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Daniel Meylan's Blog
The challenge for today’s Christian Business owner is how to resolve day to day business problems applying solutions suggested by the “nuclear church”. Prayer, miracles, signs and wonders are all valid and possible market events, but they are not solutions to all marketplace obstacles and opportunities. The nuclear church suggests solutions to business problems that are causing many Christian business owners to fail miserably. The key to marketplace success, in addition to prayer and miracles, is the wise and appropriate application of resources such as time, skills, people, money and influence.
In a time of prayer and Bible study the Lord offered an interesting perspective on one of Jesus’ miracles that relates directly to the role of the marketplace. As described in the Gospel of John, Jesus’ disciples had been fishing all night with no success. Jesus told them where to throw their net and they landed their biggest catch ever. The “nuclear church” views this miracle event as being entirely dependent on Jesus. But what about the person or persons who did the work to manufacture the strong net that facilitated the miracle of this harvest of fish? That highly skilled work took place well before Jesus used the net in His miracle. No net. No miracle. Two things happened here that are the essence of the church in the marketplace: preparation (building the net) and pursuit (doing the work necessary) = miracle opportunities.
In 36 years as a banker and commercial insurance broker and business owner, I have encountered many Christians who are woefully unprepared to operate a business (they never built a strong net) and ultimately cause significant damage to their families and the testimony of the Body of Christ. For that very reason, many secular businesses will tell you they are reluctant to enter business relationship with Christian business owners. On too many occasions, I have had the unfortunate opportunity to help try and pick up the pieces when a Christian-owned business was failing. The core issue was usually not spiritual fervency, it was a lack of competency. Christian business owners believe that the Lord will make up for their lack of business skill(holes in their net)through prayers and miracles. This is wrong. We created Weavers to offer a place where Christian business owners can learn and understand how to operate their businesses competently and profitably (build a durable net) according to biblical principles.
One of the more profound discoveries we made in the past several years in studying and learning about business from a biblical perspective is most successful secular businesses, operated by non-believers actually apply biblical principles (build a strong net) in their day-to-day operation of their enterprise. Unfortunately, non-believers have no interest in supporting the work of the Kingdom. Our emphasis for non-believers should be to bring successful business owners into a personal knowledge of Christ and help them to understand that their business is their ministry.
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