Finding Faith in Workplace: Prayer Breakfast Brings 750 to Civic Auditorium
David Siders (Stockton Record, 18 February 2005) link

Faith is not reserved for Sundays, and God cares about what happens in the workplace, a theologian and business professor told about 750 business and community leaders over breakfast Thursday at the Stockton Memorial Civic Auditorium.

“Work can be a calling,” said David Miller, the executive director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture and an assistant professor of business ethics at Yale University.

Miller, once a businessman himself, said his heart and passion is in the marketplace, where a movement is afoot to incorporate faith.

“People are fed up with living a compartmentalized life,” he said.

Oscar Anzaldo, a local agent for New York Life Insurance Co., said after the annual San Joaquin County Leadership Prayer Breakfast that building real relationships with clients is part of selling insurance and financial plans. He said faith in the workplace is not difficult to achieve.

“It’s really got to come from your heart,” he said.

Councilwoman Leslie Baranco Martin said she left work at an engineering company to do more fulfilling work. Martin, a deputy district attorney, said faith in her current job means compassion for victims and “doing the right thing on both sides.”

When Miller chose to study religion, hundreds of businessmen encouraged him. He said one from Hong Kong wrote him that he had money and homes, but that his marriage was falling apart, his son was addicted to drugs and that he himself was likely an alcoholic.

The breakfast was marked by prayers and kind words for local military personnel killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of their family members attended.

David White, the father of Stockton police Sgt. Timothy White, who died in 1990 after being beaten into a coma by a person stopped on a routine traffic violation, prayed, “Lift up these families today, Lord.”

A woman at the rear of the auditorium slipped her hand under the table and held her husband’s hand.