10/7/26 - 2168: This November, One Message Could Change Your Work
Jim: This is iWork4Him ...
Martha: where faith meets work, and believers unleash their calling
Jim: Is God pro-business? Did God create business? Is running a business a kingdom idea? Can business be used to be a blessing to others all over the world? Using business to bring flourishing to communities is a kingdom idea. Creating opportunities and jobs creates relationships and many opportunities to live out the gospel in a business context, and sharing life with those we work with.
Jim: When jobs are provided and relationships are given a chance to grow, the opportunity to share the gospel multiplies. When the kingdom is brought alive on the earth through a business venture, everyone around the business benefits, whether they believe in Jesus yet or not.
Jim: Being in business is being on a mission from God, a mission to be a blessing to yourself, your family, your employees, your vendors, and your customers, and finally, your community. Being in business is being on mission. Steve Adams joins us today to talk about his organization, IBAM, International Business As Mission, and about the upcoming summit that starts on November 16th and goes on till November 20th with dozens of incredible speakers and contributors that are all attending virtually.
Jim: When you attend this summit virtually, you'll be blessed, and so will business people around the world who are on a mission from God and are doing business as mission. Steve Adams, year two. Welcome back to iWork4Him.
Steve Adams: Thank you, Jim and Martha. I'm thankful to be on. Appreciate it.
Jim: Steve, last year you hosted the Kingdom Impact Summit 2025. You had 37 speakers, 6,000 attendees. What are you expecting this year?
Steve Adams: We, we're not gonna do quite as many speakers so it doesn't kill me having to do all the interviews. But we also found the sweet spot was right around 25, 27 speakers. Our goal is to have 25,000 this year. And, but God can do more.
Steve Adams: And it's for His glory. It's not about elevating me or IBAM even. It's about the impact. Because, what I'm really hoping is one speaker will say one thing and it'll put, turn somebody on fire for the Lord in their context, whether it's in their job or in a company they're running.
Martha: So let's step back a little bit. How did you become passionate about business?
Steve Adams: That's a... Ooh, that's a big question and a good one. I grew up in a auto worker family in Michigan, which is, that's what you do in Michigan. You build cars. And my dad -I, I wrote a book back 13 years ago called The Passionate Entrepreneur, and there was a moment, I remember, I was only seven years old, but I remember my dad putting a yellow license plate on the back of his pickup truck.
Steve Adams: And in Michigan, our plates are always blue, always. It's the Great Lakes State. But 1970 they were yellow, and I was six years old. Six years old, not seven. And my dad looked at me, I don't know why, and he said, "Son, you're not gonna work at that GD shop." He wasn't a believer yet, so he had a salty mouth. "You're gonna make money with your brain, not your back."
Steve Adams: I never forgot that, and so I went off to business school. I had a football scholarship to play football and I got a marketing degree with an accounting minor, and went into corporate banking at a bank in Detroit. And that's how I first got interested in business. And then I had an, a really interesting event. When I was in my late 20s I was sick for a year, and really thought I was dying.
Steve Adams: And the Lord miraculously healed me, and I made a promise to Him in that year. And about a year later I closed the largest deal of my career at that point, and God called me to business. He basic- when I was driving home, it was one of those senses of knowing of just, "I want you to quit this, and I want you to be an entrepreneur."
Jim: I was gonna say, we just got a call from one of our listeners, and we're like, "Really?" E- everybody's watching out here on YouTube goes, "He got a football scholarship? The guy looks like the wind could blow him over." What position were you playing?
Steve Adams: I was built like this as a senior, so I played Division II, and I was 170 pounds. I was going, I went as a wide receiver. I'm six foot three, and I'm one of those rare fast and can-jump white guys.
Jim: Got it.
Steve Adams: Now, I'm not anymore. I'm 62 years old. But then they moved me to safety the first day, and I gained about 40 pounds over the next 18 months. And so I was a big boy.
Jim: Okay, just checking. Thanks, caller, for that, for that question.
Steve Adams: Yeah, I'm not very big anymore. No, I'm 170 pounds again.
Jim: All right. So IBAM is an organization that the Lord had you create, found, a few years back. How in the last year, talk about how God has used IBAM to help grow business all over the world.
Steve Adams: Our model is we empower indigenous believers who are embedded into disciple-making movements. That's our vision. We're there to empower, not to control. And so we, what we do is we we find partners all over the world, partners like Crown Ministries, Awana, and then we work with a indigenous church planning network in Central Asia, and then another one in Indonesia. And these partners of ours bring candidates to us and have them go through a training process that we call Biz Tools, and it's some- it's proprietary software we've built over the last decade.
Steve Adams: And we train our partners to be master trainers so that they can run the program, run their own loan committee, run their own little local bank in their own community. And when we shifted away from sending a bunch of Americans on airplanes to our partners doing the work, the repayment rate, or the success rate went from around 50% to 90%.
Jim: Wait a minute. Yeah. Stop that. Say that again. Yeah. That's incredible.
Steve Adams: Yeah, we - so the success rate, meaning they pay the loan back, and they're thriving in the business, went from about 50, 60% to 90%. And we're early. It might be in the 80 to 90%, but I'll give you a story to kinda illustrate this.
Steve Adams: There's a young lady. Her initial, her, I can't say her name, 'cause she- ... her and her husband have been persecuted in Central Asia so deeply that they had to relocate to another country.
Martha: Wow.
Steve Adams: But she had an idea at her dinner table, talking to her mom about three years ago, to have a floral and gift business, and we teach them to be in niches with our marketing training. And so her idea was, "I'm gonna help professionals in this Central Asian city," which is a big one, buy gifts for their most important people in their lives, and I'm gonna make it easy for them, 'cause they're busy and they forget."
Steve Adams: So she built it all online. Three years later, so she paid her loan off in a year, and she's in six, five Central Asian capitals, and she's employing people who are called to missions to go to that, that city and start churches. And so her business has got six employees around Central Asia launching churches.
Jim: Wow. There, that's cool.
Steve Adams: That's kinda what we do. That's a story that just tells you what we do.
Martha: That's so good. Okay, so for those that may not understand, what does IBAM stand for?
Steve Adams: International Business As Mission. Yep, and and the whole focus is we wanna come alongside disciple-making movements and help accelerate them, 'cause one of the biggest challenges, we work primarily in Muslim background believer areas. But also it's true in Latin America and Africa, in these movements of growing churches, people who are stuck in survival mode- poverty or oppression, persecution it really challenges the ongoing strength of these movements. And so we come in and solve that problem for the movement, and it helps strengthen the church.
Martha: Which is so amazing, and I think that, probably a lotta listeners are just trying to wrap their head around that, because it's not, it's way more than just helping somebody have a successful business. It, it's so much more than that. But I wanna hear from you, do you really believe that business is a mission from God?
Steve Adams: I do. I believe that and we teach this in our training, that you're called to it. God has a calling on people's lives to go into business because it's not an easy life. People like to romanticize entrepreneurship in some magazines. And Os Hillman talks about the Joseph calling. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs, maybe perhaps all of them, have a Joseph calling because you end up going through a lot of adversity and God forges your character and prepares you to be, so he can use you to be a provider for people spiritually and physically.
Steve Adams: And so yes, I believe it is a calling because the pressure of business disciples me every day, and it gives me an opportunity to be, to demonstrate the gospel in my life.
Jim: And drives you to your knees, doesn't it? It drives you to your knees, Steve.
Steve Adams: It does. Yeah, it- and you earn the right to proclaim the gospel by demonstrating it first in business. So I think it's an amazing mission field.
Martha: Awesome. As we discuss how business is mission, it's crazy how 13 years ago God told us to use our business skills to help others understand the mission field that he had called them on, and asked us to create iWork4Him, and to make it a nonprofit.
Jim: Which really hurts as an entrepreneur.
Martha: So as entrepreneurs, we weren't crazy about the idea of running a nonprofit, but we've been obedient to the call. And your timely support to iWork4Him can make the difference in someone's life. When a listener learns that their work matters to God, and then they get paid to be on mission at work, it all changes. You can become a partner and watch the movement of God in the workplace by going to iwork4him.com/donate.
Jim: Steve, in six weeks, on November 16th, you're launching summit number two. All the details online. We'll have the link in the show notes, but you can find out everything at ibam.org, and then there's be a summit link out there.
Jim: Your hope for this year, when it comes to the end on November 20th, and you've interviewed all those people, and it's all released, and thousands of people have watched, what's your hope from November 20th of 2026 to November of 2027? What's your hope that God can do with this?
Steve Adams: First and foremost, my hope is that all 20, 30, 50, however many thousand people that sign up watch at least one video, and God has the message for them that they need to hear, and that it basically catalyzes every year another group of people who are either in jobs and they're trying to understand their purpose, or they have companies and they're trying to reframe their whole reason for getting up on Monday morning around the gospel and around honoring God.
Steve Adams: That's what my hope is, first and foremost. Obviously, it helps IBAM build a great big list of people who we can communicate with throughout the year. And we have a new thing this year that we're gonna make available to everybody called Third Fish Academy. So we took our international curriculum and we westernized it for the US audience, and it's called Third Fish, I think it's thirdfish.or- org.
Steve Adams: I should know that. It's so new. But we're making it available free. It's our entire curriculum and the way Jeff, the guy on our team that built it, with a team, by the end you can have a fundable business plan. And we're making it available absolutely free to churches and individuals worldwide.
Jim: So when you say fundable business plan, you mean a business plan that's written that they can then apply to get a microenterprise loan in their part of the world.
Steve Adams: Yep, and we we had our first person graduate on that just recently. We just launched it not too long ago. We have, I don't know, 100 and some users in there right now.
Martha: Awesome.
Steve Adams: And she's from South America. We didn't even know, we didn't know who she was. She's gone through the whole thing, and she's so excited. She's gonna now go to people to help fund it for her.
Jim: And are you working with other organizations that give microenterprise loans, or is IBAM doing that? Are you working with banks locally? How are they gonna get a microenterprise loan?
Steve Adams: Yeah, so that is, we don't have that figured out yet. So our international program is what we work on funding. So our whole model there is we raise money in the US, and then we grant it, meaning we don't want any of it back. We grant it to our partner. They establish a bank account. That's their bank. We teach them how to run their bank, run loan committee, do all of that, and fund those loans. On the domestic side, what we've decided to date is we don't have the bandwidth to train people in the whole process, so we're saying individuals go through the process and then seek out resources locally.
Martha: Sure.
Jim: Got it.
Steve Adams: Now, a good example might be HOPE International. I'm friends with Peter Greer, the CEO of that. They could certainly go on a website like that and seek funding.
Martha: So that's something you're really gonna be launching at the summit and getting excited about. So this year you've got a fresh batch of speakers from all over the world. What are some of the topics, just to kinda, whet the appetite of our listeners. What kind of topics are they gonna hear from?
Steve Adams: So for everybody, what we're gonna talk about is things like multiplying, how people are multiplying themselves and new believers in the business setting, whether through a job or through leading in a company, stories of faith, examples how people have overcome adversity in their business and how God has formed and shaped their lives. One of the themes this year that we're talking about also is just what does the kingdom of heaven look like in your business?
Jim: And you got some big name speakers. Who are some of those speakers this year?
Steve Adams: We do. Yeah. Robin John, he's the founding member of Eventide, which is a basically what he's done is created something called Kingdom Advisors. So there's 3,500 of them across the US. They're financial, they're wealth advisors who are trained and certified in helping believers invest their money in a way that doesn't help perpetuate things that are sinful that they wouldn't wanna be in, okay?
Steve Adams: And he wrote a book called Impactful Investing, I believe.
Jim: Okay.
Steve Adams: So Peter Greer from HOPE International is gonna be on. Casey Crawford, CEO of Movement Day International. Os Hillman, and I know that you guys have been impacted by Os.
Jim: Big fan of Os, you bet.
Steve Adams: Yeah. Mark Batterson, National Community Church in Washington, DC. He's written 25 best-selling books. Chuck Bentley, who's the CEO of Crown Ministries. And even we have an NFL quarterback, Kirk Cousins, who's gonna be the quarterback of the Las Vegas Raiders this year.
Jim: Nice.
Steve Adams: He's got a great faith story. And then Jim and Martha Brangenberg are speakers.
Jim: Wow. And we had so much fun getting that all set up with you. We can't wait for people to hear the conversation.
Steve Adams: I know. Really good, good stuff. And that's the thing, Martha, to answer your question even more, these interviews are just amazing conversations that go in directions I can't anticipate. The Spirit just takes them, and I've been enriched last year and this year so far, and I know our listeners will, too.
Martha: So you are IBAM, which is international, and you are looking for this to be a global summit. How many countries attended last year, and what do you anticipate? I know that's such a hard thing to even figure out.
Steve Adams: Yeah.
Martha: But what are you anticipating?
Steve Adams: I don't know. I think we had a few countries last year, because we don't really know how to promote globally yet. We need to extend our network with some international partners. So that's an area of improvement for us. But it's really more about, we're trying to extend the global reach of IBAM.
Martha: Yeah.
Steve Adams: And our strength is here from a support standpoint. Just this year we added two new partners now that - When we are able to, with our existing six partners, are in 100 nations.
Jim: Wow. Very cool.
Steve Adams: I know. So we're, and we're just scratching the surface. So over the next decade we hope to, IBAM will be in 100 nations in a decade.
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Jim: Steve, when you get up in the morning and start working on teaching business owners and leaders about their business, about being on a mission assignment from God, what's your inspiration?
Steve Adams: God himself, Missio Dei. He's the sending God. God is mission. And like Henry Blackaby taught us all, and that, and, we talked about that earlier, experiencing God. Like we're, I know that I am called to this. I know my purpose, and that is to really form and develop missional companies around the world that bless people, communities, and the nations.
Steve Adams: And so it's not hard for me to wake up in the morning. That's my inspiration. It's just, it's just my - it really flows out of my daily walk of being a disciple of Jesus.
Jim: You've got some amazing testimonials on the website. I recommend everybody go out to ibam.org and read those testimonials of business owners from around the globe that have already been blessed by IBAM. It's exciting. I'm super glad that you're getting to do this.
Martha: Yeah, and we'll put the link in the show notes for people so they can go find that. Steve, is there anything else that you believe that our listeners need to know about the upcoming summit?
Steve Adams: No, I think we've covered it. I think, I'd like to maybe give one thing about IBAM just so they understand us a little bit better, and that's our Three Fish Model. This is a, this will explain what we do. We have the three, we use the three fish metaphor, if you will, or model.
Steve Adams: The first fish is we teach them in biblical entrepreneurship how to maintain a business God's way. So they wake up in the morning and say, "It's your day, your way, God." And then the second fish is we actually fund the loan, fund a loan to help them get started. And then the third fish is through the training and the coaching they get, they learn how to be a disciple-making entrepreneur. They're becoming a fisher of men, if you will.
Steve Adams: So that's the Three Fish Model. That's the core of what we do, and we really are focusing on indigenous believers around the world who are already believers so that we can equip them to go into their communities and make a difference.
Jim: Now, Steve, there are indigenous believers all over America, too.
Steve Adams: Yes. I agree.
Jim: That are in small towns, in large towns. This training, it sounds to me like this'd be great for every small business owner in this country. It, it doesn't- it's not just international. If you're talking indigenous, that means you lived there, you're from there, you were born there. You're indigenous. There are thousands of people listening to this podcast, both on YouTube and 50 different podcast channels, and Rumble, and all over the place.- Is this training available to them? Can they pay to get this training locally?
Steve Adams: Yes. Yes, they can. They can go to thirdfish.org. But yes it is, because it helps you understand all the things that we've been talking about on this, this show, and what you guys talk about every day, every week, is how do I integrate my faith and business? And then it gets into the practical things like failure and success factors, marketing, budgeting, things like that.
Jim: It's awesome. What I love about what you just said, is that you're making sure they know how to run a business, get a loan to get the business running, and some of the people listening go, "I already know how to do that." But the third piece, the third part of your Fish Program is- and make disciples while you're running your business. Be a diligent entrepreneurial discipleship maker.
Steve Adams: I think, Jim, that probably for American audience, for the most part they have amazing resources they have access to on business and marketing and all that. I think the biggest impact that Third Fish is gonna have is on the spiritual formation of the owner.
Jim: Which is powerful.
Steve Adams: Yes.
Martha: So good. So we'll put the links, everybody, to the summit, to all the different information we've been talking about in the show notes. Steve, just a curiosity thing. For people that may not be able to attend virtually during the designated time will the summit be available afterwards for people?
Steve Adams: It will be for the... What we do is for a week we make it available for free, and then we then we have a where they can purchase all of the videos.
Martha: Okay.
Steve Adams: And then have access to it forever, right?
Martha: So I would just say to our listeners, check it out, see what works best for you, but don't just dismiss it because maybe that's a week where you've got a lot of deadlines at work- or something like that. This is something that you'll be able to consume and take advantage of, and we just really encourage you to do that.
Jim: Yeah, summit2.ibam.org. That's how you can get right to the summit right now. But go to ibam.org. Their stuff's gonna be updated all the time. November 16th through the 20.
Jim: Steve, incredible opportunity. I can't wait, is when we do this show next year in preparation for summit three is that we bring on a couple of international business owners that can just call in, that they're, that are safe, that can call in and share their testimony. We wanna do that next time.
Martha: That'd be neat.
Steve Adams: Yes. Some of them can actually speak English pretty darn good, so we'll, It limits our pool, obviously.
Jim: Sure.
Steve Adams: But I've got one in particular I wanna bring on, so that'll be fun.
Jim: Steve Adams, thanks for being with us today.
Steve Adams: Thank you, Jim and Martha.
Jim: If this message resonates with you and you wanna be, if you wanna see, you want more workplace believers to see their workplace as their mission field, become a partner with us. Go to iwork4him.com/donate. We could use your help to help keep sharing these kinds of stories across the world. You've been listening to iWork4Him with your hosts, Jim and Martha Brangenberg. We're Christ followers, and our workplace, it's our mission field. But ultimately, iWork4Him.