One of the international ministries hubbed here
Business as Mission
A real business, run as the mission itself rather than as cover for it or as a way to fund it. YWAM's BAM team is one of several international ministries based at Chiang Mai.
What it is
The business is the mission, not the disguise.
Business as Mission means running a genuine, profitable business and treating that business as the ministry. It is judged by real business outcomes, because a company that does not work as a company helps nobody, and it is expected to create employment, build relationships and serve a community at the same time.
That distinguishes it from two things it often gets confused with. It is not a front, a cover story for doing something else. And it is not simply a way to fund missionary work elsewhere. The work is the trading.
Why it matters in this region
Some countries do not issue a missionary visa.
In much of the region this base works across, a traditional missionary presence is either impossible to arrange or unwise to attempt. A business, on the other hand, is a normal thing for a foreigner to run. It comes with a reason to be somewhere, a legal basis for staying, and a set of daily relationships that no amount of visiting produces.
Chiang Mai is a hub for a number of YWAM's international ministries precisely because of where it sits. The BAM team is one of them, alongside Create International and others.
The nearest example we can point to
Employment as one of four pillars.
Baan Dem Rak, the base's community centre in Santitham, names employment as one of the four things it works on. In its own words, it harnesses the power of business to generate employment opportunities, empower young people to break out of the poverty cycle, and build mentoring relationships.
That is the same logic at a neighbourhood scale: not charity administered to people, but work created with them. Whether it is formally part of the BAM team's remit or simply parallel to it is something we have not confirmed, so we are not going to claim it.
Being straight with you
This page is deliberately short.
Everything above describes what Business as Mission is, and states the one thing we can document about it here: that a BAM team is based at this base, and that Chiang Mai's location is why. That is genuinely all that is currently written down.
We are not going to invent the rest. What the team runs, who it employs, how many people, since when, and how it connects to the other work here are all real questions with real answers, and when we have them from the team itself, this page will grow. Until then a short honest page beats a long confident one.
Get involved
If you run something, we would like to hear from you
People with business experience are unusually useful and unusually rare in mission settings. If you have built, run or turned around a company and you are wondering whether that skill has a place here, it does.
Contact
Ask about BAM here
Enquiries go through the base office. Email the base and mark it for Business as Mission.
P.O. Box 113 CMU, Chiang Mai 50202, Thailand.
Follow along
Get social
The BAM team keeps no separate accounts that we can point you to. Base news goes out on Facebook and Twitter.