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

by Jordan Raynor

So allow me to submit a new definition for the word entrepreneur to guide the rest of these pages: an entrepreneur is anyone who takes a risk to create something new for the good of others.

I grew up in the church and attended a Christian school where it seemed like every pastor and chapel speaker implied that if I really loved the Lord, if I was really sold out for Christ, I would go into “full-time ministry” or live in a mud hut three thousand miles away from home.

Liberty University implies this

How does God’s creative and entrepreneurial character empower me to emulate Him?

What are the right questions to ask when discerning where God has called me to work?

following the call to create impacts our motivations for creating, the products we choose to create, and what it looks like to holistically integrate the gospel into our ventures, beginning with striving for excellence in everything we do and prioritizing people over profit.

including managing the tension between trusting in God and hustling to make things happen in our ventures,

To download this free study journal, visit calledtocreate.org/journal.

in the church we often hear that God is loving, holy, omnipotent, sovereign, just, merciful, and faithful. But we rarely, if ever, hear that God is entrepreneurial. Yet, as King pointed out, that is the first characteristic revealed about God in the Bible! “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

The virtuous women in Proverbs 31 was an Entreprenuer

In Genesis 1:1, when it tells us for the first time that God “created,” the Hebrew word used in the original manuscripts is bara, meaning “to create,” connoting the idea of creating something out of nothing. When God begins to take action in the creation account, “the earth was formless and empty,” giving God nothing to create with.

Andy Crouch, executive editor of Christianity Today and author of Culture Making,

Research him. He’s referred to throughout the book.

For every act of creation involves bringing something into being that was not there before—every creation is ex nihilo, from nothing, even when it takes the world as its starting point.

a man named Bezalel, who is in need of being filled by the Spirit of God in order to build the Tabernacle, a dwelling place for God on earth. The writer of Exodus shares: Then the LORD said to Moses, “See, I have chosen Bezalel son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with wisdom, with understanding, with knowledge and with all kinds of skills—to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze, to cut and set stones, to work in wood, and to engage in all kinds of crafts.” (Exod. 31:1–5) Bezalel was an entrepreneur and artist who was being commissioned by God himself. But before Bezalel could begin the work of rearranging the raw materials of gold, silver, bronze, stone, and wood to create something new, God had to fill him with his Spirit.

In order for Bezalel to create the Tabernacle of the Lord, he needed more of God’s likeness.

the Tabernacle was a physical representation of “the universe the way it ought to be”9 with God at the center of it.

The Tabernacle was essentially its own world, with everything pointing toward God.

In 2 Corinthians 5:17 we are told that “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come” (NASB).

“God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Gen. 1:27 NASB). The dominant characteristic God has revealed about himself up until this point in Scripture is that he is a Creator.

“God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27), what is the point? The point of an image is to image. Images are erected to display the original. Point to the original. Glorify the original. God made humans in his image so that the world would be filled with reflectors of God. Images of God.

I give every green plant for food.”

What scripture is this? The reasoning green foods are best nutrition?

only humans are given multiplication as a task to fulfill with intention.

He made space in the universe for us. So, if you see a human need not being met, you see a talent that can meet that need, if you invest your resources so that the talent can meet that need, and you create new value in the world, new goods to be shared, better quality of life, or human community flourishing, then what you’ve done is not just godly, but God-like.

I wonder what we Christians are known for in the world outside our churches. Are we known as critics, consumers, copiers, condemners of culture? I’m afraid so. Why aren’t we known as cultivators—people who tend and nourish what is best in human culture, who do the hard and painstaking work to preserve the best of what people before us have done? Why aren’t we known as creators—people who dare to think and do something that has never been thought or done before, something that makes the world more welcoming and thrilling and beautiful?

Knowing what we know of God’s creative character, why don’t more Christians feel called to emulate their Creator?

the church has bought into a false storyline about work that says work is inherently bad and meaningless unless it is “full-time ministry.”

Or preaching

What if they understood that because God calls us to work, all work has meaning and can be used to love and serve our neighbors?

As Jeff Van Duzer puts it in Why Business Matters to God, “When businesses produce material things that enhance the welfare of the community, they are engaged in work that matters to God.”

Throughout ten Boom’s life, God used the watch shop to accomplish his will. Like clockwork, every morning at 8:30 ten Boom would begin the day by leading his employees and family in Bible reading. In this way, he was a pastor of sorts, using his business to disciple and love his employees. But it wasn’t just his staff he loved. The ten Boom family had a reputation for loving people and cultivating community.

While ten Boom was faithful in using his business to serve the Lord in “the little things,” God had plans to entrust him with much more responsibility

“Growing up in the church, there’s a tendency to have a hierarchy of callings, to elevate the callings of the pastor or the missionary overseas. Whether they’re explicitly saying it or not, they are pushing you in the direction of making ‘full-time ministry’ your career as well.”

“The assessment showed me that I am skilled at casting vision and creating systems to bring those visions to life. That’s creating new things. That’s creating something out of nothing.

“The highest calling is not being a pastor but becoming all God called you to be, namely a person who glorifies God in all you do.”

That’s what Christians are suppose to be doing anyway, right?

have a purpose beyond being a wife and mom. I know family comes first always, but where some people want more kids, I want to build a business. I feel like this business is a child and I don’t want it to stay in this infant state. I really want it to grow, not for my glory but for the glory of God who has given me this ‘child’ to care for. I feel like God has given me this talent, he’s given me this gift, and for me to just keep it to myself is selfish. I need to share it. I have been called to be a wife. I have been called to be a mom. But I have also been called to create. I feel like this is what I’m supposed to be doing. And if I didn’t build this business, I would feel as if I were being a poor steward of the passions,

Work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.

When discerning our career paths, almost all of our questions are aimed at serving ourselves rather than God and others. We ask, “Which career will earn me the most respect and adoration from others? Which career will help me accumulate the most wealth in the shortest amount of time? Which career will give me the most freedom and flexibility?”

But as Christians, our identity is already defined. As 1 John 3:1 reminds us, “See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” We are not what we say we do when introducing ourselves at a party. We are children of God.

It’s never been cooler to be an entrepreneur. But cool doesn’t equal calling.

Yes!

But if our work is going to be more than a job—if it’s going to be a true calling on our lives—then we must ask questions not about which career will best boost our self-image but rather how we might best serve the One who has called us to create.

three excellent questions when discerning God’s calling on their lives: What am I passionate about? What gifts has God given me? Where do I have the greatest opportunity to love others?

One of the ways God molds us and helps us discern our calling is by giving us our passions, the things that bring us pure joy.

Identifying passions like these is key to discerning our calling, but passion without competence is worthless.

the apostle Paul said, “Since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, each of us is to exercise them accordingly” (Rom. 12:6 NASB).

In order to best glorify our Creator and love others, Christians should do the work we are best at, work that God has equipped us to do exceptionally well.

If we choose work we can’t do well, that’s a poor reflection on God, whose character we are called to image to the world.

One of the primary ways we love our neighbor is by doing work we are gifted at. In Culture Making, Andy Crouch argues that, when discerning our calling: The right question is whether, when we undertake the work we believe to be our vocation, we experience the joy and humility that come only when God multiplies our work so that it bears thirty, sixty and a hundredfold beyond what we could expect from our feeble inputs.

Vocation—calling—becomes another word for a continual process of discernment, examining the fruits of our work to see whether they are producing that kind of fruit, and doing all we can to scatter the next round of seed in the most fruitful places.11

it is up to each of us to honestly ask if the work we are doing is the work God has equipped us to do well, to best glorify him and love others.

Where Do I Have the Greatest Opportunity to Love Others?

He started his first company, a laundry delivery service for college students called EZ Laundry, while he was a sophomore at Southern Methodist University. Within one year, the business had grown to more than $1,000,000 in sales with more than forty employees.

“I began to look for solutions in the world I already knew: business and entrepreneurship.”19 The solution was TOMS Shoes, a for-profit company that promised to match every pair of shoes purchased with a new pair of shoes given to a child in need. Since the founding of TOMS in 2006, the company has given away more than sixty million pairs of shoes to children in need20 all around the world and built a business worth $625 million.21

entrepreneurship itself could be used to serve God, not just by donating profits to charity. In a book titled Work as Worship, Mycoskie shared, “In a sense, [TOMS has] allowed me to go into ministry without having to leave my passion for entrepreneurialism.”25