What’s it all about?

When it comes to business and not-for-profit organisations, we believe business owners and organisational leaders play a key role in contributing to God’s work in the world. Venn’s Centre for Business and Leadership seeks to help, encourage, and challenge leaders to fulfil their God-given vocations through our bespoke learning contexts, resources, and theological and strategic consulting.

Who is it for?

Venn’s Centre for Business and Leadership comes alongside established business and not-for-profit leaders who want to deepen their understanding of God’s purposes for their business or organisation. We help them to learn thoughtful and practical ways to develop their businesses and organisations in a complex and changing world.

The Centre for Business and Leadership will help you address questions such as:

• What is God’s purpose for business?
• What heuristics and tools can help us fulfil God’s purposes within our business or organisation?
• How can the kingdom of God shape our business or organisation?
• How do I grow as a wise leader?
• How can I make sound judgements and wise decisions within my business or organisation?

By connecting with the Centre for Business and Leadership you will grow in your understanding of God’s purposes in the world and become part of a network of like-minded individuals who are willing to share ideas and provide encouragement and support.

Courses

The Centre offers a range of courses on work, business, and leadership in a range of formats from one or 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 & Leadership running a course with your group?

REGISTER YOUR INTEREST HERE >>

Consultations and Workshops

Venn’s Centre for Business & 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 & 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 >>

Resources

Venn seeks to provide fresh, constructive, and insightful resources that help you to pursue God’s purpose for your life and the business or organisation that you lead.

For business owners and organisational leaders we particularly recommend The Good of Work and How to Sabbath Well.

VISIT OUR STORE >>

In addition, we also encourage you to sign up to our quarterly digital magazine, Common Ground, which offers material to feed your imagination for how you might serve God and those around you.

SIGN UP TO COMMON GROUND >>

Venn’s Centre for Business & Leadership plans to produce more digital and print resources in the coming years focussing on God’s purpose for business, a theology of leadership, and wise decision making.

What are people saying?

“The impact of the Venn’s work on our personal lives and businesses – through their consulting engagements, retreats, conferences, vocational programmes, and publications – has been transformational. It has reshaped, almost in its entirety, the way we understand the world, engage with the world, and seek to participate in God’s redemptive purposes for it. We have come to understand our faith, our personal vocations, and our businesses in a much more integrated way.

We now find that our Christian faith and the Gospel have genuine answers to questions such as; how do we be a good employer, what is our responsibility in caring of our environment, what is our role in the redemption of our industry, how do we steward finances and wealth, what do we understand wise Governance to be, and how do we go about seeking the common good through our products and services. We feel not only more equipped to ask the right questions of the Lord, but also an ability to seek His wisdom in all we do. “

Israel Cooper, Home Construction