Entrepreneurship Education is Powerful, and When It’s Christ-Centered, It’s Transformative

For the last twelve years, students at Cincinnati Hills Christian Academy have been doing everything from managing a coffee bar and selling produce out of a greenhouse to starting a wood-fired pizza oven business and launching the world’s first fine-dining experience out of a high school teaching kitchen. And they’ve been calling it entrepreneurship education.

At its core, true entrepreneurship education should be called “entrepreneurial mindset education” as the intent is not to churn out entrepreneurs but rather to instill the mindset best characterized as “entrepreneurial.”

An Entrepreneurial Mindset Explained

This mindset has four primary attributes that form a foundation for the real-world skills that naturally develop when the mindset is put into practice. First, students work to develop a healthy, directed growth mindset that tethers goal setting and decision making to one’s mission, vision, and core values. Then, students embrace the ongoing development of grit to build resiliency and adaptability. Next, students are given controlled environments for risk-taking so that they can participate in the redefinition of failure. (True failure, after all, is not trying in the first place.) Finally, students come to be “problem finders” as they understand that problems are actually opportunities in disguise; therefore, they seek opportunity.

Armed with this mindset, students begin to collaborate around proactive problem solving wherein they effectively communicate solutions born out of creative critical thinking. In other words, they think and they act out of an entrepreneurial mindset. In this way, they create synergy between both content and skills for success in an ever-changing world.

All of these efforts, while powerful and important, take on entirely new significance when seen through a Christ-centered lens of spiritual formation. When viewed this way, entrepreneurship education becomes the pathway for not only students but also for entire schools and communities to embrace redemptive entrepreneurship as a strategy for flourishing.

And this pathway begins with a definition.

Defining “Entrepreneur”

Rather than wade through the denotations and connotations inherent in the word “entrepreneur,” I’ll share the definition offered by entrepreneur and author Jordan Raynor in his book, Called to Create: A Biblical Invitation to Create, Innovate, and Risk. He writes, “An entrepreneur is anyone who takes a risk to create something new for the good of others.”

This threefold definition speaks to the power of redemptive entrepreneurship: in effect, we are all called to take risks in the act of creating newness for the service of others. This is the invitation to participate in the ongoing project of restoration inherent all around us as we labor to build the Kingdom of God.

Lest anyone worry that entrepreneurship programs are naturally biased toward chasing money and fame, the very nature of the word itself implies an empathy for others born out of a calling to create and bring new creations to life. In this way, redemptive entrepreneurship leads to the act of bringing wholeness to a fallen world–a world not overcome with insurmountable problems but abounding in opportunities.

How, then, do we go about this work in a meaningful way? Well, first, we must start. Entrepreneurs are biased for action; they understand that taking action will create the necessary momentum for significant change. Inherent in the entrepreneurial mindset is the embracing of the “Minimum Viable Product”—the mentality that if we wait until the solution is perfect, we have waited too long. Instead we must act, we must test, we must get feedback, and we must improve.

Entrepreneurship Education Transforms Pedagogy

The same mentality is needed in our educational approach. A pedagogy that holds up perfection as the goal (whether stated or not) does not create fertile ground for the entrepreneurial mindset. Instead, we need systems and measurements that emphasize progress and embrace the spirit of continuous improvement. We need new measures of mastery and competency, and we need to eradicate the fear of failure. We need to use words like “effort” and “not yet” instead of “talent” and “can’t.”

These pedagogical changes lead to students empowered with a compass instead of a map. Joy Ito of the MIT Media Lab expresses this point powerfully in Whiplash: “The decision to forfeit the map in favor of the compass recognizes that in an increasingly unpredictable world moving ever more quickly, a detailed map may lead you deep into the woods at an unnecessarily high cost. A good compass, though, will always take you where you need to go.” As more and more traditional pathways become obsolete, we do our students a disservice when we fail to provide them with a means to navigate the uncertainty and complexity they will certainly face.

More and more, entrepreneurship programs at the university level are focusing on getting students comfortable with being uncomfortable–understanding that growth and comfort cannot co-exist. Is our pedagogical approach helping students develop high return habits through ritual and practice so that they become stronger each day? Are they embracing failure on a small scale so that they learn to adapt to changing environments?

Redemptive Entrepreneurship Explained

As educators, we can create fertile ground for the fostering of redemptive entrepreneurship. This process begins with a renewed mindset following Paul’s admonition in Romans 12:2: “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” The best way for us to encourage our students to renew their minds is to actively demonstrate the process ourselves. Are we, as educators, demonstrating a growth mindset? Are we developing our own grit? Do we practice a redefinition of failure? Do we actively seek opportunities?

When we fully embrace these four attributes, we begin to see the renewal of the mindset as the first stage of redemptive entrepreneurship, for out of this renewed mindset comes the redeemed pedagogy of our schools. We come to see true redemptive entrepreneurship as a means of helping students discover not their job or career but their vocation and God’s calling–a calling that emphasizes creation over consumption and that encourages stewardship over ownership. And when this calling is fully realized, we see students, teachers, and entire schools embrace true flourishing.

In Engaging God’s World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living, Cornelius Plantinga suggests a clear pathway to flourishing when he states, “The way to flourish is to cause others to flourish.” This succinct statement echoes the words of famed speaker Zig Ziglar speaking to countless entrepreneurs decades ago: “You can have everything you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.” Entrepreneurship, then, is a communal calling to first empathize with and then to bring solutions to the various problems we humans experience.

Plantinga reminds us that not only individuals need restoration, but also systems: “God isn’t content to save human beings in their individual activities; God wants to save social systems and economic structures too. . . . The whole world belongs to God, the whole world has fallen, and so the whole world needs to be redeemed.” Thus, our calling is clear.

The great news, then, is that all creation is potentially redeemable, including schools and the entire educational system. This redemption may start with something like a coffee bar or a wood-fired pizza oven.