LESSON 1:: The Path to Professional and Spiritual Harmony

Defining “spiritreneur” and understanding the need to combine business and spirituality.

• Work and Spiritual Lives are Not Separate The business world has the potential to offer not only material gifts, but also essential spiritual gifts such as dignity, acknowledgement, prosperity, integrity, service, challenge, and a sense of community. As you become actively involved in this course through the readings, the assignments, and the Message Board, our online “water cooler,” you will experience the convergence and energy that come from using all of your gifts and visions fully in your work and business life.

Are You a Spiritreneur?

Jesus of Nazareth is one of the most fascinating figures in history. We often think about him in religious terms, but his words and example on earth were powerful models for going through life with a strong sense of purpose and outstanding leadership skills.

These two traits are critical to the businessperson of today who places a high priority on working with passion, integrity, and effectiveness. I have given a name to this integration of spirituality and business that is so important in our world — spiritreneurship.

Don’t try to spell check spiritreneur, because you won’t be able to. The word isn’t in the dictionary yet because I made it up. It comes from combining spirit defined briefly in Webster’s Dictionary as, “the soul or heart, as the seat of feeling,” and entrepreneur — a person who organizes and manages an enterprise, especially a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk.

This course offers a comprehensive process for discerning and applying your God-given passion to everything you do, understanding the phases of spiritreneurship, and mastering fundamental characteristics which will help you, your business, and your associates realize the full potential of what you were called to do. Welcome!

How Are You Using Your Talents?

Jesus spoke of the parable of the talents — how three workers were each given talents, and two of them went out and multiplied them and received praise. One of them, however, buried his talent, and received a harsh rebuke and a big deficit in his and God’s bank account.

So the question I ask people now is the one that is the premise for Jesus, Inc.: Would you do what you’re doing even if you weren’t being paid for it? And are you doing what you’re doing as unto the Lord? Those who can say yes to both those questions are what I call spiritrenuers. So spiritreneurs are people who are making a living doing what they love, while honoring God at the same time.

Read on to hear about my personal journey that led to the philosophy that I will share with you during this course.

• What People Want in their Work Recent research reveals that there are significant shifts in the expectations and desires in our work force. Two significant trends are the desire for our place of work to reflect integrity and a sense of mission that benefits the employees and the community, and the expectation that there be opportunities for personal growth and empowerment built into our work lives. Jesus, Inc. was written for business owners and employees alike to enliven a sense of mission in all as the daily work is done.

How Jesus CEO and Jesus, Inc. Were Born

When I wrote Jesus CEO: Using Ancient Wisdom for Visionary Leadership, I was taking time off from a profitable advertising agency that I owned to go out into the desert near Yuma, Arizona and write a book that everyone said nobody wanted. We were deep into the middle of the recession at that point, and money was tightening up all around me. The real estate market — in which I was a significant player, owning seven properties at one time — had tanked. Advertising budgets were being slashed, and clients were dropping away like flies. The ones I did have I didn’t want anymore, because I was in pain — deep pain. Not the pain from losing money, so much as the pain of knowing that I was not using my highest gifts, and if ever there were a time I needed to do so, it was then.

Perhaps you are in that same boat. Maybe you have just lost a job. Maybe you hate the job you have. Or maybe you are a young person still in school training for a career that you are not certain is going to support you spiritually or emotionally, even if it looks to be a good financial bet.

If so, this course is for you. I have come to know, through solid experience, that the only path to fulfillment is living your giftedness, and the only way to do that is to look to the Manufacturer who turned you out in the first place, and that is God.

The book that everybody said nobody wanted turned out to be an international bestseller, now translated into 12 languages. As a result of that book, I have been invited to meet and consult with governors and kings, pastors and children, physicians and bankers, and candlestick makers. And to all of them, my message is the same: “Find your gifts, and then live them. That is the best way to honor God.”

Three Characteristics of Leadership

In Jesus CEO, I outlined three characteristics or strengths that Jesus had which made him such an effective leader. These characteristics include:

1. The Strength of Self Mastery
2. The Strength of Action
3. The Strength of Relationship

Jesus was gifted, and disciplined in each of these three areas — in order to become effective leaders today, we too need to become disciplined and learned in these spheres. I have met people who are naturally gifted in one and perhaps two of these areas, but never have I met anyone who was naturally gifted in all of them. In today’s market and society, if you are lacking in only one of those categories, you can fail — and fail miserably — even though you score highly in the other two.

So my passion has been to help teach people to learn from Jesus, to treat people as he did, and thus transform coworkers from donkeys into racehorses, from cowards to heroes, from selfish so and so’s into people who are willing to give their lives for you.

The Most Important Question

As I went from owning an advertising agency to being a full-time writer and consultant, I noticed myself changing. Mostly, my way of measuring success changed. While I used to measure my success — and worth — in terms of the number and amount of clients I had, or houses I owned, or cash I had in the bank, I suddenly began to measure my success in terms of one question only: Would God say to me, “Well done, good and faithful servant,” as a result of what I did today?

Suddenly my to-do list shifted. I began to prioritize, asking myself why the “still, small voice” in my heart was “still small.” I turned up the volume on a little whisper of an idea I had — writing a book about Jesus — and mentioned it to a few close friends, who thankfully embraced it. When they began to hold it dear, so did I, and that is how I ended up in a trailer park called Gold Rock Ranch in Yuma, Arizona every weekend for a year, writing a book about Jesus.

Gold Rock Ranch was an abandoned mining town that had a few full-time eccentrics living there, and as I positioned myself in a little trailer and sat writing in front of the computer — no phones, no malls, no distractions — I began to feel like I was nursing a child. Intimacy and warmth and connection began to flow through me and to me. And then I knew I was in the center of God’s will and pleasure, no matter what else was happening to my mini-financial empire in the outside world.

My wish and prayer for you is the same: That you too will be transformed — not into an eccentric writing a book in the middle of the desert — but into someone who experiences God’s pleasure flowing to and through you during your moments of concentrated giftedness.

• An Interesting Phenomenon In the current business climate are companies that have decided that part of doing well is doing good. Taking care of employees, the community, and the environment, as well as investing in charitable endeavors with money and human resources, are the hallmarks of this emerging trend.

The Four Phases

Four Rivers and a Fertile Delta

Spiritreneurs are springing up all over. I see four rivers that converged to make the fertile delta plain, which nourishes this emerging breed. The rivers converging are these:

1. Massive layoffs — causing people to question what they really are good at doing and making them recognize that they/we can’t count on Big Brother to always guarantee us a job anymore.
2. Aging baby boomers — who are asking themselves “Is this all I came to do?” — and wanting to give and contribute more.
3. A new economy — where money moves at lightning speed and is still, even in the midst of a downtime, propelling the richest age in the history of the world.
4. Technology — which allows us to be free of having to plug into machines and telephones that are plugged into walls in order for us to do our work.

These four rivers are converging still, and if you find yourself touching any one or all of those four banks, you are primed to become a spiritreneur.

The Four Phases

In the lessons that follow, you will learn what I call “the Four Phases of the Spiritreneur.”

• Phase One
  The Launch, which is when, like Moses, you find yourself being called by God to do something great, and you know it.
  
• Phase Two
  The Lurch is when, like Moses, you march in to Pharaoh with your divine plan and say boldly, “Let my people go,” only to have the Pharaoh look up at you and say, “No!”
  
• Phase Three
  The Lessons, which is when you have made it out of Egypt and that job you hated, you have endured and survived the midnight cash flow crunches and raids from creditors bearing down on you like chariots, and you find yourself with a group of complaining, ungrateful staffers, mumbling about what’s on the menu. It is in Phase Three that you learn the importance of little things.
  
• Phase Four
  The Love is when you finally feel the sun on your wings and you are soaring effortlessly, doing exactly what you were created to do and knowing it. God is flowing through you on a daily basis, and fulfillment is your middle name.

As a spiritreneur, you may encounter each of these four phases over a period of sequential years, months, or even days. Sometimes, you might experience all of them in a day.

But the purpose of this course is to encourage you not to give up and to recognize that The Lurch doesn’t last forever. It is also to recognize that The Lurch may be just as much a part of your destiny as the great Launch and the great Love.

As you work through these lessons, I will be with you. Through our conversations on the Message Board and references to our two texts, we will discuss and discover where you are in this process. Jesus, Inc. is full of experience, wisdom, wit, and some sorrow — all to prove that you are not alone in your journey to integrate your spirituality with your business. Jesus CEO will provide a plan to heighten awareness of the three leadership skills Jesus exhibited and guide you in the process of mastering all those characteristics for your own business and personal development.

So come and taste that the Lord is good, now that you too are called to multiply your talents and hear those marvellous words: “Well done, Good and Faithful Servant.”

I pray that you will be blessed.

Coming Up

In Lesson 2, we will explore what it means to be called as a spiritreneur. This is the first of the four phases in the process of traveling the visionary path of learning to do well by doing good.

Assignment: Are You a Spiritreneur?

Assignments are designed to give you the chance to do further reading in the course text and to practice applying the knowledge learned in activities and class discussions. We encourage you to discuss the assignments with your instructor and classmates.

Read the Introduction to Jesus, Inc. Consider the three marks of being a spiritreneur, and assess where you are in each of them.

1. Are you doing what you love?
2. Are you doing all that you do for God’s glory?
3. Are you able to earn a living at it?