Faith working overtime in some workplaces

By Frank Stirk

Tom Cooper, head of Vancouver's City in Focus.

It is called 'Business by the Book,' and has been ongoing now for about seven years, attracting about 100 people -- about all they can accommodate -- despite almost no promotion except by word-of-mouth. About a third are non-churchgoers.

"There's certain things we've found to really work well to bring the people and keep them coming back," says pastor David Koop. "Being prompt, on time, is really important to them. Getting good value -- a good hot meal and a good speaker for $10, you can't beat that."

Coastal's outreach to the Vancouver business and professional community is not unique. City in Focus, for example, puts on a similar "spiritual oasis" every Wednesday at noon called Faith in the Marketplace.

In fact, every weekday all across the downtown, in boardrooms and clubs, Christians are meeting for fellowship, says CIF executive director Tom Cooper. "A lot of them do [Bible studies]. They do it quietly and sensitively."

Coming alongside them are a small corps of men and women called to encourage and empower Christians in the marketplace. "We're in part there," says Cooper, "just to help people speak to that part of their life: How do you in the world of work live out your faith with integrity?"

For women, finding that help may be harder than for men, as there are maybe only three women they can turn to for one-on-one discipling. One of these is Edie Rittinger.

"Women, typically, if they are married and have children, cannot make it to early morning meetings," she says. "Many of the women I meet and know . . . need to have their lunchtimes to do business meetings. And so it's tough to find a time during the day when it works well for all."

Sometimes the concerns that men and women alike are grappling with have more to do with their families than their workplace. "We had a fellow talk about how his daughter was wayward and how as a businessman he had everything going in the business world, but he lost his daughter," says Koop. "That grabbed a lot of people in the room."

But the burning issue for most is how -- or even if -- they should share their faith with their co-workers. Tim Ernst with The Navigators in Vancouver says he perceives "a fair bit of fear . . . among Christians that I know about waving their flag too high."

While "a lot more" Christians than before are intentional about living out their faith in their professional lives, he says, "there's still some reservation about proclaiming it, simply because the workplace is so radically pluralistic . . . there is no agreement on what is truth, what is ethics. And if you come off as a Christian very strong about making your exclusive truth claims, you get a reaction pretty quickly."

"When Christians in the workplace hear 'evangelism,' they sometimes have two responses," says Shaila Vissar, who ministers to women in the downtown while running a made-in-Vancouver phenomenon known as Alpha in the Workplace.

"One is a fear response of 'You don't know my workplace,' 'This could be career-limiting,' that sort of thing. And the second thing is they feel guilt, because they think, 'Here I am in the workplace. I should be sharing my faith.'"

Yet Cooper is convinced that the marketplace environment is less hostile to Christianity than it was some years ago. "Because of the multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious community of Canada," he insists, "more than ever, people are relaxed to talk to Christians. . . . I think there's far less Christian-bashing. . . . We're beyond that."

"And I think," says Ernst, "that Christians are learning to operate within that mindset with increasing comfort and maybe some sophistication, whereby we still articulate our truth-claims, but we do it in an attitude of humility and servanthood."

But Paul Williams, who teaches marketplace theology and leadership at Regent College, questions whether this more accepting attitude will last. "It could easily go back the other way and become hostile again. . . . In fact, I think it's quite likely that it will," he warns.

"What the secularists have believed for a long time is that religion would inevitably decline. Now they're finding that . . . religion is in fact resurgent, even in Western industrialized countries. And for many of them, that's a very terrifying or at least a very worrying thing."

Williams also doubts whether Vancouver's ethnic and religious mix has necessarily made Christianity more acceptable in the marketplace. He suspects it has more to do with what he calls the region's "extreme post-modern relativism."

"The west coast of Canada is more open to spiritual things in general," he says. "It's certainly more open to Christianity at a surface level of 'anything spiritual is good' . . . compared with other business centres, such as London, New York or Paris, which are much more rationalist in their business culture, yet also a lot more culturally and ethnically diverse."

No one seems to disagree, however, that most of the churches these businesspeople attend are not teaching them a theology of work-to see their work as part of the mission of God in the world.

So instead of pastors fostering in them "a work ethic of excellence and creativity and innovation," says Williams, "too many Christians are . . . being taught a very dualistic theology, in which the only way you can serve Christ in your workplace is you go in and try and evangelize people on your break.

"And that doesn't make for good workers, because they see their work content as irrelevant to serving God, and they see the people around them as a means to an end. So they're not actually loving them for themselves."

"That's absolutely true," says Ernst. "Businesspeople who have been sitting so long [in church] without hearing a lot of connections to their Monday world, they don't even ask for it anymore."

"They need to be mandated that in fact on Monday morning, they re-enter the mission field. Pastors just need to go visit people . . . in the workplace . . . and then do all that they can to authenticate these guys as missionaries, saying, 'How can I help you carry the kingdom of God into your place of work?'"

What Christians need to realize, says Vissar, is that the place to start has to be with trying to befriend an employee or co-worker. "Building relationships. . . are the first stages of evangelism that lead to a more natural invitation to come to something or to hear the gospel. . . . But we're still clear and we're still bold."

Their faith, says Cooper, also needs to be seen by others as "authentic"-a faith that is manifested both in the quality of their work and in their on-the-job relationships. "If you exude the love of Christ, the sensitivity of Christ, the care and passion of Christ, . . . as long as you do your work well, your character will have many ways to show itself."

And until Christians learn how to be on mission in the workplace, they will not be truly effective in showing their co-workers the love of Christ.

Recently in Business Life magazine, Paul Richardson, the president of Christian Business Ministries Canada, wrote that "millions of Canadians [are] trying to find the answer to the wrong question. How can I be successful in business? How can I get rich? How can I live a life of pleasure? How can I become famous?

"And all the while, Jesus' words are being ignored. 'Whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it' (Mark 8:35)."

But that could be about to change. Next month in Toronto, a coalition of Christian leaders known as the Workplace Transformation Group is hosting a first-ever Canadian conference "for men and women in the marketplace who have a desire to better understand and fulfill their great purpose in the workplace."

February 22/2007