blond avenger

Working Knowledge senior editor Martha Lagace to Harvard’s Laura Nash: “What is an example of a business issue that someone could start to discuss with his or her theologian?”

An interesting way to frame the question…do you have a theologian?

Laura Nash: Let me back up and give you an example of the kind of thing that might cause them to say, “My religion is of relevance here.” But then whether they should talk directly with their theologian is an open question.

Say you are in a negotiation for a large contract. If you get the contract, the company’s going to grow quite a bit. But you’ve had to put a lot of resources into the construction of this deal.

And it’s risky, very risky. The terms of that deal begin to look unethical to you from any number of standpoints—layoffs; cost-cutting to the point where you know you’re going to stretch your work force very, very thin; quality tradeoffs that may mean that you’re not going to be delivering on what you say, and there may even be a safety factor. Honesty inside the marketplace in terms of how you’re representing yourself and what you can deliver.
All these things are typical stresses in the business environment.

Where would religion fit in there? Well, religion could fit in a number of ways. One is, first of all, the personal perspective, that sacred self: “I am more than the deal.” It’s really easy to forget that you are something more than the deal when you get in these high-stress situations.

Sometime in the 1990s there was an unexpected uptick in books and magazine articles about workplace spirituality. If you’ve been a business reader for a while, you probably noticed it. Chances are you didn’t hear about it at church.

To be clear, we (meaning InsideWork) don’t think church leaders are particularly hostile toward business as a category. It’s just that, having looked around quite a bit over the decade and a half since we first started a serious search for biblical wisdom on business, we haven’t found many church leaders who have particularly well-developed theologies of work and commerce. We are not the only ones who notice this.

Laura Nash again, with her cowriter, Stanford’s Scotty McLennan, from the first page of their book, Church on Sunday, Work on Monday: The Challenge of Fusing Christian Values with Business Life (Jossey-Bass, 2001):

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…

I recall taking courage from a dorm room poster at a time, circa 1970, when things seemed terribly broken to me. The poster read:

When the followers lead, the leaders will follow.

The 501(c)3 church in the West may be capable of turning the ship around to recover what’s been lost in understanding all those hours we spend working every week. But—educated guess here—I wouldn’t count on seeing that any time like soon or anything like fast.

So let’s not wait around for someone smart to tell us what to do. Let’s work the problem between us—peer to peer—in the world of business spiritually engaged. Let’s do our homework in the biblical text and sharpen each other day by day and learn, with God’s help, the old fashioned way: by doing.

Of course we’ll go overboard from time to time; people like us always do. But if we’re faithful and persistent; if we correct our course every time we realize we’re drifting—after all, copping a line from R.W. Emerson, “The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks”—I have a feeling the experts will catch up when they’re able.

And if not—if they never catch up—we’ll have learned to practice the presence of God in the marketplace by practicing the presence of God in the marketplace…we’ll have learned to sail by sailing.