UNCHARTED

These were uncharted waters. We had lots of questions; not many answers. One of my questions was - Is the church starting a business? The short answer is no. The church has a bunch of people passionate to help hurting people. So what happened is that God used the combination of passion for It's Time to OutTHINK and the pain we so easily witness around us to bring a group of people together that most likely never would have done so otherwise. It's just like God - to be right in the middle of our economic mess with His Plan.

Since Jim asked me to lead the review team, I took all the notes from the vision meeting at The Link and combed through them to create a list of all the ideas. I then met with Dan (over the phone) to try and pick around ten ideas that had real promise. We wanted a mix of ideas that might be able to happen relatively quickly and ideas that had the possibility to be big in the future. That's a tough task when you consider we just had words on a piece of paper (unless we heard an explanation in our small groups at the vision meeting). So we prayed that God would bring the right ideas to mind.

We also set an important guideline moving forward: we will never eliminate an idea. It may sit for days, weeks, months, or years, but nothing is off the table for good. We serve a big God, and if he wants us to build a car that runs on garbage - we'll do it!

We had 10-12 ideas to review but still had a little bit of a problem ... review for what? The five guys on the review team can easily evaluate them as a start up business idea, but there's no business plan, very little market research, no capital to invest. Plus we had issues about structure, ownership, profits / non-for-profit ... There were still a lot of questions.

We decided to invite the people that submitted the ideas we selected to an informal 20 minute information-gathering session. We asked them to bring anything or anyone they needed to help communicate the idea. They would pitch the idea, and we would ask questions. Then we'd do the whole thing again with the next idea. So we waded into the uncharted waters. Unsure what would happen. Confident in God's call!