Our New Accelerator Program
Announcing our nine-month fellowship for new ventures advancing a missionary encounter with modern culture.
Hey everyone - welcome back to our journal, especially recent subscribers. We’ve been working hard since our Pitch Day in December on developing our programs and ecosystem.
We’ve got more journal articles in the pipeline, but for now, here’s an update on the launch of our accelerator and how to get involved.
Tyler Prieb
Missional Labs
Our New Accelerator Program
We’re excited to announce the launch of our full accelerator program for missional ventures. Applications are open until June 15 (apply here).
If you’ve been tracking with us, you know that we spent the last year piloting two incubator cohorts around this concept (one and two), which led to our current portfolio of ventures and a virtual pitch day. It’s been fun.
We’ve since been digesting our learnings, and working with the good folks at Praxis to refine our model, and we’re doubling down on “missional ventures.” For us, missional is still a very good word, and speaks to our primary goal: to equip the Church for a renewed missionary encounter with the modern world.
We’re building a high quality fellowship program and support network for early-stage ministries and projects working on innovative approaches to evangelism, discipleship, leadership, and the Church, on the frontiers of secular culture.
You can see the full program details here, but here’s an outline of the program:
Ministry Focus - We’re looking for projects that are directly working on our key priorities (we use a variation on Keller’s framework), like evangelism, discipleship, compassion, leadership, church planting, etc. This is what sets us apart from Christian social entrepreneurship more broadly, and anchors us in the Church.
Innovative Model - We’re also prioritizing ventures with creative approaches to technology, media, economics, funding, community, network effects, etc., that will push the envelope on what’s possible for ministries and mission utilizing modern means.
Early Stage. We’re shifting up the curve slightly to work at the acceleration stage. While this might filter out some great ideas, it will increase venture quality. We’re looking for projects that have launched, and have conviction, leadership, and traction - but where our program can still add significant value.
Integrated Curriculum - The program pedagogy sits at the intersection of missiology, ministry leadership, and disciplined venture building. We think there is a gap in the church ecosystem for a training program that understands robust missiology, the dynamics of “apostolic” leadership, and the competencies for entrepreneurship and venture design.
Global Learning - We envision fellows not just from the post-Christian west, but genuinely from around the world. We think projects in London and New York have much to learn from ventures in Mumbai, Sao Paolo, or Cairo, and vice versa. The future of mission will be multi-directional.
Venture Types - We’re flexible on organizational type or funding model. The projects can be communities, churches, charities, businesses, networks, or more. For now, we are interested primarily in the impact thesis. We recognize that varied structures require different guidance, but for now we are centralizing them in a single cohort.
Peer Cohort - We take 12 fellows (with cofounders, potentially) from around the world, and put them in a peer cohort, where they can learn from each other, and build relational networks that will serve them over time. The “genius is the room,” to quote Alan Hirsch.
Mentors + Faculty - We know that guides and mentors are key to success. We’ll surround the fellows with direct coaching, mentors, faculty, and support, to help them answer tough questions and accelerate their work. These will be a combination of pastors, thinkers, nonprofit leaders, mission leaders, entrepreneurs, and specialists.
City Sessions - The cohort will gather three times in person - once in New York City, once in London, and once in San Francisco. We think these “hub” cities are gateways to broad regional support networks, and places where we can convene mentors and funders.
Pitch Days - The ventures will have a chance to give a 5 minute pitch to a supportive, curated room of leaders in each city gathering, as well as a virtual pitch day at the end, for broad exposure. We believe strongly in the power of pitching the vision as a way to build support and shape imagination.
Key Milestones - Our hope here is that these ventures are able to hit critical organizational benchmarks - clarity of vision, a good strategic roadmap, strong core offerings, a viable funding model, and more - and have the potential to be high-impact organizations into the future.
Applications are open until June 15, and you can see the program details here, and nominate a project here. The accelerator kicks off in the fall.
Why Mission?
We’ve written before about some of the theory under our project, and have longer-form thinking and research on it you’re interested (email us), but a few more quick comments on our conviction and philosophy behind what we’re doing.
We’re centered in Newbigin’s vision, that a missionary encounter with culture is most pressing intellectual and practical task of the Church in our time. This has been echoed in some amazing thinkers and practitioners over the past generation, from Alan Hirsch to Tim Keller to many in between.
We think the vision of a thoughtful missionary encounter provides the conceptual category for modern mission that can both (1) keep us anchored in trinitarian theology, the narrative of the Gospels, the history of the Church, and the local congregation, and (2) propel us outward into the world with imaginative, creative, and innovative forms of engagement and pioneering which are desperately needed, both locally and globally.
This also helps us avoid the twin pitfalls of (1) structural conservatism (endemic to the institutional Church) on one hand, which leads to slow decline, and (2) shallow and pragmatic innovation on the other (more common to anti-institutional modes), which can lack theological and cultural nuance and suffer from bad ecclesiology. We want to creatively design new missionary encounters from the ground up for the 21st century that are both anchored and ambitious.
But to do this, we need new support structures. Generally speaking, seminaries and pastors conferences don’t launch ventures, church planting groups are limited to particular congregational models, and global missions organizations are aging out and need innovation. Recent entrepreneurship groups that are Christian (Praxis, FDE, etc) are fantastic, but are generally oriented toward “normal” entrepreneurship in the public square, rather than the domains specific to direct mission - evangelism, discipleship, compassion, and the Church. There is no mature “innovation sector” in Christian mission.
Why Now?
We think we exist in a very potent moment for innovation and change. Most observers would describe the (western) church as in the late stages of severe decline. Whether that’s true in our collective spirituality, it is definitely true in our institutions.
Most meta-theories of innovation and social change (like the two loops theory) argue that the disruption and decline of dominant institutions is also the condition for the emergence of innovators and pioneers. We see this in every sector, from finance and tech to the arts, and it’s also true in the Church. The essential “optimistic” work of our moment, then, is to build new networks around the innovators, filter out what is unhelpful, and build a bridge between the resources of late-stage institutions into new, trustworthy, emerging ventures.
In other words, our strategic priority for innovation should be building dense networks and communities-of-practice around emerging pioneers. This is our current moment. (A great example of this is our adjacent work with a recent network called Searock, which supports emerging pastors and planters in primarily secular contexts. I would also argue that many good “next generation” ministries do this implicitly by focusing on young leaders).
What’s more, we also are observing the first-fruits of revival and spiritual awakening in western culture (see Asbury, for example). We think that revival is the spiritual form of renewal, and missional innovation is the structural form of renewal. All awakenings and revivals eventually lead to new innovations in mission, driven by an explosion of outward energy - think about the monastics, the Moravians, the missionary societies, the student volunteer movement, etc. We’ll write more on this, but we think the future of mission looks like networks of spirit-led ventures, and there will be a new wave of 21st century efforts and movements emerging in the next decade. We’re optimists.
Why Venture Building?
Finally, we think that entrepreneurship is a good category - it integrates imagination, ambition, innovation, coordinated effort, and scalable impact. There is a reason the “apostolic” spiritual gift is often synonymous with it. While we’re cautious of uncritically adopting capitalistic or mechanistic paradigms into the Church, we think the apostolic instinct is key to the church’s ongoing renewal and should be nurtured.
The challenge is that local congregations as structures aren’t built for direct entrepreneurialism (save a few outliers) - they’re built for teaching and community, and at their best, can effectively germinate the apostolic imagination. But they aren’t built to nurture or sustain new projects for very long.
This isn’t a bad thing, but as a result many apostolic leaders, ideas, and projects have withered on the vine - either lacking the right conditions for growth and support, or failing to “spin out” at the appropriate time. This structural problem is essentially what drives the church vs para-church divide (notice how all the apostles, prophets, and evangelists typically end up in para-church structures, and shepherds and teachers lead in churches).
We think an ecosystem for missional ventures can bridge the gap somewhat. It captures the potential of entrepreneurship, incentivizing ambition, nurturing talent, rewarding creativity, and creating high-leverage structures - but it can also speak the theological language of churches and ministries broadly, and serve them. We think that blending entrepreneurship with missiology is a good idea - it validates apostolic vocations, it appeals to young leaders, it incentivizes contextualization, and it creates the possibility of new movements.
It ultimately invites us into the mindset of what Newbigin calls morphological radicalism - an openness to method and form that allows missionary imagination to lead to new missionary structures, for the sake of new missionary encounters. So, we’re bullish on technology, media, networks, new forms of education, new funding models, etc to serve mission. The Spirit is creating new wineskins, and we believe that the right greenhouse environments can unlock imagination, talent, resource, and kingdom potential toward effective mission, for the sake of the world.
Get Involved
We’re actively building this, and we are looking for a few kinds of people to join our vision and help develop our program and ecosystem:
Ventures - If you’ve got a kingdom dream, a project, a ministry, or something that you’re working on and you’re not sure where to find support, we want to talk to you. Contact us or apply for the program.
Mentors - If you’re a leader that wants to lend your experience and wisdom to new ministry startups, we’d love to chat with you. We’re starting small but will build our mentor pool. Say hi.
Churches + Ministries - We’re looking for established ministries and resourcing churches to get behind our vision as partners. If you care about supporting effective mission and shaping the future, we’re your people. Let’s talk.
Funders. We need to raise at least $500k to get the program off the ground. We’re a nonprofit organization and aim to be the trusted place to fund the next chapter of effective global mission, to advance the Gospel. Join us.