“My church is in the process of starting up its third social enterprise."

We see these ventures as the work of stewardship, formation and discipleship. As a former banker and serial entrepreneur, I felt both excited - and overwhelmed– as the church looked to me to take the reins on this new business.

My previous companies were started with no more than a couple of others. Here, we had a whole team of people involved – all of whom have different areas of buy-in and knowledge, and I had no clue about any of it. Could I really lead these people? Would they listen to me? To add to it, this is a brand new industry for me. I’m in uncharted waters and there’s so much to figure out.  What are the processes involved? How do we make money at this? Where do we even start?

We brought in Attune to take a core group of five of us through a few workshops, to discern more of God’s guidance as we got started with this new adventure. They led us through a few exercises that revealed more of everybody’s thoughts and ideas, allowing us to really get to know each other’s hearts and minds. It became clear that this is a group who wants to glorify God – and who believes you can do this while also making a profit, while treating people well and doing good for creation.  Back in my corporate – “It’s all about the bottom line” days - I used to say to myself: “This is a machine, and I can’t be mad at a machine for doing what it’s designed to do.” 

What became clear to me through these workshops is that this new enterprise is not a machine. This is really “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

The workshops helped us to root our new venture firmly within this overall revelation. We were also able to discern and align around who we want to be, who we want to serve, and what our mission is. It’s clarified these things and helped us to keep them front of mind. Just the other day, I was reading something and I was able to quickly say “This won’t work because it doesn’t fit inside of our mission, our mantra and our value proposition. How do we tweak this?” 

I still feel a little overwhelmed sometimes, but I now feel more prepared and confident with what God has equipped me with. We have a stronger sense of unity among our team. And we’ve affirmed that this is not a space where we need to turn off our connection to the Holy Spirit. He will give us the wisdom we need when we don’t know the answers.”