I’m increasingly convinced that most Gospel-motivated ventures should probably be nonprofits.

That may sound strangely unambitious - for a lot of entrepreneurial leaders, the word nonprofit still carries the wrong associations: bureaucracy, grant dependency, cautious boards, bloated staff, slow decision-making, and organizations that seem designed more to preserve themselves than to pursue a mission.

If you want to build something innovative, technologically sophisticated, and economically durable, the instinct is often to start a company.

If you want to build something missional, organic, decentralized, and movemental, the instinct is often to start a community or network, and avoid necessary structure altogether.

I think these are category errors. Nonprofit is not an operating model. It is an ownership structure.

There is nothing inherent to nonprofit structure that requires an organization to be slow, boring, technologically behind, or economically fragile. A nonprofit can build excellent products, generate substantial revenue, hire world-class talent, operate globally, accumulate reserves, move quickly, multiply impact and generate leaders, and grow aggressively.

The more important diagnostic question is: who should ultimately own the value you create?

For almost any ministry or Gospel venture to be worthy of the name, I think the answer should be the mission itself.

Nonprofits are more radical than we think

The first reason is simple: the mission owns the value.

A company ultimately belongs to its owners. If it succeeds, the financial and enterprise value it creates can eventually be distributed to founders, shareholders, or investors.

A nonprofit has no owners.

When it builds technology, intellectual property, revenue streams, relationships, reputation, institutional knowledge, or financial assets, that accumulated value remains committed to the mission.

That matters especially in ministry, where value is often created through the generosity of many people: donors, volunteers, churches, founders, advisors, ministry partners, and communities that lend their trust.

The nonprofit structure makes a remarkable claim: if the mission creates the value, the mission should keep the value.

Second, nonprofits can pursue forms of value that markets cannot easily price.

A person coming to faith. A teenager encountering Scripture. A church being renewed. A missionary reaching an underserved community. A lonely person finding Christian community. A disciple becoming mature in Christ.

These outcomes can be enormously valuable without being easily monetizable.

In many cases, the person receiving the value cannot or should not be expected to pay the full cost of producing it.

That is precisely why philanthropy exists.

A nonprofit can organize resources around outcomes that matter deeply even when there is no clean commercial transaction attached to them. It gives the organization freedom to optimize for mission rather than simply for what a customer will pay for.

Third, nonprofits can build a richer capital stack than we often imagine.

Too many leaders hear nonprofit and think donations.

But a healthy nonprofit can combine philanthropy, earned revenue, partnerships, volunteers, donated expertise, technology, and relational capital.

Philanthropy can fund experimentation, subsidize access, and underwrite work where there is no natural customer. Earned revenue can create operating resilience. Strategic partners can expand distribution. Technology can radically increase leverage.

Nonprofit does not mean an absence of a business model.

It means the economic model is ultimately subordinate to the mission.

Building future-ready nonprofits

None of this is an argument for building more organizations that look like yesterday’s nonprofits.

The world does not need more nonprofit bureaucracy. It needs a new generation of future-ready nonprofits.

These organizations should be entrepreneurial. They should be founder-led, high-agency, close to the problem, and willing to experiment. They should test assumptions quickly, listen carefully to the people they serve, change course when something is not working, and refuse to allow a noble mission to become an excuse for mediocre execution.

They should be economically durable. Every nonprofit needs to understand its economic engine. Who pays? Why do they pay? What should philanthropy uniquely fund? Where can revenue increase sustainability? How does the organization become less fragile over time?

They should be technologically leveraged. Software, AI, digital media, automation, and global distribution have radically changed what a small team can accomplish. The future nonprofit should be lighter, faster, and more capable than the institutions of the previous generation.

And they should fundamentally remain mission governed. Growth is not the mission. Revenue is not the mission. Organizational survival is not the mission.

The structure matters because it allows the organization to build significant economic and institutional power without allowing that power to become the ultimate purpose of the organization.

These are the organizations I am most interested in.

A word to builders

If you are building a Gospel-motivated venture and are on the fence between a company and a nonprofit, do not choose your structure based on stereotypes. Choose based on what you are trying to optimize.

If your primary aim is to create private economic value, build a company. There is nothing wrong with that. There are many positive social externalities from building a company. But the point is to create economic value.

But if your primary aim is to create Gospel outcomes, serve people regardless of their ability to pay, and build an organization whose accumulated value remains permanently committed to that mission, you should be a nonprofit.

The ministries and movements of tomorrow will need builders with enormous ambition. They will need excellent products, powerful technology, disciplined economics, creative capital models, global networks, and leaders willing to move quickly into new mission fields.

I believe many of the most entrepreneurial Gospel ventures of the next generation should be and will be nonprofits, and we need to develop the developmental pathways to support them.