Recently, I was visiting my family in the East and had an interesting discussion with my 29-year-old niece. As a ready-to-wear fashion stylist for Boscov’s, she works long hours with models to create attractive images for web pages, videos, or anywhere imagery is needed. While she very much enjoys her work, she shared with me that, at times, she has difficulty seeing a larger purpose in what she does on a daily basis.
She also shared that she found it hard to see how her faith was connected to her work. As a Christian, she yearns to understand how to integrate her work life with her faith life. For this occasional book review column, I chose a title from the Work and Faith Collection that outlines the history of the Faith at Work (FAW) movement, a movement committed to working out how to attend to the exact issue my niece deals with: integrating faith and work.
Written by David Miller, project director of the Princeton University Faith & Work Initiative, God at Work lays out the history of the FAW movement. With his combined business experience and theological training, Miller was the perfect person to write this text. He spent 16 years in international business and finance before earning master of divinity and doctoral degrees.
For anyone desiring to gain a fuller understanding of the FAW movement — including businesspeople, church members, and clergy — this is an important primer.
The first chapter (of eight) provides explanations and working definitions for various important terms and ideas regarding the FAW movement. Miller explains that while the word “faith” in “Faith at Work” may broadly include major religions such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, his book focuses on the Protestant expression of Christianity.
Miller defines his use of the word “work” as focusing on jobs in which financial remuneration is involved. He finishes up Chapter 1 by offering a rationale for his book, outlining the historical nature of the disconnect people have felt between their daily work and their faith. As part of his description, he introduces the reader to terms such as “Sunday-Monday gap,” “bifurcated lives,” and “sacred vs. secular,” which aptly describe the sense of disconnect my niece alluded to during our recent conversation.
Chapters 2 through 4 cover the history of the FAW movement, which Miller divides into three “waves.” Wave One is “The Social Gospel Era” (c. 1890s–1945). Wave Two is “The Ministry of the Laity Era” (c. 1946–85). And Wave Three is the “Faith at Work Era” (c. 1985–present). Miller provides tightly focused historical descriptions and explanations of the “escalating social problems, Marxist ideology, and waning biblical influence” that led to the birth of the FAW movement. He points to important historical developments (economic, social, technological, and religious in nature) that worked to disturb the ground and then plant seeds for the FAW movement to grow. Miller also points to people (William Diehl and Howard Butt) and special interest groups (the Full Gospel Businessmen’s Fellowship International and the Fellowship of Christian Companies International) whose voices were significant in the FAW movement.
Chapters 5 and 7 provide more practical application. In chapter 5, Miller provides a strong challenge to the church and the theological academy regarding the inadequate response to those finding solace in the FAW movement. By citing a plethora of empirical research, he provides evidence of the church’s neglect in addressing the “growing needs and concerns of workers, especially businesspeople.” Miller goes on to say that laypeople “are left to fend for themselves theologically or turn to secular sources for ethical guidance and spiritual nurturance about matters pertaining to their daily ministry and the environment in which they work.” He then puts the blame for the church’s neglect squarely on the shoulders of seminaries. Miller asserts that by teaching a heavy dose of Christian socialism and liberation theology, the preponderance of seminaries graduate pastors who are ill-equipped to meet the needs of their congregants experiencing the Sunday-Monday gap. Rather, Miller says, the perception “being sent from the pulpit is that businesspeople are greedy, and captive to an oppressive system.”
In Chapter 7, Miller proposes an interesting framework outlining language to use as an organizing principal for working to integrate people’s faith lives with their work. Returning to terms he mentions in Chapter 4, he offers an explication of the Four E’s: Ethics, Experience, Evangelism, and Enrichment. He also proposes use of the Integration Box (the Four E’s) by the business community and churches. Use of this framework, he asserts, would be helpful in moving these groups beyond divisive and limited ways of thinking about the integration of work and faith.
In the final chapter, Miller asserts that with the growing significance of the social, economic, and ethical aspects of the FAW, there are implications for the “academy, the church, and the corporate world.” In the remainder of the chapter, Miller posits a number of proposals for the academy and clergy to consider. One of the ideas he recommends is that seminaries should develop “centers or institutes dedicated to theological, ethical, and pedagogical reflection on faith at work.”
The Center for Biblical and Theological Education (housed in Seattle Pacific Seminary) and the Center for Integrity in Business (housed in the School of Business, Government, and Economics) recently combined forces and received a large grant to establish 20 church-based communities of practice across the Puget Sound. These will be made up of “marketplace leaders, pastors, and seminarians who will wrestle with issues of work, business, and economics.” Further, students interested in studying business and theology at Seattle Pacific University have the option to get a dual degree: an MBA/MA in Theology, or an MBA/MDiv.
Returning to my niece’s story: In an effort to help her sort through her thoughts regarding the integration of her work and faith, I located a copy of Dorothy Sayers’s essay Why Work? (something a bit more accessible than Miller’s tome) and sent it to her. After reading the essay, she emailed me saying that Sayers’s phrase “secular vs. sacred” struck a chord with her.
In God at Work, Miller writes that during the 1980s “workers and professionals of all kinds no longer want to live bifurcated lives, where work and spiritual identity are compartmentalized into disconnected and unrelated spheres.” Here we are, almost 30 years later, and workers are still yearning for the same thing. My niece wanted to know that she was not living a “bifurcated life,” where the sacred and the secular were far removed from each other.
Review by Cindy Strong, Business and Economics Library liaison