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Great Commission Companies: The Emerging Role of Business in Missions Great Commission Companies: The Emerging Role of Business in Missions Steve L. Rundle and Tom A. Steffen IVP, 204 pages, $16

Everyone in the stands that day nearly a century ago thought they knew exactly how the game should be played. Tens of thousands watched—sometimes cheering, oft times criticizing—the team of exhausted players on the field.

And then it happened. When the first forward pass went up, so did the cry: "Hey, you can't do that—that is not how it is done!" But the game of football was changed forever.

Great Commission Companies is about a handful of 21st century men and women who believe something revolutionary ought to be done to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of missions—and have set out resolutely to prove that it can be done. They may change missions forever.

The concept of business missions, once commonly thought to be an oxymoron, is growing into its own. Businesspeople around the world are eager to add eternal significance to their temporal success. Mission agencies and evangelical churches are beginning to take their approach seriously. Business and trade opens doors to relationships that may be closed to traditional missionaries. Moreover, the authentic witness of lay professionals often has more credibility for host-country contacts in the marketplace than that of traditional missionaries.

The authors believe that globalization may have the same gospel-disseminating effect in the beginning of the third millennium that persecution had in the first millennium, and that exploration and colonization had in the second. They argue persuasively that powerful forces of worldwide material and financial interdependence—commonly called globalization—have created unprecedented opportunities for taking the message of the Cross to all nations, tribes, and tongues.

Business corporations directed, led, and staffed by Christians with a biblical worldview, they say, may be uniquely suited vessels for carrying the priceless cargo. GCC personnel play golf and dine with those who influence the lives of thousands, sometimes millions. Host-country counterparts often have difficulty escaping, ignoring, or explaining away the attractive differences they see in GCC practices and the lifestyles of GCC employees.

The first half of the book explains how and why today's global economics are so conducive to the formation of Great Commission firms. The second half defines and describes five different kinds of such companies, and then captures our imagination with heroic examples of each. These entrepreneurs abandon the comforts and security of business at home to begin companies in cultures where modern business practices and the love of Christ are little known. One such entrepreneur started a company identified as the SR Handicraft Company (the authors have prudently disguised most names of the firms, executives, and their locations). After a rocky start, it has grown to two factories generating $3.1 million in revenues. About 90 percent of its 300 employees have become Christians. These employees in turn are reaching out to their communities and have planted eight churches—one with 400 people.

I have seen 27 families resign their high-paying jobs, sell their homes, acquire cross-cultural and language training, get inoculated against typhoid, typhus, and other diseases, and fly 8,000 miles to start a GCC. They created opportunities to share the gospel with thousands and encouraged and trained local believers. And they financed or spun off a dozen other equally effective ventures.

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April 2004, Vol. 48, No. 4