EVENT OVERVIEW
Welcome! We’re excited to get to know you more as we walk together through the Labs event.
Below you will find helpful information about the Labs experience and how best to prepare to ensure you get the most out of our time together.
WHY WE’RE HERE
Before we dive into the specifics of the Labs Event, it’s important to understand where you fit within the Praxis story. We are twelve years into our own startup journey and are very intentionally building a community toward the shared pursuit of Redemptive Entrepreneurship.
We strongly believe that there is a way of starting and growing ventures that is largely under-practiced, undefined, and full of promise. In our conversations, most Christian founders and funders have a hunch that they are called to a more comprehensively faithful and sustainable approach to their work of venture building and impact creation. But the aims and practices of such an approach are unclear—mostly because they just haven’t seen it practiced. We believe the Praxis community can and will create a line of sight to just such a way of leading and building—which we call redemptive entrepreneurship. We’ve invited you into the Labs program because we believe you show considerable redemptive promise, and that you’ve demonstrated an openness and eagerness to operate more fully through a redemptive lens as you look to support other ventures in doing the same.
When we call something redemptive, it means someone is giving or sacrificing to restore something or someone to its proper place. Redemptive Labs (read: YOU) are those who, being deeply spiritually formed, generously surrender their personal and organizational power for the sake of others. A redemptive enterprise “spends itself” on behalf of the world more than on its own behalf. Organized to “bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives, and release from darkness for the prisoners” (Isaiah 61), the redemptive enterprise seeks to embody these truths to its customers, workforce, and partners. The founders, and ideally many of the funders, are led by the Spirit to create sustainable value while leaving opportunity for others (gleaning), and to operate regularly with grace and forgiveness.
Our time together will be built upon deepening your imagination and accelerating your practice of redemptive entrepreneurship in the dimensions of strategy (what you build), operations (how you build), and leadership (why you build). No truly redemptive team can ignore any of these, as they all must work together for redemptive purposes.
— The Praxis Team
PROGRAM OVERVIEW
We start by taking you through a Redemptive Lab, hosted by the Praxis team. You’ll go through with a dynamic set of peers who represent other cities (community, organization or region) being licensed to run Redemptive Frame events. As we go through the experience, we’ll also pull back the curtain to show you how you’ll run them in your community. The gathering will be fast-paced and fully-scheduled. You will leave with fresh ideas, practical templates/tools, new relationships and critical feedback from your peers and program team. We will give you time at the end to synthesize and create action items.
Day 1: Arrivals, Dinner, and Personal Story Sharing
Day 2: Praxis Activate (Vision Presentations During Breakout Sessions) and Labs Dinner
Day 3: Redemptive Labs Workshop, Reflection & Synthesis, Next Step Planning, and Departures.
EXPECTATIONS
PRESENCE:
We have so much to cover in our days together, and we want to make sure you get the most out of your time in the program.
It will be important for you to block your calendar in a way that allows your team and family to know that you will be unavailable while you are away. Programming is scheduled from early morning until the evening, and it will be frustrating to you and to those depending on you if you think you can respond to emails in between sessions. You will have just enough time to make a quick morning or evening phone call home each day, but that’s about it!
We host a tech-free environment during the program so that you can be fully present with each other and the content. We will provide workbooks for each gathering and you can certainly bring your own notebook/journal of choice. Computers, tablets and phones are to stay in your room, except for Day 3 in the afternoon when we’ll introduce you to your digital toolkit. We consider it a gift to retreat from our devices as we engage in deeper thought, conversation and fellowship with one another - we hope you will, too!
PARTICIPATION:
The quality of the peer cohort and mentor experience is dependent on the level of participation. We’ve got a short amount of time in-person to build relationships that we hope are the start of long-term friendship. With your peer cohort, we will have a few intentional times of group sharing and reflection, and have found that this format is key to building your shared experience. We encourage you to be an active contributor in both sharing and active listening.
CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE:
Submitting ourselves to honest humility and self-awareness will allow all members of the community to flourish.
Honest optimism > Glossy Pitch. The old adage applies strongly to our mentors who may have the ability to give: “ask for money and you’ll get advice, ask for advice and you may get money.” Our mentors expect to help with your biggest challenges, not get pitched, and they understand not everything is working perfectly.
Consider your cohort. There’s an intentionally humble way amongst our community and you don’t want to stand out for the wrong reasons. If you’re long winded, be concise to create space for others. If you’re typically first to speak, try to pause and listen first some times. If you’re ‘in the majority’ in some way, create space for the voice of others.
Value diversity. Don’t assume everyone’s theology, socioeconomic, social or other background is the same - in fact, assume that it’s not! Our central hallway is belief-in and pursuit-of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and beyond that, we are hopeful to widely represent the body of Christ and learn from each other in humility.
Act virtuously. We believe our community’s collective witness is best understood by our way of life, not merely the work we do. We hope that our events and program are a clear representation of a group of people that embody the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love and the cardinal virtues of wisdom, moderation, courage, and justice. This applies to everything as lofty as the courage to have an abundance mentality with donors and connections to hyper-practical decisions such as moderation of alcohol consumption at a Praxis event.