Kruse Kronicle

Dying and Booming Industries in the Next Decade

Business Insider: 12 US Industries That Will Collapse In The Next Decade

The long decline of American manufacturing isn't over yet.

Fifteen of the 20 fastest shrinking industries are in the manufacturing sector, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report on job growth from 2010 to 2020.

Government jobs, especially in the postal service, are also getting axed. ...

• Glass and glass product manufacturing
• Metalworking machinery manufacturing
• Miscellaneous manufacturing
• Federal government jobs except for the Postal Service and electric utilities
• Pesticide, fertilizer, and otheragricultural chemical manufacturing
• Metal ore mining
• Pipeline transportation
• Computer and peripheral equipment manufacturing
• Communications equipment manufacturing
• Postal service
• Leather and hide tanning and finishing, and other leather and allied product manufacturing
• Apparel knitting mills

14 US Industries That Will Boom In The Next Decade

There are lots of jobs in America if you know where to look.

The fastest-growing industries — according to a 2012 Bureau of Labor Statistics report — include ones tied to the aging population, like home health care services and offices of health care practitioners.

High tech industries are also doing well, and there's even a steady comeback happening in construction.

Between 2010 and 2020, the BLS projects an overall gain of 20.5 million jobs in America. ...

• Community and vocational rehabilitation services
• Facilities support services
• Other professional, scientific, and technical services
• Commercial and industrial machinery and equipment rental and leasing
• Construction
• Software publishers
• Offices of health practitioners
• Outpatient, laboratory, and other ambulatory care services
• Cement and concrete product manufacturing
• Computer systems design and related services
• Veneer, plywood, and engineered wood product manufacturing
• Management, scientific, and technical consulting services
• Individual and family services
• Home health care services

Business as Calling

Last summer I had the privilege of meeting Dr. Thom Thomson, professor of finance at the University of Texas. Dr. Thomson was in Toronto a week ago preaching at his brother's church, Every Nation, Greater Toronto. The topic was "Business as Calling." This is a wonderful presentation!  You can find the 30 sermon at Faith & the Marketplace Part 2: BUSINESS AS CALLING or by clicking below. For some reason my player indicates it will 78 minutes long but it is actually about 30 minutes. (Disclosure: At 11:40 into the sermon the author of the controversial Facebook post was me. I was intrigued that Dr. Thomson picked up on this post because I have privately used the responses to to the post as an example of the deep cynicism toward business held by so many theological professionals.):

Here is the sermon setup:

A leading personal finance magazine published its list of the 10 best fields of study based on the potential they had of offering a steady, well-paying career. Some of you may already be pursuing these studies or are in these business areas, such as Pharmacy and Pharmacology, Nursing, Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Management Information Systems and Treatment Therapy Professions.  As we read the New Testament in the Bible, we come across other popular professions: Jesus was a carpenter. Paul was a tentmaker. And Peter was a fisherman. All noble business pursuits providing a valuable service to the community and offering a means to make a good living. Our city – Toronto – is built on business. So how does faith enter the equation? Does it have a place? This week Dr. Thomas Thomson, a finance professor at the University of Texas, continues our series by giving us a fresh perspective on how faith can positively affect business and how business can be a worthy calling. Join us, and bring a friend, to Innis Town Hall at 10:30 a.m.

Six Ideas on How to Lead Congregations to Integrate Work and Discipleship

The High Calling: Six Ideas on How to Lead Congregations to Integrate Work and Discipleship

“How can we create a congregation where work and discipleship are truly integrated?” This is a question I am hearing more often, even though much has been written about a theology of work in recent years.

Pastors and church leaders are looking for a programmatic strategy. I don’t think there is one. ...

This is a piece I wrote for the High Calling. They posted it yesterday. What do you think? What ideas do you have?

The Benefits of Servant Leadership

Harvard Business School's "Working Knowledge" has a post, Why Isn’t ‘Servant Leadership’ More Prevalent?, which is a bit strange because the article never addresses the question. However, I did think this was interesting:

Now it appears that a group of organizational psychologists, led by Adam Grant, are attempting to measure the impact of servant leadership on leaders, not just those being led. Grant describes research in his recent book, Give and Take, that suggests that servant leaders are not only more highly regarded than others by their employees and not only feel better about themselves at the end of the day but are more productive as well. His thesis is that servant leaders are the beneficiaries of important contacts, information, and insights that make them more effective and productive in what they do even though they spend a great deal of their time sharing what they learn and helping others through such things as career counseling, suggesting contacts, and recommending new ways of doing things.

Further, servant leaders don't waste much time deciding to whom to give and in what order. They give to everyone in their organizations. Grant concludes that giving can be exhausting but also self-replenishing. So in his seemingly tireless efforts to give, described in the book, Grant makes it a practice to give to everyone until he detects a habitual "taker" that can be eliminated from his "gift list."

The Active Life - 4. "The Woodcarver": A Model for Right Action. Parker Palmer

This week we are looking at chapter 4, “’The Woodcarver’: A Model for Right Action,” in Parker Palmer’s book, The Active Life. Palmer is drawing on another story by the ancient Taoist philosopher, Chuang Tzu.

 

The Woodcarver.

 

Khing, the master carver, made a bell stand

Of prescious wood. When it was finished,

All who saw it were astounded. The said it must be

The work of spirits.

The Prince of Lu said to the master carver:

“What is your secret?”

 

Khling replied: “I am only a workman:

I have no secret. There is only this:

When I began to think about the work you commanded

I guarded my spirit, did not expend it

On trifles, that were no to the point.

I fasted in order to set

My heart at rest.

After three days fasting, I had forgotten gain and success.

After five days

I had forgotten criticism.

After seven days

I had forgotten my body

With all its limbs.

 

“By this time all thought of your Highness

And of the court had faded away.

All that might distract me from the work

Had vanished.

I was collected in the single thought

Of the bell stand.

 

“Then I went to the forest

To see the trees in their own natural state.

When the right tree appeared before my eyes,

The bell stand also appeared in it, clearly, beyond doubt.

All I had to do was to put forth my hand

And begin.

 

“If I had not met this particular tree

There would have been

No bell stand at all.

 

“What happened?

My own collected thought

Encountered the hidden potential in the wood;

From this live encounter came the work

Which you ascribe to the spirits. (55-56)

 Palmer suspects that many people will find this story a bit on the romantic side. Does it really apply to our contemporary work world?

Many people feel hampered by the hierarchies in which we often must work, by institutional structures that curtail the independence that we think we need to do our creative best. But few people work in a setting as demanding as the woodcarver’s. … When I ask Chinese scholars what would have happened if Khing had failed to produce a bell stand acceptable to the prince, they usually answer with a sweeping movement of the forefinger across the front of the throat. (57)

Few of us work under such demanding circumstances and yet the woodcarver seems to us to take on odd approach in completing his task. Palmer writes that after years of reflection on this story he sees four “critical junctures” in the story where an element of work is revealed that we can learn from. “The four elements are motives, skills and gifts, ‘the other,’ and results.” (58) Palmer unpacks these four elements during the rest of the chapter.

Motives

Each action has a motive behind it. Khing is not making the bell stand out of some whimsical desire to create but in response to a command by the prince. He must do this to survive. This may not be the most desirable motivation for action but it is what is. However, once the action is set in motion, Khing has the freedom to choose how he will complete his task. He begins by fasting to cleanse himself of all the destructive pressures and motivations that will hinder him from authentically engaging his task. By forgetting the details of his present context he was able to re-member … join back together the authentic pieces of his identity … and act out of who he truly was. Palmer writes:

 … If we are to transcend the motives and context that so often limit and distort our action, we must enter into our versions of fasting, forgetting, and dying. (64)

As I read this section my mind kept going to this passage in the Bible:

Col 3:22-24

Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything, not only while being watched and in order to please them, but wholeheartedly, fearing the Lord. Whatever your task, put yourselves into it, as done for the Lord and not for your masters, since you know that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward; you serve the Lord Christ.  NRSV

R. Paul Stevens notes that ministry is not defined by what we do but rather by who we serve. It is critical to continually “re-member” our identity as servants of Christ in the face of a world that endlessly seeks to dismember us with other motives.

Skills and Gifts.

Khing resists the adulation thrust upon him for his work and thereby the temptation to unreflectively throw himself into his task. His skill is not superhuman. His workmanship comes from experience, practice, and awareness. People often give such accolades (“the work of the spirits”) to an accomplished craftsman because ascribing high quality of work to supernatural sources frees them of reflecting on how poorly devoted they have been to their own development. Khing is not letting others off the hook.

Palmer goes on to reflect on a distinction between innate abilities we possess and skills we have learned. He writes:

The skills we are most aware of possessing are often those we have acquired only through long hours of study and practice, at considerable financial or personal cost. Precisely because these skills once cost us effort to acquire, and still cost us effort to employ, we are acutely aware of owning them. Ironically, these self-conscious skills are often not our leading strengths; if they were, they would not be so effortful. But they are our strengths upon which we sometimes build our identities and our careers – though we build on an anxious, uncertain foundation. Meanwhile, our native, instinctive gifts either languish unused and unappreciated or get used unconsciously without being named and claimed. (66)

Concerning the woodcarver, Palmer observes:

… the woodcarver possesses several other gifts [other than technical woodcarver skills], all of which are essential to the mastery he demonstrates: the capacity to wait patiently for insight to emerge, the capacity to trust in the outcomes of uncertain process, the capacity to take risks under pressure, the capacity to speak his truth even when it is not what people want to hear. (67)

To discover our innate abilities, Palmer suggests we might want to reflect on our earliest memories as a child and remember how we spent our time. What things brought us pleasure and what things we could not abide? By going back to early memories of ourselves we can recapture what we naturally did before we were socialized to conform to particular norms or to ground our identity in acquired skills. I was counseled to do this a few years ago. I think the exercise was one of the most important acts of self-discovery I have ever done.

The Other

Action always involves an “other,” whether other people or other objects. “Right action requires knowledge of the other’s nature, which means knowledge of its potentials and limits, of what it can and cannot do.” (70)

In this section I think Palmer is wrestling with a polarity. We are not intended to leave the world untouched in a pristine primitive state but neither are we to treat the “other” as only raw material to be shaped for utilitarian purposes. In this sense, I’m reminded of Darrell Cosden (Theology of Work) who reminds us that the natural order is simultaneously the raw material out of which we fashion artifacts and also our home. Embracing either pole without the other is dehumanizing. Our human existence is one of correctly discerning how we work in harmony with other, even as we reshape it.

Results

Palmer does not deny that achieving results are important but he pushes back against the idea that the only meaningful, or even primary, thing is the results.

“… As long as ‘effectiveness’ is the ultimate standard by which we judge our actions, we will act only toward ends we are sure we can achieve. People who undertake projects of real breadth and depth are very unlikely to be “effective,” since effectiveness is measured by short-term results (never mind the fact that such people may be creating cultural legacies by their “failures”). But people with small visions will win the effectiveness awards, since those projects are so insignificant that they can almost always ‘succeed’ (never mind the fact that they contribute nothing of real merit to the commonweal). (75)

Palmer tells of a friend who said, “’I have never asked myself if I was being effective, but only if I was being faithful.’” (76) But Palmer goes on to add:

Again, results are not irrelevant. We rightly care about outcomes; we have to live with them, and being accountable for them is part of right action. But to make results the primary measure of action is a sure path to either inanity or insanity. The only standard that can guide and sustain us in action worth taking is whether the action corresponds to the reality of the situation, including the reality of our own inward nature.

The paradox is that faithful action does get results. …  (78-79)

Finally, Palmer reminds us the when we act we are not only shaping the “other” but we are also shaping ourselves.

 

Questions

Do you feel trapped in your work, compelled to do work that may not be your first choice or work for which your employer is seeking to motivate you in ways that dismember your true identity? What do you think of Palmer’s idea of “re-membering” ourselves?

Have you ever deeply reflected on your childhood to discover what things brought you pleasure or dissatisfaction? What does such reflection tell you about the innate abilities God has given you?

It what ways do you experience a tension between seeing the world as raw material and as home that nourishes us?

How have you seen the tension between results and faithfulness played out in your own life?

Previous/Next

Why Tim Keller Wants You to Stay in That Job You Hate

Christianity Today: Why Tim Keller Wants You to Stay in That Job You Hate

There are few better places in the world where Tim Keller could write a book about career and calling. "New York City is a place where people live in order to work," says the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan and author most recently of Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Work (Dutton). "They basically live more in their work than in their neighborhoods. That . . . means that if you start talking about work, you get right at their hearts."

In a recent sit-down conversation with This Is Our City executive producer Andy Crouch, Keller explained why he wanted to write a more comprehensive book about faith and work, how he learned to answer congregants' questions about their work, and what Redeemer has done to equip laypeople to live into their vocations outside the church.

Andy: What's been missing from faith-and-work books that Every Good Endeavor was designed to address?

Tim: When I read faith-and-work books, they tended to pass by each other. I had the sense that they were drawing on different streams of thought, maybe different biblical or historical themes. I tend to be a complexifier. I like to hold the different biblical themes in tension. I got the sense that most books on faith and work tended to isolate a certain idea. This book is trying to bring the different streams together.

What streams of thoughts have been most missing when we talk about faith and work?

It depends on who you're talking about. It seems to me the evangelical tradition tends to talk a lot about how faith essentially spiritually helps you deal with the troubles and the stresses of work. You need help to face challenges.

Mainline churches tend to put more emphasis on social justice and basically did a critique of capitalism early on, so whenever the mainline churches or ecumenical movement did faith-and-work stuff, it was usually critiquing the market, not "how's your heart?"

The Lutheran stream emphasizes that all work is God's work. Worldview doesn't matter. You make a good pair of shoes, then you're doing God's work, because work is God's way of caring for creation.

The Calvinist stream was more like yes, it's not just you are caring for creation through work, but you are shaping it. and therefore your beliefs have an impact.

When you put those four streams together, I think they're very comprehensive. If you isolate them from each other, they can create idiosyncrasies at best and imbalances at worst. ...

The Truth About Entrepreneurs: Twice As Many Are Over 50 than Under 25

PBS: The Truth About Entrepreneurs: Twice As Many Are Over 50 than Under 25

... Myths abound about the young entrepreneurs who dreamed up crazy ideas while in their dorm room, raised millions of dollars in venture capital, and started billion-dollar businesses. But these are just the outliers. The typical entrepreneur is more like Albert -- a middle-aged professional who learns about a market need and starts a company with his own savings.

Research that my team completed in 2009 determined that the average age of a successful entrepreneur in high-growth industries such as computers, health care, and aerospace is 40. Twice as many successful entrepreneurs are over 50 as under 25; and twice as many, over 60 as under 20. The vast majority -- 75 percent -- have more than six years of industry experience and half have more than 10 years when they create their startup. Nearly 70 percent start their companies to capitalize on business ideas that they have -- which they see as a way to build wealth. ...

Gene Veith on Vocation

Intercollegiate Review: How to Find Your Vocation in College - Gene Veith

... These are all struggles about your vocation. That word has become a synonym for “job,” so that colleges debate the extent to which higher education should be primarily vocational training or whether it should have higher goals, such as cultivating the intellect. But vocation is simply the Latinate word for “calling.” It is one of those theological words—like inspiration, revelation, mission, and vision—that has been taken over by the corporate world and drained of its meaning. The idea is that what you do for a living can be a calling. From God. That He has made you in a certain way and given you certain talents, opportunities, and inclinations. He then calls you to certain tasks, relationships, and experiences.

Your job is only a part of that, and sometimes not the most important part. We have vocations in the family (being a child, getting married, becoming a parent) and in the society (being a citizen, being a friend).  There are also vocations in the church (pastor, layperson), but even if you don’t believe in religion, the vocations are operative. Not only that, according to Martin Luther, the great theologian of vocation, God works through vocation, including the work of people who do not believe in Him. God gives us our daily bread by means of farmers, millers, bakers, and the person who served you your last meal. God creates new life by means of mothers and fathers. He heals by means of doctors, nurses, and pharmacists.  He protects us by means of police officers, judges, and the military callings.  He creates works of beauty and meaning by the talents He has given to artists.

The purpose of every vocation—in the workplace, the family, the church, the society—is to love and serve our neighbors. These are the “good works” that we are given to do. That may sound idealistic. Surely in our participation in the economy we are motivated by our enlightened self-interest. And yet it is surely true that if we are not helping someone by the goods or services we provide, we will not stay in business very long. Even our self-interests are taken up into God’s providential workings. In serving ourselves we also find ourselves serving others, whether or not that is our intention. Thus our work, our families, and our citizenship can be charged with moral and even spiritual significance. ...

... College students are often so fixated on what their future vocations may be that they forget that they have vocations right now.

Slinging burgers may be a dull and boring occupation with the sole purpose of earning tuition money. While it won’t be your vocation forever, it is still a calling, a sphere of service to one’s neighbors–customers, the boss, fellow workers—and a meaningful human enterprise.

College students also have a vocation as members of their family, with obligations to their parents, brothers, and sisters. They also have a vocation as citizens of the various communities they inhabit (their hometown, their college community, their state, their country). They also have vocations in their religious communities, if they have one.

Most notably, they have the vocation of being college students. This calling, like all the others, has its proper work—namely, to study, read, go to class, discuss ideas, and write papers. ...

Good stuff! In the popular vernacular we typically think of "vocation" as an "occupation." "Vocation," or "calling," is mission given to us by God. R. Paul Stevens talks about three vocations. 

Human vocation - Doing all of those things we do that make our world run and contribute to human flourishing that God called us to do at creation.

Christian vocation - Caring on the work of Christ in the world.

Personal vocation - Our particular response to the first two vocations in our particular time and context.

Our occupation is an important application of our vocation but our occupation can change. It is only one among many possible applications. And vocation includes much more than our occupation.

A Theology of Work by One Businesswoman

Ampersand Photography: Thursday Q & A // Theology of Work

It’s Thursday! Time for another Q & A post!

A question someone posed to me a few weeks ago (I’m sorry, I forgot to write down who asked this…):

“I am a fellow photographer desiring to make a business and have been thinking through things such as: What is work according to God? What does it look like? What does rest look like? How have these two been redeemed by Christ? What are they going to look like for my life? … I would love to hear your mission statement: the reason you work and the way you should work.  I would also love to hear any edifying words you have for someone starting a photography business.

This is such a great question, and a necessary thing for any person to think through, whether Christian or not— regardless of whether you are an artist, a businessman, a homemaker, or a student. I’m going to answer this in points, that could, perhaps, be an entire blog series, but I have so many other questions to answer that I’m just going to do this all in one shot. ...

1. Defining Work

What is work according to God? What does it look like? What does rest look like? How have these two been redeemed by Christ? 

Answer: work is an expression of God’s character. It’s original purpose is the “advancement of human flourishing to the glory of God.” We were made to work, because we were made in th image of God, who is a Worker.

I attended The Gospel at Work Conference back in January. The opening session was entitled, “The Theology of Work,” and is to date, one of the best sermon’s I’ve ever heard. You can download the message here (and I highly recommend that you do so… like, NOW). A few basic points from that message: ...

Read the whole thing. You may not agree with her at every point but I love how she is wrestling with a practical theology of work in her in own context and being intentional about integrating her life.

Want to be Missional? Equip Those in the Workplace

The High Calling: Want to be Missional? Equip Those in the Workplace

I was recently invited to teach a session of a seminary class called “Pastoral Functions” at an extension of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. In this class, the pastors-in-training had been discussing such topics as Worship, Disciplemaking, Evangelism, Visitation, Funerals, Weddings, Pastoral Counseling, Children’s Ministry, etc.—topics we’d expect in a class like this.

But I was invited to talk about something significantly different and paradigm-shifting. Pastors need to recalibrate their ministry philosophy so that the members of their congregations are affirmed, encouraged, and equipped to serve God through their various vocations. I challenged the students to help the people of God participate in God’s mission on earth through their vocations. Thankfully, seminaries are beginning to understand that they will need to transition their curriculum beyond the traditional topics if they want to train pastors to lead missional churches. ...

An excellent piece by Bob Robinson. Spot on! Read the whole thing.

Rise of the Freelance Economy

Atlantic Cities has an interesting piece about the rise of the freelance economy. The Geography of America's Freelance Economy.

... Slightly more than 10 million American workers, or seven percent of the workforce, are self-employed, according to estimates compiled by Rob Sentz and his colleagues at Economic Modeling Specialists (EMSI, for short). EMSI's figures are based on data from the United States Census (American Community Survey and Non-employer Statistics). More than four million (43 percent) of those self-employed workers are members of the creative class of scientists and technologists, knowledge workers and professionals, artists, designers, entertainers, and media workers.

... It's high time we temper the the mythology of freelance work with a dose of reality. While the popular image of self-employment is technology or knowledge working free-agents, the reality is that the ranks of the self-employed are populated by a mix of high-skill knowledge work and low-skill, much lower wage service work. Not only do they often earn less money, self-employed Americans lack the basic protections and security that workers and a middle-class society require.

Given the flexibility that has come along with the knowledge and service-based economy and the preference many Americans have for doing their own thing, it will be next to impossible to go back to the old system of long-term employment tenure in "real jobs" of the past. The number of full-employed independent workers is projected to swell to 30 million in the next decade and the total number of freelancers could reach as many as 70 million when as much as half of the workforce could be involved in some sort of freelance work. What's more, 57 percent of freelancers chose to go independent in 2012, as Johnson reports, and only 13 percent say they want to go back to traditional employment.

What's needed is nothing less than a new social compact which reflects the new realities of work. ...

Then Ross Douthart, writing in the New York Times, has this piece: A World Without Work

If such a utopia were possible, one might expect that it would be achieved first among the upper classes, and then gradually spread down the social ladder. First the wealthy would work shorter hours, then the middle class, and finally even high school dropouts would be able to sleep late and take four-day weekends and choose their own adventures — “to hunt in the morning,” as Karl Marx once prophesied, “fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner ...”

Yet the decline of work isn’t actually some wild Marxist scenario. It’s a basic reality of 21st-century American life, one that predates the financial crash and promises to continue apace even as normal economic growth returns. This decline isn’t unemployment in the usual sense, where people look for work and can’t find it. It’s a kind of post-employment, in which people drop out of the work force and find ways to live, more or less permanently, without a steady job. So instead of spreading from the top down, leisure time — wanted or unwanted — is expanding from the bottom up. Long hours are increasingly the province of the rich. ...

Whether or not either of these stories has things framed just right, I do think we are in the midst of a major upheavel in what work and employment look like. I remember reading once that Americans made or grew more than 80% of everything they consumed in 1885. By 1915 is was less than 20%. I suspect this last decade is the leadning edge of changes that may be just as profound, and just as hard to anticipate, as those on the horizon in 1885.

The 20 Greatest Songs About Work

The Pessimist: The 20 Greatest Songs About Work

You might hate your job, but there’s nothing like a good song to make you feel like you’re not alone. (I mean, except when you think about it, and realize that the musicians who performed the song probably no longer have to work in an office, and are most likely drinking Champagne with supermodels in a brand-new Learjet 85, while you’re eating off-brand corn chips you bought from a convenience store that the health department should have closed down a long time ago.)

The point is, labor has been the single most popular subject of pop songs for decades (besides girls, cars, alcohol, parties, religion, and about 10,000 other things). So below, we’ve collected 20 of the best songs about the working life. Think of it as an extremely depressing playlist, like if your local radio station hired a German film director as its morning drive-time DJ. If we missed anything, let us know in the comments! (But be nice, or we’ll tell your boss you’re goldbricking again.)  ...

Take a look at the list. Any songs you would add?

 

Happiness Means Being Just Rushed Enough

Scientific American: Happiness Means Being Just Rushed Enough

... However, despite this broad consensus, and its obvious health and quality-of-life implications, there seems little empirical survey evidence that daily life is truly speeding up. ...

... In that 1965 survey, we found 24 percent of respondents aged 18-64 said they “always” felt rushed, and 48 percent said they had no excess time. When we repeated the questions in the 1990s, these figures had risen to 35 percent “always” rushed and 55 percent with no excess time, where they remained, more or less, until we last asked the questions in a 2004 survey.

This set the stage, then, for our repeating these questions in two separate surveys in 2009-10. Quite contrary to our expectations, both of these surveys now show decreases in Americans feeling “always” rushed particularly among the busiest group of those aged 18 to 64 — a 7-point drop in feeling always rushed to 28 percent — and a drop to 45 percent in those feeling no excess time. ...

... Almost 50 percent of respondents who feel least rushed and who also feel least excess time report being “very happy”, almost twice as high as the rest of the US public. It is an elite group, making up less than 10 percent of the population. They not only seem happier by ignoring the “rat race” and subscribing to a philosophy of “Don’t hurry, be happy,” but by organizing their lifestyles to minimize spells of boredom and lack of focus as well. Thus, there seems dysfunction in having either too much or too little free time. In a society that otherwise seems obsessed with speed and the latest IT gadgets, this would seem to offer a path to a more contented lifestyle.

Ten Ways to Encourage Vocational Stewardship in Your Church

Re-Integrate: Ten Ways to Encourage Vocational Stewardship in Your Church

Over the years I've had conversations with pastors who want to do more to integreate faith and work but struggle to know where to begin. Re-Integrate has a post with some very practical ideas.

Originally published at www.vocationalstewardship.org

1. During corporate worship services, pray for members by vocation. This could take a variety of expressions:

• pray aloud for a different occupational group (e.g., educators or businesspeople) each week
• invite congregants who are facing difficulties on the job to come forward during or after the service for prayer
• pray for individual members by name and vocation

2. Visit church members at their places of work.

3. Recognize vocational achievements and awards of congregants in the church’s newsletter or on its website. ...

Read the whole post. Excellent ideas!

Saturday Links

1. I don't know much about Common Good RVA but I like their vision. Christianity Today published a piece featuring them, Why the Rest of Your Week Matters to God

"In general, the church has done a fine job equipping Christians for the "private" areas of their lives: prayer, morality, family life, and so on. However, in general, the church has done a poor job equipping people for the "public" parts of their lives: namely, their work, their vocation. The reality is, most people spend the majority of their time in this latter, "public" area."

And I like this video clip:

CommonGood RVA from This Is Our City on Vimeo.

2. Can we Survive Technology? Written 57 years ago, Fortune resurrected this article by John von Neumann. The editor's note begins:

Editor's note:   Every Sunday, Fortune publishes a favorite story from our magazine archives. This week, to mark our Future Issue, we turn to a feature from June 1955 by John von Neumann tackling the profound questions wrought by radical technical advancement—in von Neumann's day the atomic bomb and climate change. von Neumann was one of the twentieth century's greatest and most influential geniuses. The polymath and patron saint of Game Theory was instrumental in developing America's nuclear superiority toward the end of World War II as well as in framing the decades-long Cold War with the Soviet Union. In his time, von Neumann was said to possess "the world's greatest mind." Here is his characteristically pessimistic look on what the future holds.

It is amazing how much of what he wrote remains true today!

3. Human beings are notoriously bad at evaluating probability and risk I hope to do some blogging on this in the not too distant future. For now, Business Insider has 'The Birthday Problem' Shows How Terrible We Are At Estimating Probability.

4. The Atlantic reports on a study concluding Wanting Things Makes Us Happier Than Having Them

"CONCLUSION: Although "materialists' perceptions that acquisition brings them happiness appear to have some basis in reality," that happiness is short-lived, Richins concluded. As such, "The state of anticipating and desiring a product may be inherently more pleasurable than product ownership itself.""

5. One of the most difficult topics to understand in economics is comparative advantage, especially why outsourcing jobs to other countries often is advantageous for both countries. Forbes has a creative piece this week, Is Outsourcing American Jobs Wrong?. However, as the BBC reports American manufacturers come back home, a trend that has been true for a few years now.

6. Whole Foods Founder Says Too Many Companies Get Capitalism Wrong

"In order to fight that perception and reclaim capitalism and business as positive words, businesses have to find a purpose beyond just making money. Profit is necessary for business, Mackey said, but it's necessary in the same way that his body has to produce red blood cells. It's needed, but it's not the sole purpose."

7. Fortune has a great piece on Why innovation is so hard.

"Most business leaders don't understand what makes innovation so different from everything else they do at work -- and they haven't adjusted their behavior to accommodate these differences."

8. We've all been watching Lance Armstrong this week. Beware! Study Finds That Having Power Can Make You Stupid

9. More on the continuing evolution of the print industry in The Growing Adoption of Creative Commons Textbooks and Nation's First Bookless Public Library Could Be in Texas.

10. Paper-Thin Computer Debuts at CES

11. Scientist reveal that Star Wars And Star Trek Got Warp Speed Totally Wrong.

"The science fiction vision of stars flashing by as streaks when spaceships travel faster than light isn't what the scene would actually look like, a team of physics students says.

Instead, the view out the windows of a vehicle traveling through hyperspace would be more like a centralized bright glow, calculations show. ..."

That's all for this week. Like the Kruse Kronicle at Facebook.

Happiness, Meaning, and a Theology of Work

The Atlantic: There's More to Life Than Being Happy  This is a fascianting piece on happiness written by Emily Esfahani Smith as she reflects on the difference in between happiness and a meaningful life. I've got some thoughts below but here is one powerful excerpt:

... This is why some researchers are cautioning against the pursuit of mere happiness. In a new study, which will be published this year in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Positive Psychology, psychological scientists asked nearly 400 Americans aged 18 to 78 whether they thought their lives were meaningful and/or happy. Examining their self-reported attitudes toward meaning, happiness, and many other variables -- like stress levels, spending patterns, and having children -- over a month-long period, the researchers found that a meaningful life and happy life overlap in certain ways, but are ultimately very different. Leading a happy life, the psychologists found, is associated with being a "taker" while leading a meaningful life corresponds with being a "giver."

"Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided," the authors write.

How do the happy life and the meaningful life differ? Happiness, they found, is about feeling good. Specifically, the researchers found that people who are happy tend to think that life is easy, they are in good physical health, and they are able to buy the things that they need and want. While not having enough money decreases how happy and meaningful you consider your life to be, it has a much greater impact on happiness. The happy life is also defined by a lack of stress or worry.

Most importantly from a social perspective, the pursuit of happiness is associated with selfish behavior -- being, as mentioned, a "taker" rather than a "giver." The psychologists give an evolutionary explanation for this: happiness is about drive reduction. If you have a need or a desire -- like hunger -- you satisfy it, and that makes you happy. People become happy, in other words, when they get what they want. Humans, then, are not the only ones who can feel happy. Animals have needs and drives, too, and when those drives are satisfied, animals also feel happy, the researchers point out.

"Happy people get a lot of joy from receiving benefits from others while people leading meaningful lives get a lot of joy from giving to others," explained Kathleen Vohs, one of the authors of the study, in a recent presentation at the University of Pennsylvania. In other words, meaning transcends the self while happiness is all about giving the self what it wants. People who have high meaning in their lives are more likely to help others in need. "If anything, pure happiness is linked to not helping others in need," the researchers write.

What sets human beings apart from animals is not the pursuit of happiness, which occurs all across the natural world, but the pursuit of meaning, which is unique to humans, according to Roy Baumeister, the lead researcher of the study and author, with John Tierney, of the recent book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Baumeister, a social psychologists at Florida State University, was named an ISI highly cited scientific researcher in 2003.

The study participants reported deriving meaning from giving a part of themselves away to others and making a sacrifice on behalf of the overall group. In the words of Martin E. P. Seligman, one of the leading psychological scientists alive today, in the meaningful life "you use your highest strengths and talents to belong to and serve something you believe is larger than the self." For instance, having more meaning in one's life was associated with doing activities like buying presents for others, taking care of kids, and arguing. People whose lives have high levels of meaning often actively seek meaning out even when they know it will come at the expense of happiness. Because they have invested themselves in something bigger than themselves, they also worry more and have higher levels of stress and anxiety in their lives than happy people. Having children, for example, is associated with the meaningful life and requires self-sacrifice, but it has been famously associated with low happiness among parents, including the ones in this study. In fact, according to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, research shows that parents are less happy interacting with their children than they are exercising, eating, and watching television.

"Partly what we do as human beings is to take care of others and contribute to others. This makes life meaningful but it does not necessarily make us happy," Baumeister told me in an interview.

Meaning is not only about transcending the self, but also about transcending the present moment -- which is perhaps the most important finding of the study, according to the researchers. While happiness is an emotion felt in the here and now, it ultimately fades away, just as all emotions do; positive affect and feelings of pleasure are fleeting. The amount of time people report feeling good or bad correlates with happiness but not at all with meaning.

Meaning, on the other hand, is enduring. It connects the past to the present to the future. "Thinking beyond the present moment, into the past or future, was a sign of the relatively meaningful but unhappy life," the researchers write. "Happiness is not generally found in contemplating the past or future." That is, people who thought more about the present were happier, but people who spent more time thinking about the future or about past struggles and sufferings felt more meaning in their lives, though they were less happy....

And this is where the church does a great disservice. We form people into clients who look to the church as a route to personal happiness rather than as people who can discern meaning. And this is especially true for a theology of work and daily life. I perceive that the vast majority of Americans either see no meaning in their work as it relates to God's mission in the world or they find great meaning it their work precisely because it is such an important component to achieving the happiness that comes from getting what we want.

For the most part, the church confirms that there is no meaning to daily work. Meaningful work, as it relates to God, is the stuff that happens within the four walls of the church or as an extension of some ecclesiastical initiative. Christian service is framed as an alternative to work-a-day life, an escape from meaningless work into meaningful work. Church leaders correctly perceive that many people see no meaning to their daily existence but the ecclesiastical impulse is to answer the question of meaning over and against daily life, not to find meaning within it.

I see one of two strategies typically at work. One is to simply avoid saying too much about daily work while offering therapeutic spirituality and opportunities for service that (for some) supplement a daily meaningless existence or (for others) enhances the meaning we find apart from God and God’s mission in the world (essentially supporting idolatry.) The other is to offer prophetic pronouncements against greed and selfishness … correctly challenging idolatries that give false meaning to life … while steering people to participate in just causes like eco-justice, gun-control, or poverty advocacy. False ideologies may be challenged but, once again, the answer is to pursue the meaning question over and against daily life, not to find meaning within it.

Until the church is willing to honestly wrestle with the meaning of work and daily life, the church will never have be an effective expression of the Kingdom of God.

Saturday Links

1. Too often Westerners perceive African economy as a monolithic basket case. There are actually many regions of that are very hopeful. Ozwald Boateng explains Why entrepreneurs are back in Africa

2. Want a higher paying occupation? Here Are The Jobs With The Biggest Wage Growth Right Now

3. Lots of recent talk about whether or not e-books will ever actually totally supplant hard copy books. This week Mashable explores Why Are People Still Buying CDs? (And people are still buying them.)

4. Speaking of transitions to digital media, Business Insider shows that Old Media Is Alive And Rocking

5. This fascinating chart shows Inflation Since 1775 And How It Took Off In 1933

6. Want to live to a ripe old age? US News reports on What People Who Live to 100 Have in Common.

7. I almost didn't link this article because I could swear I've linked it before. Why Does Deja Vu Happen?

8. Several months ago I saw a speech expert interviewed has offered voice training to a number of famous figures. One was Margaret Thatcher. They showed her speaking in the 1970s and then in the 1980s, after receiving voice training. A big piece of the change was lessening the modulation in tone and pitch, which tends to vary more widely with female voices. The changes were intended to make her sound more authoritative, which both men and women, unjustified as it may be, more often associate with male vocal traits. But apparently, the thing that really triggers gender detection in our language is the way we use S's. Change Your Perceived Gender by Pronouncing S's Differently

9. This has to be a new low technological achievement: a sensor-filled smartfork that tells you when you're eating to much. Medieval Tines: A Brief History of the Fork

10. And this has to be the Holy Grail of technology cool! Star Trek-Inspired 'CommBadge' Gives You Handsfree Access to iPhone, Android

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The Top Seven Regrets of Pastors - Thom Rainer

Christian Post: The Top Seven Regrets of Pastors - Thom Rainer

I recently interviewed more than twenty pastors who had been in ministry for at least 25 years. All of these men were over 55 years old. A few of them were retired, but most of them were still active in full-time vocational ministry. ...

1. Lack of practical training for local church ministry. "I was not prepared for 80 percent of my day-to-day ministry after I graduated from seminary. ...
2. Overly concerned about critics. ...
3. Failure to exercise faith. ...
4. Not enough time with family. ...
5. Failure to understand basic business and finance issues. ...
6. Failure to share ministry. "Let me shoot straight. I had two complexes. The first was the Superman complex. ... My second complex was the conflict avoider complex. ...
7. Failure to make friends. ...

I'm certain that #8 was failing to spend enough time reading blog posts. ;-) What else should be on the list?

 

Only one of the top 9 occupations expected to create the most jobs this decade (nursing) requires a 4-year college degree

Carpe Diem: Only one of the top 9 occupations expected to create the most jobs this decade (nursing) requires a 4-year college degree

The chart above shows the 30 occupations that are expected to experience the largest job growth between 2010 and 2020, according to employment forecasts from the BLS. Between 2010 and 2020, the BLS estimates that the total number of U.S. jobs will increase by 20.4 million, from 143 million in 2010 to 163.5 million by 2020. The number of jobs created this decade in the top 30 fastest growing occupations – 9.3 million – will represent almost half of all of the new jobs created by 2020.

What’s really interesting is that only five of the top 30 occupations expected to create the most jobs by 2020 require a college degree or more (nursing, post-secondary teachers, elementary school teachers, accountants and physicians), and ten of the fastest growing occupations don’t even require a high school diploma. Moreover, of the top nine occupations expected to create the most jobs this decade, only one (nursing) requires a 4-year college degree. ...

One-Third Of Americans Are Working For Themselves

Business Insider: One-Third Of Americans Are Working For Themselves

When the economy became unreliable, people decided to rely on themselves to propel their careers.

“We see the labor market itself following the trend that we call ‘the individualization of work' — people working for themselves,” says Iain MacDonald, CEO of SkillPages. “People are increasingly either moving jobs more often, doing what they love, or doing what they really like to do, rather than what they have to do.”

Nearly one in three workers in America are freelancers, contractors, or contingent workers, according to the Freelancers Union, and 19 percent of them say that they've doubled their income within the past year.

According to a survey by Elance, the average freelancer expects to earn 43 percent more in 2013 than they did in 2012. Furthermore, 70 percent claim they're happier and 79 percent say they're more productive working as a freelancer than a full-time employee. ...

Here Are The Most And Least Happy Careers

Business Insider: Here Are The Most And Least Happy Careers

For more top 10 employment lists go to myplan.com.

Living as an Authentic Christian in a Non-Christian World

Huffington Post: Living as an Authentic Christian in a Non-Christian World - Richard Stearns

After the election, I published an article in this space that struck a chord with many Christians. I suggested that engaging in a bitter 'culture war' in order to preserve America's formerly dominant Christian culture has been largely a failed strategy. We cannot win in the courts and at the ballot box that which we have lost in the court of public opinion. Instead, I argued, we should embrace the strategy that has successfully attracted people to Jesus for two thousand years - authentic Christianity.

What if we simply stuck to what Jesus commanded us to do: love our neighbors as ourselves, care for the poor and the sick and the brokenhearted, stand up for the oppressed, be generous with our time and our money, and live winsome lives filled with grace and gentleness?

Christians have always lived, and often thrived, in cultures where they are minorities. Christianity began in a Jewish culture and thrived in a pagan Roman one. The apostle Paul, writer of nearly half the New Testament, actually offers advice to the church in Corinth which lived in the midst of a very pagan society. His words should guide us today.

In I Corinthians 5:9, Paul encourages the Christians to clean up their own affairs. The church was in a mess with sexual shenanigans, internal bickering, and a deep division between rich and poor. Paul gives them some advice, but he also says Christians shouldn't worry about whether others follow Christian moral teaching.

"I wrote you in my earlier letter that you shouldn't make yourselves at home among the sexually promiscuous. I didn't mean that you should have nothing at all to do with outsiders of that sort. Or with crooks, whether blue- or white-collar. Or with spiritual phonies, for that matter. You'd have to leave the world entirely to do that! ... I'm not responsible for what the outsiders do, but don't we have some responsibility for those within our community of believers? God decides on the outsiders, but we need to decide when our brothers and sisters are out of line and, if necessary, clean house. (I Cor. 5:9-13, The Message)

Paul's point is this: Be strict with yourselves, expecting fellow Christians to obey the demands of Jesus. But don't hold others to the same rules. ...

Stearns post also brought to mind another passage I recently read. I just finished going back through Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon.

“In fact, much of what passes for Christian social concern today, of the left or the right, is the social concern of a church that seems to have despaired of being the church. Unable through our preaching, baptism, and witness to form a visible community of faith, we content ourselves with ersatz Christian ethical activity – lobbying Congress to support progressive strategies, asking the culture at large to be a little less racist, a little less promiscuous, a little less violent. Falwell’s Moral Majority is little different from any mainline Protestant church that opposes him. Both groups imply that one can practice Christian ethics without being in the Christian community. Both begin with the Constantinian assumption that there is no way for the gospel to present in our world without asking the world to support our convictions through its own social and political institutionalization. The result is the gospel transformed into civil religion.” (Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, Resident Aliens, 1989, 80-81.)

There is much I resonate with in Stearn’s post and with the Resident Aliens quote, but I shade things a little differently.

I don't have a neat label for my position. Maybe what I see is a polarity. I'm uneasy with the overemphasis of social activism within my Mainline Reformed world, partly because of its domestication of "justice" to contemporary leftist framings. But mostly I'm uneasy because of the neglect of the central mission of the church to be a "sense-making" witness of God's Kingdom by connecting the daily routines of life to God's mission in the world, to be a communities reflecting on the contexts and relationships where they have genuine authentic influence and being the body of Christ in those particularities.

And yet I'm uneasy with quotes like those above, and similar cases made by neo-Anabaptists, that seem to suggest we should not be seeking to influence the state at all. If some ways of ordering society are more just than others according to God's Kingdom, is it appropriate to remain silent in the public square as citizens of a democracy where we are invited to interject what wisdom we may have? And curiously, it seems to me that while many of those who want to avoid entanglement with the state have a stronger sense of the congregational community, they also have a weak practical theology for how the people of God, as they live dispersed in the world, are to make sense of work and daily life as the relate to God's mission in the world.

Rather than embracing either the activist Reformed pole or the neo-Anabaptist separatism, I'm inclined to embrace the strength's and cautions of both camps and to press for better integration of daily life with God's mission in the world.

What do you think?

Saturday Links

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. There a few less links this week. Enjoy!

1. The last typewriter rolls off the assembly line.

2. Abraham Lincoln's spirituality has been a constant topic of debate among historians. The new Lincoln movie has resurfaced the debate. Film revives questions about Abraham Lincoln’s faith, but offers few answers.

3. What impact will computer/internet technology have on our daily lives? Glimpse of your life in 2020 thanks to the Internet of Things.

"What if all objects were interconnected and started to sense their surroundings and communicate with each other? The Internet of Things (IoT) will have that sort of ubiquitous machine-to-machine (M2M) connectivity. Since there are estimates that between 50 billion to 500 billion devices will have a mobile connection to the cloud by 2020, here’s a glimpse of our possible future.

Your alarm clock signals the lights to come on in your bedroom; the lights tell the heated tiles in your bathroom to kick on so your feet are not cold when you go to shower. The shower tells your coffee pot to start brewing. Your smartphone checks the weather and tells you to wear your gray suit since RFID tags on your clothes confirm that your favorite black suit is not in your closet but at the dry cleaners. After you pour a cup of java, the mug alerts your medication that you have a drink in-hand and your pill bottle begins to glow and beep as a reminder. Your pill bottle confirms that you took your medicine and wirelessly adds this info to your medical file at the doctor’s office; it will also text the pharmacy for a refill if you are running low.

Your smart TV automatically comes on with your favorite news channel while you eat breakfast and browse your tablet for online news. After you’ve eaten, while you are brushing your teeth, your dishwasher texts your smartphone to fire up your vehicle via the remote start. Because your “smart” car can talk to other cars and the road, it knows what streets to avoid due to early morning traffic jams. Your phone notifies you that your route to work has been changed to save you time. And you no longer need to look for a place to park, since your smartphone reserved one of the RFID parking spaces marked as "open" and available in the cloud. Don’t worry about your smart house because as you exited it, the doors locked, the lights went off, and the temperature was adjusted to save energy and money.

Does it sound too farfetched for 2020? It shouldn’t since a good part of that is in the works now. ..."

4. Speaking of computers, technology lovers will appreciate that the World’s Oldest Computer Gets a Reboot.

5. Should Students Use Wikipedia? Maybe it depends on how they use it and what the objective is.

6. Does the United States essentially have a flat tax? Economist Greg Mankiw thinks maybe do. The U.S. has a flat tax (in effect)

"The Congressional Budget Office has a new study of effective federal marginal tax rates for low and moderate income workers (those below 450 percent of the poverty line).  The study looks at the effects of income taxes, payroll taxes, and SNAP (the program formerly known as Food Stamps).  The bottom line is that the average household now faces an effective marginal tax rate of 30 percent.  In 2014, after various temporary tax provisions have expired and the newly passed health insurance subsidies go into effect, the average effective marginal tax rate will rise to 35 percent.

What struck me is how close these marginal tax rates are to the marginal tax rates at the top of the income distribution.  This means that we could repeal all these taxes and transfer programs, replace them with a flat tax along with a universal lump-sum grant, and achieve approximately the same overall degree of progressivity."

7.  What are the conservative streams and thinkers that are likely to influence the evolving future of conservatism in the United States. David Brooks has some interesting insights into The Conservative Future.

8.  Did you know that You Are Most Likely to Die at 11 a.m.?

9. This would never appeal to me. I like to know exactly what I'm buying. Would drop some coins in this thing?

The BIBLIO-MAT from Craig Small on Vimeo.

10. The High Calling has a review of R. Paul Stevens new book, Work Matters, Lessons from Scripture. I hope to read it next month.

11. Good news on the crime front in Washington, D. C.: D.C. on pace for fewer than 100 homicides in 2012

Bloodletting Economics

Robet Lupton is the author of some excellent books like Compassion, Justice and the Christian Life: Rethinking Ministry to the Poor and Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (And How to Reverse It).  Each month he does a newsletter for FCS Ministries in Atlanta.  This month was particularly interesting piece. I've got a few comments at the end.

Blood-letting

November 2012

by Bob Lupton

Ever wonder why the red and white striped pole is displayed outside many barbershops?  Neither have I.  Not until I stumbled across a morsel of obscure history about this symbol.  I was immediately drawn in.

In the middle ages surgeons and barbers performed most of the operations.  Yes, that’s right – barbers.  Blood-letting was the most commonly prescribed treatment of the day, a cure for almost every ailment.  Surgeons would order it, barbers would do the cutting.  The red-and-white-striped pole outside the barbershop was the signpost that blood-letting was performed here.  The red represents the blood being drawn, the white represents the tourniquet used, and the pole itself represents the stick squeezed in the patient’s hand to dilate the veins.   Interesting, eh?

What I found even more interesting, however, was that for more than 3000 years, from antiquity until the advent of modern scientific medicine, blood-letting was universally accepted as the most effective remedy for almost every disease.  It was recommended for the treatment of countless ailments ranging from cholera to cancer, tetanus to tuberculosis, gout to gangrene.  It was even prescribed to treat acne and hemorrhoids.  Before the circulatory system was understood, a prevailing theory was that blood could stagnate in the extremities.  A build-up of bad blood could cause all manner of maladies.  The cure was purging.

Every one bought in.  For eons.  Even in ancient cultures like the Mesopotamians and Egyptians. The Talmud (ancient Israel’s sacred writings) specified certain days for blood-letting.  Hippocrates (the father of modern medicine) accepted the practice as good medicine some 500 years before the birth of Christ.  So did Socrates and Plato.  Early Christian writings offer advice on which saints’ days were favorable for blood-letting.  Well into the scientific era the practice continued to prevail.  The more blood drawn the better, even to the point of losing consciousness.  Many sessions would only end when the patient began to swoon.   1799 George Washington, suffering from a throat infection, requested that he be bled heavily (nearly four pints) and died shortly thereafter.

One typical course of medical treatment began the morning of 13 July 1824. A French sergeant was stabbed through the chest while engaged in single combat; within minutes, he fainted from loss of blood. Arriving at the local hospital he was immediately bled twenty ounces “to prevent inflammation”. During the night he was bled another 24 ounces. Early the next morning, the chief surgeon bled the patient another 10 ounces (285 ml); during the next 14 hours, he was bled five more times. Medical attendants thus intentionally removed more than half of the patient’s normal blood supply—in addition to the initial blood loss which caused the sergeant to faint. Bleedings continued over the next several days. By 29 July, the wound had become inflamed. The physician applied 32 leeches to the most sensitive part of the wound. Over the next three days, there were more bleedings and a total of 40 more leeches. The sergeant recovered and was discharged on 3 October. His physician wrote that “by the large quantity of blood lost, amounting to 170 ounces [nearly eleven pints], besides that drawn by the application of leeches [perhaps another two pints], the life of the patient was preserved”. 

“The life of the patient was preserved” by draining thirteen pints of his blood?!  Outrageous!  Sounds totally absurd today.  But is it any more absurd than the widely accepted practice of draining off the strength of able-bodied adults by “curing” them with dependency-producing subsidies?  Can we legitimately claim to be “preserving the life” of the needy by weakening their capacity to become self-sufficient?   And how absurd is it to measure the effectiveness of our remedy by the volume of recipients who return for repeated “treatments”?

Is harmful medical treatment better than no treatment at all?  The French sergeant who survived the blood-letting would doubtless answer “yes”.  His surgeon acted upon the best knowledge that was available at the time.  Is harmful charity better than no charity at all?  Recipients would doubtless urge its continuation.  But just as it took centuries of malpractice before the medical profession finally realized that blood-adding, not blood-letting, actually saves lives, so charitable malpractice may have to run its course.

Bloodletting persisted into the 20th century.  Not until Pasteur (1822-1895) figured out that germs, not bad blood, cause diseases did the practice begin to fall out of favor.  It took many more decades before the practice was finally abandoned.  The modern science of microbiology finally brought a 3000 year practice to an end.  I can’t help wondering how long it will take the tradition-steeped compassion industry to recognize the need for a fundamental change of practice.

I've actually incorporated the bloodletting metaphor in some writing I've been doing on economic issues. (Stay tuned.) For millennia, bloodletting was the preferred method for treating illness. Only in the past century or two have we learned enough about the human body to see that this is not effective, even destructive. For millennia, the preferred method for treating poverty was generosity. Poverty was an inadequate distribution of a fixed amount of wealth. Only in the past century or two have we really unlocked the powers of productivity and exchange. Poverty is now more appropriately seen as exclusion from networks of productivity and exchange.

No metaphor is perfect. Generosity had limited effectiveness over the millennia and generosity still has a critical role to play today, particularly in times crisis. But the revolution in productivity and exchange has radically altered how we address challenges we face.

All my life I've heard that the Bible talks about wealth and poverty more than any other topic, yet I find very few theologians who have ever taken even one class in economics. I can probably count on one hand the number who have had formal training in economics. The irony is that it is often those who most contextualized the Bible on a range of issues ranging from science, to gender roles, to slavery, to war, and to government, who I find become the most wooden and "fundamentalist" on economic questions ... unable (unwilling?) to make a leap from the advanced agrarian societies of the Bible era to modern economies, sometimes even pining for retreat from the dark dystopian present back to the bucolic bliss of the past. (And just to be fair, those that are most "fundamentalist" on so many other issues want to baptize our present economic order as the "biblical" model.) We aren’t going back, and idealistic models like distributism and liberationism, or any other model that doesn’t seriously take into account issues of productivity and exchange, offer no guidance for the future.

There are many challenges confronting the church of Jesus Christ but I continue to be convinced that it is the church's inability to come to grips with modern economic order, and by extension the inability to help people find meaning in the our present context and equip them for ministry in our present context, that is at the top of the list of challenges.

The Cutting Edge of Marketplace Ministries

Christianity Today: The Cutting Edge of Marketplace Ministries

How businesses are doing more holistic ministry than ever.

With all the twists and turns that led to his vocation, Chuck Proudfit might never have gotten there without the quest for more efficient toilet paper.

He was fresh out of college working for Procter & Gamble at the time. The company had scooped up the gifted entrepreneur after he graduated from Harvard. Proudfit had already launched a laser-printing business when he was a sophomore, selling it to Harvard upon graduation. Now he was on the fast track in the Cincinnati headquarters of Procter & Gamble. And one of his first jobs was to oversee a project whose objective was to fit fewer sheets on a toilet paper roll.

And then, he says, he had "a meltdown." Surely, he thought, there was more to life.

He pursued that "more" while he advanced in the business world over the next decade. That journey included running a large division of the Gallo wine empire on the West Coast, then returning to Ohio as a high-level manager for LensCrafters. All the while, he was reading voraciously about the major religions, searching for the truth.

He finally discovered it, he says, in Christ. Proudfit says he was eager to "apply my new faith to every area of my life, including my work." But when he looked to his church for guidance, he was stymied.

"The local church doesn't deal much with everyday realities for the working people in the pews," he laments. So, "more out of exasperation than inspiration," Proudfit founded the Cincinnati-based marketplace ministry At Work on Purpose (AWOP).

That AWOP formed independently of the church is common, says Princeton University scholar David W. Miller. Author of God at Work: The History and Promise of the Faith at Work Movement, Miller notes that most marketplace ministries "have formed outside the authority, involvement, or impetus of the church." What is uncommon is AWOP's holistic approach to integrating faith and work among its 5,000-plus members in the Cincinnati metro area. It's moving past a narrow focus on workplace evangelism to include ethics, social responsibility, and citywide engagement—a model that more marketplace ministries are embracing across the nation. ...

Saturday Links

Here are this week's odds and ends that didn't make it on to the blog. Enjoy the leftovers!

1. MIT Technology Review says Geoengineering Could Be Essential to Reducing the Risk of Climate Change. "Using technology to cool the planet may be the only way to deal with the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere, argues scientist David Keith." On a similar topic is this piece by Robert Kurlwich at NPR, Will We 'Fix' The Weather? Yes. Should We Fix The Weather? Hmmm. Kurlwich discusses the possibility that we may one day be able to control the earth's climate and wonders if that is a good thing.

2. Research indicates that Millennial Generation Becoming More Fiscally Conservative.

3. Are E-readers a transitional technology? Analysis: E-readers grapple with a future on the shelf.

4. Inhabitat reports on The World's First Commercial Vertical Farm Opens in Singapore. "The dense metropolis of Singapore is now home to the world’s first commercial vertical farm! Built by Sky Greens Farms, the rising steel structure will help the city grow more food locally, reducing dependence on imported produce. The new farm is able to produce 1 ton of fresh veggies every other day, which are sold in local supermarkets."

5. The New Republic has a very lengthy article The Mormon Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It offers some interesting insights in to Mormonism's road from communalism to economic individualism, a trajectory followed by many Protestant sectarian movements. Jackson Lears writes:

"Mormons embraced economic individualism and hierarchical communalism; they distrusted government interventions in business life but not in moral life; they used their personal morality to underwrite their monetary success. They celebrated endless progress through Promethean striving. They paid little attention to introspection and much to correct behavior. And their fundamental scripture confirmed that America was God’s New Israel and the Mormons His Chosen People. It would be hard to find an outlook more suited to the political culture of the post–Reagan Republican Party."

6. Annie-Marie Slaughter maintains that the "having it all" debate about work-life balance isn't just about women. Work-Life Balance as a Men's Issue, Too.

"A number of students asked foreign policy questions, and then a young woman asked me about the responses I have received to my Atlantic cover story from this past summer, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All." I answered, and several other young women followed up. After ten minutes or so, I saw that the roughly 50 percent guys in the room had gone completely silent. When I commented on the suddenly one-sided nature of the conversation, one young man volunteered that he "had been raised in a strong feminist household" and considered himself to be fully supportive of male-female equality, but he was reluctant to say anything for fear he would be misunderstood. A number of the other guys around the table nodded in agreement."

7. French and Spanish legal documents from colonial Louisiana are being digitized, opening up a new window on colonial history in that part of the world. Colonial La. records shed new light on US history

8. People who know me personally know I tend to use sarcasm and double entendre in spoken communication. One of my biggest blogging challenges is editing most of this out of posts. Emoticons can help but some of the biggest misunderstandings I have had came from people not being able to see my wink or big grin as I write certain things. For that reason, I found this interesting: The Strange Science Of Translating Sarcasm Online

9. Ever wonder why sign language often seems so animated? Why Great Sign Language Interpreters Are So Animated

10. Africa: sociologists cite religion as a key factor in preventing and alleviating AIDS epidemic

"In their new book "Religion and AIDS in Africa" (Oxford University Press), sociologists Jenny Trinitapoli and Alexander Weinreb seek to challenge the widespread view that religious beliefs and communities have unwittingly assisted in the spread of the disease through their resistance to preventative sex education. They also show that not only have religious groups had a largely positive role in AIDS prevention, but also how the epidemic has shaped religious beliefs in unexpected ways."

Finding God in Advertising

(re)integrate: Finding God in Advertising  Bob Robinson

In a profound chapter in A Matrix of Meanings: Finding God in Pop Culture, Craig Detweiler and Barry Taylor look at how advertising has shaped contemporary society. The authors offer “Ten Commandments of Advertising,” all of which point to an overarching question that people in this (and every) culture ask: “What is it to be fully human?”

“This is the question that advertising seeks to answer, a question that was one the pursuit of philosophers and theologians. Advertising is an incredibly powerful form of pop culture that influences us on levels far deeper than getting us to choose certain products. Life choices are part of today’s world of advertising and consumption. ‘The glory of God,’ Irenaeus wrote, ‘is a human being fully alive.’ In contemporary society, to be fully human is to shop. Advertising offers us ways to be alive, ways to be human.” (p. 84)

Certainly, there are ads that are manipulative and appeal to the baser aspects of human depravity in order to sell products. But advertising, at its best, appeals to our desire to know who we are, to celebrate life, to find meaning in being human. ...

I especially liked this statement:

Christianity needs to “re-message” itself as a faith that embraces the joy of God restoring humanity and encourages celebration. The restoration of all things is in our future. We await the return of Jesus Christ with great anticipation. What are we doing in preparation?

The primary vision of the church today, liberal or conservative, is to offer people meaning and transcendence by extracting them out of the daily routines of life, rather than equipping people to see transcendence in those daily routines. We do it in the form of therapeutic pietism or in the form of activism to change the world. And if you are really "spiritual" you will enter "full-time ministry" to do these things.

(Bob wrote a great post here. He recently began (re)integrate, which is devoted to addressing just the kind of issues the post raises. Be sure to check the website.)

 

Where have you seen examples of the church equipping people to see transcendence in the routines of life? How might we do a better job of celebrating life?

The Consequences of Machine Intelligence

Atlantic: The Consequences of Machine Intelligence  Moshe Vardi

If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?

... Bill Joy's question deserves therefore not to be ignored: Does the future need us? By this I mean to ask, if machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do? I have been getting various answers to this question, but I find none satisfying.

A typical answer to my raising this question is to tell me that I am a Luddite. (Luddism is defined as distrust or fear of the inevitable changes brought about by new technology.) This is an ad hominem attack that does not deserve a serious answer.

A more thoughtful answer is that technology has been destroying jobs since the start of the Industrial Revolution, yet new jobs are continually created. The AI Revolution, however, is different than the Industrial Revolution. In the 19th century machines competed with human brawn. Now machines are competing with human brain. Robots combine brain and brawn. We are facing the prospect of being completely out-competed by our own creations. Another typical answer is that if machines will do all of our work, then we will be free to pursue leisure activities. The economist John Maynard Keynes addressed this issue already in 1930, when he wrote, "The increase of technical efficiency has been taking place faster than we can deal with the problem of labour absorption." Keynes imagined 2030 as a time in which most people worked only 15 hours a week, and would occupy themselves mostly with leisure activities.

I do not find this to be a promising future. First, if machines can do almost all of our work, then it is not clear that even 15 weekly hours of work will be required. Second, I do not find the prospect of leisure-filled life appealing. I believe that work is essential to human well-being. Third, our economic system would have to undergo a radical restructuring to enable billions of people to live lives of leisure. Unemployment rate in the US is currently under 9 percent and is considered to be a huge problem. 

Finally, people tell me that my concerns apply only to a future that is so far away that we need not worry about it. I find this answer to be unacceptable. 2045 is merely a generation away from us. We cannot shirk responsibility from concerns for the welfare of the next generation. ...

Vardi's point?

We cannot blindly pursue the goal of machine intelligence without pondering its consequences.

One of the challenges of creative destruction is that we can see what is being destroyed but it is exceedingly difficult to see what is being created. As we have moved through the industrial era into the modern age, this fear that change was about impoverish the masses has been a recurring them. Futurists like Gene Rodenberry saw a day where most goods would be so plentiful or easily created that there would be little need for money or possessions. You wouldn’t need a job as a means to survival.

What do you think? Do Yardi’s concerns worry you? Or is the arrival of AI a godsend?

The Eternal Significance of Everyday Work

Values and Capitalism: The Eternal Significance of Everyday Work

Is God calling you to the workforce or full-time ministry?

Many Christian college students preparing to graduate feel as if their entire life rests on the answer to this question.

During my senior year at James Madison University, I watched plans to become doctors and business leaders dissolve as many of my friends gave up their dreams for "full-time ministry." I respected their decisions and wondered if I could find the same significance in my "ordinary" calling. As they began raising support to join campus ministry staff or church plant teams, I applied for internships in Washington, D.C., and tried to convince myself that my vocation would be equally meaningful.

I found some repose from the leaders in my church. They regularly emphasized the importance of secular work in building God's kingdom. I learned that I would find significance in any job, as long as I:

• Exemplified Christ's love
• Shared my faith with my co-workers
• Donated a portion of my income to ministry

But I found this answer only half-satisfying. It explained how I should interact with co-workers and steward my money, but what about the actual work I was going to be doing?

I came across an article in Relevant Magazine recently, called "Kingdom Living from the Middle of Normal." I was interested to see if author Kelli Trujillo's insights were any deeper than what I had heard in church. Sadly, they weren't.

To find eternal meaning in your "seemingly mundane calling," Trujillo says that, among other things, we should:

• Reduce consumption
• Reuse and recycle
• Sponsor a child
• Donate your things
• Buy fair trade
• Buy local

So I guess the message is ... my office job means absolutely nothing? While stewardship and charity are responsibilities of the Christian life, none of these points have anything to do with the "seemingly mundane" job itself. Trujillo nearly implies secular work can only contribute to the Kingdom of God in areas outside the nine-to-five, since the secular really isn't directly "God-related."

If I had read this article my senior year of college and believed it, I would have immediately deserted my "ordinary" calling to jump on the "full-time ministry" bandwagon. Troubled after reading this article, I wondered if Christians had lost a true understanding of work as it relates to doing God's work.

A few days later, ...

Read the whole thing. Elise Amyx is talking about the problem from an Evangelical perspective but Mainliners do similar things. Justice advocacy and compassionate ministries are what count as "real" ministry. There is no real theology of work and daily life.

How to Eat, Play, Love—And Do Other Christian Acts

Christianity Today: How to Eat, Play, Love—And Do Other Christian Acts

Thirty years ago, Ben Witherington III prayed for the energy to write a commentary on every book of the New Testament. This he has done, in addition to writing several other books, including a two-volume work of New Testament theology and ethics. Now, at age 60, the prolific author and Asbury Theological Seminary professor has turned his attention to activities that make up, he says, "99 percent of people's ordinary lives." The result is his latest release, The Rest of Life: Rest, Play, Eating, Studying, Sex from a Kingdom Perspective (Eerdmans). Rachel Marie Stone, author of the forthcoming Eat with Joy: Redeeming God's Gift of Food (InterVarsity), spoke with Witherington about the need for theological and ethical reflection on the everyday things of life. 

Having written many scholarly volumes, why are you now turning your attention to the "ordinary" things of life?

 

There is very little serious theological reflection on the ordinary Christian life: the things we do every day, like working, playing, eating, or going to church. I wanted to ask, "What do these things look like in the light of the coming kingdom of God? Where did God intend all these things to go?" I wanted to somehow take a global view that would work toward the integration of all these things in the mundane life: keeping in balance work, worship, play, sex, and so forth. The aim was to fill a gap in theological reflection.? ...

... What do you want readers to take away from this book?

What we are, and what we do in life, is tremendously important to God, to the kingdom of God, and to ourselves. When we think about our Christian faith and how we spend our work week, faith should not be something that we do on Sunday, but something that shapes our worldview and how we live.

So whether we eat, play, rest, go to a concert, or conjugate the word "to love," it is all doxological, which is to say it's about giving praise to God and preparing us for the kingdom. The question we should ask about anything and everything is, Can I do this to the glory of God and the edification of others? If the answer is no, a Christian shouldn't do it. That's the ultimate ethical question.

I appreciate Ben Witherington's recent focus. I thought his recent book, Work: A Kingdom Perspective on Labor, was very helpful. I look forward to this new book. I hope his focusing on these topics will serve as legitimization for younger theologians to see this area of study as focus of study. There is still a huge gap between the worlds of theology and daily life, particularly work life.

 

The Severe Jobs and Skills Mismatch in Manufacturing

Bloomberg: Caterpillar’s Worker Hunt Means Welders Top Banking Pay

... Companies such as Caterpillar Inc. (CAT) are looking for workers like Brennan. Even with trades offering competitive pay, skilled factory vacancies may soar fivefold to 3 million by 2015 amid a U.S. industry rebound and baby boomer retirements, according to the Society of Manufacturing Engineers. That shortfall threatens to jeopardize both the U.S. recovery and corporate growth plans.

The manufacturing mismatch is part of a broader skills gap in an economy that has more than 3 million jobs open, even with an unemployment rate that ran at 8 percent or more for 43 straight months until the decline in September to 7.8 percent.

Economics and history are combining to drive the skilled-worker shortage. High-school graduates are opting in increasing numbers for four-year schools that can lead to jobs with higher pay and more prestige, and shying away from manufacturing after it shed jobs for more than a decade....

... Schools that provide training for trades and fields such as nursing aren’t producing students in great-enough numbers. Enrollment in two-year colleges that award degrees totaled 7.68 million in 2010, 18 percent more than in 2005. In the same period, four-year university enrollment climbed 21 percent to 13.3 million, according to the U.S. Education Department. ...

... The average annual salary in the field [welding] is $47,900, more than a bank teller supervisor, according to jobs website CareerBuilder. Welders with their own equipment can make $70 an hour, Roy said. Billing 40 weekly hours at that rate and working 50 weeks a year would produce gross pay of $140,000. ...

... Government figures understate the factory shortage, according to a September 2011 report by Deloitte LLP for the National Association of Manufacturers trade group. The report, based on a survey of 1,123 executives, estimated that there were 600,000 unfilled U.S. jobs in manufacturing.

The Society of Manufacturing Engineers used that data as the basis for its projection of 3 million manufacturing vacancies in three years. ...

... “We’re at the edge of a significant problem turning into a critical problem,” Giffi said. “The only reason it’s staying out of critical is because growth is stalled.”

Industrial companies in search of skilled workers cite a common refrain: reluctance by parents and teachers to steer young people to factory jobs. ...

... The Irving, Texas-based company [Fluor Corp] is visiting high schools and recruiting military veterans to hire about 8,000 skilled workers, he said. ...

And I can't help but wonder how many twentysomethings there are out there with a mountain load of debt for a college education they will not use, who would have been better served with a trade education.

The Pope and the CEO: John Paul's Leadership Lessons to a Young Swiss Guard - Book Review

The business world is not an easy place to practice Christian discipleship. Some challenges are obvious but there are many trapdoors as we journey along the path. How nice it would be to have mentors along the way.

Andreas Widmer had just such a mentor. Widmer served as Swiss guard at the Vatican for two years in the late 1980s. His frequent encounters with Pope John Paul II shaped his life as a businessperson over the coming years.  Last year Widmer published a book about his personal journey called The Pope and The CEO: John Paul II’s Leadership Lessons to a Young Swiss Guard. Claudia Ellermann, a friend of mine from church, was a colleague of Widmer’s in the 1990’s and she put me on to the book. I’m glad she did.

The book is divided into nine chapters, sandwiched between some introductory remarks and a conclusion. Each chapter addresses a particular vocational question that leaders must wrestle with and offers habits we might develop to become better leaders. What is intriguing is the format. Each chapter contains a vignette from Widmer’s life as well as vignette from his encounters with the John Paul II. Widmer offers up some of his own painful failures, as well as some triumphs, and how at times he had to relearn lessons he learned from the Pope. There are questions at the end of each chapter that can be used as personal reflection or as the basis for discussion in group setting.

Widmer is coming from a Roman Catholic perspective and there were a couple of places where I had to translate ideas into Presbyterian <grin>. But the lessons learned are meaningful for any disciple of Jesus Christ. The presentation of the issues in an autobiographical format, often offering very intimate insights, makes it a deeply engaging read. I recommend this book for anyone who finds themselves in a leadership position, particularly in the business world.

Productivity and Grace: Management and Labor at a Denver Manufacturer

Christianity Today: Productivity and Grace: Management and Labor at a Denver Manufacturer

Steve Hill and Jim Howey's leadership style is unusual in an industry known for top-down hierarchies.

There's a simple reason why manual laborers are called "blue-collar": The color blue, it turns out, hides dirt better than the white seen in office buildings. But "blue collar" defines more than work apparel, of course. It defines industry, even a way of life. And its stereotypes are often unflattering.

But a metal products manufacturer in Colorado is working to undermine those stereotypes, right on the shop floor.

Sandwiched between rail lines and a tire depot, the Blender Products factory hides in a quiet neighborhood in Denver. The nondescript warehouse looks from the outside as nondescript as most warehouses do. But the way Steve Hill and Jim Howey lead inside the building is unusual in an industry known for top-down hierarchies of management.

"The metal fabrication business is extremely cutthroat," says Hill. "Workers are given a singular task, and maximum output is demanded. They're simply a factor of production. As a general rule, they have no access to management. There is very little crossover between guys on the floor and guys in the offices."

Hill and Howey aim to subvert the us-versus-them mentality. Many days they walk the shop floor, engaging their workers as peers. Employees on the floor are treated as importantly as the managers, undermining the adversarial culture simmering in many manufacturing businesses.

"The company has tried to abide by a simple philosophy concerning our employees," Steve said. "Pay them well, provide great benefits, and invest in lives. . . . The guys in our shop . . . know that I'm a human too. I have many of the same struggles they do. Showing humanness to people is key to disarming those stereotypes."

Extraordinary moments of God's grace abound. ...

Reading this article took me back to grad school and reading about Wayne Alderson.

Business and the Way of the Cross

First Things - On the Square: Business and the Way of the Cross  James R. Rogers

A comment in a Huffington Post article on the “new monasticism” caught my eye a few months back.

“Nobody wants their kid to get interested in new monasticism, ” joked Ben, a young seminarian from Michigan when he arrived at The Simple Way for a visit, “They want them to become businessmen. ”

This joke is an exaggeration of what many Christian parents want for their children—the dreaded expectation that the child pursue a “practical college major” that leads seamlessly to an ordinary, bourgeois life and career. Nonetheless, the joke would not be a joke without the sneer at business, as if the pursuit of a vocation in business necessarily means the embrace of a lesser form of the Christian life.

While not all of the folks associated with The Simple Way necessarily share young Ben’s opinion, the idea that being a monastic (whether old or new) is godly while being a businessperson is worldly reflects a widely held belief among Christians. And that is really too bad, particularly in this economy.

While I would be loath to argue that the pursuit of business is superior to the pursuit of monasticism, I nonetheless would insist that business vocations do not necessarily entail a lesser form of Christian life. Indeed, Christian discipleship can be quite meaningfully pursued through vocations in business. ...

(re)integrate: God.Life.Work

My cyber-friend Bob Robinson has officially rolled out his new work, (re)integrate:

Reintegrate is a nonprofit organization that equips God’s people to reintegrate the Christian faith with vocation so that they can participate in God’s mission on earth. We help churches, institutions, cohort groups, college students, and professionals by providing consulting, teaching, curriculum, networking, and coaching.

They also have the (re)integrate blog. You can follow on Facebook. Check it out. Pretty exciting stuff.

Dancing to the Beat of Shalom: Christians Revive Kansas City's Arts Scene

Christianity Today: Dancing to the Beat of Shalom: Christians Revive Kansas City's Arts Scene

The Culture House and Störling Dance Theater have given believers a voice in the local arts scene and beyond, meanwhile bringing a bit of racial peace to the Kansas City area.

... Since that time of uncertainty, however, the Ennas and fellow leaders at The Culture House and Störling Dance Theater have given Christians a voice in the local arts scene and beyond, meanwhile bringing a bit of racial peace to the Kansas City area.

Starting something new

Enna, who received a theater degree at UCLA and performed with a dance theater group in Sweden, began organizing a board of directors that would help lay the foundation for The Culture House, a grassroots arts organization with schools of dance, theater, and music. Störling-Enna, who received her professional dance education in Helsinki, Finland, and Paris, continued honing her skills in order to lead what would become Störling Dance Theater, a neo-classical dance company known for its powerful storytelling.

With both projects, the two wanted to merge excellence in the arts with their faith in a way that benefited the Kansas City area, meanwhile raising the bar for Christians in the arts. With the community's increased support for the Kansas City Ballet, the Kansas City Chorale, the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum, and the Lyric Opera on the Missouri side during the 1990s, they arrived at the right time. The seeds for what would become the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, which opened in 2011, were also planted during this time.

"We saw that the whole community was starting to focus on the arts," Enna says. "We came here not to 'take over the city for Jesus,' but to at least sit at the table because of the quality of our work."

The vision of The Culture House, which includes the residency of Störling Dance Theater, is to enable quality artists, believers and nonbelievers alike, to have a platform in the marketplace.

The Culture House launched in 1996 in Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City. It initially resided between a Chuck E. Cheese's and a Hooters. In 2005, the organization bought a larger facility in neighboring Olathe. The extra space proved useful.

"That's when we expanded our school of music and started our school of theater," says Enna, executive director. "We went from 100 students to 450 in one cycle. Then another 650 the next year, and it just grew from there. We now have about 800 students [and are growing."

While The Culture House is a Christian organization, Störling Dance Theater is a dance company run by Christians, not a "Christian dance company." As such, some of its dancers are not Christians. Yet "people still do, even if they're not Christian, ask for prayer," notes Störling-Enna, artistic director. "I'd say 90 percent of the dancers who joined the company and were not Christian have become Christian through the company." ...

... While not explicitly Christian, Störling does operate the Artist Development Program, which provides pre-professional dancers with nine months of intensive instruction, and helps them develop tools for their life and career, spiritual maturity, physical and mental discipline, and an appreciation of the arts.

"That is a specifically Christian discipleship program," Enna says. "You don't have to participate in the spiritual development, but besides dancing day and night, they take design classes, as well as an apologetics course and a discussion group about Christianity and culture. It's to help those young artists have the discussions, think about their faith, and be prepared for the marketplace . . . It's not just so their faith survives in the arts, but that it thrives and they have the support and the integrity with them going into it."

Today, graduates of the program are receiving scholarships to top dance and theater programs around the country, including the Ailey School, part of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York, and theater programs at the University of Harford in Connecticut and Oklahoma City University. Students have also received full scholarships to the Joffrey Ballet's summer program in Chicago. ...

... "If Christianity has been so ineffective during the past 150 years in the arts, it's moving to see that we're part of a bigger picture and that the ship is turning," Enna says. "Christians are now being known for their good work."

Ministers With MBAs

Inside Higher Ed: Ministers With MBAs

... In the past five years, programs that combine master’s degrees in divinity with business credentials have sprung up, Aleshire says. He sees two reasons: leadership studies have become more common as an academic field, and Christian ministry has expanded beyond the church into nonprofit organizations and social entrepreneurship -- start-up businesses that try to serve a larger good.

But many joint business and divinity programs are intended for students who want to work for religious nonprofits, or for Christian students studying for professional degrees -- like business or law -- who want some theological background.

Seattle Pacific University’s School of Theology offers an M.B.A., but recommends it for students who want to “serve in the marketplace as a Christian grounded in the Scriptures and theology” or be a business manager for a church or religious nonprofit. Palmer Theological Seminary and Eastern University offer an M.B.A. for seminary students who want to work with the poor. Duke University has an option for students to pursue a seminary credential and a law degree.

In most cases, “they’re going to be using it in the broader ministries, where the work of the church and the broader culture intersect and the alternative to the divinity degree is an asset,” Aleshire says. ...

I had the option of doing the joint M.B.A. and M.Div. degree offered by Eastern University and Palmer Seminary (then Eastern Baptist Seminary) back in the late 1980s but went with the M.B.A. option that included theological education at Palmer but not the full M.Div. It ruined me life! ;-) My education there is what me put my on the path to exploring the intersection between faith and economics and I haven't been able to shake it sense.

The Most Dangerous Place to Work: Nursing Homes

Atlantic Cities: The Geography of Work-Related Injuries

... The United States' Bureau of Labor Statistics breaks down the number of injuries and illnesses by industry, with some surprising results [PDF]. Nursing and residential care facilities rank in the top ten most dangerous (14.7 injuries per 100 full-time workers for state industries and 10.9 for local industries). In comparison, petroleum refinery incidences barely register (at 0.7 cases per 100 full-time workers), according to another table [PDF]. ...

Nonfatal Occupational Injury Rate, 2010:

(And what's up travel trailer manufacturing?)

Why Business Matters to God

Mark D. Roberts: Why Business Matters to God

This past weekend, Laity Lodge hosted a retreat on the topic: Christians in the Marketplace: What would it Look Like if God Was Running the Show? Our speakers were Tod Bolsinger, Senior Pastor of San Clemente Presbyterian Church in California and Jeff Van Duzer, Dean of the School of Business and Economics at Seattle Pacific University, Washington. From their different perspectives and on the basis of their diverse experiences, both Tod and Jeff challenged us to think creatively as Christians about business. Many of those who attended this retreat are business owners and/or leaders.

Both speakers commented on the fact that most of us who seek to follow Christ have not done much deep thinking about business. We have tended to uncritically endorse either of two popular options. One idolizes capitalism and the market. The other demonizes capitalism and the market. Thus, we are desperately in need of careful, creative thinking about business in light of God’s purposes for the world and for us as creatures created in his image. ...

I had the privilege of attending this conference last week and finally got to meet people like Mark Roberts and Jeff Van Duzer face-to-face. It was one of the best conferences I've atteneded on this topic. Later this year I expect to blog through Van Duzer's  book Why Business Matters to God: (And What Still Needs to Be Fixed).

Mark Roberts on Work

Mark D. Roberts: Work and God . . . Oops! The Times Gets It Very Wrong

"... So, Kreider’s assertion that God invented work as punishment reveals a double problem. His understanding of God and his understand of work are lacking. If he had done a bit of homework, actually reading Genesis 1-3, Kreider would have discovered that God set up an antidote to busyness in the very beginning: the Sabbath. Not only did God create human beings to do meaningful work, but also he created a day each week for rest, rest that entails much more than mere idleness.

If Tim Kreider were alone in his view that our work really doesn’t matter and that it is a punishment from God, I would probably not be griping. But, unfortunately, Kreider’s perspective is common, even among Jews and Christians who should know better. What we need today is not a four-hour work day and lots of time off, but rather an understanding of work that see its potential value as well as an understanding of rest that goes deeper than mere idleness."

Bingo!

Business Is the Church's Business

Christianity Today: Business Is the Church's Business  (This is an excerpt from John Knapp's book How the Church Fails Businesspeople (And What Can Be Done About It). I did an eight part blog series about the book a few weeks ago.)

It's wrong to elevate an ecclesiastical elite over the money-making members of the body of Christ.

Anyone who has spent much time in the church is likely aware of its hierarchy of occupations. At the peak of the pyramid are full-time clergy and missionaries, followed closely by other paid workers in Christian ministry. Their jobs are seen as genuine callings, often validated by special ceremonies and rituals. Just below them in rank are the so-called helping professions—social workers, nurses, and the like—whose work aligns neatly with the church's ministry priorities. Moving further down the pyramid we find the vast majority of Christians—salespeople, postal workers, accountants, business owners, electricians, corporate executives, lawyers, and countless others who compose most of the body of Christ. Seldom are their jobs described as callings or celebrated by the church. [While researching this book,] we interviewed a high school teacher who astutely summed up the harm done by a cast system that devalues much good and necessary work:

I don't think many people understand how a sense of vocation applies to their work, especially if they are not in a ministerial or helping profession. It's clear to me, since I'm a teacher, but how do accountants know their work can be pleasing to or glorify God? How do attorneys hear the Holy Spirit in contentious cases? How can retail managers exhibit the love of Christ?

I was astonished recently to hear this hierarchy colorfully depicted in a sermon by a well-loved, retired minister. He declared that the church is like a circus that requires all kinds of workers—some to pitch the tent, some to take tickets, and even some to clean up after the elephants. At first he seemed to be working toward a rather strained metaphor for Romans 12:4–5 ("Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others"). But soon it was clear that his vision of the body of Christ was much more hierarchical than anything the apostle Paul ever imagined. He explained that the responsibility of everyone in the church, as in the circus, is to support the performers, chief among whom is the preacher in the pulpit. Granted, his imagery was a bit unusual, but the message that clergy are the stars of the show is quite common indeed. Consider these words of an earnest, freshly ordained seminary graduate preaching to a downtown Atlanta congregation with many businesspeople:

Generations of people in this country find their identity in their jobs. But that is an empty life, a life that leads you down a path of nothingness. But what might it mean if God says, "Now you are the one to go deliver the message." Your life must be interrupted if you are ready to be an instrument in meeting the world's needs. You must be ready to respond to the calling that God has on your life. Think about the untouchables in India. What if God said, "I want you to be the one to travel over there and give them the message?" What about the epidemic of AIDS in Africa? What if God is calling you to do something about it?

Must we really go to India or Africa to be instrumental in meeting the world's needs? Could it be that God also needs Christians to serve the world as factory workers, hairstylists, and bond traders?

These two ministers at opposite ends of their careers had the best of intentions, but I doubt if either had ever considered the disastrous consequences—for the church or for individual believers—of a theology that elevates an ecclesiastical elite while subtly devaluing the rest of the body. ...

Book Review: How the Church Fails Businesspeople (and what can be done about it), by John C. Knapp

Seedbed: How the Church Fails Businesspeople (and what can be done about it), by John C. Knapp by Guy Williams

A couple years ago at a clergy retreat I cornered a colleague who had entered pastoral ministry after a previous career with a multinational energy company. At the time, I was preaching to a host of successful businesspeople and needed guidance. “Well, here’s where most of those people are,” my friend said. “They are busy and don’t feel they have the time to be there, but they came. And they are thinking about how the decisions they had to make on Friday are going to play out on Monday.”

The conversation made something I knew the truth of--that people have a life outside of church activities--refreshingly and challengingly concrete.

In How the Church Fails Businesspeople, John C. Knapp tackles the thorny subject of the Church’s role in helping people integrate faith and work in their Christian discipleship. ...

Vocation of the Business Leader: A Reflection

University of St. Thomas: Vocation of the Business Leader: A Reflection

From the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, "Vocation of the Business Leader: A Reflection"

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

When businesses and market economies function properly and focus on serving the common good, they contribute greatly to the material and even the spiritual well-being of society. Recent experience, however, has also demonstrated the harm caused by the failings of businesses and markets. The transformative developments of our era—globalisation, communications technologies, and financialisation — produce problems alongside their benefits: inequality, economic dislocation, information overload, financial instability and many other pressures leading away from serving the common good. Business leaders who are guided by ethical social principles, lived through virtues and illuminated for Christians by the Gospel, can, nonetheless, succeed and contribute to the common good.

Obstacles to serving the common good come in many forms —lack of rule of law, corruption, tendencies towards greed, poor stewardship of resources—but the most significant for a business leader on a personal level is leading a “divided” life. This split between faith and daily business practice can lead to imbalances and misplaced devotion to worldly success. The alternative path of faith-based “servant leadership” provides business leaders with a larger perspective and helps to balance the demands of the business world with those of ethical social principles, illumined for Christians by the Gospel. This is explored through three stages: seeing, judging, and acting, even though it is clear that these three aspects are deeply interconnected.

SEEING the challenges and opportunities in the world of business is complicated by factors both good and evil, including four major “signs of the times” impacting business. Globalisation has brought efficiency and extraordinary new opportunities to businesses, but the downsides include greater inequality, economic dislocation, cultural homogeneity, and the inability of governments to properly regulate capital flows. Communications Technology has enabled connectivity, new solutions and products, and lower costs, but the new velocity also brings information overload and rushed decision-making. Financialisation of business worldwide has intensified tendencies to commoditise the goals of work and to emphasise wealth maximisation and short-term gains at the expense of working for the common good. The broader Cultural Changes of our era have led to increased individualism, more family breakdowns, and utilitarian preoccupations with self and “what is good for me”. As a result we might have more private goods but are lacking significantly in common goods. Business leaders increasingly focus on maximising wealth, employees develop attitudes of entitlement, and consumers demand instant gratification at the lowest possible price. As values have become relative and rights more important than duties, the goal of serving the common good is often lost.

JUDGING: Good business decisions are those rooted in principles at the foundational level, such as respect for human dignity and service to the common good, and a vision of a business as a community of persons. Principles on the practical level keep the business leader focused on:

• producing goods and services that meet genuine human needs while taking responsibility for the social and environmental costs of production, of the supply chain and distribution chain (serving the common good, and watching for opportunities to serve the poor);
• organising productive and meaningful work recognising the human dignity of employees and their right and duty to flourish in their work, (“work is for man” rather than “man for work”) and structuring workplaces with subsidiarity that designs, equips and trusts employees to do their best work; and
• using resources wisely to create both profit and well-being, to produce sustainable wealth and to distribute it justly (a just wage for employees, just prices for customers and suppliers, just taxes for the community, and just returns for owners).

ACTING: Business leaders can put aspiration into practice when they pursue their vocation, motivated by much more than financial success. When they integrate the gifts of the spiritual life, the virtues and ethical social principles into their life and work, they may overcome the divided life, and receive the grace to foster the integral development of all business stakeholders. The Church calls upon the business leader to receive—humbly acknowledging what God has done for him or her —and to give—entering into communion with others to make the world a better place. Practical wisdom informs his or her approach to business and strengthens the business leader to respond to the world’s challenges not with fear or cynicism, but with the virtues of faith, hope, and love. This document aims to encourage and inspire leaders and other stakeholders in businesses to see the challenges and opportunities in their work; to judge them according to ethical social principles, illumined for Christians by the Gospel; and to act as leaders who serve God.

The Church's Contribution to the Corruption of Business

I am across this video clip last night by Noah Riner, a MBA student at Stanford. His observation is the constant refrain I've heard from businesspeople, over and over and over again, throughout my life.

Charles North and Bob Smietana wrote a book four years ago called Good Intentions: Nine Hot-Button Issues Viewed Through the Eyes of Faith. They make this observation:

In interviewing businesspeople for her book Church on Sunday, Work on Monday, [Laura] Nash discovered a chasm between how businesspeople and their pastors saw economics. Pastors and church leaders talked in restrictive terms about the need to limit greed. The businesspeople in their congregations had a different view.

Business people took a positive, additive view: faith was about expanding economic opportunity for more people through business success," says Nash. "For the business person, business was about solving problems and creating prosperity and it centered on specific activities."

The message from the church is that, while occupations like social work, teaching, or medicine are worthy vocations for Christians, participation in business is almost exclusively an exercise in sin management. There is no theology that affirms and guides the shalom-generating contribution that business makes in the world. Particularly ironic is to a see a theologian occupying the Sally Smith Chair of Theology, a position endowed by some prosperous businessperson, articulating blanket condemnations of business, markets and profit.

There are a number of reasons that predispose those who work in church institutional structures against business. I won't be addressing those here today. Rather, I want to highlight that the church offers no narrative and no support to businesspeople trying to navigate the waters of our modern economy. Then episodes of businesspeople behaving poorly come on the horizon. The response from churches? "See! We told you have evil those businesspeople really are." Then comes a whole new round of sermons, articles, and blog posts about consumerism and resisting greed. We are told to put our social justice badge on our sleeve, to run out the door, and to go Occupy Wall Street.

Well, I've got a better suggestion. How about we church leaders go look into mirror? Then we will see the weak link. Then how about we go occupy Main Street? How about we go into the lives and businesses of the businesspeople in our own congregations, learning what challenges they face and what visions animate them in their work. Instead of an endless barrages of caution and condemnation, how about we find ways to be a church that affirms and guides businesspeople as they live out Christian vocation. Granted, it isn't as sexy as protesting in the streets, but there will be no meaningful move toward a more shalom-filled world without it.

Women, Work and Motherhood

Pew Research: Women, Work and Motherhood

A Sampler of Recent Pew Research Survey Findings

Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen's comment this week about Ann Romney's lack of work experience has put the "mommy wars" back in the news. The Pew Research Center has done many surveys in recent years that explore public attitudes about issues related to women, work and motherhood.  What follows is a summary of our key findings.

• In many ways a public consensus has developed around the changing role of women in society.  Nearly three quarters of American adults (73%) say the trend toward more women in the workforce has been a change for the better.  And 62% of adults believe that a marriage in which the husband and wife both have jobs and both take care of the house and children provides a more satisfying life than one in which the husband provides for the family and the wife takes care of the home.

See "The Generation Gap and the 2012 Election," November 3, 2011.

See "The Decline of Marriage and Rise of New Families," November 18, 2010.

• At the same time, when motherhood and children are brought into the debate, there is an ongoing ambivalence about what is best for society.  Only 21% of adults say the trend toward more mothers of young children working outside the home has been a good thing for society.  Some 37% say this has been a bad thing, and 38% say it hasn't made much difference.  And women themselves report feeling stressed about balancing work and family.  When asked in general how they feel about their time, 40% of working moms said they always feel rushed.  This compares with 24% of the general public and 26% of stay-at-home moms.  For their part working fathers don't seem to feel nearly as harried as working mothers.  Only 25% of working dads said they always feel rushed.

See "The Harried Life of the Working Mother," October 1, 2009 ...

Cristo Rey: Schools that work

Faith & Leadership: Cristo Rey: Schools that work

With demanding academics and an innovative work-study program, Cristo Rey Catholic schools have thrived, sending thousands of disadvantaged students to college and creating a new and sustainable model of Catholic education.

... Today, 6,900 students, mostly Hispanic and African-American, are enrolled in Cristo Rey Network schools in 17 states and the District of Columbia.

How successful are they?

Last year, every member of the Cristo Rey class of 2011 nationwide was accepted into a two- or four-year college. For the classes of 2008 through 2010, 85 percent enrolled in college, far above the matriculation rate for all high school students nationally, and more than twice the rate for African-American and Hispanic students. After two years, almost all -- 88 percent -- are still in school. They don’t drop out.

The key to Cristo Rey’s success is a work-study initiative pioneered at that first Cristo Rey school. Under the program, students work at paid internships five days a month in law firms, banks, hospitals and other professional settings. The internships not only introduce students to the workplace; they generate revenue -- currently about $32 million a year -- that covers the majority of the students’ education. ...

... More than 1,500 partner businesses provide the internships for Cristo Rey, including such blue-chip names as Blue Cross Blue Shield, Deloitte, JPMorgan Chase, Raytheon and Wells Fargo. The companies tend to be thoroughly satisfied with the students, with 93 percent re-enlisting for the program each year. When businesses do pull out, it’s usually not because they’re dissatisfied but because they have moved, been sold or gone out of business.

O’Keefe, Lyons & Hynes, a Chicago tax and corporate law firm, has participated in the Cristo Rey work-study program from the beginning and currently employs eight Cristo Rey students.

“The moment I heard the concept, I was all for it,” said Mike Heaton, a partner at the firm.

Heaton said he never worried that the kids from Pilsen and Little Village could do the work. He had seen his own teenage children and those of his partners do the same jobs as summer interns.

“Having our own kids down here convinced us that the kids of Cristo Rey could come in and do the job,” he said.

The law firm doesn’t consider the internships a charitable contribution to Cristo Rey, Heaton said. The students actually solve a big problem for the firm. In today’s workplace, answering phones, filing and making copies is difficult work that most adults don’t want to do.

But when four students share the job, it becomes a learning experience for them, he said.

In many instances, interns move up to roles with additional responsibility, such as doing research. One former Cristo Rey student, Cristina Garcia, a graduate of Marquette University, is currently working at the firm for a few months before starting law school in the fall.

“They do good work,” Heaton said.

The students, though, aren’t the only ones who learn from the work-study program. As Pilsen teens and downtown corporate lawyers get to know each other, eyes are opened, attitudes changed.

“It goes both ways,” Heaton said. “There’s no doubt these students have changed the perceptions of some of our staff and the lawyers. At the same time, we see the students change and become more relaxed and confident by the time they’re juniors and seniors. When they first arrive, they’re shy and perhaps wondering what kind of ogres we might be.” ...

There is a Cristo-Rey High School just a few blocks from my house here in Kansas City. I had a chance to do a site visit and tour last year. It is truly an amazing program.

 

Index: How the Church Fails Businesspeople (and what can be done about it)

Over the past month I did a book discussion series on John Knapp's, How the Church Fails Businesspeople (and what can be done about it.). Each post was orginally posted at Scot McKnight's Jesus Creed blog and then I reposted each entry here at the Kruse Kronicle. Here is an index to the series for those who may be interested:

Jesus Creed

Business People 1

Business People 2

Business People 3

Business People 4

Business People 5

Business People 6

Business People 7

Business People 8

Kruse Kroncile

How the Church Fails Businesspeople 1

How the Church Fails Businesspeople 2

How the Church Fails Businesspeople 3

How the Church Fails Businesspeople 4

How the Church Fails Businesspeople 5

How the Church Fails Businesspeople 6

How the Church Fails Businesspeople 7

How the Church Fails Businesspeople 8

How the Church Fails Businesspeople - 8

(This is cross post with a post done earlier today at Jesus Creed.)

WWJD – What would Jesus do? Most people are familiar with the popular Evangelical movement that sprang up in the ‘90s, inviting people to ask this question about daily life decisions. Many people are aware that this movement was rooted in Charles Sheldon’s best-selling novel, “In His Steps,” written in 1896, featuring a minster who encourages parishioners to ask this question throughout their daily lives for a year. What many may not be aware of is the event that transformed Sheldon life and led him to write the book.

Today we continue with the eighth and final chapter of John Knapp’s, How the Church Fails Businesspeople (and what can be done about it), titled “The Church’s Potential.” Knapp summarizes for us what he thinks our next steps are. He begins by recounting the events that shaped Charles Sheldon’s life.

Knapp explains that Charles Sheldon was minister in Topeka, KS, in 1889. He wanted to make his ministry relevant to the everyday lives of his parishioners. He asked to be relieved of all but his preaching duties for twelve weeks. He spent those twelve weeks going to every part of town to learn how people lived and made a living. He spent a week as a homeless person looking for work. He hung out with streetcar workers on the job. He attended classes at the local college. He spent time in the African-American part of town. He lived with railroad workers, firemen, brakemen, switchmen, yardmen, and engineers. He spent time with lawyers and doctors. He spent time with businessmen in real estate, accounting, dry goods, hardware, and other fields. He ran a printing press.

Sheldon credited this experience with helping him to see the reality of his parishioners and it made him better able to preach and minister to his congregation. And I love this story Knapp tells:

“Lest we underestimate the impact of Sheldon’s project, consider this. Upon learning that black children were woefully behind their white peers in academic achievement, partly because many of their mothers worked during the day to help support their families, Sheldon set out to establish the first African-American kindergarten west of the Mississippi to provide early-childhood care and better education. Among its graduates was Elisha Scott, who went on to law school with Sheldon’s help and later gave the name Charles Sheldon Scott to his son, a future lawyer who in 1954 successfully argued the Brown vs. Board of Education case before the United States Supreme Court, effectively ending school segregation in America.” (149)

[Note: Sheldon’s 1890, Andover Review article, “Practical Sociological Studies,” the source of Knapp’s discussion, can be found here. On a related note, I recommend Alain de Botton’s, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, (a philosophical rather than theological work), a travelogue through several modern professions that is both humorous and moving.]

Knapp is not suggesting that each minister needs to take a similar three month sabbatical but he does suggest that pastors make an effort to get into the workplace and talk to people about their work lives. For several years I’ve sensed that until people see a profound connection between their daily work and God’s Kingdom, the church will always be something supplemental to “real life.” I strongly identify with Knapp’s speculation that, “A serious emphasis on faith at work may actually be a catalyst for the church’s larger mission.” (150) So where should the church begin?

Knapp points us back to earlier chapters. We need for churches to think about how they can enliven the moral dimensions he highlighted in Chapter 6: Moral discernment, moral discourse, moral influence, moral encouragement, and moral example. But beyond that, he points us to four essentials to consider.

Collaborative Leadership

“We have seen what lay leaders can accomplish by pouring their energies into ministries outside their own churches. If the culture of the institution is to change, lay leadership will be indispensable in helping the clergy rethink some of the timeworn ecclesiastical assumptions about the priorities of ministry. … The credibility and insights of lay leadership in faith-at-work ministries cannot be underestimated.” (150-151)

Courageous Conversations

We need space for conversations we all know need to happen but are not happening. The church doesn’t talk about vocation, business, or money. These conversations are going to make pastors and businesspeople alike uncomfortable. Included in these conversations will be how people handle their own money as well as how the church handles its own business practices.

Once the church begins to learn how to handle the internal dialog, it will need to engage the community. Knapp lifts up Redeemer Presbyterian Church’s (in New York City) Center for Faith and Work as one model. The Center offers forums for dialog on a being a Christian in a variety of industries. Through their Gotham Fellowship, they offer a nine-month training program helping young-adults integrate work and life in a variety of fields.

Relevant Worship

The images, rituals, and language of worship are disconnected from the reality of work life. We (and particularly pastors) have to be intentional about tearing down the dualities that we have created between work and worship. Knapp reminds us about the possibility of commissioning services. Sermons, prayers, and hymns that incorporate an integrated perspective need to be brought into worship.

A More Inclusive Narrative

What is the church’s narrative of itself? Visit a congregation’s website. You will find pictures of people in worship, attending bible studies, youth groups, mission trips, pastors, and possibly a mission worker or two. What you will not find is pictures of people at work!

Personally, I think folks should do as I did (though not on purpose) and read the “King Jesus Gospel” and Knapp’s book together. Our work is a central expression of living as citizens of the Kingdom of God.

Finally at the closing of the book he writes about young adults:

“… for the millennials are far less willing than their predescessors to divide their lives into two worlds. “Many millennials see their careers and personal life as one,” writes Ron Alsop in his book The Trophy Kids Grow Up. “They don’t talk about balancing work and life but rather about blending them.” (155)

Curiously, the failure of congregations and denominations to nurture integrated lives may lead not only to fragmented lives but also to the demise of the very structures that have ignored this reality.

Concluding Thoughts

Because of my work in the hierarchy of the PCUSA I have been a party to many conversations about the status of the church (the PCUSA being one expression) in our culture and the church’s future. If there is one thing I keep coming back to it is the presence of two disconnects.

First is the disconnect people feel between their daily lives and the mission of God. Knapp has focused on businesspeople. While most of us may not be businesspeople with a capital “B,” most of us do work in business settings where integration of work with faith is a challenge. Knapp’s concerns and suggested responses can be pressed in other vocational directions as well.

Second is the disconnect in the institutions of the church about the work and faith disconnection! Knapp nails it with this quote I included in the previous post.

“Diehl, Hammond, Butt, and others like them erected a platform of ideas that has allowed a multifaceted movement to thrive through the initiative and leadership of laypeople. The institutional church, meanwhile, has been less than enthusiastic about these ideas, preferring to redefine lay ministry as more active involvement in existing church programs. ‘Whether church professionals never fully absorbed that, by definition, the location of lay ministry was extrinsic to the gathered church or whether they were threatened by a loss of power and control is open to debate,’ writes [David] Miller.” (125)

My experience is that when I share my concerns about lack of integration in our daily lives with working people I frequently see a hunger to learn more. There is an eruption of both excitement and frustration. When I talk with church professionals, I have the sense that I might as well be speaking Martian. Sometimes there is a head nod toward the issue. Sometimes there is patient listening. But in the end, the critical issues on the agenda are how to improve the worship service, the youth programs, sharing of faith stories, summer mission trips, compassionate ministries, and justice advocacy efforts. Surely if we just did these things better, more people would come.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying there is no merit to wrestling with these programmatic issues. There is. I’m saying that focusing on these issues to the exclusion of nurturing people to live integrated lives as citizens of God’s Kingdom is pure folly. The image of a failing car company obsessing over body design, airbag safety, and suspension systems for vehicles that have no engines pops into mind. Until this changes, the steady stream of people out the back door of our churches into the ranks of the “religious but unchurched” will not stem and young adults will at best see the church as interesting anachronism.

I’m hitting the institutional church pretty hard. I don’t want to be unfair. I do see a pastor here and there in my own PCUSA tribe who is deeply wrestling with this stuff. I encounter an occasional denominational official who gets these issues. They span a range of political and theological leanings. I’m personally grateful to have a pastor who is tuned into these issues, who is deeply rethinking what his role is, and continues to gently nudge our congregation in new ways of thinking and being. I don’t think it is fair to paint a monolithic picture of despair among my tribe or the tribes of others, but the challenges are big.

I will offer one last concern. I’m all for para-church organizations. They play an indispensable role. Still, worshiping communities are an essential expression of the Kingdom of God. A central feature of baptism is making a visible identification with the community that God has gathered to give witness to his Kingdom.

I’m uneasy with how disconnected some expressions of the faith at work movement are from worshiping communities. There is a danger of setting up yet another dualism. We can end up having a para-church community of like-minded people for support at work, and a worshiping community that supplies us with a range of religiosity goods. That conveniently insulates our like-minded community from having to reflect on challenges that those outside our community might raise, while freeing us from the honest conversations that need to be had so that people within the worshiping community may learn from us. It becomes just one more exercise in compartmentalization. Knapp has pointed us in some directions of first steps for finding coherence, not just as individuals, but for the church. We will need winsome advocates from the business community who will actively engage in the patient work of reintegration in the institutional church, even as they are open to being transformed by God through the church.

There you have it. If you haven’t bought the book, now would be a good time. ;-) My thanks to Scot for making Jesus Creed available for this discussion. My thanks to John Knapp for having written such an important conversation starter. And thanks to all of you for conversation throughout this series.

How could your local church better help people connect the worlds of faith and work? Are their things being done in your congregation, or in other congregations, that we all might learn from? What obstacles do you see in having the courageous conversations Knapp describes? What thoughts do you have about how we might create congregations with a more inclusive narrative? This being the last post, what do you make of Knapps thesis for this book?

[Series Index]

How the Church Fails Businesspeople - 7

(This is cross post with a post done earlier today at Jesus Creed.)

How do we create coherence between faith and work? John Knapp has explained how important rethinking vocation is, and how important it is that we carefully consider a moral theology of work. Today, Chapter 7 of How the Church Fails Businesspeople (and what can be done about it), Knapp describes a workplace awakening.

Knapp suggests that an awakening to faith and work issues has emerged in the past ten to twenty years. But even prior to that, there were people who were surfacing the issues. Lutheran steel company executive William Diehl was writing books on this topic in the 1980s. Peter Hammond, connected with Diehl, became influential in Intervarsity with their Ministry in Daily Life work. There were people like Howard E. Butt, Jr., originally connected with the Billy Graham Crusades, who founded the Laity Lodge and an online ministry to businesspeople called TheHighCalling.org.

Knapp lays out several ways people are trying to integrate faith and work. Which ones do you find hopeful and which ones give you concern? Why? Are there other avenues of finding coherence that you did not see mentioned here? What do you think the institutional church might learn from the faith-at- work movement?

My sense is that a move toward more serious theological reflection began about this time. Miroslav Volf published “Work in the Spirit: Toward a Theology of Work,” in 1991, David Krueger published “Keeping Faith at Work,” in 1994, and R. Paul Stevens began publishing a string of books on work and faith, most notably for me, “The Other Six Days: Vocation Work and Ministry in Biblical Perspective,” in 1999. Other authors have emerged in the past decade but I still have the sense that interest in this topic in the theological academy is relegated to a small minority. The real change has been coming from Christians outside the institutions of the church.

Knapp highlights some examples of lay-led ministries that have emerged to hold conferences and retreats, offer resources, and to create networking opportunities. He mentions Kevin Latty’s Souly Business, Chuck Proudfit’s At Work on Purpose, Aric Renicke’s Christian Business Roundtable and Christian Professionals Worldwide, and Richard Boxx’s Integrity Resource Center. There are countless websites and social media initiatives from a variety of and organizations.

Also emerging are attempts by Christians to form groups that meet for study and prayer within the workplace. This is easier within private companies, but some public companies accommodate this, and even some government entities permit this as well. Knapp devotes a section of the chapter to pointing out that this is not without controversy. EEOC requirements and concerns about creating a hostile work environment for people who are not Christian is a challenge. Yet the walls between work and private life have been lowering and many employees want more integrated lives, whether Christians or people of other faiths. Knapp sees this as an area that is likely going to lead to more controversy and the business world is really not ready to reckon with it.

Another response to the faith and work divide has been for companies to openly embrace faith. There has been a rise in the number of “Christian-based companies,” firms that have a Christian vision as part of their business plan. Interstate Batteries, Hobby Lobby, Chic-fil-A, ServiceMaster, Amway, and Covenant Transport, are just a few prominent examples of a growing trend. Many of these businesses network through organizations like the Fellowship of Companies in Christ (FCCI).

Another growing phenomenon is the idea of corporate and industrial chaplaincies. Companies employ or contract with chaplains to be onsite and available for employees. Businesses have organized to provide these chaplains, the largest being Marketplace Chaplains USA, with 2,400 chaplains serving 418 companies.  There is formal and ongoing training required to qualify as a chaplain. Chaplains are not involved in overt evangelism but rather offer spiritual support, hospital visitation, and possibly an occasional funeral or wedding.

Finally, there is Business as Mission, or BAM. Here, businesses are established (usually in emerging nations) to evangelize, create jobs, and to apply the profits to various types of community development. Traditional mission models are often not welcomed in some regions in of the world and they are harder to sustain. BAM has somewhat of a tent-making quality, while being more agreeable to authorities, and with the additional benefit of sometimes creating jobs.

What Knapp is pointing to in this chapter is an explosion in the effort by businesspeople to make connection between public life in the business world and faith. For a more comprehensive look that reviews the past century of faith and work developments, read David Miller’s God at Work: The History and Promise of the Faith at Work Movement, published in 2007.

Some Thoughts

Whether reading Knapp or Miller, I have a conflicted response of both hope and disquiet. The hopeful part is that people are working at finding coherence in their lives. There are hundreds of organizations rising up as Christians help each other navigate the challenges. That is a good thing and there is a role for this type of service.

But the disturbing reality is this. We already have thousands of communities all over the nation that should already be offering the kind of integration and support that these disciples are craving. They are called congregations! From what I can tell, virtually none of the ministries being described are congregation based or are about equipping congregations to be more effective at addressing the faith and work divide. Concerning the movement to address the divide, Knapp writes:

“… Today the movement is flourishing, aided greatly by social media and globally networked organizations, yet without much involvement by the institutional church. Indeed, many of today’s most successful work-related ministries were born out of frustration with the church and its failure to respond to and obvious need and opportunity.

The rise of this trend is well-documented by Princeton University’s David W. Miller in his book God at Work. He concludes, “The church and the theological academy have a choice: they can sit on the sidelines, ignore the movement, and let it pass them by, or they can learn from it, engage it, and help shape the theology and practice of faith at work.” (123)

A few paragraphs later Knapp writes:

“Diehl, Hammond, Butt, and others like them erected a platform of ideas that has allowed a multifaceted movement to thrive through the initiative and leadership of laypeople. The institutional church, meanwhile, has been less than enthusiastic about these ideas, preferring to redefine lay ministry as more active involvement in existing church programs. ‘Whether church professionals never fully absorbed that, by definition, the location of lay ministry was extrinsic to the gathered church or whether they were threatened by a loss of power and control is open to debate,’ writes Miller.”

As someone from a Mainline Protestant perspective, I confess that many sectors of the movement are not all that comfortable for me. It often feels very white, very male, very Republican and deeply entrenched in conservative Evangelical and Pentecostal milieus. I worry that some of what I see too heavily equates Christian faith with patriotic American civil religion. The theological reflection, at times, strikes me as much less than adequate.

Still, these folks are making the effort to find coherence, even if the effort is being made from outside the institutional church. The Mainline churches have vacated the arena altogether. In fact, I sometimes wonder if rather than seeing the daily world of business as something that needs attention from Mainline theology and institutions, there isn’t an ethos that says that business is “conservative” and that isn’t what we do. With so many people in Mainline pews from business backgrounds, and with declining numbers of people involved in these denominations, it is quite remarkable to me that the movement to find coherence between work and faith is virtually nonexistent in Mainline tribes, except possibly in the case of a few isolated congregations here and there.

[Series Index]

How the Church Fails Businesspeople - 6

(This is cross post with a post done earlier today at Jesus Creed.)

Today we continue with John Knapp’s How the Church Fails Businesspeople (and what can be done about it). We turn now to Chapter 6, “A Moral Theology of Work.”

The business environment can often present significant ethical challenges. Where might we begin as we think about ethical behavior? Knapp suggests a good place to start is with Micah 6:8:

“He has told you, O mortal, what is good;

and what does the Lord require of you

but to do justice, and to love kindness,

and to walk humbly with your God?”

Is it possible to be competitive in business while loving justice and kindness, and walking humbly with God, while grounded in love and responsibility?

What would it take to create the five-fold moral community Knapp describes?

Is Micah and the Jesus Creed the place to ground our ethical reflection or would you frame things differently?

Grounded in Love

Knapp says this definition of what is good is grounded in the Jesus Creed: Love God, love neighbor. What would it mean to respond to others out of this ethic in business? Knapp writes:

“An ethic of love goes beyond both duty (keeping promises, telling the truth, doing a job well) and compliance (with civil law, contractual requirements, or employment policies), both of which are necessary in the workplace. Love recognizes that every person is unique and must be cared for individually, whether or not a rule mandates it. This requires us to take the time and effort to discover what actually meets the other’s need.” (101)

To Do Justice

Business people are to be advocates for justice within their sphere of influence. It goes beyond just upholding the law. It is about pursing more just structures and behaviors. Sadly, Knapp writes:

“Paul Camenisch, a theologian with expertise in business ethics, believes that the church has failed to convey to believers their personal responsibilities for doing justice at work. In a critique of Protestant policy statements on economic justice, he writes, “Seldom if ever are Christians addressed as influential actors responsible in their vocations for seeing that, within their power, justice is done. They are not seriously challenged to ask questions  about the human impact of their actions as workers, managers, consumers, and owners on their fellows …” As we have discussed, church pronouncements on economics tend to critique the macroeconomic system with little or no thought to the difficulties faced by individuals or organizations within the system.” (103)

To Love Kindness

We are not just to do kind things but to love kindness. We might easily see the natural application of this to our coworkers or customers. How about to our personal rivals or the competition?

To Walk Humbly

“It is easy fall prey to an illusion of becoming self-sufficient through the accumulation of material wealth.” (106) And with this sense of self-sufficiency can come a sense of entitlement. That entitlement can be evidenced in the form of smug condescension or even as envy of others for what should “rightfully” be one’s own. For Christians there is a danger of self-righteous as we strive to be more “Christ-like” than others. I’m inclined to think that walking humbly may be the slipperiest of all. Knapp sees it as the precondition for the first two.

Responsibility

Central to living out this ethic is an embrace of responsibility. Knapp writes:

“This [human] potential includes the capacity for genuine responsiveness in all relationships, for authentic discipleship is a process of learning to enact Christian love in every circumstance. H. Richard Niebuhr … proposes that responsibility is defined chiefly by how we respond to others including God. This concept of responsibility as response-ability may be a better way to think about ethics than adherence to abstract more principles, compliance with rules, or even achievement of good outcomes. The responsible Christian must be fully attentive to the “decisive present” and the possibilities of God’s activity through the lives of others.” (109)

With the response-ability we have, we are to make “fitting responses” based on God’s justice.

Referring back to the survey results mentioned in the first post in this series (where people from all walks of life considered an ethical dilemma they had once faced), Knapp writes:

“Few of the dilemmas reported by our research subjects could be reduced to neat choices of right over wrong, good over bad. Nor were they problems where rules could determine the best course of action. The inherent difficulty in most of the cases involved conflicting values and priorities.” (111)

In short, ethical decisions are frequently messy. Two legitimate ethical concerns may be in competition with each other. On top of this, we are frequently distracted by competing demands and time pressures. All this requires conscious effort to be truly present in the decisions we are making.

Questions to guide us

Knapp offers a list of questions we might ask ourselves when we face difficult questions with justice, kindness, and humility grounded in love and responsibility (His questions with my summary sentence):

• What’s really going on here? – Apply careful thought and investigation.
• What makes this decision difficult? – What is the crux of the ethical challenge?
• Who has a legitimate stake in how this matter is resolved? – Especially keep in mind those with less power or influence.
• Am I acting in humility, or are my own interests crowding out the interests of others? – Look at things from the position of others.
• To whom and to what am I responsible? – Be clear about our responsibilities and particularly our primary vocation of serving God.
• What options are available, and what outcomes may result from each? – Be sure to consider long-term and broader consequences.
• Have I sought God’s will? – Prayer, Scripture, and the discernment of other believers are important means of seeking God’s will.

The Necessary Role of the Church

Knapp closes the chapter with an important section called “The Necessary Role of the Church.” He lists five facets of faith community that should be present to equip and support people in the workplace. (The short summaries of each listing are mine, not Knapp’s.)

A Community of Moral Discernment – Rarely are any of us capable of answering the above questions on our own. Including people who know us, love us, share our commitment to God, and/or may have special insight into how to process some of these questions, are essential to sound discipleship.

A Community of Moral Discourse – People within a faith community often don’t agree with each other on particular problems but it is often the civil debate about a problem that helps us individually to come to better conclusions. The church needs to be a place for honest questions.

A Community of Moral Influence – Individuals often find they are powerless alone to address injustices that emerge in the work world. Congregations and denominational bodies are needed to work in support of efforts to reduce injustice and be supportive of businesspeople needing to take difficult stands.

A Community of Moral Encouragement – The business world is frequently messy. Rather than casting businesspeople as tainted Christians, we need to pray for them and support them as they work to integrate their work and faith (even as we help build the expectation that they should do so. )

A Community of Moral Example – The church needs to engage in just employment and financial practices if it expects the broader world to give any heed.

Concluding thoughts

This concludes the summary of Chapter 6. I’m not sure I’ve done it justice. I hope folks will read the book. But this chapter raised two issues for me that I want to briefly mention … one economic and the other theological.

I love the use of the Micah passage grounded in love and responsibility as a starting point for ethical reflection. And Knapp is exactly right that love is not about having warm fuzzy sentiments but rather about knowing individuals and seeking their good. Knapp is calling us to look at the neglected realm of everyday micro-economic business decisions and giving us tools to live out our calling in that context. But as we move to the meso and macro levels of economics, to decisions that deal with large firms and interactions beyond the firm, I think it becomes impossible to meaningfully apply the “love” principle.

A signature feature of advanced market economies is the ability of firms to gather and coordinate large numbers of people. Markets create vast webs of interconnection among people (who will likely never meet each other), allowing us to benefit from specialization and exchange with countless strangers. It is not possible for a businessperson to “love” hundreds/thousands of others in a businessperson’s own firm, much less those outside the firm, in the sense we have described above. Theologian Economist Paul Heyne wrote in an essay (“Morality of Labor Unions.” Chapter 24 in Are Economists Basically Immoral?, 429.):

“What does justice mean in this world of completely impersonal transactions? If we take the most general definition of justice – giving to each their due – how do we decide what each is due? In such a world the Golden Rule is simply irrelevant. Social transactions in a market-coordinated economy cannot be governed by the principle “Do for others what you would like them to do for you.” The appropriate rule is what someone has called the Silver Rule: “Do not do to others anything that you would consider unfair if they did it to you.” (429)

I do not want to minimize the important framing that Knapp has offered here.  Rather, I want to emphasize that as we move much outside the sphere of face-to-face community, we encounter inescapable sociological realties that may require a different kind of ethical analysis. We can’t simply deal with larger institutions as a family (or face-to-face community) writ large. All the more reason why we need communities of disciples to help us work our way through ethical thickets.

The theological thought I had goes directly to Scot’s King Jesus Gospel. Scot rejects the Evangelical tendency to collapse “gospel” into “salvation.” The King Jesus Gospel is about Jesus’s completion of the story of Israel and that story is rooted in the creation story, including the first great commission of exercising dominion over creation and the redemption of that mission. But I don’t think it is just the Evangelical world in Protestantism that needs rethinking.

In my Mainline PCUSA world, gospel is typically about rectifying wrong, either via compassion or justice advocacy. If Evangelicals have a “salvation gospel ,” as Scot says, then my tribe has a bias toward a “justice gospel.” Just as the King Jesus Gospel includes salvation, it also includes justice, but “gospel” cannot be collapsed into salvation, justice, or their combination. The King Jesus Gospel includes (among many other things) redemption of the first great commission. Neither the salvation gospel nor the justice gospel will do. Without the King Jesus Gospel there is no reason to give focused attention to the issues Knapp is raising. Work is peripheral to the “real” issues of either salvation or justice. I think the real starting place for a moral theology of work likely must begin with our understanding of gospel.

[Series Index]