The Wharton Way

The church in the Book of Acts was a unified koinonia (fellowship) and a collaborative group. They rallied around the Gospel & spreading it.

The Wharton Way

"Now all who believed were together, and had all things in common."

(Acts 2:44)

The Wharton School is the business school at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League institution located in Philadelphia, PA. Some well-known graduates of Wharton are Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Warren Buffet, and Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google. The founder, Joseph Wharton, was a successful entrepreneur and businessman.

Here are some comments from the Wharton website:

For more than 135 years, Wharton has been the place where visionaries, inventors, and trailblazers get their start.

In 1881, American entrepreneur and industrialist Joseph Wharton established the world's first collegiate school of business at the University of Pennsylvania — a radical idea that revolutionized both business practice and higher education.

Since then, the Wharton School has continued innovating to meet mounting global demand for new ideas, deeper insights, and transformative leadership. We blaze trails, from the nation's first collegiate center for entrepreneurship in 1973 to our latest research centers in alternative investments and neuroscience.

(Source: https://www.wharton.upenn.edu/about)

Perhaps not as known as those listed above, Adam Grant is a popular professor at Wharton. He has been voted seven years in a row as the most popular professor at the school. His book, Think Again, is excellent. I learned much about evangelism while reading this book. But Grant is not a believer; he is more of an agnostic. Grant writes about very interesting things like confident humility and engaging people, asking questions, and not coming across, in his words, as a preacher, prosecutor, or a politician, but as a scientist who is open and investigating.

This is not an endorsement or commercial for Wharton. The reason I am sharing all this with you today is their impressive slogan known as the Wharton Way. Their motto is a catchy three-word phrase: Elevate, Innovate, and Collaborate. (See: https://www.wharton.upenn.edu/the-wharton-way) The word that got my attention the most was Collaborate. It is a word used frequently today. It means to work in close association with others for a common goal.

The church in the Book of Acts, as we see in chapter 2, was a unified koinonia (fellowship) and a collaborative group. They rallied around the Gospel of Jesus and getting His message to as many people as they could. They were an elevating, innovating, and collaborating group!

Life at home, work, and church is much sweeter when we follow the example of the Wharton Way and, more importantly, the early church in Acts. I am working on a missions idea where we invite other mission-minded pastors to adopt an unreached people group like our church did twelve years ago. There is so much more we can do together, and we are better when we are together!