Redemptive Quests
Our opportunity to influence the major issues of our time.
Excerpted from the 2023 Community Letter.
Even among the talented who choose a path of building, most take safe, incremental bets. Such pursuits not only fail to push the world forward, but pose a cost in opportunity. There are important challenges facing humanity that no one is working on, including critical, and even existential challenges. In other words, if you are an exceptionally capable person, failure to pursue a good quest is not neutral. It constitutes a loss for humanity.
— Trae Stephens and Markie Wagner
In the 2022 Community Letter, I spelled out our collective identity at Praxis as a “venture-building ecosystem” advancing redemptive entrepreneurship. This language accurately describes how we aspire to think, build, and organize as a community. In this year’s letter I want to attend to what follows in our extended mission statement — “supporting founders, funders, and innovators motivated by their faith to address the major issues of our time” — with a particular interest in that last phrase as the increasing aim of our work together.
Over the past forty or so years, there has been an accelerating effort in many churches to break down the dualism of the sacred/secular divide — roughly speaking, the idea that the “ministry” vocation is higher or more important to God than “secular” ones. In 2023, in many churches, there is at least an acknowledgement that all good work matters in a spiritual sense. This is a truly welcome generational paradigm shift that has provided a solid imaginative foundation for us to see entrepreneurship as a reflection of our Creator’s image.
But beyond this ethical vocational baseline lies redemptive entrepreneurship: an invitation into yet greater potential for our lives, imaginatively and obediently loving God and neighbor through our entrepreneurial capacity, resources, and ventures. With an expansive view of who qualifies as our neighbor, we believe Christians of all kinds and levels of capacity should be actively working on the major issues of their time, and every Christian entrepreneur should be stretching their capacity to reshape the world. That is, the gospel applies not only to how we work, but perhaps even more to what we choose to work on.
Redemptive entrepreneurship is an invitation into yet greater potential for our lives, imaginatively and obediently loving God and neighbor through our entrepreneurial capacity, resources, and ventures.
Re-Risking Instead of De-Risking
Praxis friend and Founders Fund Partner Trae Stephens co-wrote an article (with Delphi Labs Co-Founder Markie Wagner) related to this idea, titled “Choose Good Quests.” While their audience is steeped in the norms of Silicon Valley and the technology sector, so much in their piece applies to the norms of Christian vocation. They map all personal and organizational endeavors, or “quests,” on a 2x2 diagram: bad vs. good on the horizontal axis, hard vs. easy on the vertical.
Here’s my summary of their thesis: it is a moral imperative for well-resourced founders and funders to go after the good, hard challenges our world faces, and each of us should seek to maximize our missional capacity based on our experience, talent, and the people and financial resources we can pull together. They illustrate this in gaming terms, suggesting that we each have a “player level” — an ability to attract resources that improves over time as a combination of our God-given gifts and station in life. The higher our level at any given time, the harder the problem we should attempt to solve. In biblical terms, it’s akin to the parable of the talents (Matthew 25) or the admonition “to whom much is given, much is required” (Luke 12) for modern entrepreneurship.
Another way of stating the Good Quests thesis is that as our authority (our capacity for meaningful action) increases, we are responsible to move toward vulnerability (our exposure to meaningful risk). If you’ve been in and around the Praxis community, you might recognize these as the words of our Partner for Theology & Culture, Andy Crouch. Andy has made the case that these moves of authority and vulnerability are critical for a life of flourishing. Trae makes the case that they are critical for the flourishing of all of us. Both are right (and I’m sure would agree with each other). Further, in the Praxis community we might reframe the spectrum of bad to good quests as the exploitative to the redemptive. Ultimately, God designed and modeled life this way for us through the example of Jesus — whose redemptive sacrifice was the greatest, hardest quest there has ever been.
Of course, we are tempted not to live this life in freedom and fullness. Most of us are told by our parents, friends, educational system, and society at large to shoot for reasonable goals, which most often lead us to de-risk our lives by accumulating power, prestige, and possessions that insulate us from vulnerability and permit us to live for ourselves alone. The Silicon Valley-shaped venture ecosystem is increasingly constructed to reward quests that trend toward the (relatively speaking) exploitative and easy: dopamine-driven fame-through-followers and “quick impact for quick exits” over lasting change. Cause-driven leaders can be lured into the “nobility trap” — the admiration offered to those who choose the nonprofit sector. And as Christians, we are tempted into easier, subcultural off-ramps or toward low-competition fields, instead of seeking the harder, innovative edge where we might step into our full redemptive potential.
Whatever the case, we often experience the cynicism that can come with either success or failure, and we lose some of our belief that things can change, becoming in the process the loudest risk-avoidance voice in our own lives. De-risking or re-risking isn’t only relevant to major career inflection points; it’s a choice in many everyday decisions we make. In his provocative book Turning Pro, Steven Pressfield writes about our tendency to avoid what we are most made to do:
Sometimes, when we’re terrified of embracing our true calling, we’ll pursue a shadow calling instead. The shadow career is a metaphor for our real career. Its shape is similar, its contours feel tantalizingly the same. But a shadow career entails no real risk. If we fail at a shadow career, the consequences are meaningless to us.
Ironically, this temptation often intensifies as our player level goes up: we are more content to have “made it” and more prone to loss-avoidance. It is so enticing to take the spoils of success (not just wealth, but even more our identity as winners) and retreat. Looking at Pressfield through the lens of quests, many of us can be tempted to withdraw to safety and control by simply choosing easy quests, despite having proven our capacity to handle risk. How often does a business leader have an exit and then engage in an almost riskless approach to the rest of life? How often does a nonprofit become more interested in incremental progress, risk management, and donor territorialism once it reaches basic viability?
It would be natural to receive this idea of redemptive quests as a call to even more, and more intense, work. Hard quests must require striving and drivenness, 80-hour weeks, exponential scaling factors, huge organizations, and hockey-stick revenue, right? Wrong. While they might feature some of those dynamics, hard quests are more about the objective of the work than the quantity, and they are best charted in decades. They’re also nonobvious in market terms: it turns out the more countercultural and improbable quests are, the less people try them. “Easy” quests (such as highly profitable replication) are likely to be taken on by many opportunistic players.
Instead, as Stephens and Wagner put it,
Future-defining problems are hard to recruit for, difficult to raise money for, and nearly impossible to build near-term businesses around, which is why they are exactly the types of problems we need the most well-resourced players pursuing.
Of course, not all redemptive quests have to be moonshots, where an astronomical amount of upfront capital and risk are aimed in one specific direction. Most redemptive projects can and should deploy a lily pad innovation strategy, which sets a clear and ambitious agenda or objective but takes smaller steps toward renewal over a long time horizon. Often, a pioneering individual or venture creates a paradigmatic shift that acts as a lily pad for an entire sector or model to jump from.
The larger aim of these endeavors is what’s critical. To quote Mihaly Csikszentmilhalyi, the famed Hungarian-American psychologist,
The unifying similarity among geniuses and innovators is not cognitive or affective but motivational. What is common among them is the unwillingness or inability to strive for goals everyone else accepts.
Returning to the “player level” idea, while Stephens and Wagner are saying that if you are brilliant it is important for the world that you aren’t just doing something self-beneficial, Csikszentmilhalyi is also saying that being a “top player” in the eyes of the world is not a prerequisite to undertaking a good, hard quest. Just staying committed to a countercultural vision can get you a long way. This is good news, because as 1 Corinthians 1:26 reminds us, “Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth.”
Redemptive Quests and the Major Issues of Our Time
So we should work on redemptive quests. What do those look like, and how might we identify them? Many of the most readily identifiable good, hard quests rely on technological breakthroughs, such as the sequencing of the genome or the development of large language model (LLM)-based AI. These pave the way for many (good and bad) quests to follow, based on adapting and applying new knowledge to opportunity.
Yet from a redemptive perspective, addressing the major issues of our time requires relational and spiritual breakthroughs as much as technological ones. Wars are fought with weapons, but they start through ego and greed. Loneliness and depression have been accelerated, not healed, through connection to all those friends. So while we may rightly lament that Christians are seldom in the rooms where technological breakthroughs are dreamed and forged, when it comes to honoring and protecting the even weightier matters of personhood, healthy Christian communities are best able to offer an alternative imagination for the major issues of our time.
Last year, we released a set of Opportunities for Redemptive Innovation (ORIs), inventoried and imagined through our Praxis Portfolio, broader Summit community, and what we see transpiring in our world today. The list largely fuses industries with issues, identifying places for us to work together for the sake of the world around us. Since release, this collection has shaped our appreciation for what’s happened — and our imagination for what’s possible — through your work. Indeed, we are fortunate to be a witness to hard, redemptive quests in the Praxis community across many ORIs, including the following four examples.
- Large-Scale Innovation for Environmental Stewardship: In 2011, Praxis Fellow Jason Ballard, along with then-Praxis Business Accelerator Lead Evan Loomis, co-founded TreeHouse (Business 2016). This “green Home Depot” venture arose from his passion and calling for disrupting the environmental impacts so connected to our homes. After opening multiple stores and raising tens of millions in funding, a challenging retail environment forced the company to close. But Ballard’s redemptive quest (and his partnership with Loomis) was just getting underway. His next step toward his vision was even more audacious, exploring the possibilities of 3D-printed infrastructure to meet the same challenge. Through a Praxis connection, Brett Hagler’s New Story (Nonprofit 2017) became the first customer and partner to ICON, where their partnership launched a prototype to awards and a media-blitz at SXSW in 2018. About 4 years, $400M and 400 employees later, ICON is now the world’s leader in 3D-printing construction technology — and Jason would tell you he’s just getting started realizing his vision of beautiful, affordable, carbon-neutral housing around the world.
- Renewing the Neighborhood: Long-time Praxis friend and Mentor David Dillon is a technology entrepreneur in Chicago, where he has lived for over three decades, and where his portfolio of companies employ hundreds. In 2016, grieved by the city’s rising gun violence, he and Praxis Mentor Michael Allen gathered a group of local business, faith, community, nonprofit, civic, and government leaders to explore what could be done. In response to cross-cultural relational and spiritual breakthroughs they experienced at the gathering, they co-founded Together Chicago, a redemptive quest focused on economic development, education, violence reduction, gospel justice, and faith community mobilization. Their practical work is a beacon of light amidst deep crises, and it has seen meaningful progress embraced by everyone from local gang members to city officials to top national philanthropists.
- Entrepreneurship & Capital for Upward Mobility: Dr. Nashlie Sephus, a 2023 Praxis Fellow, is one of an all-too-small number of Black women to successfully start a venture-backed technology company and have it acquired (Partpic, by Amazon). Instead of taking her winnings and de-risking her life, she doubled down. Through the personal acquisition of multiple abandoned properties in her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi, and partnering with Deputy Director Creston Burse on the launch of Bean Path (Nonprofit 2023), a technology-training nonprofit, she’s on a quest to change the life story of hundreds more like her.
Today, we see our Praxis Portfolio working across every ORI in important lily pad and moonshot endeavors. A collective view of the many rays of light we see:
- 215 active ventures (93 Business, 122 Nonprofit)
- Over 6,300 active employees operating in 111 countries
- Over $605M in total annual revenue
- Over $115M in capital placed to Portfolio ventures through the Praxis Capital community
We celebrate the many Praxis Fellows and other community members who have chosen to go on redemptive quests together, whether these ventures continue to thrive or face significant roadblocks in 2023. It is, after all, one of the most challenging startup climates that we have seen in our own organizational lifetime, with bank failures, inflation, a bear tech market, and more. I hope we can not only celebrate them as a whole but also encourage them one by one — helping them practically through this challenging season, no matter how much we are tempted to follow the market norms during uncertainty.
How Christian Community Changes Our Player Level
Player levels change with context. They can and should grow over time, and community is one of the most potent influences on player level. Beyond one’s own personal skills or resources growing with success (and failure) over time, a network is really what makes things possible. Basic entrepreneurial networks can vault us over the main early-stage hurdles, such as finding a co-founder, raising seed capital, and finding customers or beneficiaries. Affinity and values-aligned networks go one step further, helping people build advisory teams and test theses. But shared-cause networks, especially those pursuing the Kingdom of God, energize greater possibility, generosity, and adventure. Three ways we want to see these benefits accruing for the builders in our community, continuing the video gaming metaphor:
- A redemptive network like Praxis should give players “extra lives”: additional missional capital, a softened landing in a venture’s final season, a stable job in a time of recovery, a chance at a second startup. Not every season is a time for a redemptive quest. We’ve seen community members experience each of these blessings in recent years. The central imaginative trait here is that we refuse to see venture failure as an identity issue.
- Some player levels are lower than they should be in light of evenly distributed God-given talent across the body of Christ, and we should help them “level up.” The world’s markets for capital and opportunity are inefficient due to pre-existing bias and structural issues, which could include gender, ethnicity, educational attainment, community of origin, institutional credibility, nationality, age, and past experiences. In a redemptive network, everyone pays attention to who is in the room — and who should be but isn’t. We can and should work to unlock opportunities for promising entrepreneurs on their own redemptive quests.
- Finally, we should remind each other that our player level is “spiritually boosted,” not anchored in merely earthly terms. Our resources of the “mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16), prayer with our Father, the Holy Spirit in us, and membership in the global body of Christ should create a different calculus of possibility for our work. Some quests are harder technically or culturally than others; but to be sure, the greatest challenge and possibility of a redemptive quest is spiritual in nature. We should spur each other on to good deeds, creating fertile ground for redemptive quests, helping one another put our full selves and resources on the line to try hard things.
A Vision for Deep Change
Redemptive history is a record of God empowering individuals on hard quests, in community, creating deep change that lasts over generations: Noah, Abraham, Moses, Esther, David, Ruth, Boaz, Mary, Paul, and of course Christ himself — and the list goes on. You and I are here, building in hope, because of them. But something has happened in our age today.
Praxis community member and Belmont University President Greg Jones, in his book Christian Social Innovation, recalls a poignant question from his secular social entrepreneurship colleague at Duke, the late Greg Dees, who asked him, “What happened to the church?” Dees went on to comment, “My field wouldn’t exist in business schools if it wasn’t for the loss of interest in social entrepreneurship and innovation in the church. It’s as if you all had a meeting somewhere around 1970 and decided to quit your interest in entrepreneurship and innovation. For much of American history, anything that was truly innovative, particularly for the social good, was done by people of faith.” Greg goes on to reflect that “my own tradition, the Wesleyan movement, was at the forefront of a lot of that social innovation in American history: in education, in healthcare, even in business and food security. In a variety of enterprises, Christians had been at the forefront.”
Looking back, it’s clear that this question and reflection have animated us at Praxis for over a decade. Re-establishing the Church’s creative and prophetic contribution on the major issues of our time: this is our redemptive quest here at Praxis. Forming a venture-building ecosystem with a redemptive imagination is our theory of change toward that quest.
Re-establishing the Church’s creative and prophetic contribution on the major issues of our time: this is our redemptive quest here at Praxis.
Together, we need to cultivate a community where “crazy is a compliment”; where spiritual practices such as daily prayer and Sabbath are a catalyst for imagination; where all work and money is missional; and where one’s identity is not bound in conventional definitions of success. A place where, as Praxis Venture Partner Dave Evans says, “grace means go.”
I hope this might drive us each to ask, am I on a redemptive quest? If so, what is it? If not, what might it be? How might the difficulty level of my quest be proportionate to my personal or organizational “player level”? And do my relationships and community affiliations encourage or discourage that quest?
Elton Trueblood once wrote, “The major danger is not that we shall fail to appreciate past models, but that we shall lack the courage to be sufficiently bold in our creative dreaming….Whatever else may be the character of the redemptive society which the crisis of our time demands, it is at least clear that the society must make the habit of adventure central to its life.”
For those of you who are prompted by this letter to consider a new quest or expand your vision based on the momentum you’ve had, or you just need some friends and co-conspirators to sustain you in your adventure, I hope that you’ll find the Praxis community to be a deep partner in these pursuits — a place where the radically redemptive quest is completely reasonable.
