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Dear Parish Faithful,
Something a bit different this morning. I asked our parishioner, Kevin Rains, to please write a short essay about what it means to be a Christian entrepreneur. Kevin graciously responded to my request with the reflections below. At the end of the essay, you will find a link to a YouTube of Kevin further discussing the history behind his vocation as a Christian entrepreneur. Perhaps this is something of "Orthodoxy in the Workplace."
Fr. Steven
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Fr. Steven asked me to write a few words on what it means to be a Christian entrepreneur.
At times, I’ve heard entrepreneurs praised as gods in our culture. At other times I’ve heard them vilified as nothing more than greedy exploiters. Neither of these extremes is helpful.
In light of these misconceptions, our first stop has to be to define our terms. According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, an entrepreneur is “one who organizes manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise.” That is a good, basic start. Yet that could apply to almost anything from a lemonade stand to a non-profit organization to a multinational corporation! And it doesn’t really answer the question of what an entrepreneur actually does.
Jean-Baptiste Say, a French economist who first coined the word entrepreneur in about 1800, sheds some light on the doing aspect. He said: “The entrepreneur shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield.”
So, an entrepreneur is someone who manages resources in a productive way that benefits themself and others. This is typically - though not exclusively - related to business enterprises.
Now, what can make the entrepreneurial pursuits distinctly Christian? For that to happen, all efforts need to be in line with Christian understandings and practices. In other words, they must be guided by the mind of Christ and practicing virtues consistent with the call of Christ. Humility. Generosity. Care for team members and creation. Prayerful dependence on God and not oneself. Actions that are not rooted in anger or lust. Non-anxious. These are just a few and most of those come from Christ’s central teaching in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s gospel chapters 5-7.
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More personally, being a Christian entrepreneur to me means launching and leading a group of auto body shops. We’ve grown from one small shop in Norwood to five and soon to be six. But it’s not just that we’ve grown. It’s more about the “how.” We foster a culture of care in our shops that gets expressed in different ways that are rooted in our family’s faith.
We care for our customers through empathy.
We care for our craft by doing high-quality repairs - even the hidden stuff that no one sees after the repair but it makes the repair stronger and safer for the long haul.
We care for the communities we serve through generosity.
We care for the earth by using water-based paints that don’t compromise the longevity of the finished product but reduce our environmental impact by 97% (vs solvent-based paints)
We care for our team members by offering them the opportunity to grow and expand in their role through training and development that we pay for.
In short, we strive to love our neighbors, our neighborhoods, and the earth, while operating from a Christian lens. We also fail. And repent. Which is also part of being a Christian entrepreneur and probably the best starting point.
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In one sense, being an entrepreneur is the vocation of every Christian. We confidently declare in our creed that we believe in “one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible.” This is a proclamation rooted in the opening of our Scriptures, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 1.1) Later in that same passage, it’s recorded that God made humanity and commissioned them to “build-out” what he started. (Genesis 1.26-28) He declared creation good but it was not perfected. Humanity’s role was to take the raw materials that God created and form them into things that are both useful and beautiful.
Another way to say this is to say that God created but he intended humanity to …. Creation and culture. God made the tree but humanity made the violin. God created the chicken and the egg (the chicken came first so we can put that debate to rest!) but humanity made the first omelet. Of course, nothing can be done without God’s help and we are only creating from the raw materials he provides. Yet, we have an important role to play in taking those resources and raw materials he gave us “into an area of higher productivity and greater yield” to use Say’s words. So we fashion furniture and musical instruments from trees, make beautifully curated omelets from the simple egg, and even make complex technologies like phones and computers that allow us to communicate across vast distances. Everything that is, is from God. And any time that creation is re-assembled into something “new” humanity is fulfilling her calling.
-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1CJ4-GN0Dc&t=27s
Kevin Rains
CEO/ Owner
Rains Family CARSTAR Group
(513) 383-2854
