A Tex-Mex restaurant in Romania, a medical supply company in a Muslim country, and an Indian outsourcing firm are just some of the ways in which Christians are ministering through business. Besides doing away with the need to raise support through donations, Christian businesses are able to meet needs and go places that traditional missionaries can't.

The New York Times this week covered a new trend in missions: kingdom business. Christians have been publishing on the phenomenon for a few years now, and the movement seems to be growing.

"One businessman from California, Jeri Little, visited Romania in 1988 on a church trip and was moved by the desperate conditions there," The Times reports. "But Mr. Little, a financial planner who now lives in Romania, wanted to do something beyond a quick fix. 'I realized that we needed to not just send them money and create another banana republic dependent on our aid,' he said. 'We needed people to create business.'"

So Little opened up a Tex-Mex restaurant, capitalizing on the then-popular American television show Dallas. "Some of the restaurant's profit this year will be put back into expanding the business, but the rest will go to local aid and ministry projects, Mr. Little said. These [projects] have included opening a kindergarten and day-care center in one of Iasi's poorest neighborhoods."

"The real power of the movement is that it's not donor-funded, it's basically globally funded," one Christian business owner told the Times. "There's no restraint in the capacity of this system, because you avert the donor and plug into globalization."

"The future generation of missionary will be the rank-and-file businessman," Steve Rundle, coauthor of Great Commission Companies, told the Times. "The ...