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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From One Disruption to the Next

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

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

So what do we do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Developing a Cultural Strategy in Historic Disruption

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

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

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

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

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

Holt and Cameron highlight a clear framework:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Cultural Strategy for Praxis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dave Blanchard
Co-Founder & CEO

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

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