My Business, My Mission

A Conversation with Doug Seebeck

There have been some great books published on business as mission in the last year – some great books giving foundations, biblical basis, step by step how-tos, model cases and much more. My Business, My Mission, also published last year, is a wonderful complement to these. Written by Doug Seebeck, Executive Director of Partners Worldwide and co-author Timothy Stoner, My Business, My Mission tells the stories of the cross-cultural partnerships nurtured through the work of Partners Worldwide. These are stories of lives changed and poverty defeated through sustainable business. This is a book which looks full in the face of transformation through business and it is stirring stuff!

I had the privilege of chatting with Doug Seebeck about some of the themes that jump out of the book. These are themes that resonate in the wider marketplace ministry and business as mission movement and are significant for all of us:

‘I had found my right place’ - The ongoing need for affirmation and mobilisation

One chapter in My Business, My Mission features Timothy Jokkene, a business man who was already having a significant impact in his native Uganda long before he got involved with Partners Worldwide. However, Timothy describes a feeling of ‘overwhelming relief’ upon finding himself among like-minded Christian business people for the first time, realising that he was not alone and ‘that for the Christian entrepreneur, business and mission are one and the same. “I had found my right place,” he says…’¹.

My Business, My Mission tells the story of business people from diverse backgrounds, from Haiti, Kenya, North America, Nicaragua, Zambia, Uganda and the Philippines, and over and over again there is a breakthrough moment. Doug Seebeck describes it this way “When business people ‘get it’ – that God wants them to be the way they are, to be these entrepreneurs, that God wired them to be the way they are and that they are exactly where he wants them to be... It’s like a celebration and they begin to live differently and they do their business differently”. 

The founding vision of Partners Worldwide was shaped by the voices of business people, “Show us how we can make a difference”, “Surely there is more for us to contribute to mission than writing another check”, “How can we get involved?”..

I asked Doug whether 16 years on this is still the message he is hearing from business people. He shares: “I am constantly surprised… I have shared the stories of those early business guys over and over, and I worry that it’s not really fresh...  But then I’ll meet a new person and they are dealing with this right now in their local church. These are business people with tremendous skills, running huge divisions or companies and they want to get involved. They are told they could volunteer for this or that, but none of it is engaging their skills. Often there is a subtle negative message coming from pastors that the only value business people have is to give money. In too many places business people are still not being affirmed, they are not commissioned and they are not told that they are marketplace ministers and that what they are doing is really the church on the frontlines. I think we’ve made some progress, but I think affirmation is still a very real need.  Another challenge for us is that most interest is coming from men and the movement really needs more women business professionals. So yes, our role is still to give this affirming message and then to help with tangible ways of getting involved.”.

‘Relationships are everything’ – the effectiveness of true partnership

Roberto and Rosa Espinoza are a young Nicaraguan couple who, after starting their own businesses, gathered together 27 Christian business owners to form the ‘Network of Nicaraguan Professionals’. This group meets for mutual encouragement and support and this is something that is highlighted as a key for success, not only for this particular group but for the whole Partners movement. If you look closely, relationships are at the bottom of each of these success stories – relationships between business people within nations, strengthening and supporting one another – but also across cultures. Roberto and Rosa have been empowered in their own vision through involvement in ‘Business to Business’ – a partnership between North Americans and the Network of Nicaraguan Professionals. ‘While the financial and technical help they receive from Partners Worldwide has been incalculably important, Roberto emphasizes that it is the relationships with North American businesspeople based on respect and transparency that has had the most profound and lasting impact’.² They are emphatic: “Relationships are everything”.’

One American partnership manager expressed it this way “it all looks good on paper when you are laying out plans for a program. The original idea was that mentoring was going to be the key. But what we found out was different. The foundation of [this partnership] is a Christian brotherhood and sisterhood”. ³

The ethos of facilitating partnerships rather than running programs is at the core of Partners Worldwide. Doug Seebeck shares: “As we have become more involved in situations it is tempting to want to jump in and run a program, instead of doing the work of nurturing partnerships and then stepping back.  Again and again I tell our staff, our role is to encourage, equip and connect… encourage, equip and connect! We could just go in and run a program and call it ‘business development services’… but we would be in danger of losing the global connections. What we have found is that it is no longer ‘US to the rest’… we have affiliates in the USA learning from affiliates in Nicaragua and elsewhere, helping us make a difference in our own communities. We don’t want to lose that dynamic.’ 

I asked Doug what he thought some of the keys to fostering true partnerships were: “Well we can’t go with the attitude ‘we’ll come in and make it better’, we really have to go and listen. Partners Worldwide won’t go into a new area or new country without a local ‘pull’, as well as a ‘push’ from here. So when we go in for an exploratory trip and make connections on the ground, we ask the local Christian business people what they are most excited about, we let them develop the agenda. We talk and process all the time, we tell them how Partners Worldwide works, we ask them to reflect on what they have learned and we do the same. Our role is to facilitate, to trust the group… The local business people come up with the plan, what to focus on and how to organise it locally based on all their connections. The heart of it is really listening, not jumping in with our ideas.  Another key is servant leadership, to come with an attitude of ‘how can I serve’. Then as you serve in that way, people get your heart and they open up and trust builds. As partners come back and come back they can get under the veneer and start to get to the underlying issues of poverty… good things start to happen.”

‘A nation of business people on their knees before God’ – A movement of Kingdom entrepreneurs

As Roberto and Rosa’s story unfolds, their biggest dream is revealed, ‘Their aim is nothing less than a nation of businesspeople on their knees before God’.⁴   This is something particularly exciting that comes up again and again in My Business, My Mission – the focus on empowering national entrepreneurs to be the real change-agents in their own communities.

I firmly believe that long-term transformation through business will happen in nations largely through national Christian entrepreneurs. Therefore the posture of ‘outsiders’ should be that of catalysts, enablers and encouragers, just as it should ideally be in all mission and development work. Of course in the business as mission movement we do emphasis going cross-culturally to places where there is the most need of good news, just as we do in mission broadly. But that isn’t the end in itself. From the evidence, God is stirring up this passion for business as ministry – or mission in the marketplace, if you like – in entrepreneurs all around the world. 

I know Doug and Partners Worldwide share the view, that as we go cross-culturally, whether from the USA to Africa or Asia to Central America, we are to be enablers. Doug shared what he sees happening on the ground, “Yes absolutely the multiplication is happening locally, we are seeing it.   A challenge for us is to be willing to come in with the least baggage possible. We have learned this in church planting, to ask what really is the essence of the gospel, how do we communicate that and then leave a group to self-replicate and put their own forms in place. One guy in Uganda read a Partners Worldwide fund brochure he picked up from a friend in church and as an SME owner himself he started mentoring 130 other entrepreneurs in a microenterprise program, all from simply reading that message.   We have our organisational processes in place in order to manage our operations with integrity, but what we are seeing is that initiatives are popping up in different forms locally. This is a cause to celebrate, but it can also be a tension… It may look messy to us, not quite the way we are used to doing things, but we are asking ‘how do we help nurture it without jumping in too much, how do we encourage without stifling?’  We now have way more business mentors from other countries than we have from the USA. When we started, it was hard work and we wondered how we were ever going to get a movement! Then we saw that if we have 1000 mentors who really get it, they will replicate that 10,000 times locally and that is what is happening.”

‘We must live the change we wish to see’ – 360° transformation

In the final section of My Business, My Mission, which recounts stories of transformation in Zambia and North America, Doug Seebeck pulls out an important truth: ‘what we have learned is that if we wish to impact the world, we must be impacted ourselves. We must live the change we wish to see.’⁵

In many of these stories, business people started off with a passion to bring transformation ‘over there’, or ‘here in my community’, but what they experience is transformation in themselves. 

I asked Doug about the multiple impacts of business as ministry that he sees. “As business people really start to understand that their sphere of influence is their primary arena of ministry, they live their lives differently, they run their business differently, they treat their employees differently… and the effect of that just rolls on itself.  The transformation starts with them, then all of a sudden they are concerned with community issues that they never saw before… then more initiatives start happening. I’ve seen social change, economic change through business growth and job creation and I’ve seen churches planted. Spiritual change happens with the individual and it spreads from there.”

Because business at its’ core is built on relationship, there is the potential for transformation ‘all round’ - of ourselves and of others, of communities, institutions and governments.

Doug shares, “I think this can be tricky for the business as mission movement.  In Partners we don’t think to ourselves ‘business is just a strategy to reach people for Christ’. Business and reaching people for Christ should be inseparable, yes. However, if we do reach the lost for Christ we do that through our relationships. If we are living Christ, if we are being Christ in our dealings as business people, if we are truly doing what Jesus said, people are going to want to know more. Everybody gets very quickly to world view and what you believe. But we also cannot have a limited view. If a guy wanted to make lots of money to give to evangelism, but wasn’t concerned about wages and the rights of workers, that is not credible or sustainable. You have got to live out what you preach.”

God is concerned about the whole of life: our physical circumstances, our stewardship of creation, our society and issues of justice, the corporate and the individual, what is on our tongue, what is in our hearts. I think that is what excites me about business as mission, kingdom business, business for transformation… or whatever you want to call it! In the end it is just business. It is business done by people who are dedicating themselves to God and allowing Him to bring change in their own lives… and as they do that the ethics of a small company might be changed, or the tax policy of a nation… the faith of a person might be transformed, or the worship of a people.

by Jo P.

Excerpts from “My Business, My Mission: Fighting Poverty Through Partnerships" by Doug Seebeck and Timothy Stoner (Faith Alive 2009): 1 p87, 2 p61-62, 3 p57, 4 p65, 5 p155

Jo is the editor of www.businessasmission.com in conversation with Doug Seebeck, Executive Director of Partners Worldwide and co-author of My Business, My Mission. You can read part of Timothy Jokkene’s story here. All excerpts used with kind permission. All photographs owned by Partners Worldwide.

Partners Worldwide is hosting Marketplace Revolution: Fighting Global Poverty Through Business, October 7-8 in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Read more: e.zine Issue 2 June 2010