A back room in a post office on Orkney is not the first place you'd look to see innovation take shape. But as Andrew Jones explains, small can be powerful. Mission on a business platform — the wave of the future? If a local business project here in Scotland is anything to go by, the signs are positive.
A bowl made at the Sorting Room(Photo: © Seth Crewe/CMS)The former sorting room of the Post Office in Stromness, Orkney, is a hive of activity alive with the sights and sounds of pottery being turned, leather-working and paint being mixed. Soon to join the mix will be the noise of a print shop.
The room is officially described as a co-operative-studio-retail space.
It hosts a social enterprise comprised of almost a dozen ‘micro-businesses’ in various stages of initial development. Some of them began in small islands neighbouring Orkney.
All the artists and artisans work in the Sorting Room and also offer to teach their skills to others.
A sign for the Sorting Room(Photo: © Andrew Jones/CMS)It also provides Orkney’s first WiFi zone, a small performance space, a reading area with a small arts library, free coffee and tea, and classes in subjects ranging from blogging to spinning. And you can also buy products directly from the artists who make them. The project is becoming an invaluable community resource.
The collective vision statement reads: "We are artisans who want our creativity to inspire and we want our business to help to transform the society around us."
The Sorting Room was opened in June by Councillor James Stockan.
The Orcadian, the local newspaper, did a piece about the launch.
In the two months since the opening, our emerging social enterprise has already turned into a bustling community centre.
Workshops happen almost daily and sometimes there are multiple events happening at the same time.
Music groups and the local film club have used the space — for instance, over one weekend, it showed a Serbian movie on Saturday night and then played
A Night at the Museum, starring Ben Stiller, on Sunday afternoon for local dads and kids.
Another five or six social entrepreneurs have since jumped on board.
The Sorting Room: a bustling community centre(Photo: © Andrew Jones/CMS)Last week, four of us from the Sorting Room took a government-sponsored course on social accounting and auditing.
We learned skills in measuring the economic, social and environmental impact of our enterprise and tightened up our mission statement and our projected outcomes.
During the course I was thinking about the early Church and how the impact of its members was measured. Among the indicators of God's presence and the Church's obedience was the fact that none of them had any needs. That’s a worthy outcome!
The future of missionMany years ago, my missions professor at Fuller School of World Mission made a prediction.
He said that international missions in the future would happen on a business platform.
I don’t think that he would be surprised to learn that micro-business has already become one of the leading ways for us to help to serve our community as well as a means of building and nurturing new relationships, but he might be surprised to learn that it is also happening to mission here in the post-Christian West.
We believe that the launching of social enterprises by believers in the UK and around Europe is one of the greatest opportunities for the Church right now. Pray that we and many others can find creative ways to respond.
Find out more about the Sorting Room.
Andrew Jones is a leader in CMS' Missional Leadership Team.