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Last year, Bill Yeager of Montrose, Colorado, pumped $40,000 in personal savings from his successful software company into a radical idea. The son of former missionary parents in Kenya, Yeager began identifying and training more than 1,200 farmers north of Kenya's Lake Victoria to grow USDA-certified organic onions for expanding healthfood markets in Europe and the United States. "It hit me that we could do business as a tool to improve lives in Africa," says Yeager.

With another $70,000 from outside investors, Yeager is completing the expensive USDA training of his first group of farmers, who are members of a local cluster of 35 Kenyan churches. The rich, loamy jungle smells, scenic mountain waterfalls, and lovely lilt of the farmers' Sabaot tribal language sometimes cloak their poverty. But the farmers' incomes could now jump from $500 to $10,000 a year. "I'm just a typical 28-year-old kid," says Yeager. Perhaps, but this entrepreneur is also addicted to a money-and-ministry vision. "It's a risk, but I believe with all of my heart that this thing is going to take off."

The number of BAM practitioners is hard to pinpoint, but the practitioners themselves may be too consumed with spreadsheets to worry about such statistics. "We're not the big thinkers," says Texas-based Johnny Combs, whose successful Paradigm Engineering frees him to assist BAM enterprises globally. "We're doers," he says.

BAMers take historic cues from Joseph in Egypt, the monastic tradition, Moravians, and William Carey—who all mixed businesses with ministry. In recent years, more than 2,000 books and 800 nonprofit organizations have encouraged combining commerce and faith in the workplace. They are piggybacking on a broader trend known as "social entrepreneurship," which advocates using capitalism instead of charity to address social problems like poverty.

In the early 1980s, a group of executives formed Intent, an umbrella organization that had an early role in shaping the BAM movement. Members included Chicago southsider Clem Schultz, who in 1989 bought a controlling interest in AMI, an Asian technology manufacturer. Schultz, now 50, has felt called to Asian missions since he was 19. Today, AMI's annual sales run from $30 to $50 million.

Intent is bullish on the prospects of business as missions. "The day of the Kingdom Professional in world missions has arrived," Intent's literature announces. "The remaining people who have yet to hear the gospel of Jesus Christ will be most appropriately accessed by Kingdom Professionals who intentionally use their God-given and market-honed skills as their legitimate passport to the nations."

Today's growing global economy helps make this vision possible. The '90s "dot-com" bubble produced a massive overinvestment in infrastructure, says New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in his bestseller, The World Is Flat. According to Friedman, this "resulted in the willy-nilly creation of a global undersea-underground fiber network, which in turn drove down the cost of transmitting voices, data, and images to practically zero." Suddenly, "All kinds of work—from accounting to software writing—could be digitized, disaggregated, and shifted to any place in the world." BAMers now tap new markets created by this global network in China, India, Russia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Central Asia.

BAMers target a niche, build a serious business plan, and act. They usually capitalize, not fundraise. They don't always consult clergy members, who can make them feel like unspiritual "cash cows." They don't want to "serve God and mammon," but they also know that money funds outreach (just ask the nonprofit groups who regularly seek their donations). "Christ was a carpenter for probably fifteen years and then an evangelist for about three years," Combs quips. "So we businessmen had him for about five times longer."

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November 2007, Vol. 51, No. 11