person living with disabilities likely represents multiple family members, caregivers, and friends who are implicated in the effects of the disability even if they do not have a diagnosis themselves. Valuing people with disabilities begins by orienting all people within and around the spectrum of disability.

Even Jesus belongs within the story of disability. His incarnational life and ministry required that he be limited by a body, constrained by human language, tethered to time and space, and victimized by unjust systems of power. Jesus became vulnerable, dependent, and needful in order to meet our ultimate need for reconciliation with God.

By disabling himself through the Incarnation, Jesus dignified the reality of disability by becoming the most whole person who ever lived, even while living with limitations of cosmic consequence.

If the experience of disability can be found in the person of Jesus, then it follows that living with disabilities does not exclude a person from bearing the image of God. God is far too vast to be expressed in just one way or by just one type of person, and people with disabilities are a vital part of the diverse embodiment of God’s image through humanity. They are a countervailing force to our tendency to conflate the likeness of God with attributes like physical power, outward beauty, or intellectual acuity.

Recognizing God’s image in people with disabilities means reckoning with our small-minded and small-spirited conceptions of God’s character. Furthermore, if we agree that being made in the likeness of God endows every human with intrinsic and unearnable value, then we must acknowledge disability as an extra opportunity for—not a barrier to—experiencing our own value apart from achievement.

Each person has value because he or she is made in the image of God, and being made in the image of God includes giving and receiving love. If we want to value people with disabilities sincerely, we must consider what type of world would allow them to give and receive love most freely and fully—and build according to that vision.

A world organized on the giving and receiving of love would be necessarily characterized by mutual sacrifice, interdependence, humility, vulnerability, submission, and contentment. These are the makings of common good and common health. Paradoxically, the attributes of healthy communities stand in near diametric opposition to the values of independence, self-determination, and material prosperity. Valuing people with disabilities as a gift to society requires rebuilding our shared value system on the foundation of sacrificial love.

Opportunities for Redemptive Imagination

Since all human beings will interact with a flexible and changing spectrum of disability and dependence throughout their lives, each of us stands to benefit from reordering the world as a place of belonging regardless of ability.

While disability-specific ventures offer evident value to people currently affected by disabilities, the majority of the following opportunities for redemptive imagination will help all of us move toward a world where we systematically acknowledge human needfulness and build interdependent relational networks.

We therefore mostly focus on the possibilities for better serving people with disabilities within existing structures rather than multiplying niche disability programs. The thoughtful integration of diverse embodiments throughout all dimensions of human endeavor will allow everyone involved to witness more robust expressions of God’s image through the giving and receiving of love.

Inter-ability employment

People living with disabilities are twice as likely to be unemployed as people without disabilities, and the detrimental effects of chronic underemployment and unemployment extend far beyond financial instability. Fewer job options mean limited opportunities to contribute to shared work (fulfilling the human need for purpose) as well as limited access to the regular and organic social connections that workplaces provide (fulfilling the human need for relationships). We believe creating gainful employment tracks within existing enterprises for people with disabilities is a major pathway of redemptive action, especially when job generation is approached with creativity, flexibility, and empathy.

Alongside quantitative key performance indicators, companies committed to valuing people with disabilities as a gift to society must also identify qualitative key performance indicators, such as a sense of belonging, that do not obviously support the bottom line. Remaining accountable to those qualitative benchmarks means intentionally risking maximized profits, operational efficiencies, and scale.

To build an inter-ability workplace, venture leaders should evaluate which roles and functions allow for employees with disabilities to be needed while remaining needful. Mutually beneficial inter-ability staffing models call for an extraordinary investment of supervision, support, assessment, development, and culture-making. There may be financial returns on this investment, but the surest return is in the form of a culture whose values have a redemptive quality.

Open-source best practice playbooks

With accessibility requirements and inclusion initiatives on the rise, companies around the world are considering how to include employees and customers with disabilities. However, the knowledge of best practices (beyond just legal compliance) is, at best, uncodified and, at worst, protected and paywalled as proprietary information.

Ventures making meaningful progress in this area will commit to the intentional and continual testing, assessing, and innovating of best practices in training, recruitment, human resources, and culture-building. Once those practices have been proven sound, they should be assembled and distributed as low- or no-cost open-source playbooks available to redemptive entrepreneurs everywhere. Sharing reasonable and realistic insights on pitching qualitative KPIs to investors, board members, and stakeholders would be a particularly valuable addition to any collection of best practices.

Testing, producing, and distributing these resources will divert some amount of time, energy, and money from revenue-producing efforts. That sacrifice, however, serves the redemptive end of building businesses that value belonging.

Responsive hospitality

True hospitality is accessibility. As a sector built around the art of welcoming, nourishing, and entertaining guests, the hospitality industry offers especially exciting opportunities for valuing people with disabilities and setting new standards for ability-inclusive design and operations. Proper ADA compliance prevents exclusion from spaces, services, and programs. In other words, it allows people with disabilities to get in the door. But perfunctory legal box-checking might not guarantee inclusion—that a person with disabilities feels invited, prepared for, and celebrated. Redemptive hospitality ventures (like restaurants, hotels, coffee shops, and event venues) present nearly limitless opportunities to extend extravagant welcome beyond basic accommodation.

Accessibility policies can be reframed such that inclusion is the baseline, rather than the ceiling, to help clarify that spaces of true hospitality are person-centered rather than policy-centered. The hospitality industry would benefit greatly from universal accessibility experts as well as consultants living with disabilities themselves who could assist business owners in co-creating physical spaces, user experiences, products, and services that foster belonging. To consider how guests with physical, cognitive, or sensory disabilities might function in a space or use a product feels unreasonable. That’s because it is. Redemptive entrepreneurs have the opportunity to commit to an ethos of unreasonable hospitality in order to champion people with disabilities as a gift to society.

To be sure, some accessibility features can actually work at cross-purposes with one another. Comprehensive accessibility is not yet possible, but responsive hospitality is. With enough care and proper consultation, we can design environments that broaden the expected and accepted customer experience, consider use by atypical brains and bodies, and promote human connection.

Supportive technology

While disability, defined broadly, is not merely a problem to be solved, we support and celebrate medical advancements that treat pain or life-threatening complications resulting from certain illnesses and conditions. In the many instances in which pharmacology is not available or not curative, we believe technology is pivotal in alleviating suffering and promoting whole-person flourishing. It’s important to note that the elimination of disability is not necessarily the end goal of all pharmacological or technological interventions.

The creative leveraging of technology presents unprecedented opportunities to open nearly every part of the world to a wider range of abilities. Redemptive action in the tech sector might include innovating technologies to support people living with disabilities; adapting existing mainstream technologies for users with disabilities; or incorporating existing assistive technologies into a space, service, or program.

Supportive technology does not need to precisely mimic or even approximate a particular ability; rather, it should act as an alternative means to fulfilling a universal human need, like relational connection or bodily nourishment. Technological aids are not redemptive when they merely replace the receiving and giving of care (that is to say, love) between people. Tech should never replace healthy human interdependence. If a technology can promote whole-person flourishing—of body, mind, spirit, and relationships—then it can be a mechanism of valuing people with disabilities.

Residences and co-housing

When people with disabilities (particularly cognitive disabilities) age out of the school system and remain in their family homes, their social circles often shrink to include only their parents and paid caregivers. These image-bearers have increasingly fewer opportunities to know and be known, or to give and receive love. In our society, leaving the family home is the expected goal of maturation.

While one might assume independent living would be the ultimate goal for some young adults with disabilities, we believe incorporation into structures of interdependence is a more redemptive, holistic, and enduring approach. Independence, much like ability, is a fleeting state of being. Every person, regardless of ability, would benefit from communities organized around human needfulness, rather than societies attempting to eradicate needfulness.

Housing solutions present abundant organic opportunities for belonging, from college campus co-housing to inter-ability roommate matching systems to fully inclusive residential developments. Intentional housing breaks down the categorical walls of disability-specific programs and ministries and makes possible those ordinary, recurring rhythms of homelife that foster mutual friendship, trust, and stability. These models humanize people with disabilities by allowing them to be just what they are—human. Integrating diverse embodiments into our homes and neighborhoods makes room for the full and undeniable personhood of people with disabilities, rather than isolating them as objects of charity, pity, or mystery. These kinds of innovations offer an exceptionally effective way to equip people with disabilities with the irreplaceable resource of a built-in relational network, complementing their acquisition of knowledge and skills.

Spiritual formation

The experience of disability serves as a powerful expression of our common humanity as well as a salient metaphor for Jesus’ Incarnation. The truest and fullest expression of God’s character in the world and through the church requires diverse embodiments of love, humility, joy, freedom, and inherent value. Disability theology is not a segment of the human experience, nor is it a niche theological approach. Disability theology is inextricable from our understanding of ourselves, of God, and of Jesus’ saving work.

This is why disability ministries should not exist exclusively as discrete segments or specialized services. People with disabilities offer unique theological wisdom and embodied spiritual revelation—a ministry to the Church rather than a ministry of a church. But to offer this ministry to the Church, people with disabilities cannot be set apart. Integrating opportunities for mutual ministry—the reciprocal giving and receiving of love, care, and wisdom between people with and without disabilities—is a crucial course of redemptive action within faith communities.

Redemptive opportunities for mutual ministry in the church might begin through disability-informed seminary curricula and church planting strategies. Pastors and teachers in established churches have the opportunity to regularly incorporate disability theology into congregational studies and to highlight the unique facets of God’s image represented through church members with disabilities. Niche disability services should be maintained, of course, but church bodies must evaluate and implement ability-inclusive practices throughout church culture, corporate worship, discipleship efforts, small groups, and community engagement.

Specialized disability ministries realistically require above-average investment (funding, volunteers, expertise, specialized spaces) for below-average tangible outcomes. Partly because churches often operate with very thin economic margins, but also partly because they are captive to the same ROI-based mindset as the wider culture, families affected by disabilities often receive the dregs of services, attention, and accommodation from the church.

This is where churches have an opportunity to subvert the secular value system and model person-centered sacrifice, care, and love—rather than efficiency, scale, and productivity. That being said, we believe that creating spaces for mutual ministry within a church body is a wise stewardship of resources (by any standard) because every single person is humanized when image bearers with disabilities—image bearers with obvious human needs—are given a place to belong within churches, communities, and societies at large.

A Call to Action

People with disabilities account for over one-fourth of our neighbors, colleagues, classmates, and fellow citizens. The experience of disability today belongs to those people with meaningful physical and cognitive limitations. However, every living person may join their number tomorrow. No one benefits from partitioning people with disabilities into niche services or specialized programs. When we accept that we all will find ourselves on the spectrum of disability, we might be more willing to see what good can be made from it.

For people living with disabilities, navigating a world not made for them is an ongoing exercise in flexibility, humility, creativity, humor, tenacity, and forgiveness. These robustly formed characteristics make families and communities better. Living in proximity to people with disabilities invites typically abled people to reframe their needfulness (which is to say, their humanity) as an opportunity to give and receive love. When we value people with disabilities as a gift to society, we are receiving the belovedness of all people—including ourselves.

By placing all people within the framework of disability, opening ourselves to a broader experience of the image of God, and recognizing the deep value of non-financial contributions in business, social structures, and faith communities, we believe redemptive entrepreneurs have the opportunity to not only repair the historic neglect of people with disabilities, but also invite the entire human family into a world ordered in the way of love.

We’re sharing some of our favorite pieces from the Praxis archives here on Praxis Press. In 2024, we profiled Mike Bontrager, the Founder and former CEO & Executive Chair of Chatham Financial and the Founder of Square Roots Collective.

There’s a small town about an hour outside Philadelphia called Kennett Square.

Tucked in Chester County, a rural area with equestrian heritage, this square mile is home to 7,000 residents, with tree-lined streets and brick architecture that make a picturesque backdrop for community life.

Kennett Square is the unlikely setting for a redemptive quest that has spanned more than three decades, as Mike Bontrager has created lasting influence in business, community, and family. Through a series of moves that might have seemed foolish at worst and counterintuitive at best, he has activated teams toward an audacious vision that’s still in the making.

An Entrepreneurial Adventure

Mike grew up in nearby Lancaster County as the son of a Mennonite minister. “I believed that my future would be entrepreneurial, probably from the age of 13,” he says. “That continued to be affirmed as I went through high school and college, and really started to ask, ‘What gives me life?’”

After college, Mike married his high school sweetheart, Dot, who describes him as “a dreamer, with never just one idea.” He proposed to Dot with the opportunity to move to Zurich, Switzerland, and they began their marriage as expats while he worked for Chemical Bank (now JPMorgan Chase). Ten years saw them through a move back to New York City and the birth of their older daughters, Stephanie and Kymm.

Mike continued to work at Chemical Bank, gaining expertise in the derivatives markets and observing how the imbalance of information on Wall Street led to exploitative behaviors. When faced with a choice of doing what was best for the client and what was best for a bonus payout, the industry rewarded the latter. Mike felt the disconnect acutely: “I wanted to be at a place where doing what’s right for a client and doing what’s right for me are aligned.”

In 1991, Mike decided to found his own derivatives consulting firm, and he and Dot moved back to Pennsylvania to raise their family and start the business.

“People told me, if you want to do derivatives, you’re going to have to be in New York or London or Hong Kong,” Mike remembers. “They said it couldn’t be done in Kennett Square, and I said, ‘We’re going to try.’”

For her part, Dot was fully on board with the “adventure,” as she recalls it. “I said, ‘Let’s go!’ I figured that we could always come back to New York if it didn’t work out.” They moved to a fixer-upper in rural Pennsylvania, about 15 minutes outside Kennett Square, and Mike set up shop above their garage.

For four years, Mike worked alone to build Chatham Financial. “I almost quit,” he says. “We moved to Pennsylvania, and I’m by myself. I became much more intentional about getting together with other business people to have that camaraderie.”

It was around this time that Mike had a profound spiritual experience while listening to sermons by Tim Keller that introduced the idea that striving for performance and righteousness can create a barrier to God.

He grew up believing that he could never be too righteous; the goal was to become a better person and make God happy through hard work and discipline. Mike came to learn that God’s unmerited love unlocks a transformation that goes beyond being a “good person” and opens the door to realize a vision of restoration that God has for the world.

He began to ask what that meant for this young company he was growing. “I didn’t want us to be just a kinder, gentler version of Wall Street,” he says. “I wanted us to think totally differently than Wall Street.”

Mike became convinced of a fundamental imbalance of information between banks and their clients. “It’s not an uncontroversial statement to say that the trust gap between Wall Street and Main Street is pretty wide,” he says. “And having lived through the financial crisis, inside of some of those meltdowns, that lack of trust is well placed. So how do we as a company step into that?”

In 1995, Dave Hall joined as the first full-time employee, operationalizing the vision as they built the firm, and he witnessed this evolution in thinking firsthand. He saw how companies had enormous risks, particularly around interest rates and currencies, and they didn’t know how to manage those risks well.

Meanwhile, the banks that had all the knowledge sold them products that didn’t fit their needs. Dave explains, “The idea of Chatham was to help level the playing field in terms of knowledge and skill in negotiation to help companies address risks properly, and then help manage everything from accounting to regulation to compliance and all those kinds of things along the way.”

The Trust Business

The team began to refer to trust maximization rather than profit maximization.

Mike recalls one scenario when he made a costly mistake on a foreign exchange trade. “I messed it up and got the trade backwards, so we took the worst price, not the best price. I realized it about five minutes after the trade was done.”

He told the client about the mistake, offering to write a check for the difference, which would have been sizable. Mike remembers, “There was this long silence on the other side of the phone. I don’t think he would have ever known, and he realized it on the spot.” The client asked not to be charged for the transaction, but Chatham did not have to cover the error.

Transparent interactions like this built a foundation of trust that resulted in decades-long client relationships. In every interaction with a client, vendor, or employee, Mike learned to ask, “How do we maximize trust in this situation?”

As the company grew, Mike used the language of values to scale the culture he hoped to see. “I was very open that my values come from my faith; however, I would say to people, ‘You don’t have to have my faith to have my values.’ It led to some very interesting conversations about where our values come from.”

He expanded the idea of trust maximization into a “Chatham quest”: to demonstrate and catalyze the restoration of trust in the capital markets.

He says he likes the quest term “because it’s not clear you’re going to be successful.” This quest goes beyond interactions between individuals or even between firms—the scope reaches to finance as a system that could be repaired in some way through the actions of Chatham Financial.

In 2000, Chatham experienced a breakthrough in defeasance, a highly technical process in the commercial mortgage-backed security market. When the team examined it, they realized that the common pricing model contained hidden fees that all other firms were simply pocketing. They spent the better part of six months building their approach to do right by their clients.

When Chatham finally entered the market, opting to be fully transparent, they lost out on significant profit. Later, at an industry meeting, Mike fielded angry questions about why Chatham was preventing other firms from making a huge amount of profit.

Mike remembers, “I was not ready for this. The only thing I could say was, it’s because it’s the right thing to do. Is that an okay answer?”

The Chatham approach became the standard in the market, and today, they compete with the same companies who were exploiting the information imbalance.

The firm does not win every defeasance deal, but Mike sees it as a win because Chatham created a new kind of fairness. It became newly possible—and even imperative—for firms to act with transparency that would have been previously inconceivable.

For this degree of systemic influence, Mike firmly believes that we need more Christians in the capital markets whose faith gives them a vision that goes beyond the legal or ethical standard.

Currently, the markets are constrained by the law through regulation, usually as a response to something going wrong in the markets. Chatham chose not to maximize profit in defeasance—which would have been legal—and they were able to influence the entire system because they had built client trust and earned market power.

“We need a lot of people building companies that are large enough to have market power,” Mike says. “You need to have a critical mass.”

When Dave joined Chatham for this startup adventure, Mike decided to build a new carriage house for a new office. He told the contractor to “build it for 8 or 10 people because we wouldn’t grow much more than that.” Today, Chatham Financial has over 800 employees and operates in eight cities all around the world, with approximately 500 employees based out of Kennett Square.

Along the way, Mike realized, “We are in the trust business more than we are the derivatives business, and it was more important for us to hire people who are trustworthy. We could teach derivatives rather than hire derivatives people that we had to try to teach to be trustworthy.”

Looking back on his time at the firm, he feels most proud of the team Chatham Financial built through its work and culture. “It was the opportunity of a redemptive enterprise to attract people who have that instinct, and for the enterprise to then form those people, and for those people to be part of a community that then is formed by the character of those individuals and all the things they do, from raising kids to being part of school boards and on and on and on.”

Mike’s faith animated him to voluntarily, sacrificially hold back from maximizing profits. At the same time, this faith freed him to put conventional incentives to the side, act with transparency, and empower others to join him.

This motivation was generative in that the Chatham team members who came alongside Mike did not need to be compelled by the same faith; yet, they caught the vision of transparency and trust in the capital markets and helped the firm increase its reach. The relationships that emerged from long-term trust-building created the opportunity to act at scale for broad influence in the system.

Two Kennett Squares

In 2004, Chatham Financial moved from the carriage house into office space in Kennett Square, and Mike and Dot moved with their four daughters into the downtown neighborhood to be part of a tight-knit community.

Stephanie, their oldest daughter, remembers Mike approaching her about the move, acknowledging that it would be a big shift for her in terms of school and friendships. “I was so honored that he was inviting me into this decision with him, and I was really excited about this new journey,” she recalls. “We were doing something together as a family.”

Although Kennett Square is located in the wealthiest county in Pennsylvania, 40–50% of the nation’s mushrooms are grown nearby, and a vibrant migrant community has emerged around that industry. The range of economic status and diverse cultures in such a small area make Kennett Square more similar to an urban center than a suburban town.

From housing to job opportunities to education, the experiences of residents can feel sharply divided. To some, there are two Kennett Squares. Attending public school for the first time, the Bontrager girls became friends with classmates who had radically different life experiences from them.

“I see it as a huge value-add in my life that I was able to be in community with people who are very different from me,” Stephanie remembers. “At home with my parents, we wrestled through these things to start to understand the bigger world.”

Mike and Dot began to be more involved through nonprofit volunteering and community groups. As their relationships in town grew, they became more committed to Kennett Square.

“The deeper that we’ve gotten to know the town and really understand the people, their stories, and their history,” Mike said, “the more we’ve been able to strategize about what it means to have a community where everyone can thrive.”

Planting a Beer Garden

Over time, Mike and Dot purchased real estate around town, renovating it for residential or commercial use. One property was the original site of the Eastern Condensed Milk Company, built in 1902 and operational until 2001, but it had since fallen into disrepair.

Sandra Mulry, Redevelopment Project Lead at Square Roots Collective, remembers when Mike purchased the property in 2011: “I was so confused because I didn’t see an opportunity for investment or development. It was this derelict industrial building, and the electric and copper had been stripped out. But Mike saw something there, and then there’s no stopping him.”

Mike learned that the site was built by the Pennock family of local abolitionists, and it became imperative to save the building for the community. “It was potentially going to be demolished, and I didn’t want to see that happen to a historic building,” he says passionately, even years later. “I wanted it in the hands of someone who loved the town.”

He had an idea to use the site as a pop-up beer garden, a family-friendly gathering place for the community that was rooted in history, art, and horticulture. Sandra and the team approach every project by asking, “What does the space want to be?” She says, “The Creamery started to talk to us and tell this story, and it became really obvious what it wanted to be.”

Today, the Creamery is a beautiful industrial mix of concrete, distressed wood, and metal, almost all of which was saved from the site. Outdoor and indoor spaces include artful plants and landscaping, including wisteria arches and a green wall of ivy inside the quonset hut (familiarly known as the “Q Hut”).

The incorporation of large sculpture is striking, like the driftwood lion or the 10-foot metalwork heart. Sandra remembers telling local artists about the Creamery: “They wanted to see the space. They loved the whole concept, so they brought over pieces on loan for the summer, just to beautify the space. They were so special that we ended up buying them, and they’re there permanently now.”

What’s the connection between a beer garden and community thriving? Mike had a vision for the Creamery as a platform for community life: everyday interactions between friends and neighbors as they visit with their families and larger-scale gatherings like the annual holiday village market or the year-round farmers market (both in partnership with Kennett Collaborative). He also realized that the profits from a for-profit venture like this could fuel nonprofit work that would serve the town.

Re-Risking for the Community

After 30 years as CEO at Chatham Financial, Mike transitioned to Executive Chairman, eventually retiring from the firm. Instead of turning to a life of leisure, he saw the opportunity to build something new in and for Kennett Square.

“I’m an entrepreneur,” he says, throwing his hands up. “I love creating. I love pulling people together to create.”

The same faith that propelled him in the financial markets ignited his imagination for what could be possible in his community.

Mike had started various for-profit and nonprofit ventures to address challenges where he saw them, and he decided to pull them together under one umbrella organization called Square Roots Collective, which is committed to advancing the community of Kennett Square so that all residents can thrive. The collective encompasses nonprofit initiatives including:

• Kennett Trails Alliance: In partnership with local municipalities and Brandywine Red Clay Alliance, this initiative strives to connect the Kennett community to its natural beauty through the formation of a safe, well-maintained, 14-mile pedestrian and bicycle trail loop called the Kennett Greenway.

• Voices Underground: In partnership with Longwood Gardens and Lincoln University, the first degree-granting HBCU in the country (just 15 minutes away from Kennett Square), this organization promotes the nationally significant history of the Underground Railroad in the region through scholarly research, creative partnerships, public experiences, and historical memorialization to further its mission of racial healing through storytelling.

One innovation of Square Roots Collective is its financial structure: Square Roots Collective is a nonprofit organization that owns other initiatives, including businesses like the Creamery, whose proceeds enable other nonprofit work.

Luke Zubrod, Chief of Staff, explains, “A beer garden helps bring the community together and nurture social capital, but it also produces profits that flow back into the community.”

In contrast to a typical profit-maximizing, extractive posture of development, it’s not always an intuitive model to the community. He says, “We try to explain it simply: When you drink a beer at the Creamery, you help build a trail.”

A two-part quest has emerged in the work of Square Roots Collective. First, they hope to re-weave the social fabric of the “two Kennetts” by creating spaces to cultivate connection and an integrated town. Second, they aim to demonstrate the role that business can play in the renewal of neighborhoods by creating a sustainable cycle in which for-profit entities help fuel community benefits.

In January, Square Roots Collective hosted a memorable Three Kings Day event that provided a glimpse of this quest coming to life. At a combination of a grand opening of a renovated park, photo ops with camels, and salsa dancing at the Creamery, Mike recalls, “We probably had 50/50 Latinos and Anglos here, which is really representative of this community. It was the most integrated night I’ve ever seen in my 20 years of living in this borough.”

A cross-section of the town came together to celebrate nature, culture, and collaboration, and profits from the Creamery will go on to help the community flourish.

Building with and for the Next Generation

Recently, Stephanie and her husband, Luis, as well as her sister, Kymm, have joined the Square Roots Collective team, drawing from their backgrounds in real estate management, finance, and social work. Stephanie works closely with Mike, and their relationship has deepened from father-daughter to more of a partnership, due in part to their experience as Capital Fellows in the inaugural cohort in 2023.

Their shared journey in the program helped them to articulate ideas that were only previously in Mike’s mind, and Stephanie had the opportunity to speak into others’ situations from a position of expertise and support.

She remembers, “There was one afternoon when he was listening not to his daughter, but someone who was going to help him build his business and build something with him. That was such a pivotal shift for us.”

Looking toward the future, Mike and the Square Roots Collective team have big projects on the books. They plan to open two boutique hotels, including Artelo, where each room will be the canvas for a local artist. The original factory on the Creamery site is set to become a reserved dining space, and there are plans for a speakeasy that will elevate African American stories and history.

Although these projects are tangible developments in Kennett Square, Stephanie knows that the real work is building trust. In a small town where everyone knows each other, it’s critical to invest in long-term relationships that will enable collaboration among residents and other local organizations.

“I’m committing to figuring out how we build trust,” she says, “and a piece of that is sharing our story. How can we tell our story so that people understand what our motives are, and we can lay the groundwork for building trust?”

Decades after Mike realized that he was in the trust business at Chatham Financial, he and the Square Roots Collective team find themselves in the same business now. What’s more, their community can feel more complicated than the finance industry. In its one square mile, the long-term collaboration in Kennett Square might be a prototype for other towns or cities.

Mike says, “I am impatient in that I want to see things done, but I’m patient in that I realize that probably some of the great things we want to do are years away, and I may never see them.”

This sense of urgency with a very long time horizon is essential in a redemptive quest. He waits and hopes for generational transformation, and he acts in the short term where he and his team can make a difference in his community.

One day in the future, when children walk and bike down the Kennett Greenway or learn about African American history through art and storytelling, they probably won’t know who made it possible, and that’s exactly what Mike would consider success.

Mike’s ongoing quest is one of risk, trust, relationships, and sacrifice. He took on financial risk by founding Chatham Financial, setting up shop in a nonobvious location. To maximize trust rather than profit, the Chatham team operated with radical transparency and a willingness to sacrifice financial gain, which allowed them to shift what was possible in the system.

When it came time to retire, Mike chose to forgo a safe or comfortable route by re-risking his resources through the work of SRC. Motivated by a love for the community and fueled by the knowledge that deep community change requires many actors, he now empowers the SRC team toward collaborative, innovative placemaking with a long-term vision of a thriving Kennett Square.

“These are our neighbors,” Mike says, “and we love our neighbors. One of our theories is that real change is going to happen at the neighborhood level. If we can’t do that in a community, where can we? This is a great place to experiment with that.”

Praxis organizes around the major issues of our time, which we call Opportunities for Redemptive Imagination (ORIs). Within each, we see the possibility for alternative imagination—for Christians around the world to think differently and build accordingly.

The following framework on child well-being and foster care was authored in 2024 by Praxis Partner Andy Crouch and Venture Partner Charlee Tchividjian, in collaboration with members of Praxis’s Foster Care & Adoption ORI Project.

Our Reality: The Child Welfare System Today

Child welfare in the United States is simultaneously an achievement, a tragedy, and a travesty.

It is an achievement in that only in recent times have entire nations set up protective systems for children threatened with maltreatment. Countless dedicated people work within and alongside the child welfare system to provide an array of supporting services for families, children, and youth.

The system has uniquely established itself as a refuge of last resort for children whose parents, in the state’s judgment, cannot or will not care for them. All this is an essential expression of the pursuit of the common good, which places the protection of the vulnerable at the heart of political and social life.

It is a tragedy in that, inherently, it is largely a reactive system that often disrupts families as a first response instead of a last resort. Despite the Family First Preservation Services Act, the prevention-focused federal legislation passed in 2018, child welfare’s fractured mechanisms still gravitate toward interventions that predominantly treat the symptoms of family stress and separation.

Consequently, the number of children in foster care and those aging out has continued to increase, placing a cruel weight on an already overburdened system. Some individuals do find meaningful work and fulfillment through their role in the system—especially the adults who join it by choice, like foster families and caseworkers. But even they tend to leave their time in the system with wounds that need care.

And it is a travesty in that, in spite of many good intentions, too often it does further damage to those entrusted to its care, disempowers those it purports to serve, and perpetuates multigenerational cycles of human suffering. Like many systems in the modern nation-state, it operates bureaucratically, meaning that its mechanisms become impersonal, its officials’ incentives become misaligned, and its priorities become the avoidance of blame and the minimization of genuine responsibility.

Its failure points are most keenly felt by low-income communities and people of color. It is sadly all too common that the system can perpetuate rather than repair most of the harms it was set up to protect against. A 2011 study found that 70% of former foster-care youth in the US Midwest had been arrested at least once by age 26 (82% of males and a striking 59% of females). The “foster-care-to-prison pipeline,” though by no means inevitable, is the clearest example of the way a system designed to protect seems in practice to lead to further waves of institutionalization.

Perhaps counterintuitively, then, we see the US child welfare system as an extraordinary opportunity for redemptive action. The most broken places are the ones where redemption matters most, since redemption fundamentally means setting free those shackled by history and their current circumstances, through costly acts of sacrificial love.

And we believe, in contrast with how the system is commonly portrayed and understood, that at every single node of the system—communities, caseworkers, foster families, neighbors and kin, mothers and fathers, and the affected children—there are human beings with profound capacity for love. There is no better word for what they most need than redemption.

All redemption takes place in environments with a history of exploitation, which is more than and different from vulnerability. Vulnerability is an inescapable reality of every human life and community, part of the human condition. But exploitation takes advantage of and reinforces vulnerability rather than matching it with authority—the capacity to act meaningfully even in a broken and risky world. Exploitation, especially when entrenched over time, inscribes on persons and whole communities a sense of futility, passivity, and resignation.

The travesty, however, is that while the child welfare system exists to aid vulnerable children, the mechanisms currently in place for child and family well-being optimize for intervention in cases of abuse, or behaviors rooted in pathological detachment from the good of a child.

Abuse will never be entirely eliminated, and it is right for the state to intervene, and others to step in, to care for children who are victims of abuse. Right now, however, the majority of foster-care cases involve the broader category of neglect, an elastic determination that often includes cases where a family simply lacks the resources they would provide if they received the right kind of support.

These two categories, while having specific meaning in child-welfare contexts, illuminate a broader reality in the whole system. Abuse fundamentally communicates, “I see you, but I don’t love you.” Neglect simply, and devastatingly, communicates, “I don’t see you.” This is, in fact, rarely the case for parents who are struggling to provide for their children. But it is at the heart of what is broken in much of the foster-care system today.

Children

Children are, of course, brought into the system because of officially recognized neglect and abuse. They can be severed from their families of origin and repeatedly and unpredictably cut off from foster families and caseworkers they had begun to trust, with the trauma being repeated with each additional “placement.” Their deepest needs can be overlooked even by families and caseworkers entrusted with their care. They can easily learn helplessness early on in their experience within the system, matched later by self-destructive attempts to regain their own agency and sense of belonging and efficacy in the world.

Parents

Mothers and fathers whose children become entangled in the system are thrust into a hostile legal process, facing the overwhelming power of the state. They are weighed down with strenuous and nearly impossible expectations and timelines for reunification or case closure. This heightened surveillance can further elevate family distress, making it harder for parents to meet the system’s demands, ultimately hindering their ability to regain custody and restore their family.

Mothers are often burdened with an effective presumption of incapacity if not guilt, and are not routinely provided with the representation they would be entitled to in a criminal proceeding. They are threatened with the temporary or permanent loss of custody of their own children, one of the most painful experiences any mother can bear.

Fathers, though potentially overlooked if they are only intermittently present or entirely absent from their child’s and partner’s life, are also stigmatized and frequently excluded from decisions about the child’s and mother’s welfare. But they also should and can bear responsibility for the well-being of the child they fathered. They suffer moral, emotional, and spiritual injury when they cannot fulfill this role.

Kinship families

Relatives of the children can be the best option for a child in foster care, giving them the opportunity to live with adults they already know and trust. The vast majority of children have adults in their lives who could care for them, but methods of identifying these adults are not as effective as they could be, particularly in time-sensitive situations. Too often these potential caring households are literally unseen, denying them the opportunity to come alongside their own relatives at a time of crisis.

Foster families

In providing home environments for children who have to be removed from their families of origin and for whom kinship care cannot be found, foster families serve a crucial role from a mixture of motivations, which can include relying on their work as foster parents for financial support.

But the very high turnover rate of foster families suggests that they generally receive inadequate support for the difficult challenge of caring for traumatized children. Early idealism, sometimes increased by well-meaning campaigns by churches and other religious organizations that encourage a savior and hero mentality in those they recruit, quickly turns into frustration and flight. In some cases, they become a barrier rather than a bridge to the reunification of families, which should be the aspiration of everyone in the system.

Caseworkers

Caring professionals evaluate situations of potential neglect and abuse and make decisions about a child’s placement and trajectory through the system. But their caseloads are impossibly high, their financial compensation is notably low (even those who earn a master’s degree in social work, which is not required for many casework jobs, earn only about $46,000 per year), and the emotional demands of their work are exceptional.

Like foster families, they too exit the system at very high rates (in the year 2022, one in three caseworkers in Texas left their positions). Every such departure not only adds to the burden of the system to recruit and train replacements but leaves dozens or hundreds of children suddenly cut off from a person who offered them some level of personal continuity and connection.

Communities

Local nonprofits, agencies, churches, and volunteers are crucial yet flawed players in the child welfare system. They can lack meaningful impact measurements and deliver uncoordinated, duplicated services that fail to provide dignified support. Their focus on narrow client criteria skews results, and their siloed, slow-to-partner initiatives reflect a deeper problem. Culturally competent service providers are scarce. The nobility trap of volunteerism leads to well-intentioned but ultimately ineffective efforts, perpetuating the system’s failures rather than addressing the real needs of vulnerable families.

A Redemptive Framework

The child welfare system exists to protect children, but true protection requires expanding our vision. Paradoxically, it is critical that we not limit our redemptive imagination to the child’s trajectory and story but consider the entire family’s well-being, ensuring that support systems empower rather than constrain the potential for healing and growth. Failure to do so not only leaves the other neglected parties in the system unrestored—it actually perpetuates systemic brokenness.

After all, the most powerful possible intervention to benefit every single participant in the system would be one that prevents the need to invoke the system in the first place. If prevention were possible even in a meaningful fraction of cases, caseloads would be reduced, budgets would be relieved, and primary and secondary trauma would be diminished.

Prevention in this context can mean identifying a wider circle of neighbors and kin who already have relationships with the child and parents. We should be especially alert to the unique ability of churches and other religious communities to meet emotional, spiritual, and material needs in an integrated and relationally rich way.

There has also been encouraging early progress in deploying technology to facilitate “care-sharing” programs that mobilize local community members to meet families’ needs. The bridges built through these programs can pave the way for even more relational and transformational interventions, such as host homes for parents who choose to place their child temporarily with a trusted family, parent advocates who provide support during a season of crisis, and sustainable housing solutions.

Above all, however, prevention means restoring a safe, stable, and nurturing household for the child—an environment that both Christian ethics and much rigorous research confirm is by far the best environment for children’s flourishing. And when such families are in distress—and in some sense they always are if there is risk of abuse and neglect—this means that the most redemptive thing that could happen for the child is to have redemption happen in the life of the child’s mother and father.

Out of a well-intentioned concern for children’s well-being, many actors inside the child welfare system as well as outside charities, including Christian charities and churches, have paid limited attention to the possibility of restoration for mothers and fathers. This has sometimes been a liability of the otherwise admirable Christian commitment to adoption, which has been accelerated in recent years through intentional campaigns to awaken Christians to this fundamental responsibility of care.

Because of the inherent vulnerability (not just exploitation) of human life, there will always be “orphans”—the biblical word for children who need a loving family to take them in permanently as their own children—just as God has indeed adopted each of us. And it would be foolish not to plan for situations where, in spite of all the best efforts, children are effectively orphaned even while their parents are living, because those parents cannot or will not rise to the challenge of continuing to care for them.

But focusing only on adoption can lead to ignoring the possibility, if the child’s parents are still alive, that restoration and healing could happen such that God’s “Plan A” could be regained. In the worst case—and this is not theoretical—parents eager to adopt a child can aid and abet state systems that want a quick fix to a deep problem by legally removing a child from their biological parents’ custody.

Such a step may seem like a definitive solution to the adoptive family and the court that authorizes the adoption, but what if it would have been possible for the mother, father, or both to be restored to their God-given role in their child’s life, thus avoiding multiple generations of trauma? Adoption is a beautiful, compassionate, and necessary response to the reality of orphaned children—but it is not a sufficient redemptive response when there is any hope that a whole family, not just the child, could be restored to flourishing together.

Acknowledging the many complex contributors to the breakdown of child and family well-being, the bottom line is that the most redemptive thing for children will almost always be the most redemptive thing for the adults in their lives—above all their mother and father, but also the families and caseworkers who care for them for a time.

Any redemption that can happen for adults will be redemptive for a child.

Opportunities for Redemptive Imagination

We begin with caseworkers, who bear far more of a physical, spiritual, and emotional burden than is often recognized. The redemptive opportunities here start with the conditions of their employment, which are ultimately set by state officials guided and limited by legislation, and could be greatly improved by direct advocacy to elected officials. This will undoubtedly include better training, educational opportunities, employee care and appreciation, and competitive wages and benefits. But we see the greatest opportunity, as is almost always the case, not so much in rule-making as in relationship-building.

There are also massive redemptive opportunities to serve foster families. There have been significant advances, many of them led by Christians, in recruiting families to see providing foster care as a calling they could embrace. Because there will always be children who have to spend time in the system for their own protection, any investment in identifying healthy, capable families who can play this role is valuable. Equipping foster families with better insights and relationship-building practices for working with birth parents during temporary separations is crucial for creating positive outcomes. Recruiting needs to be matched more evenly by retaining, and it is in the retention and sustainability of foster families that we see the greatest opportunities. In one study, almost 75% of foster homes stopped taking children within 2 years of opening. Training in trauma-informed care, prayer and emotional support, and sharing the many burdens of this kind of temporary parenting are all areas where new efforts and new ventures could greatly reduce turnover and greatly increase health and effectiveness.

There is every reason to increase momentum in mobilizing kinship families, including implementing technology to help caseworkers identify kin and connect them with children in need. Research coordinated by the New America Foundation suggests that when systems adopt more effective kin-finding practices—including dedicated kin-finding responsibility, expanding the legal definition of kin, or maintaining a shared list of kin they can achieve initial kinship placement rates in excess of 80%. However, the work begins before a point of crisis: knowing a child’s relatives and their contact information is one element of being seen and known within a larger community of support. Kinship families need training and emotional support, along with straightforward paths to receiving financial support when necessary.

The next redemptive opportunity is in the area of the support and restoration of parents. There are effective interventions that help fathers who have become estranged from their partners and children reclaim their God-given calling to active love. This kind of work urgently needs scaling with particular attention to the needs of strategic subgroups, such as those currently incarcerated, those returning to the community from incarceration, and those who came of age without any father active in their lives. There is also a role, whose importance has been demonstrated by the research of Raj Chetty’s team at Harvard, for mobilizing fathers to be more active in their communities, because the simple presence of men who are actively fathering has beneficial outcomes in the lives of all the children in their neighborhood.

We believe, likewise, that there is far more that can be done to support mothers who find themselves at risk of losing their children to the foster care system. Mother-centric, dignifying support is crucial, including access to vital services such as affordable daycare and employment opportunities conducive to single-parent households. We can create non-judgmental spaces where mothers can find true belonging and relational advocacy. These environments should foster deep connections, allowing mothers to not only receive support but also contribute meaningfully to others who share similar experiences. We can offer learning opportunities that unlock their innate abilities to raise their children in environments of love, safety, and connection.

There also may be an opportunity to create a legally recognized role for volunteer or privately paid “court-appointed special advocates” for mothers and fathers who face legal proceedings related to their parental role. The CASA movement has played a critical role in providing children with their own advocate as their case moves through family court and related systems, and it is indeed important that children benefit from an advocate who can single-mindedly speak on behalf of their interests. But countless mothers and fathers who are caught up in the system also deserve advocacy—someone who believes in them and can help the system, including the courts, plot a path toward their restoration as legal parents.

Communities—local nonprofits, faith-based organizations, schools, and civic groups—hold extraordinary redemptive potential in uniting these diverse entities to provide coordinated, holistic support to families. Rather than duplicating efforts or focusing narrowly on specific client criteria, communities have untapped potential to work together to create a more seamless safety net for families at risk. This requires a shift from charity-driven, transactional interventions to long-term, relational investments that honor the dignity and potential of every family member. Equipping communities to mobilize their unique strengths—whether in providing stable housing, emotional support, or advocacy—can transform local ecosystems into places of true belonging, where fewer children and families are unseen or unsupported.

Finally, we return to the heart of these opportunities: caring for children. While ideally foster care would be needed only for a short period of time, even the briefest exposure to it becomes part of a person’s whole story, which requires attention to their needs as they grow into adulthood. In 2021, more than 19,000 youth aged out of foster care with­out reunit­ing with their par­ents or hav­ing a permanent home. In younger children, permanence might be defined as a stable home and family; in youth who are exiting foster care, we believe it is crucial to build a network of reliable connections they can count on throughout their adult lives.

While there is no simple substitute for a healthy family of origin, over and over those without conventional families have nonetheless grown into adults of wisdom and courage, having been sustained by kin, by neighbors who take on the role and responsibilities of kin, by foster families, and by compassionate caseworkers, agencies, and churches. Indeed, such networks of care are the essential ingredient for prevention, not only intervention, as more of us choose to be family for the most vulnerable around us.

The Redemptive Horizon

If we build the capacity to intervene redemptively in all these areas, we believe we can see dramatic changes for the better in the US foster care system. Indeed, we might eventually see that system shrink dramatically to focus on its most important function, providing a safe haven for children immediately at risk of abuse, while other pathways emerge to support parents in recovering their capacity to love and care for their children well. We might see caseworkers who can sustain the energy needed to come alongside the children in their care without burnout. We might see richer networks of kinship and community care that ensure that no one is neglected and that all are seen.

The greatest tragedy and travesty of our current system also offers the greatest hope: the majority of the parents caught up in it deeply long to be able to love and care for their child even when they are currently failing to do so. These families, often the most marginalized, possess an inherent dignity, agency, and capability that must be recognized and empowered, not overlooked or dismissed. They deserve redemption—another chance, another and better life. And if they find it, their children will, too.

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Praxis organizes around the major issues of our time, which we call Opportunities for Redemptive Imagination (ORIs). Within each, we see the possibility for alternative imagination—for Christians around the world to think differently and build accordingly.

The following piece on artificial intelligence was authored in 2024 by Praxis Partner Andy Crouch, in collaboration with Praxis Venture Partner Mark Sears and Praxis Co-Founder & CEO Dave Blanchard, as well as attendees at the Redemptive AI Forum.

This is a framework for how redemptive entrepreneurs—venture builders and venture-oriented investors who seek to combat exploitation, adopt ethical practices as a baseline, and pursue restoration of broken systems through creative and sacrificial innovation—can approach the suite of technologies commonly called “modern AI” (from now on, simply “AI”).

Six Assumptions

We begin with the following assumptions. We are well aware that each requires a measure of faith—that is, each is based on a certain amount of evidence that warrants our belief, though none can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

1. The enduring image

Human beings are, and for the duration of the human story will uniquely remain, entrusted with bearing the image of God.

Our ability to discover physical and mathematical patterns in our cosmos, and to develop science and technology that make the most of those patterns, is one of the intended fruits of this image-bearing vocation, meant for the glory of God, the good of our fellow human beings, and the flourishing of creation itself.

2. A pattern of deceptions

In the course of the human story we have become captive to a pattern of deceptions that have corrupted the divine image, compromised our ability to pursue or even know what is best for us, and distorted our application of mathematics and science.

We have acted as if we can live independently of God, and the life of love that God offers and commands, with no harm and indeed great benefit to ourselves (this is the most fundamental pattern, known as the sin of pride). More specifically, the “modern” world has been founded on the quest to secure good things for ourselves through some form of pure technique that does not require relationship—with others or with God (this is the ancient allure of and quest for magic, uniquely enabled in modernity by what we call technology). Likewise, modern economies have effectively subordinated all other goods, to the extent they are acknowledged at all, to the pursuit of financial wealth that purports to give us abundance without dependence (the seduction of Mammon).

Insofar as we are all caught up in these patterns of false belief and behavior, God is dishonored, human beings are degraded and violated, and creation is exploited and diminished.

3. Very good and also very distorted

AI, like other scientific and technical advances, is part of the “very good” world that human beings are meant to steward and extend.

It is a significant advance on much previous technology in the way it recapitulates the patterns of learning and cognition that arose in the course of the development of life (especially the nervous system and the brain). In the case of Large Language Models and similar systems, it also is able to incorporate (via training data) much of the vast achievement of human culture. In this way it is potentially a profound and fruitful extension of human image-bearing, and like other major cultural achievements (such as the invention of writing) it can be expected to unlock good potentialities of the created and cultivated world that were previously inaccessible.

But it is also, inevitably, subject to the patterns of deception—including the patterns it has absorbed from its training data—that will tend to bend its outputs and its users in corrupting directions.

4. As consequential as the Internet—or electricity—or agriculture

While the scope of AI’s full potential is not yet clear, it is reasonable to believe that it is as consequential a technological development as the Internet (developed and deployed 1990–2010). But we should consider the likelihood that it will prove as consequential as electricity (1850–1950), and the possibility that it will prove as consequential as agriculture (the “neolithic revolution,” 8,500–6,500 years before the present day).

Insofar as all of these were the result of image bearers extending the “very good” world, they created genuine common wealth that continues to benefit humanity and creation; but all of them were also subordinated to foolish and prideful visions, leading to significant damage to human beings, human societies, and the created world; and almost all of their most significant consequences could not have been foreseen by their early inventors and innovators.

We can expect all this to be true of AI as well.

5. Asymmetrical risk—even without a singularity

There are no good reasons, including no good technical reasons, to believe that AI will somehow usher in a “singularity” in which human beings are replaced in their unique role and responsibility for one another and for the cosmos—even as there is every reason to believe that AI, like all technology, will vastly outstrip human capabilities in specific areas.

Fantasies or fears of AI “replacing” us are misplaced (though AI will almost certainly come to replace some tasks and activities currently performed by human beings). But concerns that AI will be harnessed to exploitative ends, or will be deployed in ways heedless of its unintended consequences, are well founded.

And like certain useful but asymmetrically dangerous technologies, like nuclear fission, AI may be capable of unleashing vast destruction (as, for example, in the discovery and design of highly virulent biological weapons).

6. The fantasy of the superhuman

While AI may or may not prove to be as consequential as the most dramatic technological developments of human history, it carries unique risks because of its close and genuine kinship to one distinctive way human beings interact with the world (“intelligence”) and its ability to mimic (though probably not genuinely possess) other distinctive human characteristics including personality and purposefulness.

Misunderstood or misapplied, AI may hold unique potential for the destructive triumph of pride, magic, and Mammon. These risks apply even if AI proves technically less capable than we may imagine, because the mere fantasy of creating “superhuman” capabilities, and of inventing alternatives to human beings, is sufficient to distort relationships, economies, and societies.

Six Redemptive Directions

With these assumptions in mind, we offer the following guidance to those called to build ventures that extend AI in redemptive ways—meaning not just within ethical boundaries, but actually seeking to repair some of the damage done by previous waves of technology.

This guidance is meant to operate primarily at the venture level. We recognize that many important decisions about AI will be taken at the level of government and policy (such as regulation of the sources and scope of training data), and those regulatory frameworks will in turn constrain and enable decisions made by a handful of very large infrastructure providers (the companies developing and training foundation models).

While we hope that some redemptive actors will have real influence “from the top” on policy and may build infrastructure at very large scale, most entrepreneurs exercise their greatest influence “from below” by shifting the direction of innovation through specific applications.

Like the Internet, electricity, and agriculture, AI is a general-purpose technology that can be harnessed to many ends. Redemptive entrepreneurs can lead the way in demonstrating that AI can be deployed—in fact, is best deployed—in ways that dethrone pride, magic, and Mammon and that elevate the dignity of human beings and their capacity to flourish as image bearers in the world.

1. Redemptive AI will inform but not replace human agency.

One of AI’s fundamental capabilities is its ability to operate as a “prediction machine” that can inform human decisions and choices. But AI’s predictive powers are not being deployed in a neutral environment. Many human beings, in too many dimensions of life, are already limited in their ability to make free and wise choices by unjust markets, inflexible and quasi-mechanical systems, entrenched bureaucracies, and repressive regimes. AI could easily be deployed on behalf of any of these social forces to further suppress genuine human freedom and responsibility.

Redemptive AI will actively repair and restore human agency rather than further concentrating or diffusing it. It will provide the inputs and incentives to make better decisions, but it will not pretend to relieve human persons of their responsibility to choose wise paths, especially in areas (e.g., policing, the extension of financial credit, the evaluation of employees, or the management of natural resources) that can only be responsibly undertaken by persons conscious of the dignity of human beings and the created world entrusted to us.

2. Redemptive AI will develop rather than diminish human cognitive capacity and extend rather than replace education.

The current reality is that education—the means by which human societies prepare people to make meaningful and lasting contributions to their common life—is inequitable in most modern nations, especially the United States, and is failing to develop the full capabilities of many people. Even those who ”succeed” on the terms of our current educational systems are continually tempted by current technology and media to spend their waking life in “the shallows.”

It is obvious that AI could be deployed to accelerate these trends, by providing the means for students to fake competence in a subject, by providing ready-made “answers” to both technical and complex questions, or simply by offering an even more customized and irresistible stream of consumable entertainment. Such a direction would deprive most human beings of the opportunity to become genuinely informed and creative participants in culture.

Redemptive AI can make massive contributions to education and lifelong cognitive growth by appropriately scaffolding, supporting, and sequencing the difficult tasks involved in becoming an educated person who possesses both skill and wisdom.

3. Redemptive AI will respect and advance human embodiment.

In sharp contrast to many currents of modern behavior and belief, we believe that having bodies is “a feature, not a bug” of being human. The first few generations of computer technology have abetted a damaging trend toward disembodiment, privileging sedentary mental activity while encouraging if not forcing people to neglect their design as creatures who learn, work, and think best when we are moving purposefully through the world together.

Compared to the systems widely available today, AI has the potential to interact much more dynamically with human beings using their full sensory and physical capacities (such as through audio interfaces that allow people to stay engaged with their embodied environment rather than screen-based interfaces that draw them away from it), while also dramatically assisting people who lack one or more typical capacities to participate more fully in the world (such as through brain-computer interfaces for those who have lost neuromuscular capabilities through paralysis).

4. Redemptive AI will serve personal relationships rather than replace them.

AI shows great promise for being able to fluently interact with the relational dimension of human life (as when Large Language Models are prompted to take on the persona of a chatbot). The clear and present danger is that this fluency will be exploited, perhaps at the willing and eager behest of users, to provide deeply persuasive simulations of relationship. Such simulations will have the power of many addictive substances and behaviors, in that they will directly harness the reward systems of the human mind-body-soul complex while delivering no real benefits and degrading or entirely erasing users’ ability to choose real life.

Redemptive AI, while benefiting from its sensitivity to relationships, will never present itself as a person, will not offer to substitute itself for persons or personal relationships, and will not purport to relieve its users of the burdens of genuinely caring for and being cared for by other persons. Instead it will facilitate more relationally healthy pathways for human life.

(For example, many employers currently schedule contingent workers’ shifts in ways that are supremely indifferent to those workers’ family responsibilities; an AI “aware” of workers’ family commitments could be deployed to create far more relationally optimal work schedules while also matching or exceeding the economic efficiency of current solutions.)

5. Redemptive AI will restore trust in human institutions by protecting privacy and advancing transparency.

Too many systems today are opaque about their own operations, concealing their inner workings from the public, while relying on extraordinary levels of surveillance and data-gathering about persons. The emerging reality is one in which systems have no transparency at all while persons and their data are rendered “transparent” to corporations, advertisers, and nation-states.

Without redemptive development, including technical breakthroughs, AI will exacerbate both of these trends, because as currently designed it is an inherently opaque system, capable of gathering and representing huge amounts of data about individuals, and making that data fully available only to very large-scale owners and operators. What is actually needed is a substantial reversal in which institutions and the systems they deploy become more transparent, while persons and their individual information become more protected.

Redemptive AI will be designed to give more clarity, not less, about how institutions operate, while ensuring that individuals retain the dignity of being known through their own choices and disclosures, not through a constant and unchosen stream of surreptitiously collected and analyzed data.

(Consider the likelihood of governments wishing to “pre-incriminate,” with the help of data analysis, those presumed likely to break the law. Redemptive AI, while assisting in ascertaining the truth about criminal behavior, will extend the protection against self-incrimination by only providing public justice systems with information about actual criminal behavior, not merely purported patterns in data. At the same time, redemptive AI that operates with high transparency may be able to dramatically reduce uncertainty about the evidence offered in criminal trials, preventing unjust convictions and increasing confidence in the public justice system.)

6. Redemptive AI will benefit the global majority rather than enrich and entrench a narrow minority.

Current pathways to the most powerful AI systems are extraordinarily capital- and energy-intensive, lending themselves to concentration in the hands of a few resource-rich corporations located in a handful of countries. Depending on how AI services are delivered and priced, this does not necessarily need to mean that AI cannot benefit the majority of human beings—if it ultimately can be provided at very low marginal cost, it can have a very beneficial effect for low-income users.

But without specific redemptive innovation, it is almost certain that the greatest benefits of AI will flow to the already wealthiest and most powerful corners of the world, not least because they are already most entrenched in the data economy (compare, for example, the amount of training data available in English to that in languages spoken only by small groups of people).

Redemptive AI will differentially find ways to unlock value at “the bottom of the pyramid”—and will pursue innovations that accomplish that goal without ensnaring the world’s poor ever more deeply in a kind of datafication of their lives which disrupt human connection and largely only benefit the owners of the largest pools of data.

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A Call to Repair and Redeem Through AI

At this very early stage in the history of AI, it is extremely tempting for venture builders and investors to adopt a gold-rush, land-grab mentality, racing to claim a stake in the technology by swiftly building infrastructure and applications that promise quick financial returns, assuming (if these questions are considered at all) that ethical reflection and protections can come incrementally, once capital is secured and profit is made.

But too many recent waves of technology—social media being a particularly vivid example—have followed this pattern, delivering some benefits but also consolidating power in unaccountable large-scale institutions, substituting thin forms of existence for true human flourishing, and extracting huge costs in physical, relational, spiritual, and social well-being. If it is true, as Yuval Harari, Tristan Harris, and Aza Raskin have suggested, that algorithmic social media was humanity’s first large-scale encounter with “AI,” the rise of far more powerful and flexible algorithms is hardly something to be treated as an ethically inconsequential opportunity for massive profits.

We believe redemptive entrepreneurs, while certainly pursuing breakthroughs and moving at the speed of expertise, will build into the very foundation of their products a vision not just of leveraging what the existing system of technology has produced, but of repairing what it has damaged.

Redemptive AI can contribute to the ultimate redemptive mission: to liberate human beings to live fully as what they truly are, incomparable, irreplaceable image bearers of the Creator who made all things in and for love.

Everything changes when you come back. Second dates are more consequential than first dates! Relationships begin—really begin—not the first time you meet, but the second, when you return and reconnect.

Everything changes when you come back. Our team at Praxis has heard this from me many times over the past few years. It’s a core principle of our community, and really of any community.

We’ve seen this principle at work in our accelerator programs at Praxis, which require a commitment to two week-long retreats. The first week is intense, exciting, and often powerful and helpful in its own right. But when we come back a few months later for the second week, something is different and deeper right from the start. There is more trust. There is more honesty. And there often is more progress and more transformation.

Everything changes when you come back. We know this is true in venture building. “Follow-on investments” matter. It’s one thing to invest one time—it’s another to invest in the next round. It’s one thing to make a single gift—it’s another to give year after year as an organization grows.

The psychiatrist Curt Thompson, who has been a good friend to many of us, has spoken and written powerfully about this basic dynamic using the terms rupture and repair. Rupture and repair, Curt has taught us—drawing on attachment theory and interpersonal neurobiology—are at the foundation of all healthy relationships.

Absence and presence. Rupture and repair are found in this most elemental rhythm. We experience it first in the relationship between child and parent—most often child and mother, though this dynamic applies to every caregiver in the child’s life. The parent disappears, even just for a moment, and while we as adults know this is quite normal and natural, for the child it is a major event. The child has to absorb the parent’s absence and learn to trust that the parent will return.

You were away, but then you returned. You were gone, but then you came back. Absence and presence is the beginning of trust.

But deeper cycles of rupture and repair play an equally important part in our relationships.

Failure and recovery. Failure can happen, and often does, without anyone being at fault. Failure can happen simply because of changing conditions and the vulnerabilities of the world. How do we respond when failure happens?

I have never quite gotten over reading an article years ago in the Harvard Business Review based on studies of middle managers at a large company. Some advanced in their careers; others got stuck. What made the difference, the authors of this study found, came down not to whether they had experienced failure—they all had—but to how they failed. Successful managers failed quickly, boldly, and loudly. Unsuccessful ones failed slowly, timidly, and quietly.

But of course there is another kind of failure we must reckon with.

Sin and forgiveness. Not just failure, which may be the result of circumstances alone, but fault. Broken promises. Betrayal. These ruptures, too, are part of our lives.

And this is true in every room—the Praxis Summit being no exception. Walk into a room like the Praxis Summit and you may feel that you have walked into a room of bright and beautiful people, and you have. But you have not just walked into a room of bright and beautiful people. You have walked into a room of sinners. For all our desire to be friends and companions to one another, we are also threats and dangers to one another.

And we live in a world where sin is not just personal but structural, where even without wishing it we find ourselves participating in and perpetuating exploitation. As Scott Kauffmann says whenever he teaches the Praxis Redemptive Frame, exploitation is not just “out there” but “in here.” It is in us.

We so wish this were not so. It is so. And so we need to practice confrontation, telling the truth in love; and repentance, turning around; and forgiveness, extending mercy when it is not deserved, because mercy is only mercy when it is not deserved.

Here we have to say that we are especially grateful that although some of our community have been sinned against in very particular ways by others in the community—you still came back. And some of you have experienced the ways that our own community, captive as it is to principalities and powers, perpetuated sin without intending it, in ways that caused real damage and pain—and you still came back. That is a huge commitment to the gospel and an extraordinary testimony to the power of Jesus in your lives. If this community is ever to be truly redemptive, it will be because of those kinds of choices.

The story of our world is rupture without repair.

Simple absence from one another, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic but also by the architecture of loneliness that so characterizes the Western, technological world, has bred mistrust and suspicion. Then there has been the failure of systems that had promised to protect us. Even those systems designed with the best of intentions have not served most of us well over the past few years.

And most deeply, we have seen exploitation without repentance or repair—so often justified by the belief, or the pretext, that the other side is so exploitative that all we can do is manipulate and undermine in turn for the sake of our own side. All this has created a crisis of trust that stretches all the way from neighborhoods to nations.

Scott Kauffmann said something very powerful to me as we discussed this recently: in this kind of crisis, it is nowhere near enough simply to be on the “right side.”

I think this may help to clarify some language we use at Praxis, and that one hears in the broader Christian world, that can be misunderstood, and perhaps is sometimes misintended: the language of “cultural renewal.”

We use this language to describe the telos of redemptive strategy—seeking not simply to leverage culture, or even just improve culture, but to renew culture.

But this phrase, if not carefully qualified, can have a connotation of cultural nostalgia. It can seem to imply that we are seeking to turn the clock back to some imagined golden age, decades or centuries in the past, when the world seemed to work better for people like us.

True, whenever we teach on this aspect of Praxis’s vision we always emphasize that we are pursuing creative restoration—not simply a rewind to some past state, but a new creation that opens up new possibilities rather than just repeating past patterns. But why use the language of restoration or renewal at all? What are we trying to renew? And what exactly are we aiming to restore, to bring back to life and remake in a new way?

I’ve come to believe that the real goal of cultural restoration is not to restore a particular past culture—as if there were a time in history that was unambiguously better, for all image bearers and creation itself, to which we could return—as it is to restore the cultural conditions we all were instinctively seeking when we first arrived in the world.

The goal of cultural renewal is to make available and possible what we all believed was available and possible the first time we opened our eyes. We were born in hope, even before we knew what hope was, that there was a world of love and creative possibility in which we had a role to play. And such a world would only come into existence if there were a cultural environment adequate to recognize us, care for us, and bestow dignity on us. Every one of us, in the early moments of infancy and childhood, held on to that hope.

Many things have happened in our world to rupture that hope.

True cultural renewal would repair the shared conditions of our common life so that the hope of flourishing, felt instinctively by every human child, could be fulfilled.

In The Life We’re Looking For I write about “canopies of trust,” the relational contexts where promises are made and kept in such a way as to generate healthy, creative, imaginative life. These canopies can be as small as a friendship or as wide as a nation, and indeed these canopies cascade from large to small in healthy societies.

In the book I focus on the unique role of “households” in offering persons a canopy of trust, but we build these canopies here at Praxis, too. A venture is a canopy of trust. An investment or a grant creates a canopy of trust. Each accelerator class is its own small canopy of trust, and at the Praxis Summit we invite each class of fellows into and under a wider canopy.

We used these days to “come back” and to talk about what we could repair together. And that is what we will do the next time we come back as well. Indeed, this is what we should be seeking to do in some way every time we come back, whether two of us for coffee or hundreds of us for Summit.

Because repairing the canopy, after it has been torn, is what redemptive communities are for.

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Recently, I had the privilege of speaking with several audiences at a liberal arts college. I began my talks by posing a question: “What is going on in the world?” The first answer (from students) came quickly and definitively: “chaos.”

Later that day, I offered the same question to a group of professors, and sure enough, the first answer: “chaos.”

If that was the sentiment on a beautiful, serene campus where the primary work is to teach and to learn, we shouldn’t be surprised how true it feels everywhere—in our work, in our communities, in the news we absorb everyday, and (especially) in the wilds of social media. We’re experiencing a growing collective helplessness that the problems we face in our world are increasingly complex and we don’t know where to turn for solutions.

In the face of this sense of powerlessness amidst chaos, I believe that now more than ever, each of us needs a robust vision for how our work can be a vehicle for redemptive possibility: to bring a little more beauty and justice into places of brokenness and harm, and to bless others in the process.

I’ve had the privilege of working with hundreds of college students and recent graduates asking important questions about their vocational choices: How can I have the most impact? How can I make use of the gifts God has given me? How can I learn what it is “really like” to express my faith through my work in my chosen field? Are some fields or professions more redemptive than others? Should I start my own venture or join one? Can I work redemptively and entrepreneurially if I’m not a founder, or (especially) if I’m trying to move up in a large organization?

Over time, I’ve come to see that these questions aren’t just for graduates searching for their first job out of college. In fact, many within the Praxis community and beyond are asking these questions at various points of their working lives.

Each career path is as unique as the individual, so there is no standard formula here. Rather, I’ve identified three moves that nearly anyone can pursue throughout one’s career: developing a holistic vision for work across the Redemptive Frame, taking action within your agency, and increasing your agency by seriously considering starting or joining a startup.

Move 1. Develop a Holistic Vision for Work Across the Redemptive Frame

The faith and work movement has done the crucial work of reminding our generation in the Church that God indeed cares about our vocation, and that however important, pastoral or mission work is not a “higher calling” than other types of work. What I’ve observed, though, is a tendency to replace this “sacred/secular divide” with other ones. We invent new hierarchies, where (for example) nonprofit endeavors are seen to hold more inherent value than business careers, or where elite, “stable” institutions are seen to be intrinsically superior to emerging ones.

This is a mistake. In fact, there is significant redemptive potential in every sector and type of organization. Regardless of legal status, what makes an organization exploitative, ethical, or redemptive rests in how it operates and what it produces in the world. At Praxis, after working closely with more than 200 entrepreneurs doing pioneering work across dozens of sectors and legal structures, we’ve come to define these terms using the Redemptive Frame.

On the Redemptive Frame, the Y-axis is Strategic Vision, which deals with what is produced through our work—products, services, brands, spaces—and the impact these have on the world. The X-axis is Operating Model, or how those things are brought into the world: team culture, supply chain, partnerships, capital structure. The Z-axis is Leadership Intent, where the focus is on who the leaders are becoming as they work, what motivates them, and how they spend their working days.

This paradigm was critically missing in my own journey of connecting my faith to my daily work.

As an undergraduate business student serving on the leadership team of a Christian business club, I devoted significant time to understanding how business and faith worked together. Week in and week out for four years, I heard inspiring stories from prominent business leaders, read multiple books, and had countless conversations with thoughtful peers on how to integrate faith and work.

What sank in was pretty straightforward: Work hard, have high integrity, pray for your co-workers, practice servant leadership, and give money away (particularly to missions and the church). So that’s what I set out to do when I took a job at a large corporation after graduation.

Many years later, I had a flashback to a particularly impressionable moment from that job.

Early in my career, I worked on the product buying team at a large retailer. We were tasked with selecting the product assortment, negotiating prices and promotions with vendors, and managing sales. In one particularly important encounter, I employed all the negotiation techniques that pass for “best practices” to get what I wanted: a lower price we could use to beat our competition in a prominent advertisement.

Knowing that I had the leverage in the situation, I threatened to pull the vendor from the advertisement and replace them with one of their competitors if they couldn’t get our unit cost to the number I was demanding. Eventually, the vendor caved, and I won. We had a spike in unit sales, clearly beat our competition in the ad, saw additional foot traffic to our stores, and I was celebrated by my peers and bosses in the Monday morning ad review.

And yet my winning probably had a cost, to which I was oblivious at the time.

At the time of my flashback, I was around a number of people who were fighting human trafficking. I learned that a majority of victims of modern day slavery—an estimated 16 million people— are exploited through work in the private sector, and it’s people at the bottom of these supply chains who are most likely to pay the cost of our unquenchable consumerism. Suddenly I was able to see the contrast between the efforts many social entrepreneurs were making to combat modern-day slavery and the possibility that my work for a Fortune 100 company had advanced it in some way. While I had “won” that price negotiation, in a moment of honest self-reflection, I had to acknowledge that the costs of that winning likely had been borne on the backs of the people at the bottom of the supply chain.

This was a sobering revelation, especially given my long pursuit of faith and work integration. I realized that most of what I had learned was about my personal conduct in the workplace, but had little to say about what my work was producing in the world. Was this product actually good for the people we were trying to sell it to? Were we honest in the ways we presented what the product could (and couldn’t!) do for customers? Was the product good for God’s creation, or would it just end up in a junk drawer, donation bin, or an overflowing garage?

Moreover, I was ill-equipped to think well about how our products were made or how our services were delivered. Were we paying attention to the supply chain and asking hard questions about exploitation—or were we turning a blind eye so that our business model could thrive? How did we treat our suppliers and partners? And were we actively creating a workforce culture that truly cared for its people, or one that ran people into the ground, treating them as little more than organizational resources?

The Redemptive Frame provides a more holistic way of looking at our work, and I’ve found it to be very helpful to considering our vocational impact beyond simply how we personally conduct ourselves in the workplace. Looking back, these were the questions I wished I had asked early on in my own career.

So, the first move toward redemptive action is to develop a holistic vision for your work across the Redemptive Frame.

2. Take Action Within Your Agency

If your experience is anything like mine, as you begin to see differently, with a vision that spans the Redemptive Frame, you’ll want to act differently to pursue that vision.

But where to start? Most of us, especially earlier in our careers, don’t feel much power to change things. We feel limited agency, which we could define as our ability to make choices that affect outcomes in a meaningful way.

Additionally, when we start with problems that are too complex or remote, we tend to distance ourselves from our ability to make change happen. We choose apathy over action. Yet emerging and seasoned entrepreneurs can frequently overcome this temptation when they focus on what they can do today within the agency they actually have.

Whatever level of agency you have today, we recommend starting on the inside of the Redemptive Frame and working your way out, using this “ABC” pattern: Attack the Exploitative, Baseline the Ethical, Chase the Redemptive Edge.

Attack the Exploitative

Return with me to the example of my negotiation. If I had started with a holistic vision for my work that sought to understand the consequences and effects of what we were making and how it was made, I would have been in a better position to pose pointed questions to the vendor about their supply chain.

If I had found their factories were exploiting workers through poor labor conditions and unfair wages, I could have attacked the exploitation by addressing it directly with the vendor and being prepared to pull the advertisement if necessary. Instead, I used the advertisement as a negotiation lever to get a lower cost for my company, which actually put the vendor in a position of potentially having to further exploitation in their supply chain. Ouch.

Now, would that one negotiation radically transform the vendor’s supply chain from an engine of exploitative extraction to one of restorative justice that blesses its employees? No. Change like that, of course, takes a long time and the collective will of many people. Moreover, the redemptive edge is often difficult to see when it’s so clouded by the complex exploitation buried in so many of our norms and practices.

But the individual actions we take day in and day out matter, and this is why we must train our eyes to see exploitative practices—across the Strategic Vision and Operating Model—and do our best within our agency to attack it.

Notice that “attacking the exploitative” happens first at the personal level, then at the broader level. First, beginning within the sphere of my strongest agency, I needed to see how my decisions and actions directly exploited others, and I needed to stop doing those things. (In my case, that would have meant negotiating in good faith rather than manipulating the incentives to maximum advantage.) Only then could I have worked to help identify and root out exploitative practices in the system around me.

Baseline the Ethical

It’s not enough merely to attack or avoid the exploitative. The next move is to baseline the ethical: to ensure that our work clears the bar of integrity, honesty, excellence, and attention to best practices.

This move also begins with our personal conduct. Working with demonstrable excellence is the minimum we must do in light of Colossians 3:23 (“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord”). What’s more, excellence not only enhances your witness as a believer in Christ; in practical terms, it is the only way to earn the right to influence the way your organization operates.

For example, if I had learned of potentially exploitative practices in a vendor’s supply chain, I could have shared this with teammates and begun a productive conversation within my small corner of the company about how to address it. This conversation would have to include and address a number of stakeholders: the wide variety of vendors we did business with, experts in international labor norms, and executives within the company who had more agency to make new policy.

Over time, we could have started to shift the narrative in our advertisements for this product line from being just about the lowest prices to being about a new commitment to supply chain transparency. If we as a company were able to successfully pull this off, no doubt our competitors would take notice and this ethical practice would eventually become more of a norm, or baseline, for our industry.

Anyone who has worked at a large organization of any kind knows this kind of change is never easy. It would likely take years of hard work across dozens or hundreds of people internally and externally to pull something like this off.

Chase the Redemptive Edge

In fact, the pursuit doesn’t stop there, because there are places where even the ethical isn’t sufficient, and where we believe the gospel calls us and points us “beyond the ethical” to the redemptive edge.

Here’s what I mean. At Praxis, we define redemptive as following the pattern of “creative restoration through sacrifice.” Let’s take each term in turn.

To be human is to be creative. As bearers of God’s image, we have the capacity and calling to bring new things into the world. In doing so, we should aim at restoring things that are broken, distorted, or harmful.

In a fallen world, this work of restoration will necessarily involve bearing some kind of cost or sacrifice. To intentionally take the low seat, to consider the needs of others just as we consider our own, to (in the language of business) leave something on the table—this is the work of sacrifice, and no meaningful restoration takes place without it.

Here’s a practical form of following the “creative restoration through sacrifice” pattern no matter where you are in the organization—you can treat everyone around you with patience, care, honor, and blessing. You can assume the best of others, even when the organizational culture protects those who engage in gossip and unhealthy competition. When you do this in countercultural ways, you are being creative; you are contributing to restoration; and you will sometimes be sacrificing advantage, power or comfort, especially in the short term.

This is a high and difficult calling, and we should not treat it otherwise. Even in the best of circumstances, our efforts to pursue the redemptive edge will be partial, limited, and provisional. Even so, the call to creative restoration through sacrifice is worth heeding in whatever stage of career we find ourselves.

3. Build Agency by Starting or Joining a Startup

So you’ve sought to take action right where you are: you’ve sought to attack or avoid exploitative patterns, you’ve made a habit of acting with excellence and ethics, and you’ve even moved beyond the ethical to pursue restoration, even when it comes with a risk and cost.

Over the years, how do you pursue more opportunity and agency inside and (especially) beyond your current role and organization?

I’ve come to categorize job opportunities by type of organization and roles within those organizations through this 2x2:

It might be surprising to see that a mid-level executive at an established organization has less agency than an entry-level employee at a startup. But this is generally true. Even the most nimble large organizations struggle to pivot as quickly as even the most risk-averse startups. So one great way to increase your agency to act redemptively is to start something—or go work for someone who has.

That last clause is important. While we at Praxis have a deep love for founders, and are certainly in favor of more people starting new things, we’ve noticed two things. First, many successful entrepreneurs are made, not born. Yes, of course, some serial entrepreneurs have been starting businesses since an early age and could not imagine life outside of the founder’s seat. Yet for many others, the path to becoming a successful founder is often the byproduct of a faithful pursuit of vocational assignments, which later coalesces into a desire to start something new.

Second, there are many ways to be entrepreneurial, including joining an early-stage startup as an employee. And for those with eyes to see them, joining a startup has numerous benefits. Being a first employee of a startup—even if it’s in a highly administrative role where all you’re doing is managing the founder’s calendar and booking travel—gives you unprecedented access to the daily challenges and successes of starting something new.

Whether it be learning how to manage cash flows, deciding what type of capital is needed to operate the venture, figuring out how to access that capital, finding product/market fit, deciding when and who to hire (and fire!), founders have a great deal of responsibility in the earliest days. As such, they are likely to lean heavily on the gifts and abilities of the team they employ, which gives early employees a great deal of agency and influence.

Consider, for example, former Praxis Emerging Founder Brannon Veal, who—with a resume that includes roles at NASA and a highly respected company in the Fortune 100—joined a startup called ICON as an engineer. Instead of being one of hundreds or thousands of engineers employed at a large corporation, he’s now one of a handful of engineers working on cutting-edge 3D home printing technology within a company seeking to make affordable, dignified housing available to everyone throughout the world.

An ambitious goal, but one they have started to make progress on: in partnership with New Story, they recently unveiled the world’s first 3D printed home community. Brannon expedited his path to a high-agency role by joining a startup where his work connects directly to creating redemptive possibilities in service of a mission he cares deeply about.

A Vision for Coherence + Redemptive Action

So should everyone join a startup instead of working for a corporation or established organization? Is it only possible to realize true redemptive possibilities by founding or joining a startup? Is there a new “hierarchy of callings” where founders and employees at startups are the most redemptive?

The short answer is “no,” we cannot replace one unbiblical hierarchy with another. There are different opportunities, tradeoffs, and challenges for redemptive impact whether you are a solo practitioner, a startup team member, or an employee in a large institution.

Our particular advocacy here is that you strongly consider spending time in a smaller organization at any point in your career. Not because it’s cooler, or because you think it’s a faster track to wealth, or to not “working for the man”—but because it generally affords you the opportunity to develop greater vocational coherence and practice redemptive action in a shorter timespan.

Here’s the kicker: All of us—whether working at a startup or established organization, in an entry level or executive role—will be hindered by a lack of vocational coherence. That is why the first move (and continues to be the first move for our whole career!) is to develop a more robust, holistic vision for our vocation across the Redemptive Frame.

This helps us see ourselves as part of a larger whole—both in the organization we work for and that organization’s impact on the world. As we see our role in the world as deeper and larger, then we can more easily identify and attack exploitation through our work, move towards baselining the ethical, and always chase the redemptive.

In his book Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity, David Whyte opens by examining a famous quote (attributed to Robert Blake) about having a firm persuasion in our work, and adds his take:

To have a firm persuasion in our work—to feel that what we do is right for ourselves and good for the world at the exact same time—is one of the great triumphs of human existence.

Since I don’t know Whyte personally and dare not ascribe my faith convictions to him, I may interpret this passage differently than he intends it. Regardless, this important arrangement of words demonstrates the convictions we ought to hold about work and the world. Developing a firm persuasion is a journey I encourage each of our next-generation Academy members to take—and one that I invite you to as well.

The harsh reality of injustice in our world means that this entire conversation is a privileged one. Most people on the planet don’t have the agency to imagine, let alone make, the choices that we are considering here.

But for those of us who do, may we make the best of our position by moving always in the direction of redemptive action: making things that matter, stewarding whatever agency we have, and taking wise risks to increase our agency, so that we can bring about more redemptive possibilities on behalf of others.

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At Praxis, we’re committed to the idea that redemptive entrepreneurship comes from rethinking three fundamental dimensions of every enterprise: its strategic intent (the goods or services the enterprise produces), its operating model (its internal culture and way of treating all the people in its sphere of influence, from vendors to customers), and perhaps most fundamentally, its leader’s script, a phrase we’ve come to use to identify the history, motivations, and aims of the founders of a venture.

The stories of influential companies are almost always deeply tied up with the personal stories of their founders—for better and for worse. For that reason, we’re always looking for models, both in the present and in the Christian tradition, of entrepreneurs who clearly lived out a redemptive story.

And if you’re looking for a model of a redemptive entrepreneur from the New Testament itself—maybe the whole Bible—it’s hard to beat the Apostle Paul.

Saul of Tarsus had spent his early career totally devoted to the existing institutions of first-century Palestinian Judaism. Then he became a leader of the movement to violently suppress the followers of Jesus of Nazareth. But after a blinding encounter with Jesus himself, his entire life mission changed—including, apparently, his name.

Along with his cofounders—figures like Barnabas, Silas, Timothy, Priscilla, and Aquila—he began to build a new kind of religious community around the cities of the Mediterranean rim, one anchored deeply in the tradition of his own Jewish people but also radically different from anything that had come before. If anyone in the Bible is a model for entrepreneurs, it is Paul.

So what was Paul’s script for his own life?

The striking but inescapable answer is that he did not have one. Saul—the devoted Pharisee—had a script. But Paul—the converted, entrepreneurial apostle—did not have a script in mind at all.

What do I mean, in this context, by a “script”? Think of it as a set of well-defined steps, rooted in the past, that promises to guide you to a successful outcome. (Take this series of classes and exams and you’ll be able to get to medical school—then go through a sequence of training like first-year classes, rotations, internship, and residency, and you’ll be credentialed as a doctor.)

Richard Rohr refers to this master plan for our lives as the “winner script,” the steps that have worked for others to achieve mastery and recognition. Such a script is, well, prescriptive: Follow its steps, the script promises, and it will work for you, too.

Saul of Tarsus certainly had such a script. In the letter to the Philippians, Paul describes it. It was based on what Paul has come to recognize as “confidence in the flesh”:

If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. (Phil. 3:4b-6)

Saul’s confidence came from his past—his secure position as “a Hebrew born of Hebrews,” with parents who were religiously observant (circumcising him on the eighth day), followed by his own devoted accomplishments. As a young man he had been a student of Gamaliel, one of the most celebrated rabbis of the first century.

All this added up to what we would call a clear “track record” (not so different from the pedigree of many entrepreneurs who gain access to venture capital today). It gave Saul reason for confidence, not just about success among his peers, but about something even more important to a first-century Jew: blamelessness before God at the final judgment.

According to Saul’s script, he was ideally positioned to live a life of faithful service and receive God’s “well done” at the final resurrection, the end of history that every Pharisee expected. Saul had a crystal-clear script, and by its terms he was succeeding.

But Saul had been knocked off his horse by the blinding vision of a Messiah (in Greek, Christos) who violated all of his expectations. And this had caused him to repudiate his script:

Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. (Phil. 3:7–9)

Paul abandoned Saul’s script, but that does not mean his life became aimless. He still had a clear purpose, indeed a clearer and more powerful purpose than Saul the Pharisee had:

I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. (Phil. 3:10–14)

Paul has a goal. But what Paul does not have, in these and other passages, is a well-defined script. He has abandoned the characteristic “confidence” of those who follow scripts, with clear directions for behavior, belief, and outcomes. He hopes that somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. He has no illusions that he has already obtained this—instead he hopes that because Christ Jesus has made me his own he will be caught up in the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

The story of Paul’s life has radically shifted from his past and from matters he can control—his life “in the flesh”—to his future which is held entirely by God in Christ.

We clearly see Paul’s abandonment of the script as he reassures the Philippians about what would have seemed to them like a major disaster: his imprisonment by the government for criminal charges that could (and, in his case, ultimately did) carry the death penalty.

The Philippians were not just Paul’s dear friends, but also financial investors in his mission. Imagine calling your largest funder to tell them you had just been arrested for a capital offense—one that would derail your mission and call into question your own moral character and social worth. This is certainly not the script anyone would write for their missionary efforts or include in a pitch deck.

But Paul writes the Philippians to break them free of their scripts as well—to assure them that God is just as powerful as ever, and working both death and resurrection in Paul’s life and theirs. His very first topic in the letter is the way that the various disruptions to his ministry are actually opportunities for rejoicing rather than anxiety:

I want you to know, beloved, that what has happened to me has actually helped to spread the gospel, so that it has become known throughout the whole imperial guard and to everyone else that my imprisonment is for Christ; and most of the brothers and sisters, having been made confident in the Lord by my imprisonment, dare to speak the word with greater boldness and without fear. Some proclaim Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from goodwill. … What does it matter? Just this, that Christ is proclaimed in every way, whether out of false motives or true; and in that I rejoice. Yes, and I will continue to rejoice, for I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my deliverance. (Phil. 1:12–19)

And then Paul goes on to ponder the ultimate outcome—either life or death—and realizes that he has no script that steers him in one direction or another. Instead he has hope—a confidence not in his past (the “flesh”) but in his relationship with Christ, which allows him to view all potential outcomes of his current situation with confidence:

It is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be put to shame in any way, but that by my speaking with all boldness, Christ will be exalted now as always in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me; and I do not know which I prefer. I am hard pressed between the two: my desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better; but to remain in the flesh is more necessary for you. Since I am convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with all of you for your progress and joy in faith. . . . (Phil. 1:20–25)

From script to improv

One of the great turning points in American theater was the 1959 founding in Chicago of The Second City—the first theater troupe dedicated to improvisation. Unlike traditional theater and comedy, Second City created shows that evolved unpredictably—and hilariously—based on audience suggestions and the interaction of performers.

Previous generations of comedians had honed their jokes and routines in rehearsal, but Second City’s actors simply rehearsed improvisation itself and trusted that lines, characters, even the entire plot would emerge in the performance. Rather than memorizing lines, they mastered the art of listening and responding in real time—“improv” techniques that have become essential parts of almost every actor’s training.

If you have to pick a metaphor for the work of entrepreneurs, improv is obviously far closer than traditional acting. The essence of entrepreneurship is exploration, risk, and responsiveness to the environment, trying new directions and quickly pivoting rather than playing out a fixed plan. Entrepreneurs, almost by definition, do not follow a script.

And yet, in another sense, scripts are dangled before entrepreneurs all the time. Think about the funding script that has become so well-known in the era of venture capital—“friends and family,” followed by “seed” and “angel” rounds, followed by “Series A,” “Series B,” and so forth until the “exit.” No matter that countless successful and influential enterprises—let alone redemptive ones—have deviated from this pattern. The script is ingrained and becomes, very much like the training of an ambitious first-century rabbi, a clear guide to obtaining the goal.

Maybe the goal of the Christian entrepreneur’s life is to move from all of our scripts—our business scripts, our relational scripts, our personal vocational scripts—to a life of improv, one where we can honestly say that we do not prefer one outcome or another, as long as our life in Christ remains alive and fruitful. As anachronistic as it could seem to apply a twentieth-century American comedy genre to a first-century Jew, something like this is clearly what had happened to Paul.

The life of an improv apostle

How does Paul see his highly entrepreneurial, improvisational life? Over and over in his writings (as well as the account of his missionary journeys in Acts) several themes emerge—themes that are strikingly parallel to the art of improv:

1. Paul’s life is relational. He is driven most deeply by his love for individuals and communities—both the ones with whom he has great affection, like the Philippians, and the ones with whom he has great conflict, like the Corinthians. Most of all, he has an unshakeable sense of relationship with God, one sustained by prayer and responsiveness to God’s direct guidance. Paul does not need a script for his life because love—of God and neighbor—guides his daily choices.

   This relational approach is very close to the heart of improv. Trust and communication between actors is essential to successfully “tossing” a scene back and forth. Second-City-style improv also introduces a level of communication and interdependence between actors and audience that is not found in traditional theater. There is really no such thing as an improv monologue, because the very essence of improv is discovering possibilities together with other people.

2. Paul’s life is a matter not of achievement—the successful performance of a script—but of grace—the daily, astonished discovery of the fruitful life that God is opening up for him. The most characteristic way Paul refers to his own vocation is “the grace of God given to me.” It’s a phrase that appears about a dozen times in Paul’s letters, never referring primarily, as we might expect, to his salvation, but instead always clearly referring to his mission—a vocation he has received rather than achieved.

   Likewise, the cornerstone practice of improv is summed up in the phrase, “Yes, and—” : the commitment to treat every line and action of a fellow performer, no matter how implausible, as a gift that will open up new possibilities.

3. Paul’s life is surrendered and committed. He has nothing of his own to cling to or control—instead, every day he has to offer his whole life to God’s mission. And this, too, is like improv, which requires the complete presence and trust of the performer.

   Of course all acting, at its best, requires that kind of presence and trust—but it is possible to end up just going through the motions, or reciting lines by rote, when you have a script. When there is no script? Your only option is to show up and trust the process in each moment, with total commitment.

   To put it another way: truly great traditional actors, the ones at the height of their powers, show up with surrender and commitment in each moment of a performance (partly, these days, because they train with improv techniques). But even the most inexperienced, amateur improv actor has to show up with that level of surrender and commitment.

So we see Paul, in his various letters to different churches, discarding one script after another. In the letter to the Galatians, he discards the circumcision script—the idea that ritual membership in Israel is the key to being justified before God. Instead everything hinges on faith and grace.

In 1 Corinthians 7, he discards the marriage script, saying that it is of little consequence whether people marry or remain unmarried: “I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has a particular gift from God, one having one kind and another a different kind” (1 Cor. 7:7). In view of Christ’s return, we could paraphrase his advice in that letter, each person should improvise based on their particular circumstances (and temptation—“it’s better to marry than to burn with passion”—hardly a ringing endorsement of a single script for human flourishing!).

In 2 Corinthians he discards the “peripatetic philosopher” script of the Greco-Roman world, the all too familiar pattern of would-be sages traveling from town to town and fleecing their residents through charming rhetoric.

And why was Paul so willing to discard all these scripts? Because, of course, he had become a servant of Jesus Christ, who overturned all of Israel’s scripts for their Messiah. Indeed, if there is one consistent principle of Jesus’ life, from his twelve-year-old visit to the Temple to his dying words to his post-Resurrection appearances, it is his uncanny ability to fail to conform to people’s narrative of what a good son, teacher, prophet, or Messiah would be, even while fulfilling every part of the law and the prophets.

This is part of what makes Jesus’ encounters with people in the Gospels so fascinating—he literally never answers or acts in the way that he would be expected to do. And this applies above all to his decision to set his face to Jerusalem, resisted so strenuously by his own followers once they understood he was not setting out to take power but to die. Jesus’ willing embrace of the Cross literally put to death the entire script that human beings had written for what it would be like if God (or the gods) came down to earth.

So an essential part of Christian conversion, for entrepreneurs but also (as Paul’s instructions on marriage and so many other topics suggest) for all sorts and conditions of people, is to allow God to set us free from our scripts.

We will no longer be playing a part—we will be relationally, gracefully committed to a constantly evolving, constantly creative interaction with God and others in which unforeseen possibilities will emerge over and over again.

This does not mean that the Christian leader’s life is some kind of freeform anarchy. To the contrary, it has more clarity of purpose and values than ever before. It is very possible to play out a script in a shallow way without really understanding (or caring about) the reason behind the lines. But improv requires cultivating deep confidence in your calling, and paying keen attention to the values that should guide your response in each moment.

So instead of being about a fixed pathway to success, the Christ-shaped life of entrepreneurship and leadership is built on:

• a relationship with God, cultivated through continual prayer

• a compelling vision of creation and new creation that gives us insight into what is missing in the world around us and confidence to bring something new into being

• a holy ambition uprooted from “confidence in the flesh” and re-rooted in trust that God actually wills and seeks to use us in powerful ways to transform the world

• hope that whatever happens—whether we live or die, whether our ventures are wildly successful or seeming fiascos, whether we are celebrated, mocked, or worst of all ignored—we belong to God, the Author of our story

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Over the past forty or so years, there has been an accelerating effort in many churches to break down the dualism of the sacred/secular divide—roughly speaking, the idea that the “ministry” vocation is higher or more important to God than “secular” ones.

In 2023, in many churches, there is at least an acknowledgement that all good work matters in a spiritual sense. This is a truly welcome generational paradigm shift that has provided a solid imaginative foundation for us to see entrepreneurship as a reflection of our Creator’s image.

But beyond this ethical vocational baseline lies redemptive entrepreneurship: an invitation into yet greater potential for our lives, imaginatively and obediently loving God and neighbor through our entrepreneurial capacity, resources, and ventures.

With an expansive view of who qualifies as our neighbor, we believe Christians of all kinds and levels of capacity should be actively working on the major issues of their time, and every Christian entrepreneur should be stretching their capacity to reshape the world. That is, the gospel applies not only to how we work, but perhaps even more to what we choose to work on.

Re-Risking Instead of De-Risking

Praxis friend and Founders Fund Partner Trae Stephens co-wrote an article (with Delphi Labs Co-Founder Markie Wagner) related to this idea, titled “Choose Good Quests.” While their audience is steeped in the norms of Silicon Valley and the technology sector, so much in their piece applies to the norms of Christian vocation. They map all personal and organizational endeavors, or “quests,” on a 2x2 diagram: bad vs. good on the horizontal axis, hard vs. easy on the vertical.

Here’s my summary of their thesis: It is a moral imperative for well-resourced founders and funders to go after the good, hard challenges our world faces, and each of us should seek to maximize our missional capacity based on our experience, talent, and the people and financial resources we can pull together.

They illustrate this in gaming terms, suggesting that we each have a “player level”—an ability to attract resources that improves over time as a combination of our God-given gifts and station in life. The higher our level at any given time, the harder the problem we should attempt to solve. In biblical terms, it’s akin to the parable of the talents (Matthew 25) or the admonition “to whom much is given, much is required” (Luke 12) for modern entrepreneurship.

Another way of stating the Good Quests thesis is that as our authority (our capacity for meaningful action) increases, we are responsible to move toward vulnerability (our exposure to meaningful risk).

If you’ve been in and around the Praxis community, you might recognize these as the words of our Partner for Theology & Culture, Andy Crouch. Andy has made the case that these moves of authority and vulnerability are critical for a life of flourishing. Trae makes the case that they are critical for the flourishing of all of us. Both are right (and I’m sure would agree with each other).

Further, in the Praxis community we might reframe the spectrum of bad to good quests as the exploitative to the redemptive. Ultimately, God designed and modeled life this way for us through the example of Jesus—whose redemptive sacrifice was the greatest, hardest quest there has ever been.

Of course, we are tempted not to live this life in freedom and fullness. Most of us are told by our parents, friends, educational system, and society at large to shoot for reasonable goals, which most often lead us to de-risk our lives by accumulating power, prestige, and possessions that insulate us from vulnerability and permit us to live for ourselves alone.

The Silicon Valley-shaped venture ecosystem is increasingly constructed to reward quests that trend toward the (relatively speaking) exploitative and easy: dopamine-driven fame-through-followers and “quick impact for quick exits” over lasting change. Cause-driven leaders can be lured into the “nobility trap”—the admiration offered to those who choose the nonprofit sector. And as Christians, we are tempted into easier, subcultural off-ramps or toward low-competition fields, instead of seeking the harder, innovative edge where we might step into our full redemptive potential.

Whatever the case, we often experience the cynicism that can come with either success or failure, and we lose some of our belief that things can change, becoming in the process the loudest risk-avoidance voice in our own lives. De-risking or re-risking isn’t only relevant to major career inflection points; it’s a choice in many everyday decisions we make. In his provocative book Turning Pro, Steven Pressfield writes about our tendency to avoid what we are most made to do:

Sometimes, when we’re terrified of embracing our true calling, we’ll pursue a shadow calling instead. The shadow career is a metaphor for our real career. Its shape is similar, its contours feel tantalizingly the same. But a shadow career entails no real risk. If we fail at a shadow career, the consequences are meaningless to us.

Ironically, this temptation often intensifies as our player level goes up: We are more content to have “made it” and more prone to loss-avoidance. It is so enticing to take the spoils of success (not just wealth, but even more our identity as winners) and retreat.

Looking at Pressfield through the lens of quests, many of us can be tempted to withdraw to safety and control by simply choosing easy quests, despite having proven our capacity to handle risk. How often does a business leader have an exit and then engage in an almost riskless approach to the rest of life? How often does a nonprofit become more interested in incremental progress, risk management, and donor territorialism once it reaches basic viability?

It would be natural to receive this idea of redemptive quests as a call to even more, and more intense, work. Hard quests must require striving and drivenness, 80-hour weeks, exponential scaling factors, huge organizations, and hockey-stick revenue, right? Wrong.

While they might feature some of those dynamics, hard quests are more about the objective of the work than the quantity, and they are best charted in decades. They’re also nonobvious in market terms: it turns out the more countercultural and improbable quests are, the less people try them. “Easy” quests (such as highly profitable replication) are likely to be taken on by many opportunistic players.

Instead, as Stephens and Wagner put it,

Future-defining problems are hard to recruit for, difficult to raise money for, and nearly impossible to build near-term businesses around, which is why they are exactly the types of problems we need the most well-resourced players pursuing.

Of course, not all redemptive quests have to be moonshots, where an astronomical amount of upfront capital and risk are aimed in one specific direction. Most redemptive projects can and should deploy a lily pad innovation strategy, which sets a clear and ambitious agenda or objective but takes smaller steps toward renewal over a long time horizon. Often, a pioneering individual or venture creates a paradigmatic shift that acts as a lily pad for an entire sector or model to jump from.

The larger aim of these endeavors is what’s critical. To quote Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the famed Hungarian-American psychologist,

The unifying similarity among geniuses and innovators is not cognitive or affective but motivational. What is common among them is the unwillingness or inability to strive for goals everyone else accepts.

Returning to the “player level” idea, while Stephens and Wagner are saying that if you are brilliant it is important for the world that you aren’t just doing something self-beneficial, Csikszentmihalyi is also saying that being a “top player” in the eyes of the world is not a prerequisite to undertaking a good, hard quest.

Just staying committed to a countercultural vision can get you a long way. This is good news, because as 1 Corinthians 1:26 reminds us, “Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth.”

So we should work on redemptive quests. What do those look like, and how might we identify them? Many of the most readily identifiable good, hard quests rely on technological breakthroughs, such as the sequencing of the genome or the development of large language model (LLM)-based AI. These pave the way for many (good and bad) quests to follow, based on adapting and applying new knowledge to opportunity.

Yet from a redemptive perspective, addressing the major issues of our time requires relational and spiritual breakthroughs as much as technological ones. Wars are fought with weapons, but they start through ego and greed. Loneliness and depression have been accelerated, not healed, through connection to all those friends. So while we may rightly lament that Christians are seldom in the rooms where technological breakthroughs are dreamed and forged, when it comes to honoring and protecting the even weightier matters of personhood, healthy Christian communities are best able to offer an alternative imagination for the major issues of our time.

In 2022, we released a set of Opportunities for Redemptive Innovation (ORIs), inventoried and imagined through our Praxis Portfolio, broader Summit community, and what we see transpiring in our world today. The list largely fuses industries with issues, identifying places for us to work together for the sake of the world around us. Since release, this collection has shaped our appreciation for what’s happened—and our imagination for what’s possible. Indeed, we are fortunate to be a witness to hard, redemptive quests in the Praxis community across many ORIs, including the following four examples.

• Large-Scale Innovation for Environmental Stewardship: In 2011, Praxis Fellow Jason Ballard, along with then-Praxis Business Accelerator Lead Evan Loomis, co-founded TreeHouse (Business 2016). This “green Home Depot” venture arose from his passion and calling for disrupting the environmental impacts so connected to our homes. After opening multiple stores and raising tens of millions in funding, a challenging retail environment forced the company to close. But Ballard’s redemptive quest (and his partnership with Loomis) was just getting underway. His next step toward his vision was even more audacious, exploring the possibilities of 3D-printed infrastructure to meet the same challenge. Through a Praxis connection, Brett Hagler’s New Story (Nonprofit 2017) became the first customer and partner to ICON, where their partnership launched a prototype to awards and a media-blitz at SXSW in 2018. About 4 years, $400M and 400 employees later, ICON is now the world’s leader in 3D-printing construction technology—and Jason would tell you he’s just getting started realizing his vision of beautiful, affordable, carbon-neutral housing around the world.

• Renewing the Neighborhood: Long-time Praxis friend and Mentor David Dillon is a technology entrepreneur in Chicago, where he has lived for over three decades, and where his portfolio of companies employ hundreds. In 2016, grieved by the city’s rising gun violence, he and Praxis Mentor Michael Allen gathered a group of local business, faith, community, nonprofit, civic, and government leaders to explore what could be done. In response to cross-cultural relational and spiritual breakthroughs they experienced at the gathering, they co-founded Together Chicago, a redemptive quest focused on economic development, education, violence reduction, gospel justice, and faith community mobilization. Their practical work is a beacon of light amidst deep crises, and it has seen meaningful progress embraced by everyone from local gang members to city officials to top national philanthropists.

• Entrepreneurship & Capital for Upward Mobility: Dr. Nashlie Sephus, a 2023 Praxis Fellow, is one of an all-too-small number of Black women to successfully start a venture-backed technology company and have it acquired (Partpic, by Amazon). Instead of taking her winnings and de-risking her life, she doubled down. Through the personal acquisition of multiple abandoned properties in her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi, and partnering with Deputy Director Creston Burse on the launch of Bean Path (Nonprofit 2023), a technology-training nonprofit, she’s on a quest to change the life story of hundreds more like her.

We celebrate the many Praxis Fellows and other community members who have chosen to go on redemptive quests together, whether these ventures continue to thrive or face significant roadblocks in 2023. It is, after all, one of the most challenging startup climates that we have seen in our own organizational lifetime, with bank failures, inflation, a bear tech market, and more. I hope we can not only celebrate them as a whole but also encourage them one by one—helping them practically through this challenging season, no matter how much we are tempted to follow the market norms during uncertainty.

How Christian Community Changes Our Player Level

Player levels change with context. They can and should grow over time, and community is one of the most potent influences on player level. Beyond one’s own personal skills or resources growing with success (and failure) over time, a network is really what makes things possible. Basic entrepreneurial networks can vault us over the main early-stage hurdles, such as finding a co-founder, raising seed capital, and finding customers or beneficiaries.

Affinity and values-aligned networks go one step further, helping people build advisory teams and test theses. But shared-cause networks, especially those pursuing the Kingdom of God, energize greater possibility, generosity, and adventure. Three ways we want to see these benefits accruing for the builders in our community, continuing the video gaming metaphor:

1. A redemptive network like Praxis should give players “extra lives”: additional missional capital, a softened landing in a venture’s final season, a stable job in a time of recovery, a chance at a second startup. Not every season is a time for a redemptive quest. We’ve seen community members experience each of these blessings in recent years. The central imaginative trait here is that we refuse to see venture failure as an identity issue.

2. Some player levels are lower than they should be in light of evenly distributed God-given talent across the body of Christ, and we should help them “level up.” The world’s markets for capital and opportunity are inefficient due to pre-existing bias and structural issues, which could include gender, ethnicity, educational attainment, community of origin, institutional credibility, nationality, age, and past experiences. In a redemptive network, everyone pays attention to who is in the room—and who should be but isn’t. We can and should work to unlock opportunities for promising entrepreneurs on their own redemptive quests.

3. Finally, we should remind each other that our player level is “spiritually boosted,” not anchored in merely earthly terms. Our resources of the “mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16), prayer with our Father, the Holy Spirit in us, and membership in the global body of Christ should create a different calculus of possibility for our work. Some quests are harder technically or culturally than others; but to be sure, the greatest challenge and possibility of a redemptive quest is spiritual in nature. We should spur each other on to good deeds, creating fertile ground for redemptive quests, helping one another put our full selves and resources on the line to try hard things.

A Vision for Deep Change

Redemptive history is a record of God empowering individuals on hard quests, in community, creating deep change that lasts over generations: Noah, Abraham, Moses, Esther, David, Ruth, Boaz, Mary, Paul, and of course Christ himself—and the list goes on. You and I are here, building in hope, because of them. But something has happened in our age today.

Praxis community member and Belmont University President Greg Jones, in his book Christian Social Innovation, recalls a poignant question from his secular social entrepreneurship colleague at Duke, the late Greg Dees, who asked him, “What happened to the church?” Dees went on to comment, “My field wouldn’t exist in business schools if it wasn’t for the loss of interest in social entrepreneurship and innovation in the church. It’s as if you all had a meeting somewhere around 1970 and decided to quit your interest in entrepreneurship and innovation. For much of American history, anything that was truly innovative, particularly for the social good, was done by people of faith.”

Greg goes on to reflect that “my own tradition, the Wesleyan movement, was at the forefront of a lot of that social innovation in American history: in education, in healthcare, even in business and food security. In a variety of enterprises, Christians had been at the forefront.”

Together, we need to cultivate a community where “crazy is a compliment”; where spiritual practices such as daily prayer and Sabbath are a catalyst for imagination; where all work and money is missional; and where one’s identity is not bound in conventional definitions of success. A place where, as Praxis Venture Partner Dave Evans says, “Grace means go.”

I hope this might drive us each to ask, am I on a redemptive quest? If so, what is it? If not, what might it be? How might the difficulty level of my quest be proportionate to my personal or organizational “player level”? And do my relationships and community affiliations encourage or discourage that quest?

Elton Trueblood once wrote, “The major danger is not that we shall fail to appreciate past models, but that we shall lack the courage to be sufficiently bold in our creative dreaming … Whatever else may be the character of the redemptive society which the crisis of our time demands, it is at least clear that the society must make the habit of adventure central to its life.”

For those of you who are prompted to consider a new quest or expand your vision based on the momentum you’ve had, or you just need some friends and co-conspirators to sustain you in your adventure, I hope that you’ll find the Praxis community to be a deep partner in these pursuits—a place where the radically redemptive quest is completely reasonable.

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.

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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