Sometime in the mid-90s there was an unexpected up tick in books and magazine articles about workplace spirituality. If you’ve been a business reader for a while, you may have noticed it. Chances are you didn’t hear about it at church.

Despite all this spiritual interest, mainstream Christianity has not been a notable force in the businessperson’s pilgrimage. Traditional mainstream religion, it seems, has failed to deliver on the desire for experiential, personalized ways of knowing God in one’s work.

This is not to say that businesspeople do not consider themselves Christians. Ironically, the majority of church members in mainstream Protestant congregations are middle-class people who spend most of their waking hours at a business or are married to people in business. They are looking for ways to live their Christian beliefs and values at work, as they do at home and at church. Yet when they look to the church for guidance, they find one of two responses: clergy who are indifferent to the idea or who are wildly interested but stumped as to how to begin. As we discovered in our interviews, even deeply faithful Christians in business tend to feel a strong disconnect between their experience of the church or private faith, and the spirit-challenging conditions of the workplace…

— Church on Sunday, Work on Monday: The Challenge of Fusing Christian Values with Business Life, Laura Nash + Scotty McLennan, Jossey-Bass, 2001

Read an interview with Harvard Business School’s Laura Nash.

Buy a copy of Church on Sunday Work on Monday.