History

Our Story So Far…

In the summer of 1992, a dozen business leaders gathered to talk about whether the Bible has anything to say about commerce. "I was wrestling with the fact that I'd never heard a sermon on cash flow," Al Lunsford recalls. "I'd never seen a Bible Study on business ethics or competition or accumulating and leveraging capital." The U.S. economy was in a downturn, margins were slim — the marketplace was changing — and American churches had little to say about it. Was this because God was silent on the subject, or was it something else? Our group converged on Glen Eyrie Conference Center in Colorado Springs, determined to find out.We began by cataloging our business tensions and found we had several things in common:

These were bad feelings for people who claimed our first allegiance was to our Creator. Still, just finding we weren't alone sparked a glimmer of hope that, together, we might find a way to reintegrate our lives. We agreed to gather three times a year and undertake a cover-to-cover study of the Bible in search of the scriptural roots of commerce. We were not disappointed. The biblical narrative turned out to be packed with the stuff of business and commerce. On page after page, we found what Paul Minear noted in his Images of the Church in the New Testament: “The Bible is a book by workers, about workers, for workers.”

All of us gathered there came to think of the kingdom of God as our permanent address. We came to regard the values of God's kingdom as benchmarks for how we ought to conduct ourselves in business. We also confirmed something that we had always suspected and were experiencing, that life cannot be separated into a spiritual side and a work side. The religious communities seemed to treat certain things as spiritual and of “higher” value and other things (like business) as “lower” but necessary evils. There certainly wasn't any encouragement and reinforcement for what we were thinking and experiencing. In 1994, we chartered the Global Commerce Network as a nonprofit platform from which to propagate our story and establish links to others who shared our concerns. We continued as the core group to meet three times a year for three days to pray, study the Scriptures, and learn from one another. We also began developing Forums to share with others what we were discovering. We found that colleagues and friends-of-friends in business all over the world were reaching similar conclusions. From this we drew several insights:

  1. If we were crazy, we were in good company
  2. What we were learning wasn't merely cultural—people doing business in very different cultural contexts were seeing the same things
  3. Business people were looking for Biblical perspectives that really addressed the realities they faced in their work and business lives.

Now…A dozen years have passed and we have seen the rise of the Internet as a source of information and commerce that has yet to find its boundaries. We've seen the emergence of a global economy that outstrips everything we imagined. We've seen the new economy expand and contract and adjust to new opportunities and challenges that no one fully comprehends or controls.We have enjoyed much and endured much individually and collectively, including the launch of a for-profit company called InsideWork.

Today, we continue our process through:

In all this, we see the sometimes-subtle rule of God's kingdom at work—crossing frontiers, opening and closing doors, networking relationships, transforming the soul of commerce one company, one business unit, one department, one leader at a time.

We hope you'll join the conversation and the adventure. We can't go back to where we came from. We can only advance in faith to more clearly express God's purposes in the world of commerce.