My friend, Jarod, is up to some exciting, curious and unexpected things in Milwaukee. I asked him to share his story because it’s a beautiful intersection of pain, beauty, community and the kingdom of God…
We started Sharehouse Goods as a result of the confluence of darkness, opportunity, and longing to be involved in Milwaukee.
I was at the crossroads of professional conflict and opportunity. The immensity of failure sank in. I was still fresh into our marriage, my wife was 8 months pregnant, and we were new to Milwaukee, which meant we were still outsiders. Lots of success, but I could not sway the opinions. So I resigned.
Deep, dark, pain, as often happens within the soul of an entrepreneur produced fear and hope and simultaneously the feeling of loss and future opportunity. I blamed “them” for a bit, but then looked inside and saw massive disrepair, sin. The love of God washed over the shame of uncontrollable failure and pierced into the poisonous propensity to control life, to replace God with myself. Broken and free. I looked out and saw myself in others, and people started to be drawn to the work of the gospel in me. The mirror of God’s words showed me that I was more flawed than I imagined, and then set me free with the knowledge that I was more loved than I ever thought possible. So after losing myself in insurance sales for a couple years my wife started selling some of our books on Amazon. After learning some some tricks the business took off.
After a few years of building an online retail businesses, primarily focused on media, we bought a foreclosure that nobody wanted to touch. An unbelievably beautiful 1919 craftsman style that you could see into the basement from the second floor. By this time Sharehouse Goods had been birthed, and gestated into “real” business complete with employees, friends from the central city were helping me run it. So I had time to work on the house and help start a college and career center in a High School a block away. Kids came to help me renovate, and I dreamed of what renovation meant in a human and in a group of humans living in proximity to each other.
We had formed a for-profit business that had multiple bottom lines. We paid good wages. We drew partnerships from individuals and institutions into a web of generating profit. We poured that profit back into the community.
We were discovering that work matters deeply to God and to our poverty inflicted piece of Milwaukee. Without work, identity is incredibly difficult to form. God cares about houses being renovated, and he cares about communities being restored to flourishing. Christianity for me had always been uncomfortably disconnected from the everyday of life. I taught about the faith, but couldn’t connect it well to everyday culture without losing deep tenants of the faith. And I couldn’t delineate the implications of the gospel clearly into my community, my work and the broader world.
Sharehouse Goods began with a dive into the generous nature of God. His grace changes everything, He is compelling, and the way He began the whole of Christianity was with His Son’s faithful presence and his impact on the flourishing of individuals around him. They were free to weep, to sing, and to lash out at Him. Sharehouse Goods is messy. It involves lots of people in a sometimes organized fashion and it allows people to make money that they are responsible to spend. It is business as it should be. It runs off the excess of our culture. We “glean” from thrift, rummage, libraries, schools and more, finding things locally that people want globally. We do things that are good because it is a good way to run a business. Business for the common good cares about profit, about people, about our community. It listens to God because He cares about the common good, and it sees Him as supreme, rather than social justice or profit.
Because of our desire to be a local faithful presence, we now have a coffee shop, a coffee roasting business, four commercial properties, and a couple of other start-ups. More importantly we have Milwaukee Collide, a space where people bump into each other and ideas are generated that do good in Milwaukee.
In short Sharehouse Goods exists because God wants our faith to work out in good business, and good business to work out into our communities for the good of human flourishing. It exists because He called us and we follow. When He is done with it, we will follow into the next thing, hopefully with less fear this time.