Reimagining Faith and Management

8The entrepreneurial church

Peter Lineham

Oh, the Church has always been wise

To attractively first advertise

And invest here and there

For profit so fair

That its stock would most certainly rise

Godfrey D’Lima

The Franciscan ideal

Even before St Francis died in 1226, his dream of a church of the poor had been curtailed by the Pope. There was simply too much at stake. Francis had from the start abjured financial security, in order to throw himself utterly upon the support of God. The early mendicants were a radical church of the poor, owning nothing except the clothes they carried. It was a policy of “Sanctified destitution”, as C.H. Lawrence puts it (Lawrence, 1994, p. 39; Wolf, 2003).

In response, successive Popes recognised ...