The Sunday-Monday Gap: Called to Pew and Profit

David Miller delivered this keynote presentation at the 2005 Mid-Winter Convocation, “Living Out Our Callings in the Workplace,” at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, on January 6, 2005.

One tiny word is the only difference between the titles of my two presentations. Yet the choice between “Called to Pew or Profit” and “Called to Pew and Profit” makes all the difference in the world.

In my earlier address, I probably got everyone’s attention by saying that church is not about Sunday. It is not about life in the pew. Rather, it is about pew and profit, or faith and work. Our life as a people gathered — as the ecclesia (Greek for “called out”) — must include a practical theology and a dynamic ecclesiology for our life scattered. In this presentation, I will offer a constructive way forward for both clergy and laity to overcome the Sunday-Monday gap and to chart a possible road map for a life that calls us to both pew and profit. What does it look like to live out our callings at work, and how do we do that successfully, integrating pew and profit in a way that does not dishonor God on the one hand or render our marketplace activity ineffective on the other by branding ourselves as religious zealots?

Once upon a time in American business, success meant playing the game. And playing the game meant not allowing oneself to be too influenced by factors beyond those of the game itself. It was fine to go to church and maybe even to profess a belief in God, but that was a weekend topic that one assiduously avoided at work. Real men didn’t discuss faith — and they were mostly men. Work was work, church was church, and the twain never met. By and large, clergy reinforced that attitude, too. With the exception of the annual Labor Day Weekend sermon on “work as vocation,” occasional jabs at egregious examples of corporate greed, and Pledge Sunday, most clergy were content to stay away from discussing marketplace, career, and money-related questions.

Today, that model for businesspeople seems strangely anachronistic, almost quaint, and out of touch with both human experience and cutting-edge research. Businesspeople are no longer content to live compartmentalized lives in which their work is separate from their faith. People are no longer willing to park their souls in the parking lot along with the cars. They have come to realize that a bifurcated life that leaves faith and work in separate compartments is not only an unhealthy way to live but also an ineffective way to conduct business.

What’s more, studies suggest increasingly that companies that have a soul — an institutional appreciation of and respect for the spiritual dimension of employees’ lives — tend to enjoy a number of positive business metrics. [1] Moreover, even secular scholars, such as Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert William Fogel, are reconsidering the role of spirituality and religion in society. Fogel argues persuasively that it is no longer access to and distribution of material assets that produce an egalitarian society. [2] Rather, Fogel suggests, access to and distribution of spiritual assets are central to both the establishment and the ongoing well-being of an egalitarian society. Fogel, a secular economist, is arguing that faith matters in the marketplace. Even rock star and social activist Bono of U2 agrees. He observes, “The trick in the next few years will be not to decry the religious instinct, but to accept that this is a hugely important part of people’s lives. And at the same time to be very wary of people who believe that theirs is the only way.” [3] The voices of Fogel and Bono should ring out as loudly in the church’s ears as Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses did!

Faith at Work

Business consultants and academics of many stripes are now engaging this area of spirituality and work in droves. Indeed, my own research concludes that the surge of interest and activity in questions pertaining to “Faith at Work” are neither a flash in the pan nor simply this year’s cure-all management fad, as Quality Circles or TQM once were. [4] Rather, the increased activity surrounding faith at work meets the criteria of being a bona fide social movement — and one that will be with us for some time to come.

The Faith at Work movement is a loose network of individuals and groups around the nation who are driven by a quest to integrate faith and work and who reject the systems and structures that lead to compartmentalized and fractured lives. The Faith at Work movement is comprised of formal organizations, informal groups, conferences, e-newsletters, websites, books, magazines, and radio shows. It is a richly diverse movement of men and women of all corporate levels — from receptionist to CEO — and from all professions and lines of work, ranging from trading and technology to marketing and manufacturing.

The various programs and resources in the movement are designed to help people integrate the claims of their faith with the demands of their work. Notably silent in this movement, however, are the church and the academy. By virtue of that silence, we are ceding this field to the purveyors of “spirituality lite” and New Age narcissism. Given our tradition here as heirs of Luther and Calvin, this disinterest in offering a theological integration of faith and work is particularly ironic, if not indeed tragic.

In days gone by, IBM employees began the workday singing the company song. Does the emergence of the Faith at Work movement mean today’s employees will now start the day singing hymns and praise music? I hope not. At the risk of offending several friends in the Faith at Work movement, I find it problematic when a company, particularly a publicly traded one, overtly embraces one faith tradition as its official or de facto religion of choice. Trying to make a company Christian (or Jewish or Muslim, for that matter) leads to several obstacles, not just legal but commercial and theological as well. Are we meant to build Christian companies, or are we meant to build great companies? Are we meant to be Christian marketing representatives and Christian CEOs, or are we meant to be excellent marketing reps and CEOs who happen to be Christian? In each case, I believe it is the latter.

Christians called to the workplace can and should turn to their faith as a powerful foundation and inspiration to inform and shape their work. The nature of the work we do and the way in which we do it matter to God. Faith becomes the interpretative key. What clergy, academics, and people in the workplace lack is a constructive framework through which to explore and analyze how the integration of faith and work manifests itself in practical terms. Participants in the Faith at Work movement want to transcend either/or labels, such as conservative or liberal, right or left, evangelical or mainstream, premillennialist or postmillennialist, religious or spiritual, immanent or transcendent, and so on. Such linear spectrums fail to offer an overarching framework for discussion. Indeed, participants in the Faith at Work movement exhibit a wide range of theological and demographic diversity that resists easy stereotyping. With this in mind, I propose a way to think about how to do faith at work that might offer theological and pastoral support of the movement and its participants — in other words, it might help us integrate pew and profit.

The Four Es

My own research and market testing suggest that there are four primary ways in which a faith manifests itself at work. I call these four types of integration the “Four Es”: ethics, experience, enrichment, and evangelism. Together, these Four Es form what I call the “Integration Box,” which is an integrated model or framework for thinking about different ways of integrating faith and work.

• Ethics is the way of integrating faith and work in which people draw on their faith as a moral foundation and as a source of guidance for ethical issues they face in the marketplace.
• Experience describes how businesspeople seek meaning and purpose in their work, understanding it as a calling by which their work has intrinsic and extrinsic value and is not “just a job.”
• Enrichment is the mode in which businesspeople accent the internal and personal role played at work by faith, often seeking spiritual nurture, focus on prayer, meditation, daily devotionals, consciousness, healing, and transformation. These spiritual disciplines enrich life at work and form an anchor, if not a healing balm, that permits people ro stay grounded and faithful amid the stresses and challenges of the modern workplace.
• Evangelism is the way of integrating faith and work in which businesspeople perceive the workplace primarily as a mission field for evangelizing, witnessing, and proselytizing. Evangelizing is both straightforward and complex, as people have different understandings of and comfort with the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19–20). Thus, some view the workplace as a mission field with the primary purpose of evangelizing others, while others view the work itself as mission, part of fulfilling one’s vocation. [5]

In practice, these Four Es are not always “ideal types,” that is, they are not always rigidly adhered to by those in the movement; they often interrelate and overlap. For instance, after taking a self-analysis instrument I designed for the Integration Box and the Four Es, one woman told me she was internally grounded and primarily located in the Enrichment type — her daily prayers and devotions were essential to her identity — yet her external manifestation was Ethics. Without the former she could not do the latter. Indeed, there is another mode of integrating faith and work that is a hybrid form of the four, which we might call the “Everywhere Integrator.” The Everywhere Integrator moves in and among all Four Es, representing a heightened level of theological maturity and an appreciation for multiple ways of integrating faith and work. Finally, these types of integration can be operative at the personal, corporate, and societal level.

The Integration Box

Diagrammatically, we can picture the Four Es as four quadrants or overlapping circles within an overall framework that I call the “Integration Box.” Within certain boundaries, all Four Es are legitimate and valid modes of integrating faith and work; what is important is that they are all “in the box.” In other words, anything inside the box is an attempt to integrate faith and work, however flawed or insufficient. And as Christians, that’s where we want to be. To be outside the box is to succumb to a compartmentalization of faith and work, leading to a schizophrenic theology and bifurcated life.

The Integration Box© and the Four E’s
EV: Evangelization	ET: Ethics
EN: Enrichment	EX: Experiential

The Integration Box
Evangelization
Experiential		Enrichment
Ethics

The Integration Box offers a theological and practical framework for enabling constructive dialogue, analysis, critique, and support of the movement and its participants. Indeed, based on early field-testing with people in the marketplace, this framework allows people and groups to locate themselves in one or more quadrants, gaining greater self-awareness, affirmation, freedom, and new respect for other ways of integrating faith and work. This model avoids rigid typologies that put people in strict opposition to one another, making them incompatible. Instead, it shows that Faith at Work participants exhibit a variety of understandings and expressions of integrating faith and work. Moreover, the Integration Box allows space for seemingly unrelated ways of integrating faith and work to find common ground. Indeed, it sometimes brings together in the same quadrant strange bedfellows (such as theological liberals and conservatives), in cases where we might have expected an oppositional or even conflictual relationship.

My findings also suggest that people are predisposed to integrate faith and work in particular ways. This may be a result of church upbringing and reinforcement, personality type, theological teachings, societal conditioning, gender, geography, and corporate culture. For some, the ways of integrating faith and work are conscious and intentional. For others, they are preconscious. For still others, conversion, awakening, or sensitizing must occur in order to move them intentionally into and among the quadrants.

Overall, it appears that use of the Integration Box in the corporate world can bring greater self-awareness, other-awareness, appreciation for theological diversity, and respect for other ways of integrating faith and work.

A Boundary Between Faith and Work?

Building on these theological motifs, a Christian might find fresh and effective ways to engage in the marketplace and to conduct business. But how do we do that, especially in a pluralistic business world where people of many faith traditions — as well as those with none at all — are represented? Is there a boundary between faith and work and, if so, where? If people increasingly want a holistic life, and if research continues to support the benefits of integrating faith and work, how do we accomplish that in a way that is commercially effective, personally authentic, and theologically sound — as well as legally safe and publicly acceptable in a litigious and pluralistic world? Am I suggesting that companies, like certain non-profit organizations, should become faith-based? No, my research and advisory work suggests that, while individual people might be faith-based, such a designation becomes problematic for publicly traded companies. Public companies should seek instead to become “faith-friendly.” A faith-friendly company is friendly to and respectful of all faith traditions. Such an organization recognizes the importance of one’s spiritual identity, the value of religion in ethical and character formation, and encourages the holistic development of its people. Since I coined the term faith-friendly, many corporate leaders have told me it is a helpful concept with which to address an often controversial topic.

The Faith at Work movement can provide a rich source of ethical guidance and spiritual nurture in the development of a modern business ethic. In particular, a business ethic grounded in Christian thinking offers rich, textured, and powerful resources for modern times. It will both nurture and challenge the businessperson to go beyond the legal minimums and expectations of modern business theory. And finally, business ethics will be enriched when companies adopt a faith-friendly policy, thereby allowing employees of all religious orientations to tap into the deepest and most powerful source of ethical guidance — God. Move over Congress, SEC, and Sarbanes-Oxley.

Role of the Clergy

Much of this address has focused on the Christian called to the marketplace who is seeking to integrate pew and profit. The role of the clergy in supporting those called to the workplace is equally vital. There are many ways to describe the central elements of a typical pastor’s job, but common among them are five core areas: (1) Word, sacraments, and prayer; (2) presence and listening; (3) teaching; (4) Christian gatherings for support and outreach; and (5) personal growth and development. In practice these should be interwoven, but for discussion and analysis purposes let us briefly treat them individually.

Each of these forms of ministry can be intentionally reframed to support and encourage those called to the workplace and to bridge this false choice between pew and profit. If clergy develop a hermeneutic of the workplace — that is, a way of interpreting the Bible through the lens of the workplace — their overall ministry to the world of work and the marketplace will be transformed.

• A ministry of Word, sacrament, and prayer, informed by this new hermeneutic, will change the content, illustrations, and tone of preaching and prayers.
• A ministry of presence and listening might motivate pastors to make workplace visits with the same frequency they make hospital visits.
• In their ministry of teaching, pastors might consider convening adult education classes on questions pertaining to the Four Es and the marketplace, not just family or church-life contexts.
• A ministry of Christian gatherings for support and outreach aimed at those in the marketplace might become a vital part of a church’s small group ministry.
• A work-related ministry of personal growth and development will help pastors leave their theological and ecclesiastical enclaves to learn a new vocabulary and reach out more effectively to a new mission field — the workplace.

Pastors who develop a hermeneutic of the marketplace and apply it to these five areas of ministries will minister perhaps for the first time to a place of deep and unattended pain and possibility in their congregation.

To help reinforce the motif of pew and profit, where the word “and” is key, I will close with a reminder of the theological and practical power of another small word: avodah — the Hebrew word for “work” found throughout the Old Testament. Sometimes avad (the verbal root of the word) is translated as “work” — to work in the fields, to labor, to toil. Other times, avad is translated as “worship” — to worship Yahweh, to worship God. And yet other times, the word avad means “service” — to serve. This ancient biblical word still offers wisdom for modern times. Should not our whole life be a form of avodah? Should not our work be a form of worship that honors God and serves neighbor, thus connecting pew and profit?

Notes

1. Ian Mitroff and Elizabeth Denton, A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America: A Hard Look at Spirituality, Religion, and Values in the Workplace (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999); Robert W. Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

2. Fogel, ibid.

3. Jon Pareles, “U2: The Catharsis in the Cathedral,” The New York Times Magazine, 14 November 2004.

4. David W. Miller, “The Faith at Work Movement: Its Growth, Dynamics, and Future” (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton Theological Seminary, 2003).

5. R. Paul Stevens, “The Marketplace: Mission Field or Mission?” CRUX 37/3 (September 2001), 7-16.