Everyone in the stands that day nearly a century ago thought they knew exactly how the game should be played. Tens of thousands watched—sometimes cheering, oft times criticizing—the team of exhausted players on the field.

And then it happened. When the first forward pass went up, so did the cry: "Hey, you can't do that—that is not how it is done!" But the game of football was changed forever.

Great Commission Companies is about a handful of 21st century men and women who believe something revolutionary ought to be done to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of missions—and have set out resolutely to prove that it can be done. They may change missions forever.

The concept of business missions, once commonly thought to be an oxymoron, is growing into its own. Businesspeople around the world are eager to add eternal significance to their temporal success. Mission agencies and evangelical churches are beginning to take their approach seriously. Business and trade opens doors to relationships that may be closed to traditional missionaries. Moreover, the authentic witness of lay professionals often has more credibility for host-country contacts in the marketplace than that of traditional missionaries.

The authors believe that globalization may have the same gospel-disseminating effect in the beginning of the third millennium that persecution had in the first millennium, and that exploration and colonization had in the second. They argue persuasively that powerful forces of worldwide material and financial interdependence—commonly called globalization—have created unprecedented opportunities for taking the message of the Cross to all nations, tribes, and tongues.

Business corporations directed, led, and staffed by Christians with ...