MarsElon Musk was a co-founder of PayPal, the CEO of electric car company Tesla and the founder of SpaceX which supplies rockets for transporting cargo to the International Space Station.  Musk is an entrepreneur whose legacy may someday share space in history books with the likes of DaVinci, Edison and Ford.  He’s also a man with a vision to plant a vegetable garden on mars.  Ask yourself, what kind of crazy does it take to plant a garden on mars.  Chris Anderson describes Musk’s crazy this way:

“When a man tells you about the time he planned to put a vegetable garden on Mars, you worry about his mental state. But if that same man has since launched multiple rockets that are actually capable of reaching Mars—sending them into orbit, Bond-style, from a tiny island in the Pacific—you need to find another diagnosis. That’s the thing about extreme entrepreneurialism: There’s a fine line between madness and genius, and you need a little bit of both to really change the world.

 All entrepreneurs have an aptitude for risk, but more important than that is their capacity for self-delusion. Indeed, psychological investigations have found that entrepreneurs aren’t more risk-tolerant than non-entrepreneurs. They just have an extraordinary ability to believe in their own visions, so much so that they think what they’re embarking on isn’t really that risky. They’re wrong, of course, but without the ability to be so wrong—to willfully ignore all those naysayers and all that evidence to the contrary—no one would possess the necessary audacity to start something radically new.”

When I read that line, I just couldn’t help but think of Noah trying to explain to his neighbors who had never seen rain why he was building a giant boat.  Or Moses trying to convince an entire nation there really was a promised land and Gideon trying to convince an army of 300 they could defeat an army of over 100,000.  Then there was Solomon’s vision for the temple or Nehemiah’s vision of Jerusalem protected again by a wall.  Everyone one of these visions is on par with a vegetable garden on the moon – impossible.  But these Godly men didn’t have faith in their own visions, by faith everyone of these visionary leaders believed God could make real what He had put on their hearts.

With 7 billion people on the planet, and 2 out of 3 not knowing Jesus, our world literally needs millions of new churches.  Where will all these new churches come from?  Most of them will be started by leaders crazy enough to do what others find too risky because they believe so vividly in what God has asked them to do it doesn’t seem risky at all.