Regent Gets $1 Million to Promote Christian Economic Development
by Allie Martin
December 13, 2005
(AgapePress) - - A Christian university has received a one-million-dollar grant to create a center that will help expand business while promoting a Christian worldview. The grant from the Living Stones Foundation Charitable Trust will help create the Regent University Center for Entrepreneurship (RCE). The mission of the RCE is to improve economic and spiritual conditions of disadvantaged populations worldwide. The Center hopes to accomplish this by promoting the development of business models and entrepreneurial skills grounded in a Christian worldview.
Christian businessman Dr. Ken Eldred, a former Regent University Board of Trustees member, created the Living Stones Foundation nearly 20 years ago. Today, he is hailing the plan to establish the RCE as a move that will contribute to the "business as mission" movement. "What we've asked Regent to do," Eldred notes, "is to 'obsolete' us by teaching and digging into the models and the systems whereby we can build business around the world through entrepreneurs and, in the process of building these businesses, change the world for Christ."
The Living Stones Foundation Charitable Trust spreads its approximately $100 million in assets among projects in the U.S., Central and South America, Southeast Asia, Europe, Israel and the Middle East. The grant to Regent will help the RCE fulfill its mission to improve the economic and spiritual situations of the poor in various parts of the world and to support economic revitalization through the application of a Christian perspective.
"We're interested in taking this idea of entrepreneurship, teaching people the gospel, helping them to understand the importance of these aspects, that the fundamental foundation is the gospel," Eldred explains, "and as we start small businesses in the country or around the world, it's like a building block of the scripture."
On the other hand, Living Stones' founder adds, when people develop larger businesses like overseas private equity, his own company of a thousand-plus employees in India, for example, "it's like building a house. I mean, we're actually affecting an entire industry with Christians."
Eldred believes lives can be changed through Christian business, and part of the RCE's mission will be to demonstrate that. The million-dollar grant covers a five-year period and will help fund the center's launch and expansion.
Allie Martin, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
