The Early Church: The Forerunners of Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship

December 3, 2025

Reggie Hubbard | 2019

Abstract

We are currently amid social innovation. Politicians, economists, and social scientists tend to use buzzwords such as a demographic change to describe our current social environment, but, at the core, it is social innovation. Social innovation refers to innovative activities and services that are motivated by the goal of meeting a social need and that are predominantly diffused through organizations whose primary purposes are social. The Early Church provides us with great examples of social innovators and entrepreneurs. For this reason, among others, the Early Church will serve as our featured context for this manuscript.

This manuscript aims to answer the following questions: What is Social Innovation (SI) and Social Entrepreneurship (SE)? What were the spiritual and non-spiritual innovations used to promote social change? Who were the social entrepreneurs in the Early Church and what specific character traits did they possess? We will now explore the innovations used by the Early Church as they made their mark in this world and provided us with our earliest forms of social innovation and social entrepreneurship.

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