Entrepreneurship in religious organizations: How the Church of England developed an entrepreneurial orientation

The literature on entrepreneurship and religion consists of two main strands: “studies focusing on the choice of entrepreneurship over wage work and studies analyzing the influence of religion on entrepreneurial decision-making” (Rietveld & Hoogendoorn, 2022: 1314). The first stream of work concludes that religion shapes whether people become entrepreneurs; religiosity, through the values and norms it prescribes as well as the social capital it provides (Audretsch et al., 2013; Choi, 2010; Zelekha et al., 2014), increases both country-level and individual-level entrepreneurial activity (Drakopoulou-Dodd & Seaman, 1998; Henley, 2017; Parboteeah et al., 2015). The second line of research shows that religion, because it affects people’s outlook on life, shapes the business decisions religious entrepreneurs make (Liu et al., 2019; Pieper et al., 2020). They are, for instance, more likely to display prosocial and sustainability-oriented behaviors (Xu et al., 2022).

Hence, prior research primarily explains how religion influences macro-level entrepreneurial activity and decisions made by individual entrepreneurs. A smaller subset of the literature examines how religion and entrepreneurship are combined at the organizational level. These studies demonstrate that religion positively affects entrepreneurial activity within organizations (Abdelgawad & Zahra, 2020; Eze et al., 2021; Fritz & Ibrahim, 2010; Sabah et al., 2014). They also suggest that entrepreneurial initiatives launched by religious organizations not only improve the performance of these organizations themselves (Liu et al., 2019; Pearce et al., 2010) but also have wider implications; churches in England, for instance, have fueled the global social enterprise movement (Spear, 2010; Tracey, 2012).

While the combination of religious and entrepreneurial principles benefits many organizations, it does not work for all. There is evidence that, like individual entrepreneurs (Essers & Benschop, 2009; Griebel et al., 2014), organizations may experience tensions between their entrepreneurial and religious identities. These stem from the moral belief that religious institutions are sacred and should, therefore, not get involved in market-related activities (Gümüsay et al., 2020; Yue et al., 2019). The current literature, however, seldom discusses how such tensions are handled. When it does, it focuses on organizations that have always been run according to both religious and entrepreneurial principles (e.g., Gümüsay et al., 2020). Hence, we know very little about what happens when non-entrepreneurial religious organizations attempt to develop an entrepreneurial orientation.

As Tracey (2012) argued, leveraging the literature on entrepreneurial orientation (EO) has “the potential to provide significant steps forward in our understanding of religious organizations” (Ibid.: 106). The EO literature demonstrates that entrepreneurship is not the exclusive domain of small new ventures (Miller, 2011; Randerson, 2016) but also takes place when established organizations “take calculated risks, innovate, and pursue proactive behaviors” (Putniņš & Sauka, 2020: 712). While it mostly studies the performance effects of EO in for-profit contexts (Anderson et al., 2022; Calabrò et al., 2021; Lomberg et al., 2017; Lumpkin & Dess, 2001; McKenny et al., 2018), EO research provides several insights that have informed my analysis of EO development in a religious organization.

The first relevant insight is that EO can manifest itself in various ways: as top management style, organizational configuration, or new entry initiatives (Kindermann et al., 2023). The latter is the most widely discussed manifestation of EO (Wales et al., 2020) and takes the form of launching new ventures that introduce new products or enter new markets (Lumpkin & Dess, 1996). Top management style is often equated to EO rhetoric, i.e., the “strategic use of words in organizational narratives to convey (…) risk taking, innovativeness, [and] proactiveness” (Watson et al., 2019: 752). Organizational configuration refers to the internal organizational processes – e.g., systems, structures, routines – that support entrepreneurial behavior (Wales et al., 2020).

Second, the EO literature points out that what the dimensions of EO – risk taking, innovativeness, and proactiveness – exactly look like varies within organizations (Miller, 2011); each sub-unit is made up of different employees, with different responsibilities, who may exhibit EO in different manners (Wales, 2016; Wales et al., 2011). Across organizations, there can also be variations. In nonprofits, for instance, EO is directed at the fulfillment of social mission rather than profit optimization (Morris et al., 2011). EO is also more relational and collaborative in nonprofits than it is in for-profit businesses (Al-Tabbaa et al., 2022).

Thirdly, recent studies of EO argue that the orientation of an organization may change over time (Wales, 2016). This is a radical departure from the prior consensus that organizations with similar structures and resources, operating in comparably hostile and dynamic environments (Kreiser et al., 2020; Wales et al., 2013; Wiklund et al., 2009), are “consistently entrepreneurial or conservative” (Anderson et al., 2022: 15). CEOs are depicted as the main agents of change; their willingness to pursue entrepreneurial initiatives varies throughout their tenure (Boling et al., 2016; Grühn et al., 2017).

In sum, I derived three main insights from the EO literature: (1) EO can manifest itself in top management style, in organizational configuration, or in new entry initiatives; (2) the three core dimensions of EO are context dependent, i.e., what is seen as risky, innovative, and proactive differs across settings; and (3) the level of an organization’s EO varies over time. Notwithstanding these contributions, the EO literature does not fully explain how EO materializes in religious settings because it mostly studies for-profit businesses (Al-Tabbaa et al., in press; Balasubramanian et al., 2020) and does not pay much attention to the social construction and emergence of EO (e.g., Miller, 2011; Randerson, 2016; Wales et al., 2020).

To answer my research question, I studied entrepreneurial initiatives launched by the Church of England (CofE). The CofE is an interesting context for examining the organization-level links between religion and entrepreneurship because it is a religious organization that, after a long period in which it focused on its usual, community-oriented activities, started developing entrepreneurial initiatives in an attempt to reverse decline (Spear, 2010; Zygan & Le Grys, 2018). Unlike prior research, I was therefore able to analyze whether and how entrepreneurship affects religion, as opposed to the other way around. An additional reason for selecting the CofE is that it keeps detailed records of all decisions it takes, which uniquely allowed me to track the process of EO development.

The CofE is one of the most prominent religious organizations in England: “By virtue of its long history of association with the state, the Church of England regards itself as the Church of the nation” (Zygan & Le Grys, 2018: 541). This status is reflected in the CofE’s structure. It is divided into “territorial packages with discrete boundaries” (GS proceedings 1994: 230)¹ that cover the whole of England. Hence, everyone lives close to a church that looks after them, i.e., is tasked with the ‘cure of their souls’. Parishes are the smallest ‘territorial package’. They are grouped into deaneries, which in turn are combined into dioceses. Each of these layers delegates members to two of the Church’s main decision-making bodies: the General Synod (GS) and the Archbishops’ Council (see Fig. 1).

I have conducted a historical case study. Historical case analyses are appropriate when examining phenomena that unfold over long periods of time (Augustine & Piazza, 2022). The process of EO development in the CofE did indeed take a long time; according to two experts I interviewed prior to data collection, discussions about decline – which generally triggers entrepreneurial initiatives (Kreiser et al., 2020) – intensified as early as in 1980. Historical case studies are also suitable when researchers intend to observe systems of meaning reflected in specific situations (Hargadon & Douglas, 2001), which fits my aim of analyzing a specific religious organization to understand how religion and entrepreneurship are combined.

The historical data I collected are qualitative, making them suitable for unraveling the processes that lead to organization-level entrepreneurial behaviors (Randerson, 2016; Wales, 2016). The CofE archives were my main data source. I collected documents prepared for, and discussed during, all General Synod (GS) meetings that took place between 1980 and 2020, as well as the minutes of those meetings. GS “considers and approves legislation affecting the whole of the Church of England (…) and approves the annual budget for the work of the Church” (Church of England, 2022b). Hence, my study focuses on a central decision-making body. This is in line with prior research, which situates the responsibility for making EO-related decisions at the top of the organizational hierarchy (Wales et al., 2020).

Following common practice in historical case studies (e.g., Augustine & Piazza, 2022; Boutinot & Delacour, 2022), I triangulated my data. I used Nexis UK to retrieve newspaper articles that covered any of the documents or meetings I collected in the CofE archives. As Nexis UK mostly contains secular newspapers, I also searched the archives of the Church Times, seen as “the main newspaper of the Church of England” (Interviewee #3). Furthermore, I conducted interviews with church planters. Church planting, “the establishment of new Christian congregations” (Foppen et al., 2017: 26), is generally seen as one of the main entrepreneurial activities deployed within the CofE. These interviews provided yet another perspective on EO development in religious organizations. Table 2 in Appendix 1 explains how these data sources were used in the analysis.

The main entrepreneurial initiative announced by the CofE in the 1980s was The Decade of Evangelism: an open-ended call to action, asking parishes to commit to evangelism “in their own way and at their own pace” (GS884, 1989: 1). The central church did not take any action beyond making that call (Pike, 1990). Yet, The Decade was entrepreneurial by the CofE’s standards. Evangelism was regarded as proactive – “Christians should not be passive (…) we should seek to bring our Gospel insights upon [our culture]” (GS proceedings 1991: 599) – as well as innovative and risky (see Appendix 1, Table 3). Verbally endorsing it, therefore, constitutes a form of EO rhetoric (cf. Watson et al., 2019).

It took the CofE almost the entire first phase to agree on using EO rhetoric. This was in part due to conflicting ideas about the change imperative. While some reports mentioned “a decline in numbers” (GS514, 1981: 34) as a motivation for evangelistic change, others downplayed the decline, for instance, by highlighting “the opportunities for the Church” created by a “hunger for spiritual experience” (GS780A, 1987: 29) among young people. The CofE’s adoption of EO rhetoric was also delayed by ecclesiological critiques. Opponents of The Decade perceived evangelism as “a rather disturbing and impolite business” (Reid, 1991) and feared that focusing on it would compromise the Church’s social mission: “for those who (…) desire to call every possible person to repentance and faith, (…) works of social amelioration can seem a distraction” (GS780A, 1987: 53).

Eventually, ecclesiological concerns were addressed. Evangelism and social amelioration were no longer understood as binary opposites: “Evangelism and concern for social justice go hand in hand” (GS proceedings 1987: 668). This position was reached after GS members reminded the central church of its track record of failing to act on change imperatives. One member shared an anecdote about their diocese’s response to a report in which the CofE’s international partners urged the Church to change: “[people] said: (…) ‘We have heard it all before’. That’s the point. We may have heard it all before, but have we listened to it?” (GS proceedings 1982a: 71). Such experiences were used to stress that the binary “either/or concept of mission” (GS proceedings 1980: 808) should be abandoned to prevent new, change-delaying “civil warfare to break out in the Church” (GS proceedings 1991: 612).

During this first phase, Synod members also proposed changing the CofE’s organizational configuration: “The parish system (…) in my view [is] ripe for change” (GS proceedings 1982a: 66). Such proposals were not accepted. Ecclesiologically, the parish structure was “sacrosanct” (GS proceedings 1982b: 959) because it represented the CofE’s “concern for all without exception” (GS proceedings 1989: 640). The central church changing parish boundaries was also seen as an infringement on local churches’ decision-making prerogative: “The fundamental importance of the local congregation remains the key to any decade” (Ibid.: 623). Yet, as the following sections will illustrate, this proposal was only buried temporarily and would eventually resurface.

In the second phase, the main manifestation of EO within the CofE was church planting. Church planting can be seen as a new entry initiative (cf. Kindermann et al., 2023) because it involves establishing new congregations. It was seen as innovative, proactive (see Appendix 1, Table 3) and risky; church planters needed “courage to take chances, to overcome inertia and the inevitable opposition (GS proceedings 1994: 240). Once “one or two parishes started church planting,” the central church began “to see that possibly here is a method for everybody” (GS Misc 456, 1995: 22) and started providing guidance through reports like “Breaking New Ground” (GS1099, 1994).

Like in the first phase, there were calls for changing the CofE’s organizational configuration. GS members, for instance, wondered whether “our inherited parochial system allow[s] for creative mission strategies” (GS proceedings 1994: 231). Such changes, however, continued to be controversial. Ecclesiologically, adapting the parish system contradicted “tacit Anglican assumptions about parochial boundaries” (GS1099, 1994: 29). Central church involvement would also have violated local churches’ decision-making prerogative: “The higher the degree of local autonomy and the lower the level of central control, the larger the number of plants” (GS proceedings 1994: 241).

In the mid-2000s, Synod approved the “Bishops’ Mission Order” (BMO). BMOs removed the “right of a minister to exclude further Anglican churches” (GS1523, 2004: 142). Bishops, “for the protection of new churches” (interviewee #3), could now overrule vicars who were opposed to new forms of church in their parish. As BMOs thus impacted the parish structure, they are an example of a change to the CofE’s organizational configuration (cf. Wales et al., 2020). This was seen as risky, as it could theoretically allow bishops to approve “women celebrating communion (…) in a parish where the parish church does not accept women priests” (Hollingshurst, 2008 – see Table 3 in Appendix 1 for more evidence).

While BMOs, after an “increasing number of calls for review of the diocesan structures in the Church of England” (GS1528, 2004: 6) were approved, the CofE’s funding systems remained unchanged despite requests for using “some of the historic resources to fund fresh forms of being Church” (GS1529, 2004: 5, emphasis added) and introducing “a system of accountability” (GS proceedings 2004b: 199). These proposals contradicted dominant ideas about God’s authority – “Only God can make his church grow (GS1835A, 2011: 2)” – as well as the decision-making prerogative of local churches; centrally funded initiatives could end up “destabilizing effective existing local initiatives” (GS proceedings 2004b: 201).

While, for most of its history, the CofE “deliberately did not disturb (…) ways of distributing national funding to dioceses” (GS1978, 2015: 2), in 2015, it launched an initiative called “Renewal and Reform” to change this part of its organizational configuration (cf. Wales et al., 2020). “Renewal and Reform” allowed the central church to dip “into its £6.1 billion endowment (…) to help pay for an aggressive new expansion strategy” (Bingham, 2015). Although local churches were officially still allowed to discover “a way of doing evangelism that works for us” (GS proceedings 2017: 158), the Church’s “pro-active investment in new growth opportunities” (GS1978: 1)⁴ suggests that its understanding of evangelism had narrowed and now primarily focused on initiatives with growth potential.

Making financial commitments to growth triggered ecclesiological questions about the demographics Fresh Expressions seemed to attract: “Evangelical churches (…) look very white, very middle class, very young. What does that say if you're black, poor or an immigrant?” (interviewee #8). Furthermore, Renewal and Reform’s emphasis on targets and accountability was seen as “sorcery with statistics” (Sherwood, 2016) associated with “an overly secular management style approach” (GS Proceedings 2016: 146). These concerns were countered by referring to prior ecclesiological debates. “Renewal and Reform” would only fund evangelistic initiatives that kept “together spiritual and numerical growth” (GS1978, 2015: 2) and involved social action through “a strong bias to the poor” (GS proceedings 2015: 126). In other words, Renewal and Reform’s “managerial” policies were “not the final aim of the Church” (GS proceedings 2015: 19); they were only a means to support “mission in the poorest communities” (GS1978, 2015: 5).

Thus far, I have discussed how the CofE’s entrepreneurial orientation changed. Early, somewhat cautious initiatives primarily revolved around EO rhetoric (the Decade of Evangelism). These were later supplemented by new entry initiatives (church planting, Fresh Expressions). Toward the end of the period of study, the Church also adapted its organizational configuration (through BMOs and “Renewal and Reform”). Each of these manifestations of EO was considered risky, innovative, and proactive (see Table 3, Appendix 1). In fact, most of them were initially regarded as too entrepreneurial. Hence, the CofE’s understanding of what it means to innovate, take risks, and be proactive – the core dimensions of EO (Lumpkin & Dess, 1996) – changed along with the entrepreneurial initiatives it launched. My analysis of the arguments provided in favor of and against entrepreneurship suggests that polysemy dynamics and idea sedimentation played a critical role in these developments.

This study makes two contributions to research on the connections between religion and entrepreneurship. First, I shed new light on this relationship. Previous research primarily discusses the macro-level and individual-level effects of religion on entrepreneurship (Rietveld & Hoogendoorn, 2022). Organization-level studies, while comparatively scarce, also conclude that religion shapes entrepreneurship (Eze et al., 2021; Sabah et al., 2014). The relationship between religion and entrepreneurship is thus portrayed as linear and religion is treated as the driving force. My analysis of a forty-year-long debate about evangelism in the Church of England indeed indicates that religious principles shaped the nature of the entrepreneurial initiatives the CofE launched. Yet, those initiatives, in turn, triggered a reinterpretation of ecclesiological beliefs about the mission of the Church and the principles underpinning its governance (see Table 4 in Appendix 1). Hence, my findings show that entrepreneurship and religion can have a recursive relationship.

My second contribution to the literature on entrepreneurship and religion is providing more detailed insight into how the two are combined. Prior studies suggest that the combination works because entrepreneurship can serve as a vehicle for honoring God, creating a working environment in which religious beliefs can be incorporated, or sharing religion with others (Griebel et al., 2014; Neubert et al., 2014; Smith et al., 2019). This line of work, therefore, largely focuses on situations where there are no tensions between entrepreneurial and religious values. Gümüsay et al.’s (2020) study of an Islamic bank is a rare exception; these authors found that entrepreneurs resolved tensions through polysemy, i.e., by deliberately using words that enable multiple interpretations. I nuance their findings by showing that polysemy does not always resolve tensions. Within the CofE, combining entrepreneurship and religion required polysemy dynamics, i.e., successive waves of meaning broadening and narrowing because ambiguous terminology alone frustrated people who needed entrepreneurial guidance. In addition, I identified a second novel mechanism: idea sedimentation. As time passed, the number of ways of combining entrepreneurship and religion debated by the CofE’s General Synod increased. Advocates of entrepreneurial change leveraged those debates to strengthen their case; they encouraged their colleagues to act on prior consensus or improved the arguments underpinning previously rejected proposals. Hence, idea sedimentation made combining entrepreneurship and religion easier.

This study also contributes to research on entrepreneurial orientation. My analysis of debates about entrepreneurial initiatives in the Church of England was informed by this literature and confirms some of its recent insights (see Tables 3 and 5 in Appendix 1). Like in other nonprofit organizations, entrepreneurship within the CofE was more socially oriented than it would typically be in for-profit businesses (Morris et al., 2011). EO manifested itself as rhetoric, as new entry initiatives, and as changes to the Church’s organizational configuration (cf. Kindermann et al., 2023). Finally, the CofE’s understanding of EO’s core dimensions shifted over time (per Wales, 2016). Existing EO research, however, does not explain how and why those changes occur (Miller, 2011; Randerson, 2016). By outlining how the CofE’s EO developed, I take a first step in that direction. Specifically, I show that the CofE went through four lengthy phases, during which levels of entrepreneurial activity fluctuated, and even EO rhetoric – the least substantive manifestation of EO (Wang et al., 2021) – was contested. This suggests that EO does not instantly emerge in a religious setting, even when the right conditions, e.g., a hostile environment, are in place. I also introduce two mechanisms (polysemy dynamics and idea sedimentation) that can fuel EO development.

Although this paper sheds light on an underexplored phenomenon, it has some limitations that future research can address. For example, while my case study provides rich insights into the process of EO development within the CofE, certain original details are bound to remain invisible in historical data (Hargadon & Douglas, 2001). In my case, it was difficult to retrieve what motivated people to support or resist a new initiative. I was also unable to see whether decisions made by the General Synod pervaded across the organizational hierarchy (see Wales et al., 2011), i.e., were adopted by local churches, or were, in fact, even made outside of GS meetings. An ethnographic study that tracks how entrepreneurial initiatives are discussed across hierarchy levels in religious organizations could capture these details.

Another limitation of this study relates to the research setting. Selecting the Church of England as the focus of my analysis allowed me to trace how a religious organization became increasingly entrepreneurially oriented. However, since CofE membership continuously declined during my period of study, it is unclear whether the two mechanisms – polysemy dynamics and idea sedimentation – that drive EO development ultimately help religious organizations realize the benefits normally associated with EO. Arguably, they may have only been this prominent because of the ongoing decline.⁵ Future research could examine the interconnections between performance and these mechanisms. It may also be worthwhile exploring to what extent polysemy dynamics and idea sedimentation play a role in the EO development processes that unfold in non-religious organizations, where the idea of entrepreneurship may be less controversial.