Introduction

While we tend to think of entrepreneurs only as individuals or groups who create “firms”—that is, organizations whose primary goal is to create wealth—social scientists who study organizational emergence and entrepreneurship have been using the word “entrepreneur” to describe a broad range of organizational founders, from those starting schools and hospitals to those founding savings and loan associations and art museums. But consistently these scholars leave churches out of their examinations of entrepreneurial orientations and actions. This book is an attempt to disrupt this impulse by shining a light on a unique, but not insubstantial, set of organizational founders: individuals who start new churches. This chapter introduces three questions: (1) Are church founders “entrepreneurs”? (2) What motivates religion entrepreneurship in a crowded and competitive field trying to appeal to an increasingly anti-institutional-religion customer base? (3) What factors reduce these entrepreneurs’ uncertainty and fear of failure?