Vocational Ministry for a Different Kind of Person
An interview with Tyler Prieb, founder of Missional Labs
This Weekend Edition of Ecstatic features Tyler Prieb
Conor Sweetman: I love getting to talk to people doing stuff at the intersection of arts, church, and culture—and I’m excited to talk about your work with Missional Labs and everything that's going on there. Give me an overview of what you're doing with Missional Labs.
Tyler Prieb: We’re building missional ventures. You can locate what I'm doing in the church and culture conversation, but there are a few distinct things that we’re trying to bring out. One is the idea of the “missionary” spirit: the pioneering impulse that aims to extend the gospel, and figure out a way to make the gospel plausible, credible, beautiful, and desirable to modern culture. We’re very “Tim Keller” in that sense, of wanting to contextualize mission.
The second thing I'm trying to say is that we don't just need better leaders in the Church—we fundamentally need new structures. And the reason behind that is because it’s the social structure and the network that sustains a move of God over time. The effective ministries of tomorrow are not going to be the ones we’ve been familiar with in the past— there are going to be new ones, for a new cultural moment.
Another differentiating element of our work is the pushback to the idea, popular for the past 25 years or so, that church planting should be the primary form of mission. I think that's actually a mistake, or it's at least myopic, and this would be my biggest pushback to Keller’s vision: that he emphasized church planting as the most evangelistic thing we can do, to the potential exclusion of other organizational or movement-oriented forms.
In reality, church history just doesn’t say a lot about church planting. As Ralph Winter pointed out, history does show the Gospel moving forward through new mission structures, which aren't confined to the local congregational model. Think parachurches, monastic movements, discipleship collectives, mission societies, and more. The church today doesn’t have a paradigm for renewal in that second category, but it’s where a lot of the opportunity is—but it’s been sidelined.
As a result, much of the work that historically belonged to “mission” has been taken over by the social impact sector—think Invisible Children or Toms Shoes, and those that followed. The problem is that now new mission efforts get forced into secular paradigms to have any credibility. Many charities, for example, need secular money and secular stakeholders, and Christian leaders who don’t fit in the Church move into those spaces. But it becomes a limiter and the Gospel gets watered down. So what I'm trying to say is we need a more robustly Christian startup sector, launching new ventures, non-profits, ministries, and collectives aimed at unapologetically reaching modern culture with the Gospel. In essence, Missional Labs does the work of launching and supporting modern mission organizations.
CS: That makes sense, and I get the spirit behind it, but I wonder if maybe a problem is that so many of the words like pioneer, builder, funder, venture—they’re so attached to Silicon Valley and the world of tech, business, and entrepreneurship. So, I'm curious where you would differentiate from the mentality of Silicon Valley and why you use that terminology even though it's so embedded in that context.
TP: One one hand, I'm very explicitly trying to bring the venture paradigm to the Church, because I think it’s a helpful metaphor to activate imagination. If you look at the Church as a sector—think denominations, church planting organizations, media, publishing, seminary, schools, Bible colleges, missions organizations, all that stuff—where is the innovation in that sector? Where's the innovation in theological higher education? Where's the innovation in global missions? You could maybe make the argument that there's some innovation in publishing and media for sure, but it's not robust. So part of the aim is to organize the innovation efforts of the wider church.
On the other hand, venture doesn’t need to be esoteric to Silicon Valley. Mission is fundamentally about (ad)venture. It’s always been about risk, courage, and moving into the unknown with the Spirit, and doing so in the context of a purposive band or community of missionaries. From Paul onward, this has been a mark of the Church, and whenever the Spirit moves, we have mission movements. So from that perspective, we have nothing to fear from “venture” language. The only risk is if we assume technological or capitalistic, rather than fundamentally human, methodologies around growth and scale. Discipleship still happens at the speed of relationship.
Entrepreneur is a helpful category, but it needs to be reframed in Biblical categories. There’s a hybrid type of person, between pastor, missionary, creative, and entrepreneur—what Alan Hirsch would call “apostolic,” and they're trying to figure out how to integrate all those impulses, and do something new and meaningful to help people know Jesus, and help the Church be what it’s supposed to be. That’s entrepreneurial, even if it’s not “silicon valley” in its goals. I'm trying to create a category for those people.
CS: That actually leads me to something I was going to ask about: this concept of classism. And I see this in myself, because I am like you in certain ways; that integration of a lot of different impulses and varying skills—how would you invite people who don't normally operate in the New York, California type spaces or mindsets into the work of ventures, startups, and incubators? And do you consider any realities of classism or anything? How do you think about paving the way for people who have a little bit of that impulse but might not have verbiage for it?
TP: Building “startups” definitely speaks to a certain category of person, with a certain access to social capital and networks, and that can be limiting. But ultimately I’m interested in renewing the missional imagination of the whole church, because mission belongs to all of us, not just the elite or the talented.
As a caveat, it does take a lot of resources to move the needle and build new things, and so there definitely is a realism about needing to mobilize capital and resources. There is a disproportionate amount of mission funding resources, for example, coming from big churches and families in like, Texas, Georgia, and Oklahoma. This might be a slight exaggeration but it makes my point. We have to be realistic about resources.
But again—mission belongs to everyone, all mission is ultimately local, and every church has some resources. There are no super Christians. I think that every church everywhere in the world should have a way of discipling and calling out the kingdom dreams that are in people's hearts and activating them. To me, that's the essence of innovation! I think there should be more programs and resources that help congregations call out new dreams, nurture them, and fund them. Every church should have an incubator and a seed fund for new stuff that God is stirring.
CS: You see a lot of people with these dreams on their hearts. They're coming to Missional Labs and they're excited about what God's put on their hearts— what are the hallmarks of calling that you get excited about when you see it in others?
TP: In venture capital, if you want to invest in a startup really early, you have to bet on the idea and the founder, because there isn’t a product yet. So they will look for what's called “founder-problem fit.”
This means, given the founder’s history and their experience and their story and their network and the way that they see the world, are they the right person to tackle this problem? If so, then they will probably figure out the right way into the market and the right team and the right approach and all that stuff.
I think someone’s calling feels kind of like that. It's like when someone tells you their dream, and you feel, “Wow, this is literally the thing that they were put on earth by God to do.” And even though their idea might be new or unproven, when they say it, it just clicks.
Of course, you have to give people time, because they're not going to necessarily know that at 22 years old, you have to let that evolve a bit. But when it clicks for somebody, it's so cool. You get that sense that they have spiritual authority on it; there's a God-given passion and conviction and permission—and so I love helping people find that sense of founder-problem fit, spiritually speaking.
And we often put theological or spiritual language around it such as “Your testimony becomes your authority” or “Your pain becomes your power,” but it typically does come from these things that God lets happen or works through you and then they give you vision and authority to serve that thing for other people. That’s the seed of God activating a new community, movement, or ministry. It’s not just about passion or hype. It’s spiritual substance.
CS: I'm curious what you’re on the lookout for in this environment, where it's not just all charisma in a way that can happen so easily in both business and church environments.
TP: I do think charisma can obscure genuine, substantive anointing. We are on the decline of the celebrity pastor culture in America. If your whole thing is charisma, then there are a lot of platforms that will welcome you just because of that. In the short term, that's exciting and great to build followers, but in the long term it doesn't work—because charisma without substance is anti-authentic. So, you’re never going to build an enduring movement or a ministry that is higher or deeper than your own leadership capacity.
You can run at a substance deficit for a long time, but it always crashes. It's like the law of the lid: Whatever your leadership level is—and I say leadership broadly—whatever your maturity level is, creates the lid and the horizon for whatever you're leading. And so, we don't necessarily need high-charisma people. We need deep, real, mature, solid, stable people. It makes me think of that idea from C. S. Lewis in The Great Divorce: some people were actually so substantive that they could walk on the hard grass in the new creation. The Church needs substantial, weighty people—and we have to unlock the God giving calling in soul of the person, and create pathways for it. That’s missional innovation.
New Releases: Things we’re excited about at Ekstasis
Fragile Objects, Katy Carl's debut collection of short stories, is available for now from Wiseblood Books. This beautiful collection will break, and break open, your heart. We have an essay from Katy featured in Ekstasis Issue 10!
New Finds: Treasures from the ether
The artwork of Michelle J. Chun: “I am interested in the ways information, fragments, and materials exist, accumulate, and circulate within a community. Through my work, I aim to investigate how visual and material circulation creates cultural imaginations, multi-layered narratives, and collective memories that affirm, connect, negate, or condemn individual experiences. Through excavation of familial archive and historical references, my practice is an assemblage of precarious nostalgia, glass prayers, and treasured fragments from the immigrant’s longings for eschatological belonging—a collected longing that feel ineffable but on the tip of our tongues.”
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Conor Sweetman
Editor of Ekstasis
Conor is the founder of Ekstasis and Special Projects Editor at Christianity Today. Him and his wife currently reside in England.
What did you think of this interview? Share your thoughts with a comment!
“So what I'm trying to say is we need a more robustly Christian startup sector, launching new ventures, non-profits, ministries, and collectives aimed at unapologetically reaching modern culture with the Gospel.”
Too good.
Michelle!!! I am your number one fan!!!!