As COVID-19 keeps making it hard for us to travel, having Pioneer Business Planting (PBP) Consultations on location is still near to impossible. After facilitating two consultations online in 2020, we have decided to use this new experience. We will keep on going with developing our PBP program and optimizing it for an online experience. This way, we can still help people learn how to start businesses and help them use it to make disciples and plant churches.
PBP Online in 2021
This past June we faced another challenging, but also amazing, opportunity; to facilitate a PBP consultation of 3 days, three hours per day. Partnering up with the organizations Lifeway and New Generations, we had over 40 DMM Practitioners signing up from all over Africa, Asia and even North America. Most of them lead networks of house churches among the neglected and unreached. In contrast to the 5 days PBP normally takes, we really had to dive deep into the most important topics.
Even with some technical difficulties and time zone differences, we had a great group of enthusiastic participants. They dove onto the subjects and were excited to gain the knowledge we had to offer. From day 1 they started thinking about what businesses they could start and how they were going to apply what we were teaching them. The concept of doing business and disciple making combined was very new to some, but was received with open arms. We were able to equip them with problem solving skills and better ways of going about business and money.
One of the attendees put what they learned like this: “Business will provide an opportunity to reach other people. People can choose to go to a church or a mosque, but they don’t have a choice in going to a grocery store. They have to go there!” This is the essence of why we do business and discipleship together. Next to creating self-sustainability, it opens so many doors to the unreached. It allows us to penetrate closed communities and bring change into their lives.
As a team we are excited about the enthusiasm of the attendees. The fact that it was through Zoom didn’t hinder us. We were able to make great connections that will be further explored in the future. We are hoping to have them again for the full PBP experience, this time in person, because this small taste definitely left them wanting more. Even through Zoom God’s presence was tangible and experienced by every single person logged on. He is always there, giving us hope and leading us to new steps in building His Kingdom.
