Called to Create: A Biblical Invitation to Create, Innovate, and Risk

by Jordan Raynor

nine years old, selling baseball cards out of my bedroom. It was a terrible business, as my customer acquisition strategy was totally reliant on the hospitality of my parents. In the eighth grade, my entrepreneurial spirit took a different shape as I watched the 2000 election, mesmerized by the romanticism that characterizes the startup-like launch, rise, and fall of presidential campaigns. That election started me down a political career path. At the age of seventeen, I took my first “real job” managing a campaign in my hometown of Tampa, Florida. After winning that election, I thought I was addicted to politics; but after more political jobs in college and an incredible

entrepreneur is anyone who takes a risk to create something new for the good of others. With

Latin phrase: meaning nothing comes from nothing.

In just three years of public ministry, Jesus revealed countless characteristics about his Father. To the woman at the well, Jesus showed us that God is omniscient. To the five thousand, Jesus showed us that God is our provider. To Lazarus, Jesus showed us that God is the giver of life. And on the cross, Jesus showed us that “God so loved the world” that he would sacrifice his only Son in order to spend eternity with us. If Jesus was able to reveal so much of God’s character in such a relatively short period of time, the fact

that Jesus spent twenty years revealing God’s creative and entrepreneurial spirit should stop us in our tracks.

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the

creatures that move along the ground—everything

that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so. God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and...

Creating a tower or a theme park is not an inherently bad thing. Towers and theme parks can and do reveal God’s character and love for others. But when we create something out of

motivation to make a name for ourselves or to “make our mark” on the world, we, like Walt Disney and the Babylonians, are attempting to rob God of the glory that is rightfully his. As pastor John Piper says, commenting on this passage in Genesis 11, “God’s will for human beings is not that we find our joy in being praised, but that we find our joy in knowing and praising him.”5 The world offers many motivations for entrepreneurs: money, power, status, and influence are just a few. But all of these motivations can be summed up in this deep-seated desire to make a name for ourselves. At our core, we know there is something deeply wrong with us and we work insanely hard to prove to the world that we are not a chump. To prove that

The beautiful truth of the gospel is that Jesus Christ has done all of that work for us! As a Christian who believes that God came to earth as a human to die for you, you can rest knowing that you are somebody, because you have been adopted as a child of God. You can rest knowing that you are valuable, because God gave up his only Son to ransom you. You can rest knowing that your life ha...

violins, organs, and choruses constantly filled his

This motivation to make a name for himself is a major theme of his life and the musical. His idolatry of his work leads him to neglect his family, cheat on his wife, and publicize details of his extramarital affair in a misguided attempt to protect his legacy as a politician.

for the Lord, not for human masters.” And therein lies the key. If we create to make a name for ourselves, we will never be satisfied. We will never feel as if our work is more than a job, a true calling on our lives.

Everyone knows the cliché that nobody lies on their deathbed wishing they had spent more time at the office. While imminent death certainly clarifies what is and what is not important in life, this cliché is based on the myth we have already debunked that work is inherently bad and meaningless.

Most people who read the Bible know that God invented the family. It’s not a human creation. God invented it, because God reveals himself as a father, and he tells us we’re children. Therefore, though sin has taken the family and often turned it into a place of abuse and pain, we don’t abandon the family as an institution. We are called to redeem and rebuild the family.

For ten years, Scott Harrison’s job as a club promoter was to get people drunk and make them believe they were living the high life. In the eyes of the world, Harrison was loving his neighbors by serving a need in the market. “I spent about a decade in New York City chasing the fast life as a nightclub promoter—basically throwing fashion and music parties for a living,” Harrison recalled. “I had moved to NYC to rebel against a conservative Christian upbringing, and did that with relish, living selfishly and arrogantly.”10 Harrison’s entrepreneurial skills led to a lot of success as a club promoter, but ultimately the nightlife scene led to the unraveling of

remembers thinking, “I’m doing massive amounts of drugs, I’ve got a gambling problem, I smoke two packs a day, I drink every day, I’m addicted to pornography, I hang out in strip clubs. I’m a mess.”11 In retrospect, he said: I was the worst person I knew. I’d walked away from all the spirituality and morality I’d embraced as a child, and felt completely bankrupt. I got people wasted for a living in nightclubs, and effectively the drunker they got, the more money I made. I started reading a book by A. W. Tozer called The Pursuit of God, and it just really rocked me. Here was an author trying to serve God desperately, living a life of submission and a life of service, and my life looked exactly opposite. Everything was about me.12

Harrison added, “Faced with spiritual bankruptcy, I wanted desperately to revive a lost Christian faith with action.”13 Sitting in a nightclub at five in the morning at the age of twenty-eight, Harrison decided to make a change.14 “I offered my life to God in service, and that led me quickly out of nightclubs, and to Liberia for a new journey.”15 That journey began with Harrison volunteering as a photojournalist onboard Mercy Ship, a floating hospital that offered free medical care in th...

Termination doesn’t mean [someone is] a bad person or [is] worthless. It just means that they may not work well here at this current moment. It’s just as unfair for the employee as it is for us to keep them in their current position when we know it doesn’t work. Yet . . . termination can still be a devastating process. So at Sevenly, we have a unique twist on the golden rule: fire others the way you would want to be fired. When we explain our reasoning, we never discuss personal flaws; we always talk about the work. We try to provide them with a generous severance regardless of their tenure, and don’t penny pinch. Why?

Bob Collins had one of the most powerful jobs in finance and was responsible for investing thirty-six billion dollars of assets for Goldman Sachs’s clients as the firm’s managing director and co-chief investment officer in London. Today he owns a chain of laundromats. No, this is not the fictional plot of Trading Places 2. This is the story of how one Christian entrepreneur followed God’s call to

Money do not make you complete

I had at Goldman,” Collins said to me. “When you are a manager for thirty-six billion dollars in investments, you’re basically treated like someone who is personally worth thirty-six billion dollars. I could get a meeting with anyone I wanted. I could literally just pick up the phone and call the CEO of Coca-Cola, Cisco, or whichever company I wanted and they would take my call.” Collins had a tremendous platform that was about to grow even larger with the prospect of making partner at Goldman on the horizon, a position that would have netted

Collins left the posh cobblestone streets of London and moved his family back home to Florida, where he worked to discern where God was calling him to serve in the next chapter of his life. The Lord eventually led Collins to start a Tampa-based chapter of the National Christian Foundation, where, since 2004, Collins and team have facilitated more than $260 million in giving. In his role at the foundation, Collins has had the opportunity to work with countless Christian entrepreneurs, helping them donate some of the profits from their businesses to kingdom-building causes. As he explains, “I was working with and serving all of these Christian business owners, and I was seeing how they were operating their businesses differently from the rest of the world,

As entrepreneurs, we know how to hustle, how to work hard, how to earn our sweat equity. And that is a good thing! Colossians 3:23 commands us to “work . . . with all your heart, as working for the Lord.” But believing that our hustle is what is responsible for producing results in our ventures would be like the Israelites believing that shouting brought an impenetrable fortress crumbling to the ground. All throughout

You may say to yourself, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.” But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth. (Deut. 8:17–18)

you are the ruler of all things. In your hands are strength and power to exalt and give strength to all. (1 Chron. 29:12) Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine; you are the branches.

Those of us who are called to create are forced to wrestle with the tension between trusting and hustling. On the one hand we know that apart from God we can do nothing, but on the other hand we know that God commands us to work hard. For most entrepreneurs, the hustling comes easily. It’s the trusting that is so difficult. Why is it so critical that we manage this tension well? Because at the end of the day, when we rely on our hustling without trusting in God, we are either trying to play God or steal his glory, either of which leads to restlessness. So how should we think about

the tension between trusting and hustling? As Joshua and the Israelites show us, we shouldn’t seek to resolve the tension; instead, we should embrace it by both trusting and hustling. These ideas aren’t in conflict with one another; they are meant to be married together. But as Solomon shares in Proverbs 16, there is a sequence to trusting and hustling that honors the Lord and brings us great rest. In Proverbs 16:3, the wisest man who ever lived commands: “Commit to the LORD whatever you do, and he will establish your plans.” So before we hustle, we are to commit our work to the Lord. This is an act of trust, recognizing that it is God alone who produces results. Next, in verse 9, Solomon urges us to hustle: “In their

In 1873, the man and his wife decided to take their four daughters on an extended vacation to England, where their friend D. L. Moody was expected to be preaching in the fall. As the family was set to head to New York to board the ship to Europe, the man was forced to stay behind in Chicago to attend to a business matter. He encouraged his wife and daughters to go on without him, promising he would meet them in Europe as soon as possible. The five women made it safely to New York and boarded the Ville du Havre. As the ship was crossing the Atlantic, the women felt a sudden jolt. The Ville du Havre had been struck by an iron sailing vessel. Twelve minutes later, the ship sank to the bottom of the ocean, split in two. All four daughters died. Their mother was one of the few passengers to survive. Upon arriving in England, she telegrammed her husband in Chicago. “Saved alone,” she said. The husband left Chicago right away, sailing to England to meet his grieving wife. We don’t know much about his journey across the Atlantic, but I have to imagine the man spent his days alone, grieving his loss and questioning his God. I can see him sitting, staring out the window at the infinite sea, reading the biblical account of Job, a man like him who had been blessed with so much—wealth, success, family—only to see it all taken away from him in the blink of an eye. We don’t know much about what happened on that ship, but we do know this: as the ship crossed over the spot where the man’s ...

On a hot July day in 2012, President Barack Obama took the stage in Roanoke, Virginia, to campaign for reelection. It was here that Obama made one of the most famous remarks of the entire presidential contest, saying: If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.1

God is. Yes, God uses those who are called to create as his instruments to produce wealth in the world, but he is the one who gives us the ideas, talents, and opportunities to generate financial abundance. In short, “You didn’t build that.” He did, through you.

with striving for excellence in everything we do and prioritizing people over profit. In part 3, we walked through a series of challenges that are unique or especially acute for those who are called to create. We wrestled with the tension between trusting and hustling and how we as driven entrepreneurs can find true rest. We thought deeply about how we might respond differently to failure to show the hope we have in Christ. And we learned about the challenge of continually renewing our minds through regular communion with God, our partners, and other believers. In this fourth and final part of the book, we have been exploring “the bottom line” for our ventures, beginning with a look at how our entrepreneurial endeavors can be powerful vehicles for fulfilling our command to create disciples, and then moving into an analysis of the purpose of profit. Each of these topics significantly impacts our creating today, challenging us to reimagine our work as service to the One who has called us to create. But the question we’ve been building to is this: While our creating clearly matters for this life, does it really matter for eternity? An Entrepreneur and a Theologian Hordes of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs rushed to find open seats in the auditorium, eager to hear from one of their greatest heroes, Peter Thiel. In 1998, Thiel cofounded PayPal, serving

Their ninety-minute discussion ranged from topics such as whether or not humans can