Courses
The Centre offers a range of courses on work, business, and leadership in a range of formats from one- to two-day short courses to year-long courses (that involve evening sessions and teaching retreats). Courses on offer include:
- The Good of Work: God’s Purpose and Redemptive Plan for Work
- How to Sabbath Well: Learning God’s Rhythms of Rest
- God’s Purpose for Business: Why it Matters and How to Live it Out
- Leading with Wisdom: Becoming a Wise Leader and Leadership Community
Interested in the Centre for Business and Leadership running a course with your group?
REGISTER YOUR INTEREST HERE >>
Upcoming Course:
God’s Purposes for Business, 13-14 June 2024, Auckland
Too often in the Christian Church the world of business is viewed with suspicion or even contempt. Entrepreneurs and business leaders feel this keenly, and often wonder whether their sole contribution is to generate profits and give a proportion of these to various “gospel” initiatives. But if the life of Jesus Christ and his lordship changes everything, this can’t possibly be true. Business leaders and entrepreneurs are called to make a fuller contribution within God’s purposes for this good world.
In this short course, led and facilitated by Nathan McLellan, you will explore God’s purpose for business: what it is, why it matters, and how to make it your own. Topics covered will include God’s purpose for business and how it relates to the wider human vocation, the relationship of business to other institutions (like family and government), developing a redemptive strategy for your own business, and harnessing various tools and approaches to ensure your business is contributing to God’s work in the world. This short course will involve teaching, facilitated workshops and exercises, and peer learning and discussion.
This course is for business leaders and entrepreneurs who want to deepen their understanding of their role within God’s purposes, and to further unlock their potential for contributing to God’s work in the world.
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Consultations and Workshops
Venn’s Centre for Business and Leadership provides bespoke consulting opportunities for your business or organisation. We’re uniquely placed to bring a theological and biblical lens to strategic and organisation consulting. We have experience working with leadership groups, including boards, executive teams, eldership groups, and pastoral teams. Our consulting work has covered some of the following issues:
- God’s vision and purpose for your business and organisation
- Approaches to wise decision making
- Rhythms and practices that promote fruitfulness and longevity
- The importance of institutional limits and realistic expectations
- Growing in leadership discernment
- Understanding work and vocation
- A Christian perspective on governance
REGISTER YOUR INTEREST HERE >>
Communities of Practice
Communities of practice are small, intentionally formed learning communities that are focused on Christian formation. Members of a Community of Practice are committed to God’s purpose for business in Aotearoa, New Zealand, attending to their own Christian formation as business or organisational leaders, and encouraging and supporting other members of the group. A Community of Practice meets for residential teaching retreats throughout a year and, between these residential retreats, evening or dinner sessions.
REGISTER YOUR INTEREST HERE >>
Governance Development Track
We believe there is a need to build governance capacity for the Christian community in Aotearoa, New Zealand, especially in the Christian not-for-profit sector.
The Centre for Business and Leadership offers governance opportunities in which you will:
- Learn how to support, challenge, question and test an executive as it seeks to fulfil the mission of a Christian organisation
- Learn how the executive develops and then reports against the strategic and annual plans, and how governance holds the executive accountable to the strategic objectives and annual goals of an organisation
- Grow in Christian wisdom and discernment as future board members
- Learn to uphold an organisation and its mission and work in prayer
- Learn some key skills as future board members e.g., how to read financial accounts
REGISTER YOUR INTEREST HERE >>