Scout Brobst , July 30, 2024

Venture Missionaries

Missional Labs wants to treat the church like a startup The Baffler/Emojipedia

Like most founders, Brian Chesky is a true believer. In 2011, the company he cofounded, Airbnb, was riding high on $7.2 million in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners. The company enjoyed this influx of cash for less than a year before they were put on the back foot. A Berlin-based clone called Wimdu providing Airbnb-esque homestays in Europe was on the rise, thanks to infamous billionaire cloners, the Samwer brothers. Chesky flew to Germany to hash things out with them. After arriving at their makeshift office space, he saw two monitors on each desk: Airbnb’s website was open on the left, and Wimdu’s on the right. Shameless! The brothers gave Chesky an ultimatum: you are the innovators, but we are the executors. Buy us, or else. For a moment, he considered it. Then he thought about the bigger picture: “This is war, and in a war between missionaries and mercenaries, the missionaries always win.”

Chesky told this story to Roelof Botha, the managing director-cum-steward of Sequoia Capital, on the venture capital firm’s podcast, Crucible Moments. On the show, Botha gives his entrepreneur guests permission to be prophets for an hour, speaking about a time in which their decision-making became divine, allowing them to transcend the role of chief executive and achieve something a bit more heaven-sent. Botha is a true believer too. He met Chesky and his cofounders in 2009, back when Airbnb was still calling itself Air Bed & Breakfast. At that point, it was more idea than business, but a good idea, one worth investing just shy of $600,000 in at the seed stage. A decade later, post-IPO, the returns on Sequoia’s initial investment were cartoonish. Tech entrepreneurs and VCs alike have faith in their own genius—a faith affirmed by the fact that they’ve been able to remake sectors of the economy in their own image. 

According to some consumer investors, it is possible for tech to go deeper than providing services of convenience and journey all the way to the center of private life: shaping the ways in which we construct meaning and order our values, a place where major religions still play a dominant role. In 2021, the firm Andreessen Horowitz led $40 million in Series A funding for Glorify, a subscription-based app for Christians that encourages daily worship. General Partner Connie Chan told media that she had been monitoring the sector for years, pointing out that YouVersion, an online Bible, could have been a unicorn several times over if it weren’t a nonprofit. She argued that businesses tied to the “core part” of an identity are where people spend the most time, and therefore are more likely to retain customers and deliver higher returns. 

Glorify might fall into what the organization Missional Labs calls “missional ventures,” or entrepreneurial projects that use modern tools to shape a more promising future for the church. Founded by pastor Tyler Prieb in late 2020, Missional Labs does not invest like a VC firm but rather provides strategic guidance and mentorship to pre-seed stage ventures that propose to do something about the great decline of organized religion, particularly in the United States. It is an accelerator that is “adjacent, but distinct, from the broader world of social innovation, kingdom business, or faith-driven entrepreneurship.” That “broader world” includes Kingdom Dreams Initiative, which takes startups through a four-step launch sequence that will “excavatethe dream already in the heart of every believer,” and Praxis Labs, which provided funding to Missional Labs in 2023 and seeks “entrepreneurs and builders who follow an alternative script of purpose, success, and human flourishing.” Praxis has built a broad portfolio that includes an unaccredited college, a modest swimwear brand, and a screen time reduction app for “intentional families.” 

Americans have been divesting from religious convention since the beginning of the century, a trend that is most undeniable among Christian denominations. An increasing number of people report no religious affiliation at all, and fewer claim to be members of houses of worship (down some forty million in the last twenty-five years), many of which have been forced by dwindling ranks to close. The most religious among us are growing old. The youngest distrust major institutions. Others simply lapse into idleness. There is no single reckoning that explains this decline, just a struggle to maintain religious behavior against the competing demands of life. 

For Missional Labs, this uninspired religious landscape is a task to be taken up by a few creative “pioneers” who can preserve tradition by saving it from itself. In his newsletter, Prieb references the world-building venture ecosystems that have sprouted up across secular capital as proof of concept: a16z launched TxO (Talent x Opportunity) in 2020 to address the lack of support given to “dope” entrepreneurs who can create “cultural breakthroughs”; BMW’s MINI began URBAN-X to nurture startups that “reimagine city life,” working with founders to scale their climate-tech solutions in a short immersive program. If such campaigns can shift the infrastructure of public life to become more equitable, more accessible, or more resilient, he reasons, then with a different set of priorities, we could shift religion back to the center of our lives.

There are four themes that Missional Labs identifies as “critical for addressing the gaps and opportunities” in mission, aspects of the church that have failed to engage with the modern world and, as a result, are losing resonance with have-been or would-be Christians. These areas are “Evangelization and Witness” (drawing outsiders in), “Making Disciples” (keeping insiders faithful), “Renewing the Local Church” (creating new and better congregations), and “Advancing Global Mission” (broadening the reach of Christianity beyond the West). Each is implied to be experiencing a crisis of unimaginative thinking.

Wedged in between innocuous ideas for community-building projects in urban hubs and discipleship programs for internet-age women are more ambitious ventures supported by Missional Labs, ones that “embrace disorientation” like the organization encourages. There is a futurist—someone investors might refer to as a thought leader—who is building a “lighthouse beaming the grace of Christ into the chaos of the metaversal sea,” setting up Christians to evangelize in new digital realities. There is also a platform where specific questions about scripture can be fed into algorithms, which then provide instruction on how a believer is meant to think about the world. Is capitalism compatible with Christian teachings? Yes, as long as it is practiced with the understanding that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. 1 Timothy 6:10. Ecclesiastes 5:13. 

Where an investment thesis might be, Missional Labs has a statement of belief instead. The organization is guided by “historic Christianity,” as described in John Stott’s Lausanne Covenant, one of the formative documents of modern evangelicalism. In 1974, Billy Graham, disturbed by “lifeless religion” and siloes of belief and behavior in the global church, gathered the First International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland. The ten days of dialogue among Christian leaders that followed produced the first edition of the Covenant, which outlined what it means to be an evangelical: to believe in the one-eternal God and commit to the extension of his kingdom, with scripture as an infallible guide. The group urged integral mission, or service and gospeling as enmeshed goals. The genius of the document, according to itself, was its focus on mainstream concerns—how to spread the good word and get along with others—without getting distracted by controversial secondary issues in the culture. 

This big tent guidance permits Missional Labs to support all sorts of projects that claim to take the gospel to the whole world, among them a “safe space” that balances conviction and compassion for those who identify as both Christian and queer, and a boutique matchmaking company that funnels Christians through a rigorous application process until only the elite remain, taking notes from apps like Raya and The League. Both, apparently, managed to convince the organization that their “kingdom vision” can scale. 

Whether the pursuit of innovation is biblical in and of itself, and Prieb and other religious leaders have agreed that it isn’t, the ulterior motive of venture accelerators—to move fast and break things—leaves little room for ethical babysitting. To insulate their dealings from accusations of theological misalignment between success and the sacred, Missional Labs and organizations like it have embraced the term redemption, meaning the righting of a wrong through sacrifice, as in atonement. No one involved might claim the connection, but there is great fraternity to be found in the philosophies of Silicon Valley’s secular proselytizers and its mission-driven ones. “[Our founders] try to defy the odds,” Sequoia Capital’s Botha told the Stanford Graduate School of Business last year. “They do not accept the world as it is; they seek to remake it as it should be.” According to a16z’s Marc Andreessen, technology provides an indispensable “lever on the world,” one that will enable our descendants to “live in the stars.” 

Such statements could come just as easily from the mouths of religious founders and investors. But in theory, the two sets of believers embrace a pair of contradictory benchmarks: the spoils of the innovation economy, and the virtues of the gospel. The latter comes with a call for moral clarity and a mandate to be humble and emptied of glory. No matter how sincerely held, such principles are rendered null by the blunt force of the demand for shareholder returns. The question for a faith-based accelerator, then, becomes something different: Which Christian future might generate the highest profit? Would it be prudent to align with the majority, who reject outright or are skeptical of Christian nationalism? Or the small number with deep pockets who would like to see a secular government replaced with Old Testament law? The world may be transformed by these ventures, but redemption has little to do with it.