Grow Your Christian Business: 3 Ways to Let God Lead
I have a hard question to ask you, but I want you to take it seriously if you consider yourself a Christian business owner. Do you run your business as a Christian or as an atheist?
Don’t be too quick to answer until you hold the answers to the following questions up to the Word of truth in James 4.
- How do you determine your business goals?
- How do you decide where to spend your money, time, and other resources?
- What is your process for picking board members, team members, and business partners?
- How are you as a leader being refined and trained?
- What measurements do you use to determine success or failure?
“Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.’ Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that’” (James 4:13-15).
When a Christian Business Owner Lets God Make the Plans
When I started my nonprofit, SPED Homeschool, I had a strong personal walk with God that I just assumed would boil over into my business. But as my business goals sat before me and my anxieties grew about how I would accomplish the HUGE dream God had given me, I found myself tempted to write up a business plan that made sense to me and go with it instead of seeking the Lord’s will.
There were times I started out in a self-led direction, only to have all my efforts reduced to rubble. Looking back, I am thankful God swiftly crushed my self-made paths and the pride that went with them.
Maybe you are in this place of anxious anticipation about how to fulfill the vision God has shared with you. I want to caution you about taking your own path to accomplish that God-sized dream.
God’s will is more than just solving a problem for the here and now and using the most direct method to get from point A to point B.
Instead, He is about perfection and working out His plan so everything He has already planned comes together. It is God’s plan to lead you from point A to point B, a path He has already charted.
Following requires trust and faith that He has already taken care of everything you will ever need to accomplish the dream He has shared with you.
How to Lead Your Christian Business by Faith
Wondering how to lead a business on trust and faith toward God’s dream of success? Here are three things you need to do:
- Stay connected with God.
- Set aside time every day to spend in God’s Word, studying, praying, listening, and meditating. Guard that time as your most important meeting of the day, because it is.
- Frequently meet with godly mentors you’ve given the right to correct you and guide you. Do you have a board of directors? If so, these individuals should be this caliber of people.
- Carve out larger blocks of time, both monthly and yearly, to fast and pray. This time is crucial for realigning your larger business plans before they get too far off course.
- Be open to running your business counter-culturally. God tells us that His ways are not our ways and that goes in running a business as much as it does in our personal walk with Him.
- Consistently keep your pride and greed in check.
When we give into the sins of pride and greed, we tell God we do not believe He can supply what we need because by what we see He has allocated our portion to someone or something else instead of us.
What we forget is that God’s storehouses have no limit and His ability to honor us in the sight of others has no bounds. Jesus was the perfect example of how to live this way. He focused on what God had called Him to do and was grateful and faithful with each day’s provision to get one day closer to that goal.
God-Sized Dreams Are Possible With God-Led Strategies
In 2017 I had a dream to create an organization that would make homeschooling the number one choice for parents of children with special educational needs.
Other than that dream, I really did not understand how I would accomplish that goal. We had no money, but I had a lot of connections.
From there God revealed to me that His plan was to do something completely revolutionary in the homeschooling world: Develop a resource collaborative base for business and professionals who offer quality educational products and services for families who teach special education at home.
I want to leave you with an example using one God-led strategy that happened early on with SPED Homeschool―a weekly broadcast. At the time I didn’t realize how pivotal this move would be in accomplishing the larger vision of our organization, but I trusted God and followed His lead.
The Unexpected Results of Following God’s Plans
That first week we maybe had 1 or 2 live viewers, and I fumbled my way through the entire show. But I had faith that God could multiply my little bit of talent as long as I persevered and stayed the course.
Now, two years later, we average 200 live views and another 200 views of the recorded video across our Facebook, YouTube or Periscope channels and over 800 weekly downloads and plays on our podcast station.
The growth has been consistent and has all happened organically as we trusted in God over advertising to build our community. I didn’t understand at first why God had us take this unconventional method. But now, looking back, I have a much better understanding.
First off, our partners will pay $45 to $60 to sponsor one of our broadcasts, not because we have a vast audience, but because they have told us our audience is one of the most engaged homeschooling audiences.
Second, this broadcast is bringing in new partnerships as curriculum companies, therapy providers, educational consultants ask to be guests on our show. Yes, they are now approaching us instead of us searching for them.
Trust God to Lead Your Christian Business
I could share so many other stories about how God has revamped my understanding of the dream He gave me back in 2017. But that would only be a tip of the iceberg compared to all that He has yet to reveal in this plan as I move forward in leading SPED Homeschool.
All we need to keep doing is follow His lead and remember He will provide. He is faithful to bring to completion all of His plans.
