WWJD – What would Jesus do? Most people are familiar with the popular Evangelical movement that sprang up in the ‘90s, inviting people to ask this question about daily life decisions. Many people are aware that this movement was rooted in Charles Sheldon’s best-selling novel, “In His Steps,” written in 1896, featuring a minster who encourages parishioners to ask this question throughout their daily lives for a year. What many may not be aware of is the event that transformed Sheldon life and led him to write the book.

How could your local church better help people connect the worlds of faith and work? Are their things being done in your congregation, or in other congregations, that we all might learn from? What obstacles do you see in having the courageous conversations Knapp describes? What thoughts do you have about how we might create congregations with a more inclusive narrative? This being the last post, what do you make of Knapp’s thesis for this book?

Today we continue with the eighth and final chapter of John Knapp’s, How the Church Fails Businesspeople (and what can be done about it), titled “The Church’s Potential.” Knapp summarizes for us what he thinks our next steps are. He begins by recounting the events that shaped Charles Sheldon’s life.

Knapp explains that Charles Sheldon was minister in Topeka, KS, in 1889. He wanted to make his ministry relevant to the everyday lives of his parishioners. He asked to be relieved of all but his preaching duties for twelve weeks. He spent those twelve weeks going to every part of town to learn how people lived and made a living. He spent a week as a homeless person looking for work. He hung out with streetcar workers on the job. He attended classes at the local college. He spent time in the African-American part of town. He lived with railroad workers, firemen, brakemen, switchmen, yardmen, and engineers. He spent time with lawyers and doctors. He spent time with businessmen in real estate, accounting, dry goods, hardware, and other fields. He ran a printing press. [Read more...]

I’m so grateful for this excellent series by Michael Kruse. Hope you all appreciate his fair-minded summaries. I believe one of the biggest issues in what Christians say and hope about politics and economics rests upon flimsy understandings of how economies work. Michael Kruse has been a teacher for many of us.

How do we create coherence between faith and work? John Knapp has explained how important rethinking vocation is, and how important it is that we carefully consider a moral theology of work. Today, Chapter 7 of How the Church Fails Businesspeople (and what can be done about it), Knapp describes a workplace awakening.

Knapp suggests that an awakening to faith and work issues has emerged in the past ten to twenty years. But even prior to that, there were people who were surfacing the issues. Lutheran steel company executive William Diehl was writing books on this topic in the 1980s. Peter Hammond, connected with Diehl, became influential in Intervarsity with their Ministry in Daily Life work. There were people like Howard E. Butt, Jr., originally connected with the Billy Graham Crusades, who founded the Laity Lodge and an online ministry to businesspeople called TheHighCalling.org.

Knapp lays out several ways people are trying to integrate faith and work. Which ones do you find hopeful and which ones give you concern? Why? Are there other avenues of finding coherence that you did not see mentioned here? What do you think the institutional church might learn from the faith-at- work movement?

My sense is that a move toward more serious theological reflection began about this time. Miroslav Volf published “Work in the Spirit: Toward a Theology of Work,” in 1991, David Krueger published “Keeping Faith at Work,” in 1994, and R. Paul Stevens began publishing a string of books on work and faith, most notably for me, “The Other Six Days: Vocation Work and Ministry in Biblical Perspective,” in 1999. Other authors have emerged in the past decade but I still have the sense that interest in this topic in the theological academy is relegated to a small minority. The real change has been coming from Christians outside the institutions of the church. [Read more...]

Today we continue with John Knapp’s How the Church Fails Businesspeople (and what can be done about it). We turn now to Chapter 6, “A Moral Theology of Work.”

The business environment can often present significant ethical challenges. Where might we begin as we think about ethical behavior? Knapp suggests a good place to start is with Micah 6:8:

“He has told you, O mortal, what is good;

and what does the Lord require of you

but to do justice, and to love kindness,

and to walk humbly with your God?”

Is it possible to be competitive in business while loving justice and kindness, and walking humbly with God, while grounded in love and responsibility?

What would it take to create the five-fold moral community Knapp describes?

Is Micah and the Jesus Creed the place to ground our ethical reflection or would you frame things differently?

[Read more...]

Real estate people say real estate is about three things: location, location, location. Well I suspect integrating business and faith is also about three things: vocation, vocation, vocation. “Vocation” comes from the Latin vocare meaning “to call.” “God calls each of us into the divine relationship, and we respond to this call through the living of our lives, including our work lives.” (89) You might say that vocation helps us understand our location within God’s mission.

Today we move to the second part of the John Knapp’s How the Church Fails Businesspeople (and what can be done about it). The first four chapters have explored the nature of the divide between work and faith. The last four chapters invite us to think about how we might find coherence. Chapter 5 “Rethinking Christian Vocation” is the topic for today.

Does Knapp’s description of vocation match your understanding of the term? What impact does this understanding of vocation have for the sacred/secular, eternal/temporal, and public/private dualities we discussed last week? What do you think about the Naaman story and the idea that we can be whole working in a less than perfect business?

Knapp opens with a story about a man who told him that, “God called me out of AT&T” into a “business as mission” enterprise that would aid the poor in emerging nations. I’ve heard many similar stories myself. But Knapp wants to know, is it possible that God calls some people into AT&T and to remain there? Do we have a theology that would support this idea?

Knapp reminds us that:

“The Scriptures affirm even the most basic forms of work, not necessarily because they yield individual wealth or even happiness, but because they nourish life and prevent suffering (e.g., Gen 3:19; Prov. 14:23; Prov. 20:13; Eccles. 9:10; 2 Thess. 3:10-11).” (88) [Read more...]

From Mona Charen, in her brief sketch of Arthur C. Brooks.

The value that connects ownership and possessions to labor, hard work and one’s ambition is eroding.

The American work ethic can be eroded though, and will be, Brooks argues, by an expanding welfare state. It isn’t just that people who believe life to be unfair demand that governments “equalize” outcomes. It’s that once governments undertake to equalize things, people begin to believe that success is more a matter of luck than of hard work. A 2005 study of 29 countries found that where taxes are high and wealth is redistributed through social programs, people are much more likely to believe that success is a result of luck.

When government confiscates from some to give to others, the givers are affected. Or maybe they start out that way. Redistributionists are a lot less charitable than free-marketeers. A 1996 study found that people who disagreed that “government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality,” gave four times as much to charity as those who agreed. And those who disagreed “strongly” gave eleven times as much. [Read more...]

The Godfather movie trilogy has one of my favorites takes on ethics with business: (insert best Brando voice here), “It’s not personal. It’s business.” And then there is the infamous tell-all Mayflower Madam from the 1980s, Sydney Biddle Barrows, who said, “I ran the wrong kind of business, but I did it with integrity.” We chuckle at such rationalizations but it isn’t only mafiosos and madams that feel the need to compartmentalize. Many people in business feel the same pressure.

Have you ever experienced role strain in your work life? Have you ever caught yourself justifying questionable behavior by convincing yourself you were “playing by the rules?” Is there some sense in which ethics might play out differently in work environments versus other contexts?

What impact, for good or ill, has your work life had on shaping your identity?

We continue today with John Knapp’s How the Church Fails Businesspeople (and what can be done about it). The first two chapters looked at how both business and the church contribute to the faith and work divide. The third chapter looked at the church’s ambivalence about money. Chapter four, “Divided Worlds, Divided Lives,” rounds out the first part of the book where Knapp has been describing how faith and work became worlds apart. The final four chapters will explore ways we might move toward coherence. The challenge explored today is how to live as if Jesus is Lord in a compartmentalized world? [Read more...]

This series on the church and business people is by Michael Kruse. I hope every pastor reads this.

Henri Nouwen once observed that when people came to him for counseling, most of them would open up and readily discuss the most intimate details of their sex lives. But when he began probing about personal finances, body postures became closed and people would want to know why he was getting so personal. Money is important to us.

Today we continue our discussion of John Knapp’s How the Church Fails Businesspeople (and what can be done about it). We are looking at Chapter Three, “Uneasy Bedfellows: Money and the Church.”

How do you reconcile the historic ambiguity about wealth and money? Going back to at least Calvin we have the realization that we are not in a zero-sum game but that wealth can be grown. Does this matter for how we see wealth? Why do you think we in the church find it so hard to wrestle theologically with money and wealth?

Dr. Knapp believes the divide between businesspeople and the church is rooted in a related issue: the Christian community’s longstanding ambivalence toward money. This is important because work and money are inextricably connected in our culture. Money and wealth are the means by which we “keep score” in our society, not just in terms of how we rate possessions but, unfortunately, too often it is how we value people. Money and wealth have been a central concern of Judeo-Christian ethical teaching from the start. In this chapter, Knapp gives us a brief survey of “Money and the Church” over the ages.

The Bible

Frankly, the Bible offers us a seemingly conflicted perspective. Wealth is presented as a blessing on some occasions while on other occasions we are warned not to desire wealth, even to renounce it. Knapp recounts several passages dealing with wealth in the Old Testament and sees three common themes: [Read more...]

This post is the first in a series by this blog’s good friend, Michael Kruse, who has his own very active blog.

Tina Turner once asked “What’s love got to do with it?” Today, many businesspeople are asking “What’s God got to do with it?” For some, the question is a facetious way of saying that God really has nothing to do with business, but for many Christians it is a very real question … a question for which the church is of little help.

What barriers do you see to living out your faith in the workplace?

Is it unrealistic to expect that the church could aid businesspeople with the decisions they make?

Last December Eerdmans published a book called How the Church Fails Businesspeople (and what can be done about it) written by Dr. John Knapp. Dr. Knapp is the founding director of the Frances Marlin Mann Center for Ethics and Leadership at Samford University. He has also done adjunct work at Columbia Theological Seminary. (He is also a fellow PCUSAer.) Over the next several days I will blog my way through his book and I invite you to join me for conversation.

A central piece of Knapp’s book is a survey his doctoral students at Columbia Seminary gave to 238 people from all walks of life. There were five questions: [Read more...]