Ekklesia as enterprise: Discovering the Church at work

Abstract

A growing number of leaders around the world believe that business can be a force for good: for justice and equity, for meaning-making, and for human flourishing. Yet the Church has very little to say about engagement in the marketplace beyond the tradition’s negative injunctions (i.e., do not abuse people). This lack of theological address to the marketplace leaves the Church with a partial witness amid empire, with a critique but without creativity. This gap is not problematic for the “powers that be,” which let the Church preach and have its protests so long as the status quo is protected – which is what happens unless there is a new creation. The new creation provokes the “powers” and the institutional Church by concretizing hope in God’s economy and evoking the gifts God gives for human flourishing. Reimagined as ekklesia in enterprise, the Church will undertake the construction of a new theology of work. It accomplishes this first by the creative discovery of divine movement in the world that began at creation with God’s word that work is good, then by the appropriation of ekklesia’s cultural orientation for the common good, which leads to the marketplace, the heart of the empire and the locus of human flourishing, the place for the Church to make its revolutionary witness to the way of Jesus.