Results

When we began our quest for the spirituality of work the question was: why for heavens sake had we—and most everyone we knew—conceded this unnatural separation of spirituality and work?

Our lives, like our friends’, tended toward compartmentalization: work, worship, family, friendship, health, wealth, intellect, sex…

Honestly, these were blinding insights; like searching for something in the dark and all of a sudden the lights come on and it’s more than the eyes can bear. One day, for instance, someone connects the root level of disintegration with the loss of integrity—dis-integration—and BAM! The light comes on and no one makes a move for fear of falling over. Several of us worked in industries where integrity was reduced to regulatory compliance minus whatever the company could get away with. Ethics? Spirituality? You gotta be kidding…

None of us wanted to do business that way. We craved integration, full and thorough, so no part of our lives would ever again seem detached from the rest. We gathered four times a year to study the biblical texts and tell our stories, pledging to create a safe place to describe where we truly were in our work and relationships and spiritual health (as distinct from where we thought we should be).

The process was transforming. Our companies didn’t suddenly emerge as industry leaders, our relational difficulties weren’t instantly ironed out, the money didn’t flow like water but we were changed just the same by the re-integration of our lives. And bit by bit we went deeper than we’d gone before in relationships in biblically informed business practices and in intimacy with God.

It seemed only natural that we would organize our insights on spirituality and work in some kind of guide that others could follow—not a lot of hand-holding; just pounding stakes in the ground and planting flags here and there so people could follow (and improvise around) our trail. We still had our day jobs so the writing took another couple of years back and forth.

It was tough going. Most of us, after all, came from religious backgrounds of one sort or another. Now, having examined the Bible from the position of people in business we had to fight the impulse to reduce what we were learning about spirituality and work to…we might as well say it: Sunday School lessons. Not that there’s anything wrong with Sunday School, but these were the hard won insights of businesspeople. What we were finding out in direct encounters with the biblical text bore little resemblance to our experiences in conventional religious education. Perhaps that’s just our experience; maybe you go to a better Sunday School than most of us.

In any event, we did our best to stay honest to the context of business and commerce as we developed (and continue to develop) what came to be called the Scriptural Roots of Commerce.

Eventually, still keeping our day jobs, we started a company to propagate what we learned the last dozen years—to prove in a business context what we embrace with our minds and believe in our hearts.

We call the company InsideWork

InsideWork is the next step in our quest to reclaim the spirituality of work through hardheaded research, feet-on-the-ground consulting services, collaborative learning designs, and the relentless pursuit of Biblical best practices for business leaders.