TheHighCalling.org: Interviews

Wake Up to the Sacred: An Interview with Barbara Brown Taylor

Becky Garrison — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 06:00:00 GMT

After working as a parish priest for 15 years, Barbara Brown Taylor (www.barbarabrowntaylor.com) left her parish position to become a religion professor at Piedmont College in 1998. In her book Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, she shares her experience of wandering through the vocational wilderness to discern where God was calling her to serve.

What prompted you to write Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith?

I wrote the book seven years after leaving parish ministry, which was a painful and unexpected change for me. In all that time, I had not read or heard anyone speak of the vocational wilderness I had gone through—so I decided to write the book I wished I could have read.

When you were ordained, you say you got exactly what you wanted. But as you observe in this book, you didn't realize how much this would hurt. How so?

At a concrete level, I didn't realize how much my neck would hurt when dozens of people leaned over to lay hands on my head! At a more visceral level, I didn't realize how much being ordained would cost me in terms of my own relationship with God. In a weird way, the demands of doing the job kept me away from the resources I needed to do the job at all.

Any words of advice for others whose dream job has turned sour?

Pay attention both to the dream, which may need revising, and to the sourness, which may be a great prompt to rethink the relationship between your role and your soul. Most of us will have more than one job in our working lives, which means we will have more than one opportunity to seek meaningful work at different stages of our own deepening humanity.

What would you say to others who feel they are in a job where like you, they can't find the time anymore to be quiet or still or pray?

Pay attention to the costs of living without that time and decide if you are willing to keep footing the bill. The older I get, the clearer my priorities are. I don't have time for a job that doesn't leave me time to be quiet or still or to pray. I have already moved once and changed jobs twice in order to protect a still space in my life—so I know I can do it again.

Any words of counsel for those who, like you, feel they are burned out in their job but feel they can't leave due to this economy?

Again, I think every person has to weigh the costs of staying put versus the costs of leaving his or her own particular situation. If I had young children, I would probably work a cash register to make sure they had health benefits. Still, I know people who lost jobs they were not burned out on who say how much they have benefited from learning to live on less.

How do you see your work at Piedmont College as a calling?

The short answer is that I can construe any job that involves working with other human beings as a calling. The longer answer is that I love working with young adults who are making major decisions about how they will live, what they will value, how they will think, and what they will do for a living. Learning how to serve them without doing their work for them is a high calling for me.

What spiritual practices do you use in your current job to keep you from getting burned out again?

Teaching is a good job for an introvert. I am actually expected to spend time in the library! Silence and solitude remain essential spiritual practices for me. Without time to read, think, and pray, I doubt I would have anything worthwhile to say. On the job, I am aware of practicing holy listening as well as a kind of community building that strikes me as sacred. In my classroom, every student has a voice and an honored place at the table. The Golden Rule rules.

How did your spiritual life deepen once you left ordained ministry?

There was more time to read, think, and pray, for one thing. I was also freed to seek God in riskier ways, without worrying that I would lead anyone in my congregation to follow me over a cliff. Pastors are representative people whose words and deeds have consequences for the members of their churches. What I say and do still has consequences for my students and my college, but the stakes are different. Academic freedom is a terrific perk.

Why are you concerned about the church's intellectualization of the faith?

The most important reason is because I don't read the gospels as intellectual treatises. On the night before he died, with all the conceptual truths in the world at his disposal, Jesus asked his disciples to share food and wash feet—apparently trusting these physical practices to teach his followers what they needed to know when he was no longer around to teach them himself. It is very hard to intellectualize food and feet. When I ask Christians to tell me about their faith, 99.9% of them tell me what they believe. Just once, I would love to hear someone describe faith in terms of how he or she lives.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by saying that the call to serve God is first and foremost the call to be fully human?

Sure. I say that first of all to flush the low opinions most Christians have of what it means to be human. This always strikes me as odd, since the Christian church has gone to such trouble through the centuries to assert Jesus' full humanity. So I focus on the word "full," suspecting that both Jesus and the church have something to teach me about what it means to live fully into my humanity with other people and all creation. If I don't start there, then my service to God risks being so spiritual that it is really no earthly good.

Why do you compare your prayer life to hanging laundry on the line?

That passage comes from An Altar in the World where I speak of hanging laundry on the line as an act of devotion—each garment serving as a prayer flag, a tactile and spiritual connection to someone or something I care about. My point is that there are ordinary things we do every day that hold great potential for connecting us to the Divine—but discovering them involves surrendering hard distinctions between "the secular" and "the sacred."

How can our ordinary lives become sacred?

I think they already are. I think our job is to wake up to the sacredness that is already there.

Elaborate on the statement, "There is no spiritual treasure to be found apart from the bodily experiences of human life on earth."

That's a statement I make early on in Altar, based not only on the very embodied teachings of Jesus but also on the fact that the body is the soul's address. Even things we sometimes conceive as happening apart from the body—reason, imagination, revelation, inspiration—these take place in minds and hearts, which are parts of our bodies. I am always surprised by people who speak of faith as if it happens in the air somewhere. Our bodies are God's best way of getting to us. Revelation begins in the flesh.

Interview with Michael Card: Writer, Musician, Theologian

Marcus Goodyear — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Michael Card is something of a Renaissance man—part musician, part teacher, part theologian, part writer, part inspirational speaker, and radio show host. The success of his career has certainly surprised him. He has written more than 19 number one hits, including songs like "El Shaddai" and "Emmanuel."

Recently, Michael Card began speaking and leading worship at Laity Lodge retreats. At one of the retreats, we sat down to talk with him about his latest book, A Better Freedom.

At Laity Lodge retreats, you've talked a lot about servants and slaves in conjunction with your new book. Can you tell us the difference between a servant and a slave in the Bible?

I think the words are just sort of nuanced. In Greek, they're different words. A "servant" or a "diakonos" is a person who has more choices. A "doulos," which is based on the word for being "bound" is more of what you and I would think of, traditionally, as a slave—a person who has no choice; who is owned by someone else; who's given up everything, or at least, maybe everything had been taken away from him or her.

Can you talk about slavery in the New Testament, specifically?

First of all, we looked at the fact that Old Testament slavery and New Testament slavery were two fundamentally different things.

New Testament slavery was very severe—more of what you and I would have thought African-American slavery was like. There were virtually no laws to protect the slave. And, what laws there were, were usually disregarded—slaves were mutilated, branded, collared. There was not much hope.

But, there were those slaves who were at the higher echelons, who were professional people—house servants, doctors, lawyers, skilled craftsmen—who did have some hope of getting out. It was a fairly complex system.

There seem to be a lot of passages about masters and slaves. Why is this such a prevalent image in the New Testament?

That's the reason I sort of centered on the subject. It is a really pervasive image, especially owing to the fact that everyone identifies themselves as a slave or identifies themselves with slaves. I mean, Peter, Paul, John, James, Jude, Mary, Jesus' own mother, Simeon, the angel in Revelation. John falls down before the angel, and Simeon says, "I'm just a slave like you; don't do this." And then, most especially of course, Jesus, who Philippians 2 says came in the form of a "doulos," a slave.

When we read these passages, I tend to read the slave and master passages thinking about myself as an employee which is not at all fair to my employer because he doesn't treat me like a slave.

Maybe I need to talk to some of your employees!

[laughing] I don't have any. But I wonder, is there a danger in reading these passages through the lens of our workplaces?

No, not necessarily. First of all, I want people to read these passages any time and any way they can. And, the advice, especially in the household codes that Paul gives to masters, is basically great advice to a modern-day boss.

Paul says they should remember that they have a master; they have a boss, and that's Christ. And, they're subject to Him. He sees everything they do. And, they're to be kind to the slaves, and that sort of thing.

And, likewise to slaves, Paul talks about showing respect to their masters and not doing things just to be seen—not being people pleasers. It's a wonderful word to modern-day bosses and employees.

In your book, you talk about "eye slaves." Can you explain what you mean by that phrase?

I love the word; and Paul uses it twice, once in Colossians and once in Ephesians: the Greek word—ophthalmos—"eye," doulia comes from doulos, the word for "slave." When you translate that word into English, it becomes a whole sentence. It means, "those who do things only when people are watching them."

I don't know about you, Marcus, but for me, I resonated with that, because I'm an eye slave. Sometimes I do things just because I know people are watching me. If no one was watching, I wouldn't do it.

Paul says that in the household codes; but then, Jesus says the same sort of thing in Luke 22, when he says don't do things to be seen by men. Don't be like the Gentiles who lord it over each other. You're not supposed to be that way. Jesus says you're called to be slaves; you're called to be servants. It's not like that with you. You shouldn't be that way.

Romans referred to slaves as "talking tools."

Yes.

At TheHighCalling.org and at Laity Lodge, we hear from a lot of people who feel like they are nothing more than "talking tools." They feel like they're dehumanized by their work. What would you say to these people? What does the Bible say to these people?

Well, it may be true. They may be dehumanized. They may be looked upon as tools of production. I think that's probably true of a lot of companies and a lot of bosses. But, I think the word of Scripture to them is that Christ does give us, I've heard it called, a "concealed dignity" because I belong to Him, because He is my master.

Your boss doesn't own you. The big company you work for doesn't own you; but someone does. And, the Bible says He paid for you; He purchased you out of the marketplace, like a slave is purchased.

For those people who are feeling dehumanized, the Bible has a good word for them—you have a concealed dignity because someone else owns you. That would come as a good word to me, I think, if I was working for some huge corporation that treated me like a guinea pig or something. Someone else owns me, and it's not my employer.

In your book, you talk about these slave stories and slave parables that Jesus told. And you say he was telling them to a culture of slaves.

Well, certainly. When he tells those parables, there are slaves standing around. Peter owned slaves; the rabbis owned slaves. It was a very common part of life in the first century.

And they were perfect exemplars because a slave was a person who was owned. A slave was a person who had a master. I think Jesus appeals to slaves so many times in his parables because that's a big part of the point he's trying to get across. We have a master who owns us.

I have to admit that it is hard for me to think of myself as being owned.

Before people who are reading this get too upset, we need to realize that Jesus is redeeming that image of slavery. It's not the brutal institution of Roman slavery or African-American slavery that I use for examples. It's a completely different relationship. Just as He redeemed the cruel image of the cross and made it so meaningful, He's redeemed this image of slavery.

So the image of New Testament slavery is parallel to the image of taking up a cross.

It is. And the cross is the way slaves were executed. The cross is a slave death. Jesus dies a slave death.

But we live in a culture of masters. How do we then listen to these stories?

I would say that we live in a culture of people who live as if they were masters. But in fact, like you said before, a lot of people feel that they are slaves. And the people who live as if they were the masters need to realize that's all an illusion.

So much of the world that we live in is illusory. That is why we always turn to the Scripture and listen to what the Scripture has to say to us. It says we belong to someone else. And this is whether we've said "yes" to Christ or not. John tells us that Jesus died for the sins of the whole world.

Even people who don't know Jesus have been purchased by Jesus. He died for their sins; He purchased them. And that gives Him the right to judge us in the last day. Because He's paid for our sins, He can judge us in the last day.

So, I think that's my word to Christians and non-Christians—you're owned. You have a master. If you haven't thought about your relationship with your master, it is something you need to meditate about.

At Laity Lodge you've talked about the "Servant Savior"—or the master who humbles himself to become a slave. In the Foundation, we talk a lot about servant leadership. How is a "Servant Leader" different from the "Servant Savior."

Jesus is the "Servant Savior," but he is also a servant leader.

Of course, that was a problem with the disciples. They were looking for a different kind of a leader who would exercise authority. Specifically, they were hoping for someone who would kill the Romans. They never dreamed that Jesus would die for the Romans. That was unimaginable to them.

It's a good thing that you guys focus on servant leadership, because not only is it effective leadership when we serve each other and wash each other's feet the way Jesus washed His disciples' feet—but I think in a biblical sense, it's the only kind of real leadership there is. There is no other kind of leader than a person who humbles himself.

Is the Greek word for "leader" the same as the Greek word for "master"?

Kurios means "master, lord, owner."

What's the state of slavery in the world today?

Slavery isn't a thing of the past. There are more slaves now than there have ever been in the world. Even in the U.S., there are slaves—largely Hispanics. But, there's a huge sex slave trade in people of all ethnicities. And there is slavery in places like India and Africa. There are literally millions and millions of slaves in the world right now.

As Christians, what can we do about slavery in the world?

Well, praying is always important. International Justice Mission is a good place to find out what you can do.

I worked for an organization called World Serve. World Serve is a ministry that works in closed and restricted countries. World Serve, in serving the Church in those countries, helps people who are enslaved.

But again, it is so important to pray for them.

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Read more about Michael Card on his website http://www.michaelcard.com.

Talking with Chris Lowney, Author of Heroic Living

Nancy Lovell — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 06:00:00 GMT

A Jesuit seminarian walks into J.P. Morgan. . . . If that sounds like the start of a joke, in the case of Chris Lowney, it's not. This one-time Jesuit, by his mid 30s, was a managing director at J.P. Morgan. And the question is: how does a Jesuit seminarian, a guy trained to listen for God, do on a floor of MBAs trained to leap at the opening bell? Chris answers that in two books: Heroic Leadership and Heroic Living. Both books take St. Ignatius of Loyola into the cubicles, trading floor, and boardrooms of investment banking.

The result, for anyone in business, can be blood-stirring. If you find no spiritual growth in spreadsheets . . . if you'll entertain that a workday is potentially rife with teachable, transcendent moments . . . if practical means to uncover spiritual purpose in your secular career appeals to you—Lowney has something for you. The seminarian economist offers no quick fixes and occasional gaps emerge between his vision and your daily operations. But Lowney asks the right questions and offers thoughtful, readable answers.

No joke.

Chris, why does a person leave seminary for the corporate world? Did you believe you had another calling?

Most of the time I was a seminarian I was pretty happy. But that kind of lifestyle is, in a way, a gifted one. I realized I could stick it out but at the cost of being somewhat unhappy, and that's an important indicator of what we're supposed to do with our lives. Many fulfilling jobs are difficult and have difficult moments—but in a deep way, I realized my own path was outside religious life.

That's a relief. I was prepared to envy someone's having, in his mid-twenties, a clear call to serve God in the business world. But you're claiming no master plan.

The last thing I'd done as a Jesuit was to teach economics at a high school. So to get a job to support myself, I just started sending resumes to big banks.

When did concepts of holiness enter your equation?

I didn't think of holiness at work until much later in life. I think what the psychologists tell us bears out in my life experience. When you're young, you tend to focus on promotions, money, family. At some point in our 40s, we begin to think, "Does this make any sense? What's the point of my life? What am I trying to accomplish?" My life, in a way, followed that pattern. I didn't think in that dimension much until I'd been at Morgan for ten years or so.

People start to feel great frustration between what they believe deeply and their daily work: "I can't connect what I believe to what I do all week." Lives are split and it's a source of pain—whether they frame it in religious or life terms. I wanted to take that on and ask: Are there ways to begin to think about what we do to bridge this chasm?

And there you are, a seminary-trained economist working among Harvard business school types. That raises another question: when your associates learned of your background, what reactions did you get?

It would be all over the place. One of the problems in a lot of investment banking firms is that people with homogenous backgrounds operate in ways that lead to tunnel vision and tunnel thinking. It's a little tangential to the point, but I think we see some of the fallout of that in the crises over the last two to three years. They are complicated crises, and I don't mean to oversimplify. But a contributing factor is crowds of people with the same background, training, and approach to problems. You slip into groupthink quickly, and things can easily go wrong. All to say that for some people my background was a curiosity and nothing more profound. They'd all gone to Harvard Business School and knew what those folks were like. A seminarian was an odd piece. Occasionally but rarely, people who by virtue of what I'd done probably looked at me as an intermediary, someone you could discuss ethical concerns with that they might not have raised generally.

Investment bankers tend not to be reflective people?

One important aspect of their work involves short-term decisions—say in foreign exchange or equities. That style of decision-making and thinking tends to pervade entire companies. Yet for many kinds of decision-making, most particularly personal life decisions, that's an unhealthy approach.

In Heroic Living, I ask people to consider what mental approach they have to important decisions. I suggest that the [investment banker] model of decision-making is bad for important life choices.

Do you think business school ethics classes can make a difference in how the students do decisions . . . do life?

I think it's a great dilemma. It's important to put that subject on the table and force people to articulate, in a classroom setting at least, their own points of view. There was a wave of [ethics courses] after the 2000 series of corporate scandals—Enron, etc.—and a flurry of ethical studies in business schools. The great dilemma is the difference between what you know and what you do. A great mystery, not just in business, is what makes people morally courageous. No school course makes people morally courageous. While it's good and important for students to talk about ethical ramifications of what they do for a living, anyone who imagines that [a course] is a panacea for ethics in the workplace is smoking dope.

Are you a special case, then? Do you think you could find "holy ground" in the corporate world apart from your seminary background?

Probably not. I was trained to think a certain way and look for certain things. The book suggests that people must do personal digging to surface what they ultimately care about and stand for. Nowadays everyone wants five quick tips and the longest part of my book has no quick tips. The first half is more reflective and time intensive. That's necessary to transform ourselves into people with an appropriately profound sense of who we are and what we're about.

In Heroic Living, Chris, you refer to Andrew Murray, an employee at a multinational aerospace company. He asked himself how spirituality, life, and work fit together. His two-word solution: be holy. What does that mean?

I used his story because he was serious about his religion and was trying to figure out faith within a sophisticated modern workplace. In a business setting, the concept of "holy" is provocative and counterintuitive. One definition is to be aware you're in God's presence—and to have that in mind when we're dealing with annoying colleagues or considering whether to help a person or stab him in the back. Those are ways to think about the idea of holy as opposed to the knee-jerk notion that holy is when you kneel in church and pray.

That attitude of God's presence can be difficult to sustain. You also speak of a "thy kingdom come" vision. How does a person, practically, rise from focusing on the next deadline to "thy kingdom come"?

The simplest, most practical thing I can say, which is one of the practices the book recommends, is that people start with a small entrée. A couple of times a day take five minutes at least—at lunch and evening—and do three simple things:

1. Remind yourself why you're grateful.
2. Consider an objective you wish to achieve or a personal issue to address.
3. Think back to the last few hours and take away a little lesson.

That's a simple practice but profound in that it can get people above the fray of their lives for a minute, and reoriented, before plunging back in.

Mind you, it doesn't get to the questions that require more personal investment and time. Questions like, "What is my sense of purpose?" And "What do I believe in?" But it can be frustrating to tell people to start with those questions. That three-part practice gets people into a reflective habit that might open up to asking more profound questions.

Several times in the book you refer to the Jesuit Father Cizek—an accomplished man who found himself in a tragic dead end and came to some conclusions about God's will.

In some way he's an extreme example, a type A who ends up in a Russian prison camp and can't control his circumstances. And that's the point. One of the pitfalls you find with people is unwillingness and inability to deal with the reality of circumstances. There are times when what we need is courage to quit a job or to tell the manager where to get off or whatever it is. Other times our circumstances are such that we don't control enough to change things. The only wise choice is to say, "What do I do in these circumstances I find myself in and can't control?"

That segues to the idea of wisdom. You say it's both spiritual and worldly.

This is a personal observation. In the last 20 years especially, we've grown in love with technology, fast decisions, mathematics, science—and we tend not to believe there's such a thing as wisdom. People can learn wisdom over time, and a body of experience gives advantages in approaching problems. We tend to undervalue that. "Wisdom" has become an esoteric, religious thing. To me, if the last two years on Wall Street illustrate anything, it's the importance of people with the good judgment who say, "I know what your math model tells me but are we running appropriate risks?" All those insights and judgments! Religious traditions have valued wisdom, and wisdom is spiritual. But it's also a practical gift—the kind of gift all people but especially spiritual people should try to cultivate.

Part 2: An Interview with Daniel Lohrmann, Chief Technology Officer of Michigan

Becky Garrison — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Daniel J. Lohrmann, author of Virtual Integrity (Brazos Press, 2008) is an award-winning computer expert. As Michigan's chief technology officer, he directs over 750 technical staff in the State of Michigan's Infrastructure Services Administration. This is a continuation of his discussion with TheHighCalling.org about how Christians can maintain their virtual integrity in the workplace.

What is integrity theft?

The Internet is an incredible tool that can help companies offer new products and services, become more efficient and improve communication. At the same time, new temptations towards the dark side of the net are emerging every day.

Everyone has heard about the dangers of identity theft. Integrity theft is similar, but rather than your money being at risk, you can lose your reputation as a result of online actions. I have seen colleagues sacrifice years of education and put their careers in jeopardy for a few moments in cyberspace. Every day in America, people are disciplined for unacceptable online behavior at work, and many lose their jobs. Worse than that, I've witnessed marriages that end, families that split, church ministries torn apart, and staff arrested and put in jail.

Why do we need to worry about integrity theft?

I'm sure that Internet surfers never suspect that their online activity could end up with tragic consequences when they started. Yes, these individuals made wrong decisions, but I call it "integrity theft" because most people underestimate the impact of their virtual activity. They foolishly think "cyber sins" don't count the same.

Proverbs 7:22-23 says it this way: "All at once he followed her like an ox going to the slaughter, like a deer stepping into a noose till an arrow pierces his liver, like a bird darting into a snare, little knowing it will cost him his life."

Just as we take steps to protect sensitive information, we need to take steps to protect our personal integrity in cyberspace. Most of us ensure that our credit card statements are accurate, personal data is encrypted as it traverses the Internet, etc. In the same way, we need to understand and protect ourselves from the lurking cyber threats to our Christian character.

Elaborate on how you see ethical and moral lines being increasingly blurred in cyberspace by Christians who use the Internet in their work environments.

At work, we are given powerful technology tools that can touch lives on the other side of the planet in an instant. But is our online marketing offered in ethical ways? Are we honest in relationships or are we being deceptive? While there are gray areas, many businesses push dangerous approaches.

As you surf the net at work, where are your eyes drawn? What messages are coming through? While previous marketing approaches were broadcast to everyone via TV, new approaches are much more specific. Ads target various audiences using information like age, surfing tendencies, location, gender or buying patterns. You may end up somewhere you never intended to go five minutes earlier. These personalization techniques are being used for good and evil.

On a more personal level, there is a tendency to justify online activities at work with excuses like "everyone is doing it." Thinking that virtual decisions don't count the same as "real world" actions, Christians conveniently rename immoral activities. Plagiarism becomes copying text, stealing becomes downloading files, lying becomes protecting yourself—often without a second thought.

What's virtual trespassing?

Virtual trespassing is just like physical trespassing—except it occurs in cyberspace. For example, we are not required to allow someone into our house if we think they will harm our family. While online laws are different, similar laws exist to protect children from cyber predators. There are also protections from spam, fraudulent or deceptive practices, and other online activities.

Everyone is entitled to a workplace which does not discriminate against their religious beliefs. Just as posting pornographic pictures on the walls at work could lead to lawsuits for a hostile work environment, staff cannot be required to visit online websites which violate their religious values or beliefs.

How does virtual trespassing occur?

Virtual trespassing occurs when content enters your digital space (devices such as your home PC, work laptop, or mobile device) that violates your values and beliefs. If you had your way, you would not view this content. At work, you should not be asked to perform actions and/or view material that conflicts with your Christian faith. No doubt, mistakes are still made. I recommend addressing these situations as quickly as possible so that you are not asked to continually compromise or tolerate actions if you deem them to be unethical or immoral.

As we move forward, I expect to see more situations where employees feel that their religious beliefs are threatened online at work. Companies like Google claim they will "do no evil," but who's definition of evil is used? As "cloud computing" matures and businesses are offered "free" office applications like email if their staff just watch ads and commercials, who decides what's allowed? The desire to cut technology costs could lead to the marketing of evil at work.

How does one develop an e-conscience?

In 1 Timothy 1:18-19, Paul told Timothy to "fight the good fight, holding on to faith and a good conscience. Some have rejected these and so have shipwrecked their faith." We are in a daily battle to keep a clear conscience, and this pertains to every area of life. Remember that Jesus repeatedly described lust as a matter of the heart. Our thought-life is clearly the first step towards our actions which become habits.

How does one refresh their values in cyberspace?

There are essentially three steps in this process:

Reexamine offline (or "real-world") values/beliefs based upon the Bible.
Compare and contrast online and offline thoughts and behaviors.
Establish a list of values and behaviors for online life.

As you spend time to work through this process in detail, you will strengthen your e-conscience. You will see how God's Word applies to various online activities and actions. Sadly, most people have a different code of conduct for online life than they do for the real world.

Why does one's Google reputation matter?

Most companies now do an online search for content as part of their background check on applicants before hiring staff. This is a part of the reference check process. If there is content online that shows you in "inappropriate situations," your chances of being hired will be diminished. Remember that the Internet has a great memory.

Beyond the hiring process, your professional reputation and the reputation of your business or government office is also at stake. Imagine the bad press when a security breach happens at a bank. That bad press hurts their trust with customers. Negative publicity can cost the bank significant time and money to correct.

In the same way, our personal reputation is at stake every time you visit cyberspace. This can be a positive or negative aspect to your career. Professional blogs or other content can enhance your career and establish you as an authority on a topic over time. However, be careful to follow company policies and procedures. There are many stories of emails, text messages, and even "Tweets" (from Twitter.com) causing problems or being used in lawsuits around the country. Our goal is to be above reproach at the office regarding these matters. There is no doubt that others are watching to see if actions match our words—especially online.

Some might say that imposing any online controls goes against the concept of free by taking on this Big Brother mentality. Your response?

Our information is all over the place right now. Many people freely provide information to websites like eHarmony, eBay, eBanks, Christian websites, blogs, Facebook, Amazon.com, and others. They provide this data in order to gain efficiency (time), better service, or a lower price. While we need more options for those who desire increased privacy, we also need options for those who want to securely share information to gain benefits. Facebook's popularity demonstrates this point well.

I am a supporter of better enforcement of online privacy laws, since many companies misuse our data or don't clearly spell out what they will do with the information they collect. But building end-to-end trust cannot be accomplished if everyone is anonymous. Our virtual experiences in cyberspace will become more and more like real-life experiences, and in the real world I want to know who I am dealing with.

How do you suggest we find a balance here?

Think of the Internet as our new digital superhighway system. We have many freedoms on our roads, but we also have many laws. There are numerous parallels between roads and the Internet, including the need for good training, ensuring safety, and accepted codes of conduct.

At work, you must remember that the network belongs to your business. Courts have upheld that there is generally no presumption of privacy on company networks, and you must abide by acceptable use policies, as long as policies are clear and equally enforced. So remember, there are no "personal" messages at work—according to the law.

I also agree that controls alone will never solve our problems. There are thousands of ways to get around filters and controls, and we cannot rely on technology alone to solve online problems. Solutions must address people, heart issues, repeatable processes, and technology.

Part 1: An Interview with Daniel Lohrmann, Chief Technology Officer of Michigan

Becky Garrison — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Surfing your values means connecting your offline values with your online world. It starts with a good understanding of the risks you face every time you enter cyberspace. Our integrity is being attacked every day, and the Internet is now at the frontline of that battle. It also means living out the implications of your faith when you connect.

I know people who are afraid to use the Internet today because of the temptations they face and their inability to block content that violates their convictions. As Christians, we have an opportunity to influence how the Internet evolves in the future. Many technology companies like Microsoft are interested in providing easier ways to surf your values in cyberspace. They rightly view online trust to include much more than just security and privacy.

How do you see the concept of online trust developing?

As we move forward over the next decade, I would rather have a few trusted Internet partners hold my data than hundreds of smaller online retailers who can't properly secure my data in cyberspace. Think of these data brokers as similar to banks that currently hold our financial data, but these companies will hold our detailed "values" profiles. This approach can enable online experiences to revolve around our beliefs, as well as likes and dislikes. But we will control the settings. This information will be vital to provide characteristics for coming avatars (online representations of us). While this may sound like "Big Brother" to some, I believe it can enable Christians to maintain a more wholesome experience in cyberspace. Rather than filtering as we do today, websites will deliver the content that we value—personalized to our beliefs.

What suggestions do you offer to those Christians who find themselves getting caught up in blog battles while defending their religious beliefs?

First and foremost, be humble. Psalm 41:12 says ". . . In my integrity you uphold me . . ." Spurgeon's commentary points out that God's power and strength enable our integrity and every good gift. We should praise God that he restrains each of us from gross sin. When others sin, they show us what we would do but for his grace. Remember that most of the arguments floating around cyberspace have been around for hundreds or even thousands of years, so you probably won't be the one to end various controversies. Ask yourself if you should even be in these conversations during work. Know what is appropriate for various situations.

Second, be kind, polite, professional, courteous, etc. Rude comments will not reflect well on you or Christianity in general. The Internet provides an impersonal channel that seems to allow us to "vent." Usually, this is inappropriate. Ask: would I say this to the person's face?

Third, understand the limitations of technology. Talk in person, when appropriate. I have seen professional colleagues who were sitting right next to each other send long emails back and forth that became more and more heated in tone. Once I even intervened and called an impromptu meeting in my office to talk through a situation.

Finally, think about the long-term impact of your words. Will I view this comment as positive five years from now? Will this blog reflect well on my marriage or company?

What's wrong with a bit of harmless flirting or horseplay online to break up the monotony of the workday given you'll probably never meet these folks in person?

Others are watching and things often get out of control. Are you being a good Christian witness? Remember that whatever you say or do online is a reflection of your actual character. Tragically, there are even married people who flirt—which is clearly wrong.

Cyberspace often acts like an accelerator, bringing devastating consequences to careers, families, marriages, and even your faith. Oftentimes, people go way too far down the primrose path before they stop. Like a snowball rolling down the hill, you may be surprised how difficult it is to break bad habits. I have seen people fool themselves by saying that their online activities were harmless—right before significant problems surface.

The temptation people face is to go a bit further than yesterday. The old "thrill" no longer satisfies, and they click one more time. I've seen this behavior over and over again. Stay away from the cliffs, and you won't go over the edge.

Why do you encourage people to seek out an accountability partner?

Accountability works in every area of life. We wrongfully think that accountability is for losers. But the best athletes, musicians, and employees all seek accountability with coaches and mentors to help. We value accountability for diets such as Weight Watchers and for exercise regimes. Why? Because accountability helps us succeed at our goals. In 1 Timothy 4:12, Paul exhorted Timothy to "set an example for believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith, and in purity."

While online, accountability partners will reduce the temptations you face. By simply being open with others about your surfing habits, you will improve your effectiveness. Contrary to popular opinion, I think accountability enables more possibilities such as social networking at work. If managers know that staff are not abusing the privilege of Facebook, they will be more likely to support the use of social networking tools at work.

I use Covenant Eyes at home, and my wife gets my accountability report. This simple step reduces many temptations. Another misperception is that experts don't need accountability. To the contrary, the best and brightest are the most tempted to break the rules—because they know how to not get caught.

What concerns do you have about social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook with a particular emphasis on how you see these sites being utilized by employers?

Social networking can be a great tool to help businesses connect with customers. However, these tools can also be abused. How much is too much? Is the activity work-related? If not, where are the lines for personal use? It is back to accountability and the many shades of gray. We need guidelines for a mobile work force, and the answers are getting tougher to enforce. One or two bad apples will no doubt hurt others who use these tools responsibly.

The trick is to have work teams build in transparency and accountability with meaningful boundaries. In the book, I suggest that we may want to use the "Honor Code" model that we used at Valparaiso University. We must trust but verify, or companies will throw out the social networking baby with the bathwater. New tools are coming from technology companies like Websense to help this process, but in the meantime, don't abuse the privilege of social networking—if your work allows it.

You didn't mention Twitter in your book. How can this tool be utilized effectively by Christians?

Twitter has really taken off since I finished writing Virtual Integrity. It is a great example of how rapidly Internet tools are evolving. People use Twitter because it is so easy to send "tweets" (short messages) about what's happening to anyone who is listening—with generally no permission required or friends to deny. While blogs can take a long time to write, Twitter is about quick hits.

Twitter provides a great way to follow hot news on various topics as well as links to interesting blogs. You can follow interesting people or Christian conference proceedings live, with the ease of IMing on portable devices but the advantages of infinite reach. Twitter has been used extensively during emergency situations to provide the latest updates such as the California wildfires or Chinese earthquakes. One church even had a "Twitter Sunday."

Twitter isn't for everyone, and Internet users seem to either love or hate tweets. Keep in mind that Twitter messages are also searchable by anyone via Google or Twitter search. Very personal information can easily become public, so remember to stop and think before you click.

How is one's soul in danger in many office settings?

In our postmodern world, few people want to label various websites or activities as "wrong." We want to believe, "I'm okay and you're okay." But getting back to basics, what does this web surfing have to do with getting our job done? If you find yourself continually visiting inappropriate sites, examine your motives.

At work, many people are in front of a computer for the entire day, so temptations to do wrong can become overwhelming. Popular websites are attracting visitors with sexy videos, movie star stories, and other content that may seem intriguing—but may lead you down the primrose path. These sites are functioning as crossover bridges to dangerous places online. Christians are becoming addicted to harmful content that affects their faith in negative ways. We're not just talking about porn. Shopping and sports sites can even cause problems.

How can faith-at-work programs address the concerns that you're raising?

Many Christians want to incorporate their faith into their office life in practical ways. Faith-based programs provide opportunities to engage in such dialogue which can explore Internet activity at the office. Some great examples and ideas for your office can be found at The High Calling as well as websites like Faith & Work Life.

I believe that faith-at-work programs enable helpful discussion about values and beliefs in the office. As Christians discuss their faith, along with company values such as integrity, online conduct will inevitably come up. At the core, these are heart issues, and open discussions about appropriate and inappropriate conduct at work can only help your personal situation.

Why do you like Christian websites like TheHighCalling.org?

This is a wonderful website which explores the many moral aspects and challenges to integrity that Christians face at work. I like what your editor Dan Roloff said in a recent article: ". . . We're continually bombarded by moral choices, our prayer is to lead us not into temptation in order that we may stand before God as wholly sound people." God's Word challenges us to work out the implications of our faith, and your website certainly encourages and enables that process.

In many ways, Christian websites allow us to surf our values right now. We see content that lifts us out of the mud and mire. TheHighCalling.org can help us connect our offline and online values. And yet, we also visit YouTube and many other secular websites, so we need workable strategies beyond just Christian websites. Americans usually shop at Walmart and not ChristianMart—both offline and online. Nevertheless, TheHighCalling.org offers an oasis in cyberspace.

Interview with Bill Yeargin, CEO of Correct Craft

Christine A. Scheller — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Bill Yeargin is the refreshingly down-to-earth President and CEO of Correct Craft, an 84 year old company that manufactures and sells the Nautique line of inboard wakeboard and water ski boats. He has been at the helm for just under three years, but is a well-known figure in the marine industry, having served on the executive team at Rybovich Yachts and on both national and international industry boards. Yeargin is the author of two books, Yeargin on Management and What Would Dad Say? and has published more than 200 management and leadership columns. He shares his practical advice in person at management conferences throughout the world. At home in Orlando, Florida, he boldly combines faith, service and work. Yeargin talked to TheHighCalling,org about how he does this and about leading his company with integrity in these challenging times.

My first question may be a silly one to ask a native Floridian, but here it goes: Do you and your family enjoy boating?

Totally! I wake skate and wake surf . . . and my family and friends all enjoy boating. My daughters are seventeen and eighteen. I truly believe one of the reasons we have a close family is because of boating. It is a great way to spend time with each other and one that everyone loves!

The Correct Craft mission statement is "Building boats to the glory of God." How do you glorify God in this type of business?

By loving God and others. Also, I believe we better demonstrate our faith when we show it through our actions, rather than our words. We are not afraid to be bold about our faith, but we are much more interested in living out our faith than sharing it through bravado.

What unique faith challenges do you face as a manufacturer of luxury goods?

We struggle with the same things as everyone else. I am not sure we have any unique challenges, even though they may feel unique when we are experiencing them.

We take our responsibility to develop and build good products very seriously. Our faith is one of the reasons that we do not cut corners. That shows up in the awards we have won; yet we don't do the right thing for the awards. We do the right thing because it is the right thing to do.

Tangible examples would be the modesty of our models and the lack of alcohol at our marketing events. I think it is fair to say that our models are the most modest dressers in the boating industry, for which we have been criticized some in the past. Our faith definitely impacts us in this area. We are not caught up in the "sex sells" mentality.

We also put a Bible verse in our brochure, but I would one hundred times prefer people know our faith is important through our actions and how we treat people rather than know it because we wear it on our sleeve.

You also told New Man eMagazine that it's more difficult to separate business and Christian principles than to integrate them, but that you, like all of us, fall short of your own ideals. How do you walk out failure, particularly in relationship with customers, peers, and coworkers who don't share your faith?

I stumble in my faith walk so often that I have a lot of experience walking out failure! First, I know that I will inevitably fall, so I don't try to hold myself up as an example. I try to communicate in our events that I am not any different than anyone else, and if you watch me long enough, I will let you down. (I don't mean to; it just happens because I am human.) Second, I try to be quick to confess when I mess up and never try to cover up anything. I think it is important that leaders don't set themselves up as super-human, because they will eventually just hurt someone by letting them down.

On a related note, you instituted voluntary Bible studies, community-service projects, and mission trips when you came to Correct Craft. Was there resistance to these changes?

None. We have done all of our faith-related activities on a voluntary basis, and we respect an employee's right not to participate. Shortly after arriving at Correct Craft, I implemented a weekly Bible study and soon thereafter the mission trips. We have taken employees on two trips to Mexico to build houses for the needy and one trip to Nicaragua to work at a shelter for homeless teenage mothers. The employees who went on these trips loved the opportunity to serve and were incredibly blessed.

Does Correct Craft pay for employees to do community service or mission trips?

Most times not. However, we have on a couple of occasions taken training days and used them for community service. In those cases, the employees were paid. Employees are not paid to go on mission trips, but we do subsidize the cost of the trip to make it easier for more employees to participate. I write a CEO blog, Nautique Insider, and have written a few times there about the trips and community service in which our company has been involved.

Do you have any suggestions for others who might want to offer voluntary faith-based activities in the workplace?

Don't hesitate; just do it. The key is to offer the opportunity, but also to make sure that there is no recrimination against those who choose not to participate. We go out of our way to make sure there are no negative consequences to not participating in our faith related activities. We love people to join us, but if they choose not to do it, that is their right.

It's been a challenging season for business. Instead of laying off employees, you initiated a program that combined scaled down boat building with training and community service. Can you tell me more about that?

At the start of 2009, we were beginning to experience a significant slowdown in the boating industry caused by the global macro-economic downturn and exacerbated by the severe credit crunch, both in our retail and wholesale operations. We knew we may have to make employment cuts, but we also wanted to obtain a clearer picture as to how long these environmental issues would impact us before making those decisions. For the first three months of this year, instead of sending our employees home when we did not have production work for them, we implemented a significant employee development program. This program provided training to our employees in many different areas such as teamwork, communication, production, Lean Six Sigma, and others. Our goal was to provide them with skills that would help them not only at our company but for a lifetime.

In addition to the training, we also dedicated some of these nonproduction days to the community service I mentioned earlier. We took over 100 employees to serve in various areas, which is consistent with our company philosophy of trying to be servants in our community. Over the past year, we have served in a local homeless shelter, at an organization that serves children with life-threatening diseases, and with Habitat for Humanity.

Since then, have you had to lay off any employees?

The boating market has continued to deteriorate, and I was very disappointed to have to let some employees go who we invested in heavily as part of the program mentioned above. However, we feel good about the fact that these employees were given training that will help them for a lifetime wherever they work.

The hardest part occurs when an occasional employee questions our Christian values because we are terminating them. As a business, our Christian values do not exempt us from global economic forces, and sometimes we have to make tough decisions. However, when we have to make the tough decisions, we try to do it in a way that is respectful to the employee and consistent with our "high care" values.

How do you keep the weight of responsibility for your employees' lives from weighing you down, especially in a difficult business climate?

Believe me, it is tough because I want to make things right for everyone, and I have a strong desire to help everyone I can. But I have to focus on what I can control. I also know that God loves the people even more than I do; I have to depend on him to take care of them.

You yourself have only been at Correct Craft for two-and-a-half years. With so many people in transition, what advice can you give them about making a career move in uncertain times?

My advice would be three-fold.

First, focus on the things you can control. So many people get caught up in things they cannot control (like the general economy and what Washington is doing), and it is a huge waste of their time and energy. If I put my faith where it should be (which I often have trouble doing), I can more easily focus on what I can do and not worry about what I cannot control.

Second, see change as an opportunity.

Third, remember that God has an eternal perspective, and we don't. The Bible says in Isaiah 55 that his ways are not our ways. When we try to see things from an eternal perspective, many times it will change the way we feel about our current circumstances.

Correct Craft has weathered tough times before. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1959 after a government contract for 300 boats was pulled, forcing the layoff of most of its 500 workers. The company refused to play ball with a corrupt official and spent 25 years paying back 100 percent of its debt. How does this story demonstrate the company's values?

The company felt that God had directed them to pay back the money that was discharged in bankruptcy. They believed they could glorify God by doing that, and I have spoken to many people over the past couple years who have been touched by that story.

I can see why! Well, that's it. Thanks for your willingness to speak to us. Is there anything else you would like to say to readers of TheHighCalling.org?

Thank you for being interested in us! While I don't want to seem like I am in sales mode, we would love for your readers to check us out at Nautiques.com . We have some great product and we try to build it in accordance with our company mission statement of "Building Boats to the Glory of God!"

Finding God in What You Do - an interview with Ken Eldred

Drew Dyck — Sun, 31 May 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Ken Eldred is an entrepreneur, philanthropist, and ministry pioneer. For over 20 years, Eldred served as CEO of Inmac, a public company he founded. He assisted in founding Ariba Technologies and has participated in business ventures in the U.S., Europe, China, and India. Eldred's passion is to bring Christ into the workplace. Toward this end, he has developed a model called "kingdom entrepreneurship" that encourages Christian businesspeople to spread the gospel by starting for-profit businesses in the U.S. and abroad. Eldred is co-editor of On Kingdom Business (Crossway), winner of a 2004 Christianity Today Book Award. His most recent book is God Is at Work (Regal).

When you became a Christian, you thought that in order to do real ministry you would have to become a pastor. Is this idea—that real ministry happens only in conventional ministry—still pervasive in the church?

Yes, I think it is. It screams at you more by its silence. It's not that people talk negatively about business; they just don't talk about it at all. So it's assumed that it's not something that's important to God.

It's also created a gender divide in the church. Several studies have shown there are a disproportionately small number of men in church. I think part of the reason is that pastors talk a lot about relationships. Women tend to be better at relationships than men. Men need help in this area. But when that's all that the pastor talks about, the women sort of say, "See what I told you?" So the guy's ribs get a little sore. Finally he says, "The pastor has nothing to say about my biggest concern, which is providing for my family's needs. He just picks on the weakest area of my life." He starts thinking "What am I doing here?" Then he walks away. Then the kids start to walk away and only the wife stays. It's going to get worse because more and more women are joining the workforce and they're going to wonder, "Does God have anything for me in my business life, because that's where I spend eight hours of my day?"

How can church leaders connect more effectively with business people?

Church leaders need to go to their business community. And when I use the word business, I mean people that are in the workforce, because ultimately everything is a business. The pastor needs to go to them and find out about their problems, learn about what they fear, what gets under their skin, and about what they're dealing with in the office. Thirty years ago, when I started my company, I invited my pastor to come over. We were operating with about 200 employees at that point. We were growing. And I said to him, "I don't know how to bring Christ into this business. How do I do that?" He looked at me and said, "I don't know either." That was the last conversation we had.

We're pretty good at being "the church gathered." We've learned how to worship. We're pretty good at teaching, at least inside the church. But we really haven't followed the model that Christ gave us of the church scattered—being out in the community, spending time in the public arena. Who is the moral authority of this nation? It's the pastors. They have to stand up and be part of this broader community. Pastors are our shepherds. Jesus went out and he took the twelve with him and he showed them how to live. He never was a businessman. He wasn't a fisherman like Peter, but he showed Peter how to operate in the world.

You base your ministry on a "kingdom business model." What does that mean?

It's been defined various ways, but when you get down to it, it's an attitude. It's a sense of priority. Is Jesus number one? Is he the center of all things? Or is something else the center? A business person can be a loving Christian. But if that person is focused on the bottom line as the primary driver, that isn't Jesus, and the bottom line becomes the god for that hour. We have to always ask, "Who is Christ in the middle of what we do?" And it forces us to ask what business is really about and what we expect to accomplish.

In your book, you add a new term to the business lexicon: "the triple bottom line." Can you explain that?

A growing trend in secular philanthropy and economic development is commitment to a "double bottom line." This means that not only must a business provide strong financial returns, but it must also provide significant social or environmental returns. Kingdom business rests on a similar recognition that our objectives should go beyond financial returns. For the Christian, however, effective transformation involves addressing economic, social, and spiritual conditions. So we have a three-fold objective for kingdom business, a "triple bottom line" that may be outlined as follows:

profitability and sustainability
local job and wealth creation
advancing the local church and building spiritual capital

Each of these objectives is important, and they should be pursued simultaneously. None should be sacrificed.

If we operate a business within a kingdom model, we're not only interested in what comes in, but in how we treat our employees, what we teach them about God. We have eight hours a day to teach them about God and to apply the truth of the gospel in business activity.

That's a particularly important principle right now. So many companies are failing. I'm sure Christian businesspeople are grappling with how to maintain their witness as they have to make tough decisions.

It's a very difficult time. I've been through a number of these cycles and I've been hurt in all of them. But God has made me rise again. This downturn has been very hurtful. But I look at God. I don't look at the circumstances. I'm looking at his word and what he's promised me. God is going to do what he intended. He's going to do this for my good and for my welfare.

Someone once asked me, "What happens if your company fails and you're a Christian? Haven't you really just let your employees down?"

I said, "Yeah, I have."

He said, "Well, doesn't that have a negative impact on your ministry?"

I said, "Absolutely not!" It's how you treat people in the process of failure. It's God's business. If it's going to fail, that's the way it is. But what an opportunity to show the love of God, to treat people with love and respect even when things fail.

The debate over money in the church has become highly polarized. "Health and wealth" proponents think of blessing primarily in material terms. Then there are others that almost extol poverty as a spiritual virtue. What's the balance?

Basically the prosperity gospel is all about me. The gospel of prosperity is about others.

But God has one plan for us, and it trumps all other plans: to conform us to the image of Jesus Christ. Sometimes wealth does not conform an individual to the image of Christ. Christ did not have wealth in this world. There are people who have great wealth and use it responsibly for God, and there are people who receive great wealth and just blow it. So wealth, by itself, is nothing. But wealth with God is something else. When things get tough for me financially, I submit myself to God's plans. If he wants me to finish my life selling pencils on a corner, that's his decision. He knows what's best for me. God's seen me through difficulties before. I've watched him raise me up again. I don't necessarily mean financially, but he always raises me up out of a pit.

Your book contains some powerful stories about how God rewarded you for not cutting corners or participating in questionable business practices.

I've never sacrificed doing this. Early on in my business we faced a dilemma. Back then we had some software that we just passed around. Somebody brought to my attention that that software was sold for only one application, and I didn't have a right to share it. I called in my chief financial officer and told him about it. I asked him how much it would cost to get the software for each computer. It was going to be a quarter of a million dollars! He said, "I don't know how we can handle this hit." I told him we'd worry about the hit later. I said, "Go out and buy this software and replace everybody's pirated copy with a purchased copy. God's going to provide somehow."

Well, we bought it. At the end of the quarter, our earnings were right on target. Sales jumped significantly, and it made up the difference that we needed to pay for the software. When I honored God, he took care of my problem. And it was something that God showed my CFO and other employees as a witness. When we operate in righteousness, whether we're in somebody else's company or in our own company, God is going to honor that. He's trying to show people his righteousness. That's what it's all about.

Interview with Nancy Kehoe - Distinguished Clinician and Nun

Becky Garrison — Sun, 03 May 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Dr. Nancy Kehoe is a nun (Religious of the Sacred Heart) and distinguished clinician and licensed psychologist. She is an Instructor in Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at the Cambridge Health Alliance affiliated with Harvard Medical School. In her forthcoming book Wrestling with Our Inner Angels: Faith, Mental Illness, and the Journey to Wholeness, Kehoe talks about her pioneering work in leading patient groups in the discussion of their religious beliefs and its role in their treatment.

What concerns were raised when you first proposed doing this group?

The staff thought the clients would become more delusional around religion; they feared that the religious clients would feel free to proselytize, that discussing religion in the community would be divisive; the staff feared the clients would ask them about their beliefs.

What prompted you to write Wrestling with Our Inner Angels: Faith, Mental Illness, and the Journey to Wholeness?

After the death of one of my clients, I learned that she had willed me her plastic crate of journals with the hope that I would do something with them. As I read through all her journal entries, I saw that she was on a quest to distinguish between where God was as she suffered with her mental illness and what were the symptoms of her illness. I knew then that it was important to tell her story both to give hope to those who anguished with similar questions and to teach professionals who often ignore the religious aspect of a client's life.

How does your faith affect the way you work with the mentally ill?

My grandfather was hospitalized twice for depression and my grandmother absolutely believed that the Sacred Heart of Jesus would not let her down and that my grandfather would return to his family. This family story always told me that faith and mental illness were not mutually exclusive. It was my belief that those who suffer with mental illness might also have religious backgrounds that could either be helpful to them as they struggled with their illness or that some beliefs might be problematic. That faith conviction prompted me to begin the groups. Often times in leading the groups, when I feel at a loss as to what direction I should take with a person or when I am overwhelmed by the suffering in their lives, I pray. I count on my faith for guidance.

How has working with this population informed your faith?

Working with the men and women in the day treatment program has challenged my faith and made me question what it is that I truly do believe. I search for God in the midst of the darkness and pain I see, and I've come to a new sense of mystery. I believe more strongly than ever that God is present in the community and that I see God's Presence, God's Spirit in the courage, the resilience, and the compassion of the clients.

What did your clients teach you about how they used the arts as a form of self-expression?

They taught me about how arts express their spirit. If we believe that we are made in God's image and likeness, creativity is in the deepest part of a human being. In our spirits, in the core of each one of us, God is found. That is where I see the clients expressing themselves through their art.

How did their stories unleash your own creativity?

Because I was so deeply moved by their stories, I determined to write this book. In doing so, my own creativity was unleashed in ways I never would have imagined.

In the book, you talk about Buddy and Beverly who died from cancer. How did their deaths inform your work and your faith?

It was not the deaths of Buddy and Beverly that informed my work and my faith but rather their lives. The “estate” that Beverly willed me and the discoveries I made about her life as I read through her journals made me aware of the journey she was on to discover where God was in the midst of her pain. I could only marvel at her courageous and often lonely journey, a journey I wanted to reveal to others as a sign of hope. Buddy informed my work and my faith by his persistent questions, his unwillingness to accept any response from me that didn't make sense to him. Consequently, he made me reexamine all my beliefs and how I expressed them. With both of them, I grew in my sense of how God does act in our lives, whether we name God or not in the process.

You have said that God told you to become a nun. How is what you experienced and what many Christians experience in their relationship to God different from those who experience auditory hallucinations?

Beth and Taylor, two of the women I write about in the book, can answer that better from their own experience than I can from mine as I have not suffered with auditory hallucinations. However, we want to name or experience the voice—the sense of the Other, the effect is one of peace, a sense of wholeness, Shalom as the Hebrews mean it.

That does not mean that the Voice or the experience may not have its painful, difficult, or challenging aspects, but it is not destructive. Auditory hallucinations on the other hand are experienced as disruptive, chaotic, negative, demanding, and harsh. These voices sometimes lead to self-destructive behavior.

How can we discern whether a spirit is good or destructive?

What does the spirit invite us to do? What sense accompanies the prompting of the spirit? Does the prompting lead to peace, joy, patience, long-suffering, kindness—all fruits of the good Spirit—or does the prompting lead us to a sense of disease, a turning in on the self instead of turning outward to the community, to openness toward others or toward secrecy, to acting in the dark? Are we willing to submit our sense of the spirit to another? The basic way we discern is to consider the direction of the spirit—toward life or toward death.

What did working with your clients teach you about how to love your neighbor as yourself?

They have taught me that it is critical for me to take care of myself, to love myself, to nurture myself, to stay grounded in my faith and my times of solitude so that in turn I can nurture them, be open to their pain, and be accepting of my limitations.

What advice do you have for Christians who would like to reach out to this population but don't know how?

The most important advice I would offer is to consider the person first and then the mental illness. Individuals who suffer with mental illness are first and foremost persons who have a mental illness. We never refer to a person as a cancerous person or a heart-diseased person, but we do talk about a mentally ill person. Secondly, I would say to get to know people and their histories. Thirdly, become more aware of the way those who have a mental illness are marginalized. Then actively work to change stigma, beginning with yourself.

Interview with David Ramos, Part 2

Becky Garrison — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 06:00:00 GMT

As the founder of Latino Leadership Circle, the Rev. David Ramos works with other Latino leaders to provide venues for theological reflection, pastoral support, and educational forums. Also, in his capacity as a staff minister at Faith Fellowship Ministries, David serves as the Chancellor of Faith International Training School. In addition, he’s conducted missionary initiatives in Africa, Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, India, Philippines, Turkey, Spain, and Venezuela. We decided to sit down with David to glean his insights regarding how he creates opportunities to give those who feel they’ve been excluded from the conversation the opportunity to have a real voice in the church.

What would you say to those who feel that you have to be ordained in order to serve as a religious leader?

You do not need to be ordained. In fact, the gospel talks about the priesthood of all believers. While I wanted to be ordained and am an ordained minister, for most of my life, I conducted ministry but was not ordained. I was what was known as a marketplace leader, who worked as a professional as well as within the church. Some of the most powerful strategic voices are people who are not ordained, but serve both God and people in strategic places in the kingdom of God and in the world. So, I really would encourage people not to get stuck on that.

Could you elaborate on the term "mosaic leadership" and how this concept informs your work?

Mosaic leadership integrates a tapestry of different people, along with their gifts, talents, worldviews, and various perspectives. This generation necessitates a mosaic leadership, because more than ever before, we've seen both politically and theologically the damage that can be done by ideology and ethnocentrism. But, I believe that if we have a Mosaic leadership that is very deliberate and sensitive to different positions and attempts to responsibly engage the other and create spaces where people's voices can be heard, then people can achieve full participation in the type of things that we're trying to achieve.

It's not always easy. Sometimes you may be deceived to think that you are operating that way until you realize that you, yourself, may have operated within particular enclaves, both theologically, racially, politically. And, hence, we continuously need to be open and sensitive to correction—by the Spirit of God, by friends, and by those who are interlocutors who oppose us. I think they are all educational opportunities.

How do you deal with the turf wars that always seem to happen when different groups try to come together to achieve a common goal?

If you have a heart to serve people, you'll always have opportunities. Some people try to rob your thunder or they try to circumvent you and take over. I think sharing is very, very important, both in process, as well as in distributing credit for any event or initiative that we do.

Also, one needs to step back if necessary. Sometimes, letting other people take the credit is okay. Now, you're not to be a doormat for people, and you need not be politically foolish. One can be wise and shrewd in the world and be able to halt abusive people or people who are solely politically motivated. We can do that without having this ambition for the limelight or an ambition of a personal agenda that auspicates the purposes of God and authentic spirituality.

What advice do you have for others who are working in multi-cultural settings as to how they can build up their leadership?

Get to know the people who know the grounds and include as many people as possible. Also, surround yourself with people who are unlike you theologically, politically, and racially. You can be of like-spirit in the sense of Spirit of God, but have different perspectives or different narratives. I think by us allowing ourselves to be informed and be touched by others, it changes our paradigms and enables us to have a much more global vision. In order for us to do that, we need to have an authentic openness. I don't think that can occur if we are so utterly locked within our own paradigms. If one is truly sensitive, one can be deliberate about a process.

Does it create more work? Sure. Are you going to make everyone happy? No. Are you able to retain control of your own leadership? Yes, if you can say, "Hey, listen. These are the things you want to do. These are the objectives we are trying to accomplish. And we would like to do this together. There are some things we can negotiate, and there are some things that are nonnegotiable." If you effectively communicate these things to the people you invite, I think they can respect you for making an honest attempt at honest dialog.

What advice do you have for those ministers who want to be multicultural but every time they plan an event, the gatherings tend to be almost all people like them?

One of the things is the issue of power. A lot of times we don't realize that our power paradigm speaks volumes to any relationship. If we're going to have authentic cross-cultural and cross-racial events and initiatives, then this power needs to be shared. When there is a shared power that may take you in different directions. Ask yourself if you are willing to do that. Are you willing to allow people to take you in a different path? Are you willing to allow it to look differently than your view of a particular event? How married are you to your vision?

I would highly recommend not to bring people in at the end of a particular thought process but to involve them from the very beginning. The earlier you bring people into the process of developing any type of endeavor, the better it is and the more authentic it is, because people will believe that you're having a valid, authentic dialog that started from the conception stage. If you allow people to inform the conception stage, then you allow them to have authentic ownership of the project.

How can outside organizations partner effectively with local grassroots groups?

A lot of times, people are afraid that their indigenous initiatives are going to be co-opted by outsiders. That could take many forms. For example, money is a form of power. A lot of times when people offer finances, there are very large strings attached. Those strings can be political with various agendas attached to this money that sometimes raises flags for people.

Instead of telling people, "We'll give you money, but you must be affiliated with our organization," try saying to them, "Listen, our heart is church planting. We realize we can't do this alone. The body of Christ is multifaceted and mosaic. We're so invested in this dream that we want to enable others to plant churches and to create their own visions. Our role is to provide a supportive reality, so that we could come alongside of what God is doing and allow other people to run with their dreams." I find that incredibly admirable. I've seen models like this such as Redeemer Presbyterian's Church Planting Initiative. They provide money for people who are doing church plants, and then they give them the autonomy and the ownership of those initiatives.

What have been some of your biggest learning experiences in working in urban settings here in the United States?

The issue of money really sticks out to me. As a social worker, one of the heart-wrenching things I've witnessed time and again is that when there is an economic crunch in the city, a lot of community-based organizations cannot survive this financial crunch. I've seen a host of extremely talented leadership and wonderful teams unable to survive because they don't have the finances. We must endeavor to create our own institutions and our own financial base that enables us to be liquid. It is going to take a lot of creative people to embark on this endeavor. But unless that happens, we're going to continue to see community-based organizations and church plants dry up on the vine for lack of finances.

What keeps you focused during extremely stressful times such as this current financial crisis?

The Rev. Dr. Ray Rivera mentions that one must have a transcendental vision. Why are we called to something? If we are truly called, then we're not seeking personal gain. Obviously, we need to survive. But we're not seeking to establish our own kingdom. We're here for others. If we have a transcendental vision and an authentic calling that comes from God, that means that regardless of what is happening around us—whether the wind is blowing in our favor or is blowing against us—we need to continue with this vision. We need to be committed to it, because it's right. That keeps us motivated and keeps us at the ground suffering with those who suffer, crying with those who cry, because it's right.

Interview with David Ramos, Part 1

Becky Garrison — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 06:00:00 GMT

What are some of the best leadership lessons you’ve learned from your work as an ordained minister?

I’ve learned to put the people as a primary focus. If I focus on the needs of people and I factor their motivations, their fears, and what they are struggling with, then I’m able to be more sensitive to their needs and able to leverage their gifts in a way that they’ll find meaningful. So, part of my approach to leadership is really trying to get to know my people and to appreciate them individually.

Are there specific Bible verses or stories that have been most helpful to you in your work as a leader?

One of the verses that immediately comes to my mind is when David says about God, "Your gentleness has made me great" (Psalm 18:35). There has been so much talked about in the media about leadership. Ministers were modeling their churches on the paradigm of pastor as CEO; and some were actually taking cues from Donald Trump. So I went the total opposite direction. God had a tender relationship with David. The love David experienced with God enabled his gifts to grow so that he could become a very successful warrior, author, and leader. So, I believe in gentleness.

How do you define the idea of local leadership?

I believe biblical leadership aspires to have people tap into spiritual motivations and questions of meaning and purpose. This style of leadership takes a serious look at spirituality—not just as a luxury or something that one does on the side—but as something that forms one’s identity in a very real way. I believe that people yearn for spirituality. Many people feel divorced from their roles in the workplace. A lot of people suffer psychologically and physiologically, because they hate their work. If we could get people to align their labor with what is most valuable to them, I think they will feel more actualized. And I think that we’ll get better employees.

Why did you found the Latino Leadership Circle?

Back in 2001, I was seeing talented young leaders here in New York City who were divorced from the matrix of what was going on. I wondered, "Where are the mentors? What are they doing with this whole generation of emerging leaders?" I would kind of complain to God about this. Then, I felt God tell me, "Why don’t you do something?" I was a little stunned by that at first.

Then, I decided to gather friends and people I knew in the workplace who were divergent in their political views and their theological views. I invited them to come to have a discussion about their lives. Out of these meetings came the Latino Leadership Circle (LLC), which is a cohort of ministers and marketplace leaders. One of the primary things I wanted to do was to create a safe place where people could come and bleed. People have described the LLC as a lifeline where a great deal of intimacy has occurred. Also, we’ve moved into creating educational events in the city so people have forums available to look at the various issues.

How do you know that this venture is God-centered?

One of the things the Bible talks about is the "fruit of the Spirit"—love, patience, mercy, kindness. I see these reflective characteristics in the people who participate in the LLC. Also, I see it in the way we engage other people when we partner strategically with other organizations. We attempt to value them and really attempt to glorify God in all that we do.

How do you see the LLC working with your partners overseas?

We’ve begun to think of this notion of a global federation of the LLC. We have been approached by many other cities who want to create an LLC. While we just haven’t followed up on that, there is this idea of connecting people who are of like spirit. But it’s not just one particular city or environment. How do the global realities impact what we can do to help our brothers and sisters in a different country? I believe that our generation is seeing that gap being closed because of the Internet and the freedoms we have that generations before us did not have.

What is the impetus behind launching the ACTS Urban Youth Leadership Training program?

As a young minister, I was in a no-man’s land. Not only did I not receive any support, but I had a lot of resistance from my own local church. I didn’t want other young people to have to suffer the things that I suffered. So, I started working with the American Bible Society as a director of Urban Youth Strategy. One of the things that I proposed to them is to create a leadership program.

ACTS is an acronym for Assessment Consultation and Training and Support. The training is a 12-week intensive interactive training where we get urban youth leaders to learn about different things, such as strategic planning, project planning, creating community assessments, leadership team building, and social justice. We’re trying to help urban youth by giving them executive skills so they can actualize the responsibilities they have in their local churches.

How do you mentor others?

We’re looking to return to creating this mentoring dynamic where younger people can come and be able to bleed and then share and discuss their personal and professional journeys. Also, we stay in contact with our graduates and the people involved with LLC by inviting them to participate and collaborate with some of the events we do in the city.

Who have been your mentors?

My pastors in my life have all been mentors. They were men of God, whom I have a great deal of respect for. Even though some were austere, they projected a responsible leadership and underscored virtues, such as holiness and the severity of leadership. They gave me a sense that one needed to be responsible and have an intimate relationship with God.

One much more contemporary mentor would be Rev. Dr. Raymond Rivera from the Latino Pastoral Action Center. I trained as a professional social worker, and I always felt that the gospel and the community were interconnected. But I didn’t have a language to put into action that part of the gospel mandate to reach the poor and to be able to work with those who were less fortunate than I was. Rivera had all these theological categories that resonated with my spirit and enabled me to pursue the dreams and the ambitions that I have to marry social advocacy and theological training.

How did he help you stay motivated when working through some very difficult situations?

What I learned from Rev. Dr. Rivera is his commitment to the community. He lives within a community that he’s been committed to for decades. He’s a survivor who has weathered many storms. That stalwart spirit—of finding a way where there’s no way, and holding on in spite of our struggles—has been inspirational for me.

Also, I think that I’m of a particular temperament that is naturally more jovial. I’m more sanguine in my spirit. That’s helped buttress me against negativity, as well as the sometimes personal attacks by peers or other types of betrayals that I have encountered that are just a part of leadership. The dynamic of unwarranted competition that sometimes occurs is painful but also laughable. I think that God has enabled me to have a good spirit about it all and to be able to laugh at the end of the day.

How do you deal with those situations in which someone is treating you in what you might describe as an unbiblical manner so that your response glorifies Christ?

I believe that Jesus is a great example of suffering through false accusations. They not only attempted to kill him, they successfully murdered Jesus Christ. Through all this, he loved his enemies. Chapter 5 of the book of Matthew underscores in the Beatitudes that we are to love our enemies and to pray for those who despitefully use us.

Now, I know that’s easier said than done. Believe you me, I’ve had a lot of times when I’ve felt angry or very, very hurt by people’s attitudes, as well as things they’ve done to mitigate, undermine, or outright obstruct some of the things I try to do. But I believe that love is very powerful. Oftentimes, people think of love in terms of weakness. They see that as a weak virtue. However, Jesus demonstrated throughout his ministry that love is very, very strong. As leaders, we need to return to Christ-like leadership that is epitomized through love in action.

Interview with Makoto Fujimura - Part 2

Becky Garrison — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 06:00:00 GMT

In his new book, Refractions: A Journey of Faith, Art, and Culture, artist Makoto Fujimura pens a series of essays exploring life, art, and faith. Makoto spoke with us recently about what it means to be an artist and how we can all be creative in our daily work. He will be a leading a retreat for Pastors and Lay Ministers to Artists at Laity Lodge from April 20-23, 2009.

Following is a continuation of our conversation with artist Makoto Fujimura.

How did your art become a ministry after 9/11?

It was not intentional. I was merely trying to address the concerns of everything around me. A temporary gallery was started—International Arts Movement (IAM)—that was an effort to create an oasis of collaboration in the downtown community. It started simply by conversing with those who were there at the time, many of whom were artists. Because we are artists, part of what we wanted to do was wrestle together. Their art was affected by 9/11, and mine as well. And, it was important to journey together for the time being. It turned into a series of exhibits and performances and small conversations there. It was temporary, but, afterwards, it left a legacy in how these artists began to work with change and how they are influenced by that time.

I wasn't necessarily doing this as a “ministry.” But we did minister to people. Every person struggling through those tough days recognized that something important was going on. This event had awakened in us something that art wasn't able to address at the time.

What would you say to people who feel they don't have the artistic talent that you were given, but yet they still have this need to create?

All of us are created to be creative in some way. We may not call ourselves artists or we may not be a professional artist; but creativity is an essence of being human. When you think about it, things that last in our memories are times when we were part of creating something. And, whether it be procreating, in terms of our families, or generating a business or creating an opportunity of mercy, or creating opportunities for people to hear the gospel—all of these are creative acts. And God calls us to that.

That is especially true of nonbelievers, because Christians know by common grace that God poured his gifts into all of the earth. There's a difference between common grace and special grace of salvation knowledge; but common grace is just given generally to all of nature and all of humanity. So, there's an overriding principle of generative creativity that we all long to be part of.

I think artists are catalysts. If you look at a Van Gogh painting, you see a vision that is sharp and refined and out-of-this-world, in a sense. You'll never see a cypress tree or a starry sky in the same way again. So, it's that kind of vision sharing. It's a gift that's being shared with all of humanity. And you can use that as a catalyst to be creative yourself.

What do you say to artists who feel that the church doesn't value their contributions to what they can bring to the body of Christ?

That's reality. But the question is, do they want to be part of the solution, or do they want to be part of the problem? Many times, artists are really unable to rise above the problem; and they become part of the problem. That's one of the things that International Arts Movement is trying to address. Artists can be the most generous, life-giving group of people because we're asked to be resourceful all the time. We've been trained to deal with having nothing and creating out of nothing—not quite as excellently as God did by far.

We can really provide the world with a sense of purpose and significance, and we can create hope even in desperate situations. Artists have this instinctive capacity to run right into the storm, rather than run away from the storm. I always say that you can choose to be part of the storm, or you can move into the eye of the storm. That is the greatest place to create from and has the most energy, as it were in Jeremiah 23:19. And so, there are all these opportunities, I think, that artists can miss if they don't see the whole picture. I encourage them to be part of the solution.

What about those who don't work as an artist? How can they view their work as a creative ministry?

Whatever your medium of adventures may be, you can certainly learn from the artists. You know, I speak to people all the time who say, “Well, I'm not an artist; I don't understand art at all.” I ask them, “What do you do on Sunday afternoon?” And they say, “Oh, we take a walk in the park, or we see a movie or go to a concert.” And, I say, “Well, so, you appreciate art in that way, or you cook something together or you have a family barbeque.” That's part of our creativity working through us.

What artists do is accentuate those experiences to give us a full reality that most of us are not aware of. They open up this vista of experience. By wrestling through these things and having a Christ-centered attitude toward things, we don't have to fear culture. We can live in it and critique it, because all culture is twisted. There are idols everywhere. Originally, idols were good things turned into idols. Our purpose as Christians is to turn them back into a source of goodness, beauty, and truth. That takes discipline and some knowledge. You can learn from artists how to hear music and how to look at the world in a way that opens up this whole new area of experience.

Why do you say prayer is the highest art form?

Prayer is agreeing with God and saying that there is a “world that ought to be” that God is really preparing. That takes imagination and a great deal of poetry and color and aroma of Christ. Those are all things that the arts can help us with.

What relationship do you see between imagination and curiosity and the fruits of the Spirit?

Oh, good question. The gift of the Spirit is articulated as a fruit, and fruit is love. That's the primary quality. Joy, peace, patience, kindness—all these things flow out of love. Then, love is defined by Christ in the sacrificial love. That is a gift that is given out into the world.

In that sense, there's an overlap between artistic practice and gift practice. It all should flow out of love. The problem is that we've twisted creativity into just a transgression. The post-modern critique is, basically, this ironic stance toward life itself. You have to be shocking and transgress. But, we forgot to transgress in love.

There's a lot of what art can do that has been stymied or truncated. Our ideologies have segmented things so that art has become separate from faith, business, and sciences. While those categorizations are helpful, we have to understand that, as it says in Colossians, love holds all things together. Christ is the One, the Creator who is holding everything together. Therefore, art needs to be integrated into some holistic synthesis.

Some people say they've been accused of being too curious and questioning too much. How do you respond to that?

I say it's great to be curious. I don't see a problem with that at all. In fact, I think children are naturally creative and curious. And then, I think about our education system. By the time you are in third grade, you are told not to ask questions or be creative. I find that tragic, because there's a part of us that is always yearning to be curious, to be a child again. And, art can release that part of us; and, in some ways, that may be why it's so uncomfortable.

Conventionalities and functions of society are often challenged by the curious. I think what Jesus meant by “let these children come to me” is that the qualities of a child—the innocence, curiosity, the exploration—is exactly what we need as Christians. We need those qualities in order to expand the Kingdom.

How then do you see art as evangelism?

There are many attempts to use the arts as a tool for evangelism. I understand the need to do that; but, again, it's going back to commoditizing things. When we are so consumer-driven, we want to put price tags on everything; and we want to add value to art, as if that was necessary. We say if it's useful for evangelism, then it has value.

And, there are two problems with that. One, it makes art so much less than what it can be potentially. But also, you're communicating to the world that the gospel is not art. The gospel is this information that needs to be used by something to carry it. Only, that's not the gospel at all. The gospel is life.

The gospel is about the Creator God, who is an artist, who is trying to communicate. And his art is the church. We are the artwork created in Christ Jesus to do good works. If we don't realize that fully, then the gospel itself is truncated; and art itself suffers.

Finally, who are your spiritual influences?

I became a Christian reading William Blake. He was an 18th century Romantic poet. So, this man struggled in his faith journey all through his life but came back to orthodox Christianity at the end. He is definitely an influence. Definitely, artists like El Greco and art in general have pushed me to ask deeper questions about the reality of the world and my soul.

Then, there are the missionaries that I met in Japan who clearly communicated the gospel to me—even though I didn't understand or I disagreed with them. But, they did—so in love, in prayer. And my wife, who suffered along with me and who basically led me to that community and led me to Christ—all these are wonderful influences.

In New York City, I've been enormously affected by Dr. Tim Keller's preaching and teaching. I was involved with him from very early on in the Redeemer movement. He really opened my eyes to see that the city is not a tool to be used for mining success; but it is a conglomeration of people who need to be loved. And loving the city, rather than being against it or being of it, is what I'm still learning to do.

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See Part 1.

Interview with Makoto Fujimura - Part 1

Becky Garrison — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 06:00:00 GMT

In Refractions: A Journey of Faith, Art, and Culture, artist Makoto Fujimura pens a series of essays exploring life, art, and faith. Makoto spoke with us recently about what it means to be an artist and how we can all be creative in our daily work. He will be a leading a retreat for Pastors and Lay Ministers to Artists at Laity Lodge from April 20-23, 2009.

How do you see your work as your calling?

I knew that my work as an artist was my calling before I was a Christian. You can't really commoditize art. The pure artists feel called to do what they do despite enormous difficulties such as not being able to market their works or having an audience necessarily at that moment. This made more sense after I became a Christian, and I knew who called me and to what purpose. One of the things that I discuss in the book is how the process of creativity and the journey of faith overlap. In fact, I was part of a study group called the Faith and Work Group at Yale that examined: “Why is it that Sunday faith is not translated into Monday through Saturday?”

What did you learn from that study group?

I wrote an essay in the book titled “Optimum Foraging Theory: Can You Have Your Birds and Eat Them Too?” It was based on the experience of our group touring the Tyson Factory and thinking through what it means to have a calling of some kind but also have a market reality.

As a Christian, how do you deal with the commercialized aspect of the art world?

Recently, I have been writing in Refractions and on my blogs about the necessity for the market system in the art world to change into more of a hybrid system. Instead of being based purely on the celebrity-driven, ego-infested market system, it would really take into account one's creativity and the biblical paradigm of Shalom prosperity. That's different from just having market prosperity. God plans for us to be thriving in our creativity. Therefore, there has to be an over-arching system that accounts for that. While there are a few pockets of Shalom prosperity, currently, there is no system like that in place. The church should be one of the first places where that could be possible.

What do you think keeps the church from not being one of those places?

I think it's bought into the commoditized system. It's driven by market desires and consumer mentality. We have big churches, which is not bad in itself, but with mall-like structures and 20th century evangelism, the church kind of turned itself into salesmanship of the gospel—where it can be bought or sold. And the person receiving the gospel is either buying it or not buying it. That's a problem in many ways, as we can imagine.

The ineffectiveness of our not being able to create that hybrid system leads to the gospel being boiled down to some level of commodity. As a church, we need to really reconsider this system by recreating our system and calling for systemic change.

How do you glorify God in your daily work?

I glorify God by fulfilling my calling and being faithful in small things. But it's also about being willing to stand for my faith in certain ways. I do that by being authentic and integrating my faith journey with my art. I work with whoever I work with—whether it be a gallery or the whole system that is driven by a celebrity market system with ideologies that are somewhat opposed to biblical values—but I love the art world instead of disengaging from it.

How do you achieve that balance?

Jeremiah 29 calls us to pray for the prosperity of the city in which God has called us into exile. We are in exile. That's just the reality. But that doesn't mean we can disengage and run away from it. Jeremiah tells us to plant gardens and settle down and get married, which means a long incarnational journey to live and work in the place of exile and to honor God there as Daniel did. We become a better Babylonian than the Babylonians.

What Scripture verses or Bible stories influence your art?

Well, the entire Bible is written by our Creator God for broken creative people of God to create and love. That's how I read the Bible; it's a creative book to be read as our creative journey. So, to me, every single verse in Scripture is filled with creative principles that we can learn from—not for the sake of creativity, but for the sake of sanctification and our journey toward the City of God.

What is the biggest spiritual challenge you face in your work?

I would say it is the market pressure, because I have to survive and feed my family as a full-time artist. So, you toil and labor under the curse. Unfortunately, it's very hard to make what I do sustainable because of market pressure and lack of support from the world and from the church. You have to be entrepreneurial. I'm fortunate that I have that capacity, but a lot of people don't. Oftentimes, that puts them at risk in the world. And yet, God has been kind to me and my family and has sustained us as I fulfill my calling. I consider that a daily miracle.

Speaking of family, how do you juggle your family, your ministry, and your art all at the same time?

I talk about that in the book. It's really an amazing miracle and journey that certainly is a juggling act. I do it because I believe it's important. My journey as an artist and what I create is directly linked to advancement of God's kingdom somehow. If I didn't have a conviction, it would be hard to make it work. But at the same time, there's wisdom there that involves making sure that I have a team around me that protects me from burning out, so my work can be sustainable.

What does your work teach you about your faith in the person of God?

I learn a lot from the process of painting—even the frustration of the business side of things or my own failings in what I desire to accomplish. I hope they are teachable moments for me. Creating art is essentially a discipline in which one learns to deal with these frustrations. They are birth pangs that are constantly there in front of me as I work. And, I struggle through that. It's hard work. But in the end, it is utterly rewarding and reveals very much the process that Paul talks about in Romans 8 where the whole creation is waiting for sons of God to be revealed. This whole birthing process, as it were, is repeated in smaller ways on the surface with my paintings. Even as I write, I experience that. Everyone in a creative field experiences that.

What led you to create the International Arts Movement?

I was living in exile and living in the gap and knowing that there's very little support to fulfill my calling as an artist, not in this market system. I was trying to make art sustainable. So, whether you're a Christian or non-Christian, there's some support. That's why International Arts Movement (IAM) is not a Christian ministry, but it is an arts organization—nonprofit arts organization run by Christians. We see art as a primary place to wrestle with deeper issues of art and faith and humanity.

How does IAM influence the New York City art world?

First of all, we're a very small organization. So, we can only be a catalytic organization. We partner with other organizations as well as work with churches and sometimes non-Christian organizations, because we believe that this calling to rehumanize is very much needed from all spheres. I believe creating the “world that ought to be” is a necessary calling for every human being. It's part of my “shalom” calling as well. God has instituted this calling for me, my family, and IAM to work toward peace and prosperity of the city.

We don't create a nice, comfortable place for ourselves. That's because we feel that struggling through the public sphere and all the pluralistic context that we have to deal with is good for us. Thus, we learn to speak in a language that is not tilted and biased and built on fear of what the other side is doing, but we learn to mediate in our culture on what is true and essential about humanity.

How do you facilitate this dialogue with IAM?

We have public dialogs in all sorts of spheres in the arts and business. In the future, we're even going to involve scientists as well, because the issue of rehumanization affects everyone. Here at IAM, we have a vantage point of doing that through the arts. While that's our central point, our conferences, our lectures, and now the Internet are wide open. Anybody can sign up to be a member for free on our site and join in. It's really a wonderful adventure to have a movement to be a resource to people in their creative journeys.

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Read Part 2.

Jesus Calls Us to Be Ambitious: an Interview with Andy Crouch, Part 2

Marcus Goodyear — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 06:00:00 GMT

"How long will it take before I realize that these doubts are not about any objective measure of my influence or power?" (Andy Crouch)

Andy Crouch’s most recent book Culture Making is one of the best things we read in 2008. Not that we were surprised. We’ve followed Andy’s work since he became director of the Christian Vision Project at Christianity Today in 2005.

He spoke with us recently about what it means to be a culture maker in our ordinary jobs. After this interview took place, Andy led a retreat at Laity Lodge in the summer of 2009. He'll be back in 2010 to lead a retreat with D. Michael Lindsay. Contact Laity Lodge for more information.

>> Read Part 1 of our interview with Andy Crouch about faith, work, and culture.

So how does ambition fit into our work as culture makers? I'm sure you didn't write Culture Making and plan to sell only 5,000 copies. You want it to sell a million copies. So does IVP. How do we wrestle with that paradox?

To be honest, Marcus, I'm not sure I exactly know.

(Laughs) Fair enough.

Temperament is involved here. Personally, I am a strangely unambitious person. I'm driven by other things. But then, I have friends who are just temperamentally ambitious. And, I wouldn't say that I'm right and they're wrong or vice-versa.

Let me put it this way. It's all in what you're ambitious for and in how you're working toward your ambition. In the book, I talk about grace as a marker of God-breathed cultural creativity.

I define "grace" based on Jesus’ parable of the sower. He sowed seed on all kinds of ground. On the best ground, one seed falls in the ground and multiplies 30, 60, or 100 times.

My ambition is to place myself—in the things that I do and the places I go and the kind of cultural creativity I engage in—on the best ground so I will see that kind of abundance.

It's very important to emphasize that abundance doesn't come from my striving. Sometimes ambition and striving are equated so that I’m trying to claw my way into influence. I have not seen that bear good fruit in individual lives or even in the broader culture. But, I have seen people bear good fruit when they are ambitious to be where God is multiplying.

Can you give us an example of that?

I was with a guy who runs a couple of billion-dollar hedge funds a couple of weeks ago. And, I was talking about grace. Afterwards, he said to me, "You've given me language for what we do in our business. We try to invest in places where people are discovering ridiculous abundance that they're not really even responsible for. They're just the prospectors who come across this abundant part of God's creation."

He does green energy investing right now. And he said, “Whenever someone is in the center of delight and surprise and finding unmerited stuff bubbling up from God's created world, that's where we want to invest.”

That seems to me like a very proper ambition.

So some of those green energy companies are making culture in the positive way your book describes?

Oh, I think so. I don't know a lot about this guy's particular business. We talked for about 15 minutes or so.

But, I think this is one of the fundamental commitments we have to make as Christians. God has created an amazingly abundant world. We actually see this in the Genesis creation story—the second creation story in Genesis 2 where it not only describes this lush and abundant garden, but says the gold of that land is good, and the bdellium and onyx stone are there too. “Really?” I think whenever I read that. “Is this a little mineral report for future readers?”

The garden had vegetative abundance, but there were also natural resources under the ground, like gold and onyx, just waiting to be uncovered. As culture makers, we uncover and develop the latent good potential of the world that God's given us.

Western economics operates out of a sense of scarcity. But we operate out of a sense that the world is created to be abundant. And our job is to discover its abundance, not to exploit it, but to do justice to the way that God created it to function.

Let’s change directions a bit. Sometimes our Christian subculture uses a lot of war metaphors. We talk about making war on Christmas or trying to take over Hollywood. Do you think that our subculture is obsessed with working our way into power?

Most of the people I talk to who work in Christian media are engaging and very well-informed, culturally—maybe more so than my prejudices might suggest. But it just fascinates me how consistently they express some combination of fear and hostility toward the wider culture. I would say that our Christian media and Christian industries are unreasonably defensive.

In some respects, Christians do stand in very distinct opposition to our culture. Our culture values some things that Christians cannot value. We have to say, “This is wrong.” And we have to be able to use strong words when we say it.

What are some of the things that we must oppose culturally?

In the Atlantic Monthly from October 2008, Ross Douthat tries to answer the question, "Is pornography adultery?" He gingerly lands on the answer, "Well, yes, kind of, sort of, in a way, well, I guess it may be." (Laughs)

And, I thought, "Can't we say something stronger?" (Laughs) Yes, it is adultery! It’s exactly what Jesus was talking about [in Matthew 5:27-28]. There's nothing to be redeemed about it. It's one of these few cultural goods where you can only say, "This is just wrong. This is not right. Stop!"

There are things that we have to oppose with whatever legitimate means we have.

I read that article. He definitely concludes that pornography is wrong—even if he stops short of calling it adultery.

The Atlantic Monthly itself is conflicted about these things. But we have a lot of allies out there. People are genuinely perplexed, even though they may not have a very firm or clear moral foundation to orient them. When Christians treat them all as adversaries, we're positioning ourselves in the culture to be seen as the opponents. We become the people who are against things. And, that's a very thin basis for legitimacy in a pluralistic, democratic society.

What really grants you credibility and authority in our culture is what you stand for. We want to cultivate and create something really remarkable and good. Too often, we're on defense and that's a losing posture. Instead, we need to create as much as we can without compromising our convictions.

The internet is allowing us to create more than ever before. How do we avoid the internet becoming another “Tower of Babel”?

The Internet is a great cultural good in some ways—right up there with electricity, I suppose. And cultural goods are rarely bad or good. They open up some possibilities that you wish they wouldn't; and they open other possibilities that are really wonderful.

Just within the Christian world—it has helped spread reliable and substantive theological resources for the growing church around the world. Almost everywhere you go in the world, there's an Internet café within an hour's drive.

Pastors can get online at their Internet café and benefit from the same kinds of resources that used to be locked up in libraries in western seminaries. But at the same time, horribly heretical forms of Christianity thrive.

And very exploitative businesses. Global trafficking of people is probably at the highest level it has ever been. More people were trafficked between countries as effective slaves in the 20^th century than in all of the centuries of the Atlantic slave trade.

But this is how culture works. You know the possibilities that open up are both wonderful and terrible, usually at the same time.

So cultural creativity or culture making requires cultural maturity. But how do we get that?

Say I want to be mature. What do I do?

We have to let go of the idea that we will be able to create pure cultural goods that will never do any damage.

The reality is we're all going to participate in creating things that, because of sin, will probably be distorted—although, because of grace, they may be developed into more wonderful things than they are now. We have to be willing to say it is in God's hands, ultimately.

So how do we move toward this more mature attitude about our work?

I always go back to the basic disciplines of silence, solitude, and fasting, along with immersion into worshipping God and studying life of the church, studying the story, the Bible that orients us.

On the first day of the week, we immerse ourselves in the true story. We're given the resources through the preaching of the Word and through the sacraments to participate in that story. And we suspend our normal “daily needs.” We turn off the Internet. We set things aside. Twenty centuries of people testify that this is what produces maturity.

You’re talking about Sabbath.

Sabbath becomes tremendously important. One of the biggest threats and challenges in our own culture is this constant frenetic busyness that simply prevents us from ever contemplating what we're creating; why we're creating it; what our ambitions are.

I tell you, if you want to find out the state of your own heart and your ambition, spend some time in silence and solitude. And then, if you really want to find out, go without even just one meal; and you will find out whether your ambition for influence is really driven by a fear of insignificance or a desire for power and control, or whether it's genuinely a desire to be of use to God in the world.

Those things come bubbling up. You can't stop them when you take away all these implements of distraction that we have all around us.

So maturity is when we are not motivated by fear of our own insignificance, but by our desire to do good?

That's right. It's a daily challenge for me. I present at some big Christian conferences, and doubts sometime crowd my mind after such an experience for days afterward . "Did I do a good enough job? I didn't get as much applause as this other person." It's really ridiculous.

How long will it take before I realize that these doubts are not about any objective measure of my influence or power? They are my own fears.

And, that's what the disciplines are for. They cleanse us of useless motivations—that lead to people doing really stupid things to get noticed or to get power or to get wealth. In their place comes the spirit of Christ, who actually prepares us to be very ambitious.

How does Christ call us to be ambitious?

I mean, we pray a very ambitious prayer on a regular basis: "Your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven." But, at the same time, we pray a very small prayer: "Give us today our daily bread."

When we pray these prayers together, then we're placing ourselves in the right place to be used by God in what he's doing in the world and the transformation that he's bringing in culture.

>> Read Part 1 of our interview with Andy Crouch about faith, work, and culture.

Your Stapler Is Making Assumptions: an Interview with Andy Crouch, Part 1

Marcus Goodyear — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 06:00:00 GMT

"We make choices about what kind of business we are going to create, what the business is going to make, and how the business is going to make it." (Andy Crouch)

>> Read Part 2 of our interview with Andy Crouch about faith, work, and culture.

Andy, your book is called Culture Making. What does it mean to make culture?

I chose that title for a couple of reasons. First, I realized that the only way you change culture is to make more of it.

This is important, because very often Christians have thought that the way you change culture is by criticizing it loudly and repeatedly or even by imitating it, by copying it. But those strategies don't actually change culture very much, if at all. Culture only changes when we make culture.

Also, I think we've missed how tangible culture is. We think of culture as this vague, abstract sort of ether that permeates everything. We hear about the fish swimming in water; it doesn't know it's in the water. And, we feel—well, that's what culture is like. Of course, there is some truth to that; but culture is actually made up of tangible goods, actual things.

Like omelets?

There are several recipes hidden in the book; and you know, that's culture. So is the chair that I'm sitting in; so is the house that I'm in right now; so is your office building; so are Interstate highways—something else I talk about in the book a lot.

When we see that culture is actual, tangible things and that any meaning or value that culture transmits comes through tangible things, then we start to realize, "Oh, I actually can affect this in some way—perhaps a small way—but I can create something."

Whereas, if we only think about culture at the level of meaning and value, we end up thinking that our job is to simply analyze meaning and value. We become philosophers of culture, but we don't become creators of culture.

You talk about cultural artifacts in the book—are you saying that every act of creation has meaning behind it?

Almost always. Anthropologists use the word "artifact," but my favorite word is "cultural good," because it kind of has that sense of something good and something specific. Initially, every cultural good is created by a small group of people who sense that something is lacking in the world.

So what's the cultural good of my stapler?

(Laughs) Oh my goodness. Actually, there are all sorts of meaning and values encoded into your stapler—the value of organization. It's better to make that pile of paper into a single thing rather than separate sheets that can be scattered around. Now, they're going to be read in a linear form.

So, there's a preference encoded into that for reading straight through a document rather than being able to spread out its pages or scatter its pages.

Is that a moral value to prefer linear reading over something more scattered?

I'm not saying that all cultural goods necessarily have a moral component; but they do address questions of how the world should be. And, the stapler says the world ought to be organized.

This is not something that all human cultures have taken for granted at all. I was in Kenya a couple of years ago, and I got to go on safari, which is what, I guess, most Americans do when they go to Kenya.

We flew over the bush on our way to the Masai Mara, and we could see these human settlements from the air, very irregular little enclosures where they keep their cows and where they live.

When you fly over the U.S., you see grids and circles, and the same in Europe; but when you fly over the bush in Kenya, you see these irregular, sort of, roughly circular shaped things. These are human cultures that don't place the priority that we do on measurement and order.

Is one system better than the other?

It's hard to say actually. In Kenya, they preserve certain kinds of possibilities in their relationships with one another and in their relationships with the environment that we find very hard to capture.

Even very concrete things—like your stapler or like the way we shape our human settlements—encode a certain set of assumptions about how the world is and how it ought to be.

The way we shape our businesses must reveal quite a bit about how we view the world as well.

Absolutely. We make choices about what kind of business we are going to create, what this business is going to make, and how the business is going to make it.

Every set of choices opens up one set of possibilities, but also closes down other possibilities. So, you can't have a really nice neat tidy desk with everything stapled and, at the same time, have a range of options and free-flowing creativity that you could have if all your pages were spread over your desk.

We have to make choices.

In a way, human culture is just a constant reevaluation of our horizons of possibility. How well do they work for us?

And, every human culture senses they don't work quite right—there are some things that are possible that should not be possible. And, there are some things that are impossible that should not be impossible. So, we're constantly asking what could we create or how could we move those horizons a little bit?

What does culture making look like for an employee in a business?

You’ve raised the question of cultural power. We have the sense that some people are more able to make culture than others, because they decide in a very tangible way what widgets we make and what widgets we don't make.

And so, if I'm not the person with ultimate cultural power, can I create anything at all? Of course I can. Every human being is given a creative capacity by God. And, most of us, especially in our western world, can exercise that capacity in our paid work.

Not everyone. Some people really do have machine-like jobs, but they can create in other spheres. But, I'm guessing most of the people who will read this interview have a certain degree of freedom in their work.

Even though we're employees who have responsibilities to bosses or companies or stockholders?

We're responsible, not just about creating, but also cultivating—keeping what's already good, good. The whole reason we have our job, often, is that our employer hopes that we'll do a better job than someone did before.

That usually involves looking at what has already been done and asking, "What should I cultivate here?" What is good enough to just keep doing because it has been done very well?

What about employees who want to do something new? Who ask, “What hasn’t been done before?”

I think many, many jobs have room for that question. What is missing that I could create? Every job should be a fully human, dignified activity. Say I'm working at a fast-food restaurant. Can I shape the culture of the front counter in the way that we interact with our customers? Every time I serve someone, can I relate to them in a slightly different way than has been customary in this particular restaurant?

And over time, I will change the culture by my choices and by working with my fellow employees, even though our manager may not care or may not have thought to ask us to do it.

So there’s hope for the employee who is dissatisfied, thinking "I can't be a culture maker, because I'm too insignificant." In fact, they're not recognizing the power they do have.

Exactly. And, here's the great irony. When we start thinking about cultural power and what we can change, everyone feels insignificant. This is the great difference between power and money. Some people in the world wake up in the morning, and they have more money than they know what to do with. Their biggest problem is how to spend it and give it away wisely.

But, no one—not Bill Gates, not Warren Buffet, not Carlos Slim—wakes up in the morning and says, "I have enough power." We all wake up and think, “There are things I would like to change in the world that I cannot change, no matter how much of myself I invest or how much energy I exert.” And, that's actually true.

Employees often find it hard to imagine that they may be more free than the owner or CEO of the business. At least theoretically, the employees have the option of changing jobs and leaving. The owner has to sell or close it down to get out of it. So, in a way, they feel more constrained.

We all feel the sense that we're overmatched by the cultural challenges we face. But when we focus on that, we miss the fact that God has given us power. There is no other word to use. God has given us the ability to create something new—even if it seems very small.

How do we learn to be content with small? In the book, you talk about culture being made on a small scale; but we live in a world of megabrands.

I'm not sure it's exactly that we have to be content with small, although we have to start out being content. Contentment is a radical and deeply Christian idea. Why am I content with my relatively small lot in life? It's because God is big, and I'm part of God's big story.

Now, that being said, even megabrands are going to feel small to the people who actually run them. They don't feel like they have their hands on the levers of matchless power. Every brand has competitors; every brand is a few years away from irrelevance. As near as I can tell, I can't think of any exceptions.

So, it's a change of mindset. It's not about how big the lever is that I'm pushing on. That's always going to feel very small. But I believe there's grace at work—a kind of a tailwind behind what I do. However small my work may start out, God is going to multiply what's really good in my work in ways that may end up being huge over generations or centuries.

>> Read Part 2 of our interview with Andy Crouch about faith, work, and culture.

Let It Flow Out: An Interview with N. T. Wright

Mark D. Roberts — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Bishop N. T. Wright is arguably one of the most important theologians writing today. He’s published everything from weighty theological tomes like Christian Origins and the Question of God, to accessible commentaries like Paul for Everyone: The Pastoral Letters, to inspirational books like Simply Christian and Surprised by Hope. When N. T. Wright agreed to lead an intimate retreat at Laity Lodge, we took the opportunity to ask him about honoring God in everyday life and work.

What does it look like to be "Simply Christian" outside the professional church from 9 to 5?

It looks like a million different things. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, "Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in eyes and lovely in limbs, not His." In a sense, when you become a Christian, you become your genuine self. You’re called into that fresh selfhood. God made each of us to be really quite different and to reflect in a million little glittering diamonds that sense of the differentness of Jesus. Jesus looks like one way in this person and another way in that person. Ordinary people develop skills and talents which are peculiar to them. Then they bring those gifts to the church—gifts of art, gifts of leadership, gifts of craft, gifts of service of all sorts. You will see a rich variety develop.

Just as an interesting aside, our local culture in the north of England is a working-class culture. For generations and generations, everyone has lived in these little row houses like in the mining or steel communities. At the end of the village, there is one big house, which is where the owner lives. He tells everybody what to do, and they do it. He pays them, and they go and have a beer. That’s it. They don’t have any decisions to make except which pub to visit at the end of the day. That is still how a lot of people approach the church. We don’t expect to think. We don’t expect to make decisions. That’s what the Vicar is for. We expect the clergy to tell us what to do, and we don’t want to think for ourselves. I want to say, "No, you’ve all got to be individuals and do your own thing." Actually, I think that’s part of the Gospel.

How do Christians glorify God in their daily work or does our work have some other, more nuanced, purpose?

There are all sorts of different jobs. George Herbert’s famous hymn, "Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws, makes that and the action fine." It’s a very important principle of Christian service. Now, it’s much easier, no doubt, to think of yourself as doing important Christian work if you’re preparing sermons or being chief in a music band in church or whatever. But actually, the guy who sweeps the step is doing just as much good as you are, maybe more. I am delighted when I go to a church and see people doing mundane things with a sense of pride, because they’re doing them for the love of God and the body of Christ. I love those people. Nobody knows who they are; nobody knows their names. As a bishop, I try to go around and thank them because I can see they’re doing a good job. Of course, we’d all like to be the architect who builds the cathedral or the composer who writes the symphony or whatever. But most of the time, we do what needs to be done. Christ shines out of the way we work, not so much what we do, but how we do it.

How does one’s work fit into the overlap of Heaven and earth?

If it is true that we are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, then each Christian is a place where Heaven and earth overlap. C. S. Lewis said, "Next to the blessed sacrament, your Christian neighbor is the holiest object ever presented to your senses." In Christians, the true Christ should be truly present. From that point of view, what you do as a Christian should embody that overlap of Heaven and earth. But we often think of Heaven in such grandiose terms, often platonic terms, and we just see that Heaven and earth are meant to go together. They were put together in the first place in Genesis 1 in the garden.

The call to a new creation at the intersection of Heaven and earth seems to be a call for action.

Yes, it is. That’s the short answer. But let’s be absolutely clear what we’re talking about here. Salvation and justification are not the same thing.

What you do in the present matters. It’s hard for Protestants to hear that without thinking, "Oh, dear, this is good works again." That’s a scare tactic. Sometimes, it’s a political scare tactic—to stop Christians from actively working to change the way the world is, confronting justice, and building communities of peace and hope instead of ones of violence and hatred. The verse which says it all for me is the last verse in 1 Corinthians. Okay, you’ve got this great chapter on resurrection. What is Paul going to say after writing a whole chapter on resurrection? Is he going to say, "Since there is a resurrection, look up and wait for this glorious future?" No, he says, "Therefore my beloved ones be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain." Your work is "not in vain." Why not? Because everything you do in the present, in the power of the Spirit and in union with Christ, everything that flows out of love and hope and grace and goodness somehow will be part of God’s eventual Kingdom. That is the message of the resurrection. The resurrection is your new body in which you will be gloriously, truly wonderfully you. The resurrection means everything you’ve done in the present through your body—works of justice and mercy and love and hope—somehow in ways we don’t understand will be part of God’s new creation. We are not building the Kingdom of God in that old social Gospel sense. We are building for the Kingdom of God.

Does this change how we think about creation as it is? How should Christians respond to issues like pollution?

We are stewards of creation, as I stressed at Laity Lodge. That is our calling as human beings. If we are careless about creation or wantonly destructive of it, we are in radical denial of what it means to be human. God made this world beautiful. He made us stewards of creation under him and over the world. We don’t always know how to do this, but we can be prayerful and wise and seeking to be good stewards. Then we will more likely be genuine humans and our world will more likely flourish. We can’t just go on treating God’s creation as a cross between a gold mine and an ash tray. We can’t just get what we want, grab it, and run. We can’t just dump our garbage and not worry about it.

What does it look like if the Kingdom of God in the Church tries to put the world to rights?

Salvation is not simply God’s gift to the Church. It is God’s gift through the Church.

The Church is supposed to be a lighthouse, a beacon of hope and warning and mercy and all the rest of it. The Church is not just supposed to tell people they are sinners and need Jesus so they can go to Heaven. No, the Kingdom of God is about God’s Kingdom coming on earth as in Heaven. The Church is to be the agent in making that happen.

Now, here’s the problem. Some churches concentrate on simply bringing people to faith and building them up in faith, with a little bit of missions spilling over if you’re lucky. These actually tend to do rather well because they make people feel good. My Church is about me. Churches that are very active in getting out there and making things happen in the world are sometimes, sadly, not as good at attracting members.

You must always come back to prayer, worship, and Bible study. Make sure that Christians are not going hollow in the middle individually or corporately. But, then let it flow out. First, focus on mission. Second, grow leadership. Third, encourage discipleship. Then, act collaboratively. That means the church helps the local education authority, the local housing committee, the police force, whatever it may be. Let’s work with everyone who we can.

Sometimes the Church fails to collaborate and compromises itself with the ways of the world. Other times it stands back and critiques, "We’re in the right, and you’re in the wrong." Here’s what the Church partnerships look like when we grow the Kingdom.: Collaborate without compromise; critique without dualism.

An Interview with Tony Jones: Part 2

Marcus Goodyear — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 06:00:00 GMT

According to his website, "Tony is the national coordinator of Emergent Village (www.emergentvillage.org), and a doctoral fellow in practical theology at Princeton Theological Seminary." We spoke with him recently about some of the topics in his recent book The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier—as well as his understanding of ministering to others through our daily work.

When most people think of church, they think of the buildings where we meet on Sunday morning. What do you mean when you say church?

I use that term "church" as broadly as I use the term "ministry." By church I don't mean bricks and mortar. I mean those of us who have submitted ourselves to some kind of communal form of Christianity. Christians need to get together deliberately and do stuff in tandem with one another. I don't think one is probably really a Christian if one is not somehow involved in communal life.

The whole Bible is written to people in community. The letters were written to communities and meant to be read publicly and talked about. And the Old Testament was meant for the entire nation of Israel. It was never addressed to a single person. So, I think we need to take that as the precedent.

How is technology changing the way we perceive church?

People have stolen this idea from mathematics that the church is a bound set. A bound set has a discreet boundary on it. So you might say you're either Presbyterian or not. I think of church as a relational set, more like the Internet. It's this relationship between multiple cells or multiple hubs. So you might say Roman Catholicism is a hub, Presbyterianism is a hub, and you might say Laity Lodge is a hub. All these different websites are hubs, and all these things together make for this massive web of relationship that is Christianity.

Technology is the primary force that drives us. It is driving the entire communications industry and transportation industry and all other industries that are dependent on communication and transportation. Everything we do about our lives, how we talk to our loved ones, how we vacation, how we work, where we work, all that is driven by information technology, and the Church is too.

I've talked to some pretty naive people who say, "Well, the Church is different. It isn't like a business. The Church isn't affected by culture." Well, come on. Of course it is. So, the future of the Church is going to be driven by the technological innovations that are happening so rapidly right now.

Did I just hear you reject the sacred/secular divide?

I totally reject it! 100%. I think it is Platonic philosophy for someone to say there is a sacred/secular divide, that there are some things in creation that are holy and some things are profane. I think that is the philosophy of Plato; it is not biblical.

The Platonic image of God is an immaterial transcended mind that hovers somewhere off in the cosmos, untouched by human fingerprints. The biblical image of God has dirt under his fingernails. He walks with Adam in the cool of the day. He leads Israel as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. He wrestles with Jacob and whispers in prophets' ears. He literally gets dirt under his fingernails in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. This is the uniqueness of Christianity, that God came in the form of a human being.

That is unheard of in other religions. In fact, it's blasphemous in other religions.

So do you believe God is involved in every aspect of life and work?

Absolutely. People talk about bridging the Sunday/Monday divide. But that kind of language exacerbates the problem. I've heard pastors talk about life "Between Sundays." As if we don't know how to get from one Sunday to the next or something. Talk like that from Christian leaders is deeply problematic. I'm not saying that the people who are listening to this don't struggle in their daily lives with living out God's calling to ministry in every aspect of life, right? But, it's no different if you work in a church. Working for IBM, Best Buy, or Target is not any more or less profane than working on a church staff. Every one of these things to which we are called as a vocation has the opportunity to be a place where we are open to the movement of God's Spirit—or where we think it's all about us and our achievement.

We're just coming out of an election season, so let's talk about politics. What does it look like when a politician's work is ministry?

It's like the cop we talked about before. How could politics not be ministry? Politicians and elected officials have a great responsibility to care for people, to talk in ways that help people feel like their concerns are being heard.

I do worry when politicians say, "We need to water down the distinctives of Christianity or Islam or Judaism in a pluralistic environment." I don't know that you can do that. Talking about Jesus may be a little offensive to Jews and Muslims, but you can't just talk about love or something like that. Christianity hinges on Jesus Christ. We're just really in a time of deep cultural conversation about how we pull this off in a pluralistic environment. And we don't know exactly how it's going to happen.

An Interview with Tony Jones: Part 1

Marcus Goodyear — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Tony Jones has been the national coordinator of Emergent Village (www.emergentvillage.org). He is currently theologian-in-residence at Solomon's Porch in Minneapolis and a doctoral fellow in practical theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. We spoke with him recently about some of the topics in his latest book The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier—as well as his understanding of ministering to others through our daily work.

Can you tell me a little bit about your time as a police chaplain? Do you have any good stories from that?

I have this one story that got cut from the book that is incredible. I got this call late at night, like on December 22 or 23, for a DOA. The guy who died was about 480 pounds, and he hadn't gotten out of bed for 3 or 4 years. His room was floor to ceiling, wall to wall, homemade shelves full of food. Cans of beef stew and bags of Fritos, and it had a stench like nothing I'd ever smelled before. And, this was not the stench of death, but it was a stench that long preceded his expiration. The cops and firefighters were trying to resuscitate him and roll him off the bed.

Then there were five single guys living in his house with him, all down on their luck. Then, someone said, "His wife is in the basement." So, I go downstairs, and there's his wife. She's probably 5 feet tall, 105 lbs., from Thailand, and she's crying. Then their two little kids come running out from this bedroom behind a sheet that's strung up across the kitchen, and they don't speak English. His wife barely speaks English. But she just starts crying out, "He no too fat for me! He no too fat for me!"

Oh, that's sad.

Yeah, and it struck me to the heart that this woman loved this guy. He was very special to this group of seven or eight people on the margins of society. Ironically, they were a block away from the biggest church in my town, so the cul-de-sac is stacked with cars of people who are parking and walking down to go to this megachurch for service. And here this guy is basically eating himself to death who has a mail-order bride from Thailand and five buddies who live in his household.

Being a police Chaplain, it's story after story after story like that. I could tell you about making death notifications in the middle of the afternoon to totally unsuspecting people to tell them their spouse has died or their child has died—hanging out with cops who are suicidally depressed because of what they've seen on the job, struggling with dispatchers who are going through divorce and trauma.

So you would definitely consider your work a ministry?

Those kinds of categories bother me—something is ministry and something else isn't ministry. It's not very helpful to draw those lines. But sure, my work is ministry. I just don't think what I do is any more ministry than what someone else does.

At TheHighCalling.org, we often say that all work can be ministry. It can be hard for people to see how everyday work is ministry, though. How about the policemen in your story, for instance. Were they ministers?

Police officers are in such a strange role in our society. They almost never spend time with people at their best. Whether they're pulling you over for a ticket or coming to your house because your spouse just had a heart attack. They have to deal with domestic abuse and suicide and massive car wrecks. These are the worst moments in life, and that's when police officers are with people. So, it's a very traumatic role for them. And you know, some cops are not the least bit pastoral, but a lot of them are very sensitive. It's funny. They say, "We really need these Chaplains to help us with death notifications, because we're no good at stuff like that." But most cops are really good with people. Everything they do—when they pull somebody over, when they arrive at the scene of an automobile accident, how they carry themselves, what kind of words they use, what kind of tone of voice they have—it all becomes ministry in their daily lives.

So, I hear you talking about ministry in terms of relating well to other people—treating other people right. What does the Trinity teach us about relationships in our daily lives?

Some people say, "Anytime you talk about the Trinity, you're a heretic." Because it's impossible to talk about the Trinity without overemphasizing the threeness or overemphasizing the oneness. For me, I definitely err on overemphasizing the threeness. The beauty is the relationship between the three. And the eternal loving relationship between the Father, Son, and the Spirit flows into all of creation. That becomes the calling of all Christians—to be in true, deep, loving relationship with other human beings and with God and even with all of creation.

Boy, there's so much interest in the Trinity right now. People are talking more and more about what the church really is and how we develop communities where people care for one another and live in reconciliation with one another. A lot of this is driven by a newfound love for the theology of the Trinity.

That's a good thing, right?

Absolutely! A lot of Christians in America talk about the Trinity, particularly church people and professionals who get paid to be Christian, like you and me and pastors and seminary professors, and people like that. We talk about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but we don't act as if the Holy Spirit is up to stuff. I imagine this is true in other industries as well. We talk about the Spirit, but when it comes to growing our church or business, it's all about us.

Let's make sure we have better JumboTron screens in our worship center! Do we have enough visitor parking? Do we have beepers for the moms for the nursery? It becomes all about technique and method. But you know what? The Holy Spirit is the author of church growth, the Holy Spirit is the author of salvation, not human beings, not us. Yet we keep saying, "Let's hone our methods. Let's get better at this. Maybe if we had better coffee."

An Interview with Lauren Winner

Marcus Goodyear — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 06:00:00 GMT

During a summer retreat at Laity Lodge in 2008, Lauren Winner sat down with one of our editors from TheHighCalling.org, Marcus Goodyear, for a conversation about spiritual practices and holistic living—and the challenges of living out spiritual practices in a secular world.

Lauren F. Winner is the author of three books, Girl Meets God, Mudhouse Sabbath, and Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity. You can read more about her at her website.

What do we learn about God from living out a spiritual practice in the workplace?

In the workplace perhaps more obviously than in other spheres of life, we have a clearer picture of who is Caesar and who is God.

We always have to think about how we can glorify God through something other than full-time ministry. Often, pastors don't talk about this much because, in their own lives, they do not have to think much about how to connect ostensibly secular work to the service of God.

They don't?

Well, pastors are not in the position of devoting 40-60 hours a week to secular work. So the situations they deal with are different. It's not their daily question to figure out how to live out their spiritual practice in the workplace.

How do you live out spiritual practices?

My job presents an idol to me. That has been my struggle with teaching in the university—my spiritual struggle. Work is an opportunity for me to have things totally out of balance. Workaholism is something I'm prone to.

So it is an ongoing effort for me to keep work in perspective. I have a job that I love every iota of. And because I teach in seminary—it is Christian service. So I can cloak my workaholism in a lot of pious-sounding tropes.

But I also work in the context of a research institution. So the university can be productivity- and goal-oriented in ways that are sometimes not consistent with discipleship. It is a constant struggle for me to remember that those are my pitfalls. And the only way to successfully ward them off is to have other people help me see them. They'll say to me, "This seems like something is out of balance." Or maybe they just ask questions.

What does it look like to have people hold you accountable?

I don't use the word "accountable." I think we ought to table that word for 50 years.

All right. What does it mean to let other people help you remember your pitfalls, then?

Here's an example for me. We have corporate worship every day. We're a divinity school. But you're not required to go. I could go to work all year and never attend the worship. But I have committed to going. If I went to all of them, I'd spend 6 hours per week in corporate worship. But when I come up for tenure, the university tenure board isn't going to take that into consideration.Going to the worship service is not a system of being held accountable. It is a way for me to join the community. If I didn't show up for several weeks, people might ask me how I'm doing.

How do you avoid spiritual disciplines from turning into legalism?

I don't think there's anything wrong with establishing a discipline and committing to it. If someone wants to tar my disciplines as legalism, then I just disagree with them.

Sure, but legalism is a problem for some people. How can we guard against it—and make room for grace?

The problem comes when there is no flexibility. Going back to the corporate worship, sometimes I need to be flexible enough to know that something else has come up that is more important. For me, my besetting sin of workaholism is not going to lead me to be inflexible. Instead, I may use legalism as an excuse to be a workaholic.

I have workaholism and sloth in tandem. They are not contradictory! I'm very undisciplined in my work habits. When you have the marriage of sloth and work—it results in me very rarely having a rhythm in my life where I'm relaxing. I'm either slothfully avoiding work—or I'm frantically trying to get the work done. And slothful avoidance isn't really relaxing.

Can you take the Sabbath into your work at all?

If you mean, "Can you work seven days a week and pretend to take a Sabbath?" No. People have all sorts of creative ways of adapting the Sabbath. And some of them can work. But if we're not careful, pretty soon we get away from the idea of the Sabbath completely.

I've heard people say I practice an hour of Sabbath every other day. But that's not Sabbath. You can't practice Sabbath in an hour. And the very mindset that causes you to want to do that is opposed to the mindset of what the Sabbath is about.

Let's define our cultural problem. We emphasize productivity and profit. So telling people to be integrating and thinking about work all the time sounds like all we are here to do is work. It's pretty clear from Genesis and Exodus 31 that we're not supposed to think about work all the time.

What is the relationship between work and rest?

God rests, and God—through commanding the Sabbath—invites us into his rest. It's not more sophisticated than that. Part of what we are created to do is rest with God. That's the difference between Sabbath and a bubble bath. Are we just resting? Or are we resting with God. The Sabbath is not principally about me getting relaxed.

Getting relaxed is good. You might get relaxed on the Sabbath, but that's not the point of it.

You wrote a book called Real Sex. What advice do you have for Christians facing sexual temptation in the workplace?

In certain Christian circles—sexual temptation often gets used as an excuse not to have meaningful professional relationships with the opposite sex. If the men won't have lunch with women, that promotes an old boy's network that is really bad for women in the workplace.

Interesting answer. Not at all what I was expecting. That doesn't mean we should be blasé or ignorant about sexual temptation. We need to be very careful. But we shouldn't use sexual temptation as an excuse to be sexist. When you became a Christian, you said you had to relearn how to understand your work. Where are you in that process?

I'm sure that will be a life-long relearning. For me, the problem is figuring out what it means to live with the notion that if we labor, we labor in vain. My work can very easily become a source of real pride for me. And also it can foster real illusions of self-sufficiency.

Because the work I do is "religious," I can say I'm pouring myself out for the sake of the gospel. When In fact, I'm pouring myself out to make myself feel good, or puff myself up in my head, or keep myself busy and distracted.

My work can still have fruit—because God is bigger than my motives. But in terms of my spiritual life, my work is something that Satan—whatever we mean by that—can grab onto and twist.

What are some ways our view of work can get twisted?

My problems with work are not most people's problems. I have work that I really like, and I have work that pays me a living wage. And I'm grateful for that.

Pastors who are happy in their work have very little understanding that a lot of people in the pews have to get up on Monday and go to a job they'd really prefer not to go to.

People who love their work should be on their knees in thanks. We cannot take that for granted. To those whom much has been given, much is demanded.

Reading the Bible with Workplace Eyes - An Interview with Will Messenger

Paul Seebeck — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Will Messenger is an Episcopal Priest in Boston with an MBA in marketing from Harvard Business School, D.Min. from Gordon-Conwell Seminary, and M.Div. from Boston University School of Theology. He is the former Director of the Mockler Center for Business and Ethics at Gordon-Conwell and is now the interim writing director for the Theology of Work Project. After speaking at Laity Lodge last year, Will sat down with us to talk more about what the Bible says about the meaning and value of work, whether you're in sales, financial analysis, energy, or medical diagnostics.

Why is the institution of the church seemingly unable to address questions of meaning that people have in the daily activity of their work?

It's not a simple answer because there are multiple causes or roots of the situation we're in. One is the tradition. The Christian church inherited this idea, primarily from the Greek world, that economic matters, work, things like that are inferior to intellectual or spiritual matters. It's kind of ingrained in our caricatures of religious life. If you say the word "heaven" to people in the church, what image comes to mind? As a pastor (Messenger was ordained in 1998), I can tell you many think of people in white robes playing harps on clouds. Yet there's absolutely nobody in a white robe playing a harp on a cloud in the Bible!

There are some churches, pastors, theologians, working Christians, and church-related organizations that are addressing the workplace. But the church needs to do more—in particular in understanding theology of work. Most people, if they don't already enjoy their work, have a hidden hope that they would. Often church leaders don't know enough about what people do for a living. You have to know the details of someone's work if you want to help them make a difference in their work. The church is getting good at saying my work matters to God, but now what? How can the church guide me in doing my work well?

What more would you like the church to say?

I'd like my church to help me with the daily situations I face in my work. For instance, when I was at IBM, about mid-way through my time there, we were under increasing competition in the '80s. Someone remembered that IBM's main strength was its highly trained, highly professional sales force. So, we began to position ourselves with customers not as salespeople, but as consultants. Well, a consultant is under the obligation to propose the best solution they can come up with, regardless of whose hardware it is. Does this mean when we go consult with our clients, we're supposed to propose no IBM hardware or software unless we think it would be more effective. The answer of course was NO. Our job was to sell IBM. So, I said, "Okay ,that means we're not consultants, we're salesmen, we're good salesmen, we're professional salesmen, but we're not consultants." I wanted my church to help me think through this and decide what I should do about this. Was my thinking correct? Should I openly oppose IBM's new policy? Should I quietly do what I thought was right with my own customers? I felt the Christian faith had something to say about this, about truth and integrity. We weren't trying to lie to our customers, but I wanted help from the church to figure out the difference between making a good point and kind of spinning unrealistically.

You're basically trying to help others with what you wish would have been somehow provided for you.

That's exactly right. It's what I began to try to do as a pastor and teacher.

I want to hear about that. Did you preach on some of these questions that you have?

All the time, not specifically about IBM, but about how following Jesus could make a difference in daily life, including specific workplace situations. Pastors basically preach to themselves. You take a question you're interested in, and you try to find the answer. If it's something you aren't even interested in, how will your congregation be interested in it? I came to embrace the idea that if preachers do this well, others can benefit from it also. I feel the same way about theology at work.

What did you learn as a pastor serving a church, trying to integrate all of these questions and experiences you brought from the workplace?

It was a lot harder than I expected. I spent my first three years as an assistant pastor at an Episcopal Church in suburban Boston. Just recently, I finished four years as a church planter and founder of Charles River Church in Boston that really intended its prime mission to be equipping people for daily life at work. In both cases, it was difficult. It's not hard to preach a sermon where you bring genuine questions of daily life and work to the text, to try and find answers. But because people in the congregation work in so many places that are so different from each other, there's only so deep you can go.

For example, in my mind, truth and deception in the workplace is becoming a crucial topic. Yet in terms of giving out specific applications, it really depends on a person's workplace. I can tell you that it's never right to put out false or deliberately misleading financial statements. But think of a more typical situation: you're competing long-term with someone else for a promotion, and you know they're making a proposal today that isn't very good. How much should you correct them? Hopefully, you want to do what's best for the company. Hopefully, you don't want to compete with the person in an unjust or unloving way. Anything you say is probably suspect anyway, because you're competing with them down the road. How should you handle the situation? Ethics aren't relative, but the specific context changes. If you're a manager, and you know there's going to be a layoff and someone asks if his/her job is safe (because they want to buy a house), what are you supposed to say? Diverse workplaces work out these ethical principles in a variety of ways. I believe all of them need to apply the Christian faith to finding these answers in their own context.

You're an adjunct professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and the leader of the Workplace, Leadership and Business Ethics program. Have you given up on the church as the central place of equipping laity for their daily work?

As an ordained pastor, I love the church. I haven't given up, but I am frustrated with church culture and what I see and experience in most church organizations. In general, church has not connected with people in terms of their work or in most aspects of daily life, with maybe the exception being family. Robert Wuthnow, the Princeton sociologist, calls this the greatest act of self-marginalization the church has ever engaged in. I don't want to say, "Fine, forget the church, we're going to find alternative delivery mechanisms, channels, organizations to deliver our message." I don't just blame this on pastors or lay people. I've been in both of those roles. I know how hard it is. We really need a fundamental change in how churches view their mission. Equipping people for the workplace should be one aspect of that, but it's not the only aspect. Churches have gotten so adapted to just doing what they do, that for the most part, they have lost a sense of what the world needs. I don't have the answer, but I feel like if I get 20 to 25 years in this field, I'll be able to help find the way forward.

Isn't this what you're trying to do as the Research/Writing Director of the Theology of Work Project—trying to create structure that integrates some of these theological workplace questions that you have?

One thing I'm very excited about is we are creating a worldwide high quality community of discourse. We want to engage workplace theologians from around the globe, make use of the best existing publications, test our conclusions with workplace Christians, so that things we develop aren't idiosyncratic, not just my best guess, or your best guess. So we're going to read the whole Bible with workplace eyes by pairing biblical scholars with workplace Christians from around the world. We hope to produce something like a biblical commentary, if that is the right word, a biblical guide so to speak on work. Scripture has profound workplace implications. When Jesus said, "let your yes be yes and your no be no," my guess is he meant that to apply at work also.

We began by polling about 150 highly influential people in our field, (Howard Butt, Jr., David Rogers, Dwight Lacy, and David Williamson of Laity Lodge being among them) and asked, "What are the top ten workplace questions you wish you had some guidance with?" We received more than 600 specific questions that I boiled down to 20 key topics. One of them is on work and rest. Another one is on calling. Yet another is on ethics, very distinctly on Christian business ethics. And so on. We plan to publish our research on these 20 topics online, so that we can invite others to contribute ideas, articles, stories, and feedback, sort of like a wiki. We think these 20 topics are broad enough to be widely applicable, but specific enough to not just be platitudes.

We are also trying to develop a process that people in the workplace can use to discover biblical, theological help for them. Ultimately the work of developing processes by which people can do theology for themselves is most important to me, because of all the questions I've had in the variety of workplaces I've been in.

Part 1 of an Interview with Will Messenger

Paul Seebeck — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Will Messenger is an Episcopal Priest in Boston with an MBA in marketing from Harvard Business School, D.Min. from Gordon-Conwell Seminary, and M.Div. from Boston University School of Theology. He is the former Director of the Mockler Center for Business and Ethics at Gordon-Conwell and is now the interim writing director for the Theology of Work Project. After speaking at Laity Lodge last year, Will sat down with us to talk more about what the Bible says about the meaning and value of work, whether you're in sales, financial analysis, energy, or medical diagnostics.

Will, it's great to visit with you to talk about what we are both very passionate about—helping people follow Jesus in their daily life and work.

Laity Lodge is an organization I trust and respect. I taught at the Lodge earlier this year about following Jesus in your job description. Now I'm eager to share some of what I've learned in my journey and desire to follow Christ in the nonchurch workplace with a wider audience. TheHighCalling.org is well used by people throughout the Christian world. I hope this interview can be helpful in extending their mission beyond the folks that walk into an event at the Lodge.

You obviously have a heart for this vision that God is present in the activities of our daily work. How did this become your sense of call and purpose?

For most of my adult life, I've been interested in this question of how to follow Christ in my work when that work is not at church or in a church-led workplace. I'm specifically interested in how to be a servant of Christ through the activities of my job description. How does one follow Christ as a financial analyst? As a bus driver or whatever it is that you do? For years, I was interested in this solely for my own sake, not because I wanted to get a job teaching it. I'd planned to be in the world of science. My undergraduate degree was in Physics (Messenger graduated with highest honors from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland in 1982). I had to get a job to make some money while I tried to figure out what I was going to do with my degree. I got hired as a salesman for IBM. To my great surprise I loved it! It wasn't so much about how I could sell hardware, but how I could help people solve business problems by using information technology. It was almost like I was a solutions engineer helping them creatively solve some of their toughest issues. I enjoyed serving the customers.

You asked, “How do you follow Christ as a financial analyst?” Do you have a working answer for yourself?

I worked one summer as a financial analyst in an investment bank. I got assigned to work on a project to see whether we could get private equity investors to buy power plants from electric utilities. If so, we could earn a big fee on every transaction. The way we approached it was this: I would build a financial model for each power plant to show how many megawatt hours it could generate, the price it could sell each megawatt hour for, the cost of coal, wages for employees, etc. Then I would crunch the numbers asking the maximum interest it could afford to pay on junk bonds that private equity investors would issue in order to raise cash to buy the power plant.

Then we could see whether we could find investors who would be willing to buy bonds, even though the interest rate would be too low to really compensate them for the high risk that the power plant could go bankrupt if coal prices rose, or electricity demand fell. I was at the bottom of the totem pole. The person who came up with this project was fairly inexperienced as well, trying to generate fees by proposing a few deals. To me that wasn't a particularly redemptive way to go about it. It wasn't about how to finance the power-generating needs of the utilities. It wasn't about creating a sustainable financial structure to help a company endure the ups and downs of the energy markets. It was just about seeing whether we could get a bunch of deals done and earn big fees.

Unlike at IBM, I couldn't see what business problem it was going to solve. I believe that in all things Christ is working for the redemption of our world that is busted in all kinds of ways—not just in our worshiping the wrong things and running after false gods in a very literal way, but in economic things and in organization things that are wrong in our world. I think God is interested in power generation. I knew that the power generation industry was hampered with all kinds of problems at the time. But I didn't see how our exercise was addressing the real issue of the actual job of power generation.

So was there anything you did as an investment banker that you thought was redemptive—or meaningful from God's perspective?

Oh, yes! I helped another company recapitalize itself by issuing convertible preferred stock and using the proceeds to pay off debt. It gave them a more secure financial base, so they could focus on the growth of the business. Plus it made sense for investors. I don't want to overstate how redemptive a good financial transaction is. There's a clear distinction between someone's soul and financial structure in an organization, but I don't think God doesn't care about finance either.  Financial structure makes it possible to research and produce useful goods and services, to employ people, and to provide investment income for retirees, college endowments, and the like. The picture of the final Kingdom, eternity if you will, is not one of us becoming disembodied spirits flitting off somewhere where there isn't anything. Instead we see a new heaven and a new earth, and the kingdoms of the world bring their treasure to the New Jerusalem. So we continue to have the spheres of life fully embodied—the stuff of creation is transformed, but not eliminated.

How delighted are you by the freedom of this idea that God is in the midst of and redeeming all?

It took me a long time to think of that as a freedom. There was some unmeaningful stuff about the work I did. Even at IBM, I began to ask whether my long-term goal in life was really to generate return on investment for their stockholders. In the 1980s, IBM lost its focus on customer needs, and lost a lot of business as a result. I left before the company had its first-ever layoffs.

I was successful at IBM, but I actually was more fulfilled at a company that failed, called Advanced Metabolic Systems. We were developing a new treatment for diabetes. If it had worked, it could have revolutionized treatment for a serious disease. It turned out our treatment wasn't as effective as we hoped, but the idea was promising enough that it was worth investing in. The incomparable contribution that I believe business can make towards healing still energizes me.

I wish my church would have helped me think this through. That's where I wanted to go with the questions of meaning and purpose that were creeping into my daily existence and work. I had a secret desire the Christian faith would help, even though I didn't expect much from my church. I went to business school (Messenger received his MBA with high distinction as the top graduate in marketing from Harvard in 1988) then went to work for McKinsey, the management-consulting firm. Ultimately I got bit by the entrepreneurial bug and joined the startup diabetes company I just mentioned. When that failed, I began to think about what I wanted to do next. I realized the thing I was most excited about day to day at that point was my church. So I decided to become a pastor.

You were in your mid-thirties and working on your M.Div.V at Boston University School of Theology (Messenger graduated summa cum laude in 1997). What was your seminary experience like?

God must have had a good laugh with me, because I was in seminary thinking, I'm leaving the business world to become a pastor. But God wasn't planning on removing me from the business world! In seminary I continued to work as a consultant to pay the bills. I was doing an assignment with a cancer diagnostics company. It had been successful by creating innovative blood tests. But when they asked me to help them, blood testing was becoming a low-margin, commodity business. They were asking the question, “Should we become a low-cost producer, so we can compete with these giant diagnostic companies, or should we find some other area of cancer diagnostics where we can still be an innovator of better products for the market?”

I realized the main questions were profoundly theological at their core—“What's our purpose? What's really worth doing in the world? Why do we even have a company here?” Some managers wanted a new line of business that would continue to allow the company to be innovative. Others thought that was foolish, “We're a cancer blood test company—we can't give up the whole company to suddenly be in some other line of business.” There was a hardening of positions; good people were leaving. I'd say, “Your side hasn't lost yet, why don't you stick around?” They would say, “It's just not the same company.”

This convinced me that there is a need for theological debate in the workplace. Not at the expense of, but in addition to, an economic debate. It would help us integrate the two questions both sides were asking, “How can we make the most money? What do we think we can do that's meaningful enough to even think we can make money?” What if we asked instead, “What's our company about? What are our strengths, our weaknesses? What can we do that will benefit and bring meaning to our customers, our shareholders, and ourselves?” Even if someone doesn't believe in, or refer to God, there's a hunger to ask theological questions.

Video Interview with Eugene Peterson

Steven Purcell — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 06:00:00 GMT

The musical group U2's Bono quotes Eugene Peterson from the stage. Readers of the best-selling Bible, The Message, find themselves holding onto lines from his fog-slicing Bible paraphrase and many other works.

For several years, TheHighCalling.org provided a daily prayer and reflection by Eugene Peterson. He has spoken with us before and written some articles for us, and he is a regular speaker at Laity Lodge, one of our partner ministries in the Laity Renewal Foundation.

During a summer retreat at Laity Lodge in 2008, Eugene Peterson sat down with one of our directors, Steven Purcell, for a conversation about faith, work, and art. After you view the video interview (about 17 minutes) or read the edited transcript below, we invite you to visit Laity Lodge's YouTube channel where you'll find other interviews with leading Christian thinkers.

Give us your thoughts about the sacred-secular divide.

It’s a false distinction. There is no secular-sacred divide. And, there wasn’t until the 18th century. It’s an enlightenment thing. Martin Buber was a great Jewish writer, philosopher, theologian, and translator, and he spent much of his life fighting this distinction, trying to show the world how this was a false distinction.

It destroys people on both sides.

“Secular” people think they don’t have anything to do with God. “Sacred” people don’t think they have to deal with the world or anything that’s not God visibly. So it distorts from both sides. But we can recover. In fact, this is what the Christian faith, basically, is trying to do—recover the interpenetration of God into the way we live our lives.

So the division between laity and clergy is a myth too?

This is something that Laity Lodge is particularly concerned with—the division between laity and clergy. I went through a list of people the other day of who have influenced me the most. In England it was Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, and Baron von Hugel. All of them were lay people, not a single clergyman or priest in them. In America, Wendell Berry, Wallace Stegner, Bill McKibben, William Stringfellow, all laymen. Stanley Hauerwas, one of our best theologians, was a layman. Kathleen Norris, Marilynne Robinson, both lay people. I think we cannot just lay down and accept that distinction between laity and clergy. Or let people make that distinction. We can’t try to deal with it by saying, “We’ve got to bridge this gap between laity and clergy.” There is no gap. It’s just a perception gap. Our witness and the way we live can take care of that or do something about it.

Why is it difficult for us to see our daily work as holy or sacred?

The glib answer is that it’s the devil’s work to make us think that way. There is no place in our history, in our tradition, in Scripture that makes that kind of division. Most Christians do their best work in the marketplace, in the home, in the street, doing business, buying cars, selling cars.

One of the really famous best sellers among Christians is Brother Lawrence’s Practicing the Presence of God. Brother Lawrence was a lay brother. He was not clergy. He wrote these letters and meditations in which he talked about flipping pancakes to the glory of God, picking up straw off the floor to the glory of God.

Just a few years ago, Kathleen Norris wrote a book called The Quotidian Mysteries. She’s a poet, and her book is Brother Lawrence for Americans in the 21st century. Quotidian means “daily.” What you do daily. And she goes through all these daily things and shows the sacredness. This is the place and time when we live to the glory of God.

I say it’s the devil’s work because there’s nothing inherently un-Christian or unspiritual or unsacred about any of those daily activities. But if you have somebody whispering in your ear, “This is not Christian work. You’re not praying. You’re not doing good.” That just distorts you.

What does faith look like outside the church?

The whole task of the Christian witness is to do what Jesus did. We incarnate the presence of God, the action of God, the words of God, where we are. One of the remarkable things about Jesus’ life is he was comfortable in the temple, comfortable in the synagogues, but he didn’t spend most of his time there. Most of his time was in the marketplace, fields, around people’s tables, on the streets. And he wasn’t less sacred when he was having dinner with the Pharisees or with the prostitutes or the tax collectors than when he was in the temple and in the synagogue.

How do artists help us see God around us?

I used to drive up every week into Pennsylvania—we lived in Maryland—to visit a woman in a nursing home. In the winter time, especially, there was just grey, grey, a lot of farm land, nothing going on. One time, we both stopped in this museum and looked at this painting by Andrew Wyeth. There was a girl, Christina, sitting on a hillside and that’s it. It’s not a romantic picture, but suddenly, I was never bored again when I would make that drive to Pennsylvania. Every time I looked out on those hills then, I just saw Christina every place. This is the environment where beauty takes place, and courage. But, artists did that for me. Musicians do it. Of course, storytellers do.

If we let other people select what we are doing, like if television is your way to get out of yourself or escape the ordinary, that doesn’t help. Because you’re letting somebody else introduce the world into you. An artist doesn’t do that. You’ve got to find them usually. You can buy pictures, you can go to a studio, you can go to museums. Or, you can do it yourself. You can do your own painting; you can do your own photography. Make up you own songs. Like Matthew did this morning at Laity Lodge, he made up his own song, and it was quite lovely. It was him. And nobody thought, “What’s he doing that for? He can buy a CD and get something better than that.”

What motivated you to write The Message?

The quick answer is I was asked to do it. It was an assignment, but once I started doing it, I realized I’d been doing this all my life. I had a congregation of people who didn’t know the Bible. I mean I’m overexaggerating. Some did, but there were a lot of new Christians. There were a lot of tired old Christians who had quit reading the Bible years ago. So I wanted to recover the story of the Scriptures. I wanted to recover the narrative tenor of the Bible. The first editions of The Message didn’t have any verse numbers. That was deliberate, and I gave that up reluctantly, tried to keep them as hidden as possible. But I wanted to recover the fact that this is not a book of moral things, moral axioms, or dogmatic propositions or ideas about how to live your life. This is a story that you live into.

Tell us about the difference between "studying" the Bible and "reading" the Bible.

It distressed me for years as a pastor that people often studied the Bible, but they never read it. They tried to find stuff in it to use. They didn’t enter it and let the story live through them. I think you can be self-conscious about reading the Bible; it becomes a religious act. It’s not a religious act; it’s a human act. I mean these are all real people who did the same stuff we did: Abraham doubted, David murdered and committed adultery, and Job doubted and cursed God or came close to it. These are all people very much like us in a different culture, but still the same components, and this is their story. This is how God met them and how they sometimes had no idea he was meeting them for years. They would be surprised by what happened. That’s what motivated me. It motivated me before I knew it was motivating me. I was doing this long before I knew what I was doing.

Do we really need disciplines to follow rigidly?

Rather than programmed disciplines, I think we know we need silence. We need solitude. We need space. We need negative space. Look for ways to do that, because everybody’s life is a little bit different. I guess I hate the imposition of disciplines on people. They kind of become corsets. I think of them as corsets, but nobody wears corsets anymore. My mother, every Sunday after church, the first thing she did when she would get into the house is say, “Oh, I’ve got to get this corset off.” She’d go into the bedroom and remove her corset and say, “Oh, I feel so much better.” Well, for a lot of people, spirituality is a corset. They don’t put it on all the time, but every once in a while they do. And they can’t breathe.

When you experience silence, when you keep a Sabbath, you deliberately interfere with how the world expects you to do things. Without even trying, you have more solitude, more silence, more space. You can look around, and you can listen. Breaking through the noise, the demands of the culture, of the household, and your workplace, that all requires some intervention. Without some intentionality, you just get filled up with everybody else’s agenda. So anything you can do to break that—keeping a Sabbath is the obvious way to do it. But just keeping the Sabbath doesn’t do it unless you keep the Sabbath as a Sabbath. It isn’t just a day off. Think of practices like photography, painting, water color, bird watching, all these activities slow you down and make you pay attention. This is why artists are so important to us, because artists don’t paint anything that you don’t see everyday. They just help you see something that has been there all along.

Talking with Ravi Zacharias: Part 2 of 2

Marcus Goodyear — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Dr. Ravi Zacharias is the founder and president of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, an organization that exists “to reach and challenge those who shape the ideas of a culture with the credibility and the beauty of the gospel of Jesus Christ.” He makes it his goal to reach people where they are—“in the university, the arts, politics, business, and the church.”
We’ve long admired Ravi Zacharias and his audio show “Let My People Think,” but recently he got our attention again with his books The Grand Weaver and The End of Reason. We were excited when he agreed to talk with TheHighCalling.org about his views on leadership, mission, pleasure, spirituality, worship, and work.

Help me understand your view on pleasure. In your book The Grand Weaver, you said, “Anything that refreshes you without distracting from or diminishing or destroying your final goal, is a legitimate pleasure.” So what is an example of legitimate pleasure in work?

If my wife were here listening to this, she would start chuckling. In my memoirs book Walking from East to West, she said, “Ravi, every third page has an illustration of food in it. One of the things I’ve enjoyed doing during these 30 years of travel, Marcus, is having a lovely meal with people in their home or somewhere else. I also love the pleasure of long walks in the early morning and later in the evening. It’s relaxing. It’s refreshing for the body and the soul. Lewis talks about this in Screwtape Letters in a marvelous way. The pleasure of good music, good entertainment, an exciting sports game—our bodies are meant to be exercised and to be exhilarated in legitimate ways. I think pleasure comes in many different ways. Unfortunately in our world, pleasure has become synonymous with heathenism, and that is destructive. That’s not what I’m talking about.

But do you take pleasure in your work itself?

I have to be honest, like many other good things, the pleasure comes after the fact, not before. You work hard, you prepare hard, you sense the anointing, you see the response, and then you’re delighted.

You have said that one cannot mix the profane with the sacred. Often the choices we face in the workplace are not clearly profane or clearly sacred, so how do we learn the wisdom to distinguish?

It’s a very, very good question. I really think God gives us some elbowroom; otherwise you would end up being judgmental and legalistic. Anything in my experience that brings in profanity or vulgarity or appeals to the sensual in me makes me feel very uncomfortable. There are people I know who watch a movie that might have language or something sensual that I would feel terribly uncomfortable with, but they are okay. I like to leave that between them and God. They have to know for sure in their hearts that this is not compromising of their conviction and their sacred walk with God.

There is no way that I can watch something debased and sensual in a scene without it scarring my memory and probably provoking the wrong kind of response. I think in the end it injures my whole imagination, but if somebody thinks they can handle that and deal with that, in a small degree, without injuring their soul, it’s something they're accountable to God for. For me, no. I can’t handle that and don’t want to, don’t wish to. Everybody has to draw the boundary lines somewhere, and I tell young men and women why I draw it where I do. For me to then cross those boundaries . . . Like Paul, I would say, “Whatsoever is not of faith is sin.” If it’s contrary to your conviction, you would be sinning against God.

When Michelangelo was starting to paint unclad people, his teacher said to him, “Why are you doing this?” He said, “I want to see man as God sees man,” and the teacher said to him, “But you’re not God.” I think that’s a very strong junction to remind us that the eye gate and the ear gate ultimately affect the imagination.

So, would you say that faith in the workplace is primarily an issue of ethics and morality around these kinds of choices?

I think ethics and morality are a symptom of it. The true matter is one of spirituality. I think there are things that injure the spirit and things that build up the spirit. That’s why I don’t think one chooses between the secular and the sacred. One chooses between the sacred and the profane. If a man is an engineer building bridges, he’s as much involved in the sacred calling as I am in building a bridge to the person’s mind for the Gospel’s sake. The engineer who lives for Christ is as much salt and light where he or she is, therefore I think the calling cannot be profane. The workplace, ethics, and morality play a vital role, but as I say in the book, The Grand Weaver, immorality matters only because it is symptomatic of one’s spiritual relationship with God.

In The Grand Weaver, you mention three perversions of spirituality or false truths: the traditionalism, the legalism, and the superstition. Do you see those trickling into the workplace as well?

Yes, but I think I’d like to add another one—antinomianism. Some churches seem to think there is no law that you abide by; you do whatever you want to do. Traditionalism I think came and went, although in some aspects of Christendom it is very much there. Legalism is very present. The church is meant to be a place where people who are lost come and find the healing Balm of Gilead.

When Christians who struggle with legalism go into the workplace, how do you think that affects their work?

It’s tough. If they are putting their own behavior into certain parameters, that’s one thing. But if they have some kind of a pseudo pride and a superiority, they just make others feel inferior because “I do not do those things, I do not go to these places, I do not use such language.” Basically, rather than presenting the attractiveness of Christ, they’re presenting a negative picture of what it means to walk joyfully with the Lord. So legalism, both in the church and in the workplace, tends to be the sideshow of a very conceited soul.

That’s a good phrase. Peter talked about everybody being a kingdom of priests, that is one of my favorite parts of the Bible. Do you think the church has lost sight of this?

Martin Luther did not to come to abolish the priesthood; he came to grow up the laity. I think we have lost sight of that in terms of our intercessory and our representative role. We are part of the body of Christ, we bear one another’s burdens, and we have direct access to the person of Christ in our priesthood. Yet it is the priests who despised God’s name by bringing the lame, the blind, and the sick in Malachi. I think sometimes we give what is left over in ourselves, or we fail to play our role in the community. For example, the father of a home should really be playing a priestly role on behalf of his family, on behalf of his children. That is a very important responsibility given to him. It’s interesting how quickly women Bible study groups pick this up. They bear each other’s burdens and pray for their friends. Men sometimes miss out on that privilege of bearing one another’s burdens and so fulfilling the law of Christ. It’s a very important role that the church has missed out on, intercessory prayer and representational prayer.

I also wonder about worship. Can work be worship?

Worship is coextensive with life. It is an aspect of worship. The person who works diligently is reflecting the value of an offering to God. Before I preach any sermon, I first make an offering to God before I present it to the people. I think we must always do this whatever we do. Whether I’m cleaning a house or building a house or maintaining a house, if a person looked at my work, they should see it as an expression of my reverence for God.

This is why we work. When the devil offered Jesus all the kingdoms of this world, he said, “I’ll give you all this if you’ll bow down and worship me.” Jesus said, “No, you shall worship the Lord your God alone and him only shall you serve.” It is that rare combination of two words, “proskeneo and letrea.” Proskeneo means the reverence; letrea means service. By people’s response to The Grand Weaver, I’ve recognized that one really has to meet people where they are . . . in reverence and in service.

And where are people today in regards to reverence and service?

They want to know how these threads—mission, pleasure, spirituality, work, worship, all the things we’ve been talking about—how do they converge in daily life?

Talking with Ravi Zacharias: Part 1 of 2

Marcus Goodyear — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Dr. Ravi Zacharias is the founder and president of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, an organization that exists “to reach and challenge those who shape the ideas of a culture with the credibility and the beauty of the gospel of Jesus Christ.” He makes it his goal to reach people where they are—“in the university, the arts, politics, business, and the church.”
We’ve long admired Ravi Zacharias and his audio show “Let My People Think” but recently he got our attention again with his books The Grand Weaver and The End of Reason. We were excited when he agreed to talk with TheHighCalling.org about his views on leadership, mission, pleasure, spirituality, worship, and work.

What have you learned about leadership from the team of people you work with at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries?

I was very naïve about this, but people need good, strong leadership. Its value is underestimated. I foolishly assumed everybody is a self-starter. I tried to give everybody the vision that I wanted them to run with, and then expected the organization to run well. Years later, I realized how critical leadership is and how seriously I should’ve taken it. One makes mistakes, blunders along, and then thinks the work was just totally unnecessary.

Was there a particular moment when you realized how difficult it was and how much people needed leadership?

The first time something happens you say, “Oh well, it was probably the individual’s responsibility or they made the mistake or whatever.” If it happens the second time or third time, you say to yourself, “No, it’s not them. It’s the leader.” The leader has to lead well and lead properly, and you know, those skills are not readily visible in many. I’d be the first person to admit that I wish I were a better leader than I have turned out to be. My calling is that of a preacher and teacher and an apologist. To lead an organization—sometimes that has felt like a secondary calling for me.

How have you measured success in your leadership?

I look at it in two ways. Today, I am more equipped and better able to meet the needs of my calling as a speaker and as a writer, the calling that I sense deeply in my heart, for which God had wired me and positioned me. I would measure that in terms of both my inner peace—my closeness with the Lord—and in the response we get from audiences all over the world.

The second way I measure success is by asking, “Have I built an organization that has fulfilled its optimum potential?” I would say I sense a fair degree of contentment with where I am personally, but I would also say we could have done a much better job.

I have to admit I was a little afraid of this interview, because I’m kind of overwhelmed with what you’ve done. So to hear you say that “it is not all you had hoped it would be” is startling to me.

It’s a very candid thing, Marcus. I wished I had done a better job of leading this organization. I just think we could have done a much, much better job had the right person been at the helm of leading this organization. I have been constantly committed to a vision, a burden, a passion, a need, and a calling. I have given my best to it, and I have no regrets, but in terms of the cohesiveness and the measured impact and growth of it, I wish I had to do this all over again. I would have made many, many different turns along the way.

This is where Billy Graham excelled. People have not realized what an incredible leader he was. We think of him as a speaker and preacher, who had this huge audience globally. But he had an an eye for the right kind of person to lead various aspects of his ministry, from George Wilson to Cliff Barrow to Sterling Houston, and then you know like Bev Shea and the musicians. I wonder why his teams stayed together so long. I think it’s two-fold. Number one, it was a culture much more given to loyalty and commitment in that generation. But number two, I think his incredible eye and insight into the right kind of person was key to his leadership.

You have talked about writing mission statements for your business and your life and marriage. What are some of the practical steps people should take if they want to write that kind of mission statement?

When you write a mission statement for your life, you have something to measure it by. It is critical that individuals have converging missions for their lives. Imagine, for example, a meeting is called by the CEO and they’re sitting around and the whole discussion is on the software and the breakdown of this or that. As they are about to end the meeting, one of the men around the table says, “But what about the shirts.” And the CEO says, “What do you mean ‘what about the shirts’?” The man replies, “Isn’t that what this company is about, the manufacturing of shirts?” The whole discussion has been sidetracked around other issues, but the main reason for their existence was never discussed. If you have diverging lines of mission, a person may have a complete personal ambition in something to excel and be the best speaker he wants to be. But that person has to know how to work with a team or you are basically preparing somebody else to launch his or her own calling in ministry. If you’re called to launch other people into ministry, okay. But if not, then that person wouldn’t be a good team player. The most difficult aspect I’ve found in building this organization is building a team.

What have you learned in this struggle about building a good team?

First and most important characteristic in every team member is humility. Unfortunately, we are all victim to the same thing. Speakers and those who are in the public eye often fall prey to big egos. As C. S. Lewis said, “It all boils down not to what they are saying, but the way they are saying it.” This is a very critical thing that happens. If I had to do it all over again, I would start looking slower in building a team, and I would do it with a person whose first characteristic to me was that of humility.

Before we ever sit down to write mission statements, how do we discern the specifics of our mission?

First, establish what your personal walk with Christ is going to be; then it should blend with the calling to which God has called you. Your calling is basically God’s claim upon your life. In the book, The Grand Weaver, I basically said “God shapes your burdens and beckons you to your service to Him in the place and pursuit of His choosing.” Then you establish a mission statement on how you’re going to do this.

My calling was to be a proclaimer and to speak and to teach others to go and do the same. So, I’m a proclaimer and persuader on the one hand, but I also prepare other young men and women on how to do that persuading and proclaiming. I have to balance it all. Sometimes I would rather just go and speak and proclaim, but I have to take away from that in order to go and teach, disciple, and mentor. One of my main responsibilities now is the mentoring of younger apologists.

An Interview with the President of Disney Parks: Al Weiss

Marcus Goodyear — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Al Weiss’ official title is president of worldwide operations for Walt Disney Parks and Resorts. According to Disney public relations, “He is responsible for operations at the company’s theme parks and resorts spanning three continents and including the Walt Disney World Resort, Disneyland Resort, Hong Kong Disneyland and Disneyland Resort Paris. He also oversees Disney Cruise Line and Disney Vacation Club.”

And Al is a Christian. He is active in his church, First Baptist Church of Kissimmee, and he serves as Chairman of the Board for Vision360, a national church-planting organization. Recently, Al Weiss spoke with TheHighCalling.org about his work, his faith, his family, and his priorities as a leader in all of those places.

What’s the best leadership lesson that you’ve learned from your time at Disney?

In an organization as large as Disney, no one individual could possibly know what’s going on in all places. So I have to hire a great team that has all kinds of skills and expertise and then rely on them to perform their functions. My goal is to make sure I hire great people who have leadership skills, because some of the people who report directly to me have 60 thousand people working for them. Then I figure out ways to serve them so they can be successful.

What’s the best leadership lesson you’ve learned from Vision360?

Vision360 is an organization that was started about three years ago to target the need for more churches in the greater Orlando (Disney World) area. But we quickly sensed God wanted us to expand this model for church planting around the U.S. Now our focus is not on one geographic location, like a Disney park, but on the globe. So we are looking for people who have a global heart and mindset to reach across the world through church planting. To me the lesson is the same: you’ve got to have key leadership in place that can relate to and motivate people and set the right tone and environment for success.

So you’re President of Worldwide Operations for Disney Parks, which is a huge organization, and CEO of Vision360, which is growing. How do you keep your perspective, find balance in all of this?

I keep my priorities in place. My relationship with the Lord is first; my family is next; ministry and career are behind that. I make decisions that ensure I have success in all these arenas. About five years ago, our very athletic daughter was in her first year in college. She was going to play fast-pitch softball and basketball—about 90 games a year. I’d made a commitment to be there for her. Then, I got offered a job in California. If I’d taken it, I would have missed the majority of her games. So I turned it down. In the next four years, we got to see her play in about 80 or 85 games a year. There are times you have to make decisions to reinforce the priorities in your life. If you do that consistently, you’ll have success in balancing those things that are important to you and keeping them in the proper perspective. I have one life to live, one calendar, and one set of priorities. I live my personal life and my business life by the same priorities. It makes everything easier for me because I’m living my life one way.

How open are you about your faith at Disney?

I don’t go out and talk to people about my faith on a regular basis. Many people know I’m involved in Vision360 and that I go to church on a regular basis. People know my parents were in ministry; my dad was a church planter when he grew up. We have many Bible Studies on our property; I’ve been asked to speak about my faith to those groups. In the corporate world, I think the most important thing is to do your job to the best of your abilities. At the end of the day, that’s what they appreciate and care about.

One of Disney’s philosophies is that everyone in the park is a cast member. What are the challenges in remembering the value that every employee brings?

Every time you’re in a big company with unions and negotiations, there are times where it can play out in the media in a negative way. For me, the key is to make sure we respect each person for what they do and we give them proper credit. After we’ve trained our employees and given them the tools they need, the most important thing we can do for our cast members is to make sure that if they choose to have a career, they can have a career with us. We ensure that this happens by promoting about 75 to 80% of our management needs from people right within our company. You’re also accountable to stockholders and board members.

How do you balance the needs of your stockholders with the needs of your guests or even the needs of your cast members?

If we’ve set the right tone and environment for our cast members, they are going to want to deliver great experiences to our guests. If we are delivering great experiences to our guests, they talk about us in a very positive way. They walk away having a great vacation experience, and they come back more often. I call that our “Circle of Life” where we’re satisfying all those constituencies, because we’re giving the cast a great experience, we’re giving the guests a great experience, and then you get a return on your investment to the shareholders.

Do the shareholders ever get impatient? I’m thinking back to something I read about what happened at the parks after 9/11.

I don’t think we have had many impatient stockholders after 9/11, because what we did was a pretty amazing yeoman’s feat. We had a pretty significant drop in business right after 9/11. We had a certain targeted cost reduction we needed to make to continue to achieve a certain level of profitability that would be received well by Wall Street and the shareholders. We decided that we were going to find that level of cost reduction without laying people off. That ended up being a pretty smart decision. You would have laid cast members off into a market where everybody was laying people off, and they wouldn’t have been able to find jobs so they would have gone on unemployment roles, and been a burden to the government. Just months after 9/11, our business started ramping back up. We very quickly moved up to good levels, and we would have hired most of those people back.

So, you’ve been with the company for many years, since 1972, right?

I’ve been there for 35 years! I started when I was seven [laughs]. No, I’d just graduated from high school, and my first job was to go into the Magic Kingdom and clear the cash registers back to zero. It was called a “z-run.” We would get a receipt from the cash register of the sales for the day and take them to cash control. They’d bring the money down in a locked bag with a receipt on the top saying how much money was in that bag. We'd match up those receipts, put them on a spreadsheet, put them in the vault, and then send them to the bank to get counted and deposited.

During those 35 years I’m sure the fantasy has broken down for you a couple of times.

There have been times where maybe I didn’t think I was promoted in the organization as quickly as I should have been, but I can honestly say that every single role that I’ve had, I’ve loved. I’m in my 22nd different job at Disney, and the first 22 years I had 20 different jobs, so I was moving to a new job just about every year. I never really got a chance to get bored. What I did was I really got immersed in those jobs; I tried to do the very best I could and let the results of what I did pay off.

Do you have a favorite memory from your time at Disney?

I go back all the way to my first job. I would go up on Main Street to clear those cash registers back to zero; the park would be empty of people, the lights would all still be on, and I’d walk into one of the most magical fantasy places in the whole world. It was so amazing to walk around the park at that time. For me, that was one of the coolest experiences that I’ll never forget in my life.

Do you have a favorite memory of your time with Vision360?

Just seeing God’s hand upon this ministry. I could talk about miracle after miracle that has happened as a result of just doing what God asked us to do. Through Vision360, God has put us together with amazing people from around the world, and with gifts of land. We’ve started planting churches in Orlando—we’ll have at least 15 in 2008. What we’re seeing in these churches is a very good family environment. There are many, many individuals who come and feel like they have a safe place to go, a place where they can be supported, they can be loved and cared for.

Interview with Parker Palmer, Part 2

Marcus Goodyear — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Ten years after its first release, Parker Palmer is republishing his book of encouragement for teachers called The Courage to Teach. The book helped countless teachers and other professionals to recover meaning in their work lives, in the midst of troubled, sometimes toxic systems. Recently, TheHighCalling.org spoke to Mr. Palmer about helping teachers and other professionals reconnect with their vocations and reclaim their passion for work.

The Center for Courage and Renewal builds "circles of trust." How do people create these circles in a workplace dominated by fear, jealously, and unhealthy competition?

This concept of a circle of trust is spelled out in detail in Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life. The purpose of each circle of trust is to make a safe space for the soul to speak. The kind of workplace you describe is the quintessential unsafe space. Many people in workplaces of that sort want to find their way toward identity and integrity, but they are surrounded by distrust, envy, power plays, and so forth. I think churches have a huge role to play in this. We just received a large grant from the Lily Endowment for a project at our Center that helps us teach pastors and lay leaders around the country how to build circles of trust. Virtually all of them are taking this back to their churches. So now we have doctors, lawyers, and teachers in the church sitting in safe places getting in touch with their deepest callings as Christians and human beings. The next step is for these people to gain a kind of strength and new capacity to take what they’ve learned in the safe places into a more challenging, even hostile environment.

Can you give us a concrete example of what this might look like?

We have teachers in these circles learning how to ask honest, open questions that aren’t disguised as advice. They’ve worked at developing this new muscle of communication in a safe place.

They say things like, "In a staff meeting, somebody said something I absolutely disagreed with. But instead of speaking in opposition, I asked an honest, open question." They expressed their desire to understand more deeply what the other person was saying and why they were saying it. Suddenly things start to change. Instead of a pitched battle between two points of view, the person who first spoke is feeling like someone is listening to them, and the person who asked the honest, open question is actually listening. The vision here is to change the dance with each other just a little bit in all of the daily, practical, on-the-ground things that we do with each other. If we don’t change the dance, pathologies keep multiplying themselves in the workplace. For example, a doctor in a hospital who is disdainful of the nurses is cutting off an important avenue of communication that may someday bear on the well-being of a patient because the nurses are afraid to say anything to this person.

What do you think are some of the biggest spiritual challenges facing leaders today in any profession?

We have so much work to do in every profession to bring the institutional context in which we do our work into line with the highest values of our professions. Catholic priest Ivan Illich wrote a book in the '70s. A passage in Deschooling Society went something like this: "Just because we have hospitals, doesn’t mean we have health care. Just because we have schools, doesn’t mean we have education. Just because we have courts, doesn’t mean we have justice. And just because we have churches, doesn’t mean we have faith."

If you look at HMOs or public schools these days, a lot of them put obstacles in front of the good people who work in them. Individuals would like to serve patients or students well, but institutional circumstances prevent it. There is incongruity between the highest values of their profession and the institution in which they work. We must encourage leaders to ask critical questions about the integrity of the institutions in which they work. We must equip leaders to be wise about how institutions change. A lot of our institutional structures divide the communities of work that they are supposed to be holding together. Schools, for example, tend to force teachers to privatize. Each of them has so much individual work that there is very little opportunity to form community with fellow teachers or between teachers and administrators. This dynamic needs to change, so our institutions depend on the strength of community within them. Leaders must attend to community building within their institutions, or they are actually undermining the quality of work that can be done.

Can you give an example?

A dramatic study became available a couple of years ago. It is detailed in a book called Trust in Schools. Two scholars, Anthony Bryk and Barbara Schneider, at the University of Chicago studied the effort of school reform in the Chicago city school system. During the '90s, they asked two very simple questions: "Which schools have grown most in their capacity to serve kids well?" and "Which schools have not grown or even declined in their capacity to educate young people as measured by standardized tests?"

Their study looked at factors that would explain the difference between those two sets of schools. They looked at every external variable that you can think of. How much money did the schools have? What were their governance models? How about their curriculum teaching technique? Or their in-services? Not one of those external factors had any real explanatory power. The factor that explained a huge amount of difference between the schools that succeeded and the schools that failed in serving kids well was named "relational trust."

If you had high levels of relational trust between teachers and administrators, between teachers and parents, you were much, much more likely to be able to serve kids well than if you had low levels of relational trust. Statistically it was astonishing!

What did they learn about this relational trust?

First, if you had leaders who cared about trust, kids were much, much more likely to get served well than if you had leaders who didn’t value it. They also discovered the correlation between relational trust and success on behalf of kids, held constant no matter how much money was involved or how well-funded the school was. So you could have a very rich school with low levels of relational trust, and they would be failing kids. You would have a poor school with high levels of relational trust, and they would be helping kids. So what helps relational trust along? That loops us right back to where we started this conversation. It’s inner and spiritual work around questions of ego, envy, anger, greed, suspicion, and paranoia. All of these kind of inner demons are examples of inner darkness that gets in the way of trusting each other.

It turns out that those things also get in the way of successful implementation of institutional mission. That study, called Trust in Schools, could just as easily be titled, Trust in Hospitals or Trust in the Justice System or Trust in Business. A building full of people who trust each other, no matter what kind of work they’re trying to do, can do that work better than a building full of people who don’t trust each other. Trust is a huge variable. The only question I have is, "Why do we keep imagining that the answer lies somewhere else?" This—relational trust—is a secret hidden in plain sight.

Interview with Parker Palmer, Part 1

Marcus Goodyear — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 06:00:00 GMT

What advice do you have for public school educators who are trying to serve God in their daily work?

School educators are the subjects of intense public, media, and political criticism. They are often misunderstood, berated by larger society. Public education is hard-pressed by "No Child Left Behind." The motives behind the bill were to hold public education accountable to results, and to make sure all schools measured up, no matter how many disadvantaged children they serve. Unfortunately its major impact has been to get children to pass standardized tests. Teachers find themselves having to "teach to the test," which is very different than trying to educate the whole child to become a whole adult. Kids get factoids, rather than dealing with deeper educational tasks, with values, with relationships, with questions of character, ethics, and one’s own vision for one’s life. Education is in a world of trouble. Teachers need help to sustain their vocation. The Courage to Teach is aimed at nurturing the teacher’s heart. If they bring their truest, best self, or as we Quakers say, "that of God and every person" to their work as educators, they will find courage to resist those things that deform education and ill-serve our children.

You have said, "Good teachers join self, subject and students in the fabric of life." How does a Christian do this in public schools without indirectly imposing their faith on their students?

In the early years of the American experiment, Quakers were persecuted, even hanged, on Boston Common by other Christians who were threatened by their beliefs.

So I don’t have any romanticism for the good ol’ days when someone’s religious beliefs could dominate our public processes and public institutions. But I also have very little patience with a system of education that ignores the questions of meaning, purpose, and value. I don’t want to go back to Boston Common, but at the same time I want to open public education to the profound questions of meaning that young people have in our times. I think in a public school classroom, it’s possible to help young people with questions, meaning, purpose, who they are and why they are here on earth without ever sending a child home saying to Jewish parents, or Muslim parents, or atheist parents, "Mom and Dad, this teacher is trying to turn me into something else." We owe children a gracious, open exploration of these questions, and adult companionship, without trying to engage in the sort of proselytizing that crosses the church/state barrier in inappropriate and destructive ways.

What is dangerous about proselytizing?

As a Christian, who grew up Methodist, I was deeply influenced by the scripture in 2 Corinthians that says, "We have this treasure in earthen vessels to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us." I think those earthen vessels include our language, and theological formulations. I think the mystery of God, and the mystery of God in Christ is so vast. It’s idolatrous to claim that my church is the one who has been able to boil that down into a right set of words that everyone must agree with.

You’ve said, "The sense of self is very closely tied to what people do." How does one bring identity into a profession, without losing oneself to that profession?

You’re asking, "How do we live open-heartedly in the world without having our hearts broken?" At 68, I have come to a simple conclusion: I have a choice to make.

Either I live with my heart open, investing in my work and taking the risks that come when the expression of my own truth might get me crosswise with people. Or I exist in my work and in the world in a closed-hearted way. To me this choice is a no brainer, because to be in the world in a closed-hearted way is to risk a kind of spiritual death, a death of integrity really. As Thomas Merton said, most of us live lives of self-impersonation. To be in the world as an impersonator of yourself, when selfhood is your birthright gift from God, is an insult to your Creator and certainly a diminishment of yourself. I have learned to choose to be in the world in an open-hearted way, because pain itself is a sign that I’m alive. Being open-hearted is my only chance at the joy that life can bring.

So why is living with integrity so difficult for us?

Our work institutions compromise the integrity of their mission. Public schools try to win favor under "No Child Left Behind." Some HMOs and even hospitals are more interested in the bottom line, rather than the well-being of the patient. In these examples, the personal integrity of teachers or physicians become threatening to the institutions in which they work. When personal integrity threatens institutions, the Jesus story happens all over again. He was crucified, because his integrity got him crosswise with the major institutions of his time, with the arrangements of power. The Christian story has moments that contain a penetrating, sad, and sometimes depressing description of reality. But ultimately, the Christian story is hopeful. We can stand in the midst of a death dealing reality, open-hearted, bringing new life, taking the risk of threatening the hard-heartedness of institutions.

In this new life that comes from being open-hearted, what is the relationship between renewal and courage?

A powerful book in my life is by a Guatemalan poet named Julia Esquivel. A political refugee in Guatemala, she was forced into exile. For simply trying to help her grade school students survive, she got on the wrong side of an oppressive regime. Esquivel wrote a book of poetry, Threatened with Resurrection. When I first saw that title, it just turned me upside down. I was raised in a church that said, "Death was the big threat and resurrection was the great hope." But here was a woman of great courage and integrity saying, "Sometimes a living death is more comfortable than being truly resurrected, which is a threat." She means if you can tamp down your feelings, get your heart in a box, and not get crosswise with anything that’s wrong around you, maybe they will not see you. Maybe they will ignore you and let you live your little private life. But if you embrace resurrection and new life, God knows what you might be called to. The teachers who suddenly understand their calling is not to satisfy the people who make the tests but to serve the children, these teachers need resurrection or renewal. They need the courage to act on what their hearts say. The doctors who remember they have taken a hippocratic oath and say to themselves, as one physician said to me a while back, "You know I work in an HMO, which has me right on the edge of violating my hippocratic oath three or four times a week." That’s a person who will need courage to act on his renewal of heart.

When we start connecting and bringing our identity to work, suddenly there’s a tremendous pressure to avoid failure, because our egos may be tied to our performance. How do we reconcile that?

I think ego is strongest when we are not in touch with our own identity as children of God. My ego, or false identity, is the piece that tells me that I’m something special, that I’m not anybody’s child, that I’m the leader of the pack. That’s the piece of me that doesn’t want to fail. The failures I’ve experienced and the pain brought as a result were because I was working heavily out of ego. When one works out of ego, the aim is not to serve your patients or your children. Instead it becomes about winning, looking good, and not being deprived of one’s perks. Identity and integrity rightly understood are the antidote to ego.

It’s baffling and troubling to me that there is this Christian cult of success that I actually think is very ego driven. So many Christians have embraced this cult of success.

So by contemporary standards, you’re saying that resurrection isn’t a success story?

If you read it as a success story by contemporary standards, you’re distorting the fact that Jesus did none of the things that contemporary success cult members tell us that we can do by believing in him. Jesus opened himself to shared suffering with the poorest and the most oppressed. The right belief will not make my bank account bigger, my reputation brighter, and all things well.

Inner and spiritual renewal doesn’t reduce our stress or get us comfy with life.

For me, the most powerful meaning of the cross and of Jesus’ life is God’s willingness to suffer with us, to bring redemption and meaning out of that suffering, with a sense of purpose.

Are we called to suffer or to be renewed?

We Quakers have a saying that renewal is about getting in touch with "that of God within me." When people do this, they hear more clearly their calling. And they recognize their need for courage to walk this path to which they’ve been called.

What I Really Need Is Goodness: Meet Marva Dawn

Paul Seebeck — Wed, 21 May 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Our partner ministry, Laity Lodge is pleased to have Dr. Marva Dawn as their speaker at the June 5-8 retreat (along with Mark Roberts, the Senior Director and Scholar-in-Residence of Laity Lodge). Marva is a highly regarded theologian and author. She'll be speaking on "a sabbath way of life" out of her latest book, The Sense of the Call. This book, by the way, was recently honored by the Academy of Parish Clergy on its list of Top Ten Books of the Year.

Though Marva is respected and loved by thousands throughout the world, she's new to Laity Lodge and TheHighCalling.org. So, to help you get to know her, we asked Paul Seebeck, who frequently does interviews for The High Calling of our Daily Work to introduce us to Marva. Here is Paul's story.

An older looking lady in a worn dress needs help as she shuffles her way to the speaker’s podium.

“When I was with my husband on the phone last night, I just started crying,” says Marva Dawn. “I realized I loved my husband even though I didn’t feel it.”

I had never met Dawn, an internationally renowned theologian, author, and educator. I also haven’t read any of her 20 books, not even two of her most famous works: Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down: A Theology of Worship for This Urgent Time, and A Royal "Waste" of Time: The Splendor of Worshiping God and Being Church for the World. So I wasn’t sure what to expect at a pastor’s conference at Regent College in Vancouver, BC, where Dawn was leading us through cries of lament found in many of the Psalms: “How long, Lord?” “Why?” and “Where are you in this God?"

Physically handicapped, Dawn wears a leg brace, and is blind in one eye. She tells us about her tears and her lack of feelings for her husband first. The latest medication for her malady of physical infirmities is taking its toll. But she doesn’t wallow in physical or emotional pain. We are hooked by her strength. We are open to hear how our human emotions are stronger than our intellect—often because of a lack of affirmation growing up. Yet in our cries of feeling forgotten before God, we can learn to train our heart, our will, to become stronger than our emotion, by letting God in and practicing trust in the gifts of divine kindness.

At the end of the session, I ask Dawn what she wants Laity Lodge to know about her.

“That I’d like to be as good as my husband is,” she says. “He is so gentle, so self-sacrificing, so willing to serve.”

When Dawn is introduced at speaking engagements around the world, they always joke about her four masters degrees (she also has a Ph.D. in Christian Ethics and the Scriptures from Notre Dame).

“It’s a good thing for me to be made fun of for that,” she laughs. “I’ve always been so driven in academics, but what I really need is goodness, the kind that my husband has.”

Dawn has never been to Kerrville but is “doubly excited” to be at Laity Lodge. A cousin in Austin who is dying of a brain tumor has told her how wonderful the community is. She is looking forward to being in the surroundings at Laity Lodge, as she opens herself to what God’s spirit might be asking her to teach.

“My blindness,” she smiles, “has me learning this awareness as both a spiritual and physical practice.”

Suddenly I’m aware that our focus for this conference was the spiritual practice of crying out to God, yet what I remember most about being with Marva Dawn, is the laughter we shared.

Talking with J. I. Packer, Professor in Theology at Regent College

Steven Purcell — Sun, 04 May 2008 06:00:00 GMT

J. I. Packer is a Board of Governors' Professor in Theology at Regent College; Vancouver, BC. He is author of many books, including the bestseller Knowing God. Additionally, since 1966, J. I. Packer has worked closely with Howard Butt at Laity Lodge—where the message of TheHighCalling.org originally began.

In this special interview, we sat with J. I. Packer on a porch at Laity Lodge and asked him questions about faith, work, vocation, and daily life. Portions of this interview are available as online videos as well. We embedded some clips below for fun.

What does God say about vocation?

The word vocation means "calling." And right at the heart of vocation is, I believe in every case, the sense that God has called one to do what one is doing. The sense of being called comes out of thinking and praying about what one has been gifted and so fitted to do and which of the options for life activity is the best one. Never let the good be the enemy of the best. And then, as one thinks about these things and prays about these things comes the sense, "Yes, this is what God has called me to do." And all honest work is worth doing for the glory of God, and we may find ourselves called to do any honest work that we're fitted for.

How do we offer our everyday work to God?

The first thing I think is to make sure that the work we're doing is honorable work that can be offered to God. Smugglers, so they used to say in the 18th century, and drug dealers, so I say in the 21st century, can't really offer their work to God because it isn't honest labor. But assuming your work is honest labor, think of the glory of God as you plan it and perform it. God made us for honest work. And we glorify him by doing honest work. And pray that God will enable us to do it well and that he will accept it and use it. Use it to make the world a better place than the world would be without it. Then we've done what we can.

How can Christians view their daily work as worship?

Worship is honoring God in every appropriate way. W hen one's labor is labor that one feels called to, then one is fulfilling one's vocation as one pursues it. I think it's a matter of conscious, deliberate prayer. "Lord, I offer you this. Make what you can of it. I'm doing it the best way I can to serve you and to honor you. Help me to do it as well as I'm capable of doing it. And make it a blessing to other people."

How can Christians view their daily work as ministry?

Ministry means service to other people. And all work, it seems to me, is oriented to the welfare of other people—directly or indirectly. The answer to your question, I think, is to be conscious of your work as service to people by asking the question, well how does this work serve and help people? Once one sees how the work is going to help people, then pray for their blessing through the work. I think that's the way to go.

What is the greatest challenge facing the Church today?

I think there's no doubt that the greatest challenge facing the church of the west in 2007 is that the culture is being secularized all around us. We're living in an era of post-Christianity. And we are losing younger people. Which means that we do need to make a special effort to project the Christian life of wisdom and truth and—well, what should I call it?—contentment, really, Christian contentment to younger people. There's a quality of life in Christ that the world knows nothing about. And it makes life infinitely richer than life would be without it. Young people today have mostly been brought up in homes where the Bible isn't read and taught. They don't say grace. They don't have family prayers. There's no religious component therefore in the upbringing that the children get. And all the influences of school and the community projects in which young people get involved, all those influences are away from and out beyond Christian concerns. So the church needs to take a deep breath and go for young people, it seems to me. When the church has secured the faith and the loyalty of young people, and Christ has used the church to bring young people to himself, and young people's work is strong. Well, then through the young people, the church must labor to capture families. Family Christianity is something basic to Bible Christianity. And we've got to try and get it back. We'll be swimming against the stream all the way. But that I see as the top challenge.

Then after that, the second challenge is keeping the waters of the stream of Christian faith and teaching clear and not—how shall I say it? I was going to say polluted but that's a hard word, so let me change it. I can't think of a kindly word. Not infected? That's no kinder really. But by other ideas. Modifying Christianity in terms of other religions. Modifying Christianity in terms of secular ideas. This is ruinous and it mustn't happen. So the church has to work hard to make sure that it doesn't happen.

Are you saying the Church should make a space for young people?

Yes, I'm saying that. I'm saying more than that. The church first must get its act together in terms of what used to be called catechesis, catechism work. That is a plan, a syllabus, for teaching young people Christian basics. When you look at the youth work in a lot of our churches, you realize that just about everything is being done except teaching the folk the basics. So much is amusement. So little is teaching. And I do want to see things changed on that point.

Where did your desire to write originate?

I always enjoyed writing when I was very small. And I was asked to write things early on before I was ordained actually. And I wrote them to oblige the people who asked me. I never thought of myself as a professional writer in those days. But I came to think of myself as one who clearly is called to be a professional writer when a book of mine published in1958 became a bestseller—Fundamentalism and the Word of God. It sold 20,000 copies in its first year. And it's still in print as a matter of fact. And its success made me think, "Oh well, obviously writing is meant to be a major part of my ministry." Then, some other books of mine succeeded in the same way, and so the conviction that writing was actually the central activity of my ministry got stronger and stronger. Though I'm not sure I should say the central activity. I should say a central activity because just in terms of the satisfaction that it brings me and I hope the usefulness of it, it is parallel to and on par with the work that I do as a teacher in the classroom at Regent College. Where I just love teaching, and shall go on teaching as long as my mind holds together.

You've spoken at Laity Lodge for many years. What first brought you there?

An invitation to bring my family to Laity Lodge which came from the top man, Mr. Butt, and which was conveyed to me and my wife in England. We were still living there at the time. This was in 1965. And I immediately found myself wanting to come and share with this ministry because I was so completely at one with this vision.

That's encouraging! Mr. Butt has been given a powerful vision.

It's always seemed to me obvious that lay vocation is as important as clergy vocation. And the church is only healthy when the laity are being taken seriously in ministry within the church and in testimony and witness and work outside it. So it didn't take us very long to agree that next year, we would be very happy to come as a family. And I was asked to do four weeks on the trot expounding scripture. And I said, Yes, I will happily do four weeks on the trot. So in 1966, we came and I did it.

And I found that Laity Lodge was just as significant as it had sounded when they had explained it—only more so. It's a beautiful setting with beautiful buildings. And for me a very delightful climate. And Laity Lodge has had my heart really—from 1966 to the present.

What do you remember of your first Laity Lodge experience?

The family came, that's the first thing to say. We were put into Lodestar, the new house as it was then. The first thing when we walked in was that a scorpion fell to the floor out of the ventilator or the light I'm not sure. And there it was wriggling in the contorted way that scorpions do. And that stuck in our minds all the time that we were here.

What do you see as the significance of Laity Lodge's work?

I see Laity Lodge as a pioneer institution. I've sometimes spoken of it as a prophetic institution. Meaning that it has at its heart a potential for reshaping the future in a good way. It spreads something which is right at the heart of Laity Lodge's own sense of its place in the order of things. The sense that in the Christian community, the distinction between clergy and layfolk is secondary. What is primary is the sense that we are all together in Christ. We are all on par in Christ. We are all of us called to serve Christ, and to live in fellowship with each other as we do so. In other words, just putting in terms that Laity Lodge has usually employed, we are here to ensure that the laity are taken as seriously as the clergy have ever been. And to lead if we can, to lead churches and Christian communities everywhere into a way of living in which the contributions of the laymen, the work of the laymen, the ministry of the laymen, the laymen's work in the world and in the church is seen as just as important as the work of the clergy in the church. I think that's a vision that has yet to be caught in the world church. And I celebrate the fact that Laity Lodge carries the flag for it. And I hope that Laity Lodge will continue to carry the flag until the point is taken everywhere.

Talking with Micheal Flaherty, President of Walden Media: Part 2

Marcus Goodyear — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Micheal Flaherty is the president of Walden Media, a company he co-founded with his former college roommate, Cary Granat, to produce films, books, and interactive programs that tie directly into school curricula. Acclaimed for such films as The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe; Charlotte's Web; and Bridge to Terabithia, Walden Media aims to recapture imagination, rekindle curiosity, and demonstrate the rewards of learning. Producing both original works and adaptations of acclaimed children's literature, Walden Media projects are enhanced by comprehensive outreach and supplemental programs for teachers, librarians, and parents. Upcoming releases include The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008) and Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D (2008).

As company president, Flaherty guides Walden's vision across all business units.

Flaherty lives in Lexington, Massachussetts with his wife Kelly, his son Christian, his daughters Eileen and Reagan, and his dog Jumbo.

>> Read Part 1 of our interview with Micheal Flaherty

How did your vision of "recapturing imagination and rekindling curiosity" at Walden Media come about?

When we first started the company, my business partner's oldest daughter and my brother, Chip's, oldest daughter were asking all the great questions—everything from the physical things to how far is the sun from the earth, how many planets are there, to more interesting questions about love and about the meaning of life. I remember us listening to them and my business partner Kerry saying, "It's kind of sad, but there seems to be some calendar moment when your children stop asking you the big questions and lose their curiosity about everything. Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to create media that kept kids asking the big questions, while it kept them excited and interested?" That was the origin moment for the idea of the company. We named it Walden, because Thoreau was a great independent thinker. He was always asking questions.

We did something interesting at our church this past summer. After the service, we could stick around and ask questions. It’s always interesting to me to see people that have been going to church for so long always coming back to some of the more basic questions about prayer, unanswered prayer, the problem of pain, suffering, justice. It’s interesting to me to see that people are still asking the big questions, you know, after a lifetime of studying these things.

I have a lot of interest in fantasy, which is one of the things you guys do very well. What's your reaction to some Christians who argue that fantasy leads to interest in the occult or that fantasy is just escapism and nothing more than that?

I always want to be careful about that, but I do know that J. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis both addressed it head on. Lewis, in particular, in his letters to children did such a great job addressing this and addressing the importance of how fantasy doesn't detract from reality, but it actually makes us more aware of it.

Do you think there is such a thing as a dangerous story or a story that we shouldn't tell or that we shouldn't learn?

I was brought up to never say never. It's different for me, because growing up in my house stories were so central, whether it was comic books or literature. Every story that we read and every movie that we saw, we saw in the context of family, so we had plenty of people to talk about that with.

My son recently saw Flushed Away, with his grandparents. He talks about it constantly, but he won't watch it with me, because something in the movie scared him. Sometimes he'll ask me, "Do you remember this part in Flushed Away?" Then, I'll remind him again that I haven't seen the movie. What you experienced growing up reminds me that I need to experience as many of these stories with my kids as possible.

It would really give you a common language. Shared stories give plenty of things to reference. It makes it a lot easier to reference the Gospel, because kids start to understand it. One way to answer questions is by referencing stories and referencing the people in the stories.

In Philippians, Paul says to focus on whatever is true, noble . . . What do you do when you have a story that has moments of ugliness and things that aren't noble? How do you make decisions about that?

Paul didn't shy away from the fact that the human heart is capable of every darkness. To appreciate Paul, and to appreciate the wisdom in that saying, is to appreciate where he had been in his life. Paul would not be as interesting and compelling a character if we didn't understand what got him to that point of wisdom. I think that in order to understand the true and the noble, you have to have glimpses of their counterparts. I think that it's critical for all of us to recognize that nothing is beyond reconciliation and nothing is beyond redemption. So, even if we've gone to those dark places, or those places that are less than noble, or less than praiseworthy, we have that ability to be the creation. I think that's one of the problems, so many people feel that's beyond them. When you talk about things like praiseworthy and noble and good, what about the people who feel like they can't reclaim that or recapture that, because they've experienced so much that's counter to that and so much that's opposite that? I think people need to know that the praiseworthy, the good, and the noble are always within our reach, regardless of where we've been.

What's the relationship between maintaining the purity of that message—so to speak—and the financing of that project?

The intersection of art and commerce is always a tricky one, and nobody has the formula. In music and in theater and in film, the most profitable stories tend to have these great themes of brokenness, redemption, and reconciliation, but also be stories that the whole family can enjoy. So we're already hedging our bet. Just in terms of the mission statement, we are appealing to the broadest possible audience.

In states like Texas, teachers are now required to teach media literacy. So from a sales standpoint you have not only the entire family, but also teachers as potential clients.

Teachers are the toughest accountability group on the planet. You have to defend every choice that you make, and you know we've gotten to understand the difference between faithful and literal. As hard as you try to be a hundred percent true to the text, film is a different form of media. There are choices that you need to make in adapting a book to the film, but teachers have been very helpful explaining "here are the critical characters, themes, and plot points that you can't miss, the non-negotiables." That's always been a basic help for us as we're developing these projects.

I like that phrase, "the difference between faithful and literal."

We have to go back to that after every single film. People wonder why this certain aspect of the book wasn't in there, or why we added a different element to the film.

Why do you think people feel so strongly about these stories?

I think that they can remember, not just the story, but the time and the place where they read that story. It's as close as a family member in terms of the memories that it conjures up.

So if you mess up the story, you're messing up . . .?

You're messing with a part of their personality, because stories really do form us and shape us. I think people are properly protective of them.

>> Read Part 1 of our interview with Micheal Flaherty

Talking with Micheal Flaherty, President of Walden Media: Part 1

Marcus Goodyear — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 06:00:00 GMT

As company president, Flaherty guides Walden's vision across all business units.

Flaherty lives in Lexington, Massachussetts with his wife Kelly, his son Christian, his daughters Eileen and Reagan, and his dog Jumbo.

>> Read Part 2 of our interview with Micheal Flaherty

Walden Media marketed the Narnia movies to churches. What were the specific ethical guidelines in line when you did that?

We always go after the core audience. With Narnia, there are several core audiences: the Sci-Fi audience, the fantasy audience, the literary audience. But there is also the faith audience. We thought we should make people aware that this film based on this great book is coming out. We were very careful. Even though our expertise is in educational curriculum, it's not in developing faith curriculum. We decided faith leaders, pastors, and parents, if they wanted to teach the faith aspect, could create their own materials. We let church people know the film was coming out. We made clips available. Beyond that, in terms of how to use that or teach, we let people come up with their own ideas.

Walden Media, though, does seem to be merging education and entertainment. How do you keep balance in your movies where on the one hand you avoid mere eye candy, but on the other hand you avoid creating moralist propaganda?

The latter part is what we guard against the most. The key is to be as faithful as possible to the story, that's our North Star. Sadly, I do think there is this artificial distinction drawn between education and entertainment. I think of some of the best media out there, Les Miserables. I've seen it 11 times. Then I went on to read the book. I read more about Hugo and more about the French Revolution. Something that initially was pure entertainment for me sparked a surge for learning in me that no textbook or class in school could have ever done. So, for us, if we can tell terrific stories that bring up terrific scenes and also introduce us to terrific people and terrific events in history, then the educational stuff is inherent.

So you're assuming really good art inspires people to take action and become creative themselves?

For my birthday, my wife got me Rembrandt's painting of the Prodigal Son. She also bought me, Henri Nouwen's book that he wrote on the Prodigal Son, which is about his reflection of spending several hours of looking at the painting when he was visiting in Russia. I've never really been captured by art, but it's unbelievable what that painting has sparked in me. It's sort of the tale of the Prodigal Sons, plural. For the first time I really understood that, I looked at the painting, and I could physically see unconditional love. I could somehow understand love, and also understand brokenness in a new way. I've heard so many sermons on that parable; I've read that parable so many times in the last 30 years. But it's unbelievable what this one painting and Nouwen's reflections on it have done for me. I can't think of holier work than planting and nourishing life-long learning in children and adults and getting them to ask the big questions.

How do you teach children to ask the big questions?

I think by getting them to fall in love with the stories and not be scared of failure. It's terrifying for me to see now what's happened to kids, particularly from kindergarten to third grade, where pretty rigorous instructions on mathematics and all kinds of things are largely supplanting fantasy play and storytelling. These kids are under such tremendous pressure at such young ages! We have a great person here who runs our educational development, Randy Testa; he's been a teacher forever. He was Robert Coles teaching assistant for a long time at Harvard. Robert Coles' wrote all the great books about the spiritual life for children.

How do you deal with it, though, when people are skeptical about your vision and message?

By being a constant presence and recognizing that winning trust in the educational community is going to take several decades. When we first went out there with Holes, we would go to conferences and the teachers were rolling their eyes, and they said, "Here we go again, another media company coming in to parachute in and help us market their movies. They'll make their money and then leave." Then they saw us the next year with Winn Dixie and the next year with Narnia, then the next year with Charlotte's Web. We're slowly winning their trust. It's going to be a lifelong mission for us.

Can you give any news about when Screwtape or Dawn Treader will come out?

The first time I spoke with you, I had just received the first draft of Dawn Treader. Literally as we were speaking it was there on my desk. I hadn’t even opened it up yet. I couldn’t wait to read it, though, because Eustace is one of my favorite characters.

Dawn Treader is moving very well. Michael Apted, who directed Amazing Grace, is directing it. He also directed Coal Miner’s Daughter and a bunch of others. He’s a great director. He’s the president of the Directors Guild.

Screwtape on the other hand is just a really tricky adaptation.

I think a big part of being faithful to that work is keeping it dark in a way that's probably going to bother some people. I don't know how that works with movie profitability, but Screwtape always takes the approach of the demons. They have to be the heroes—even if they're tragic heroes—for it to be faithful to what Lewis did.

We're trying to find that balance between the comedy and the stakes. We’re working hard on the script. One of the questions we're asking is how do you show the real transformation that happens inside a person.

Screwtape keeps encouraging the patient to go through the motions in his daily life and work.

You just nailed the entire paradox of this project. The book is so clever, because Screwtape is saying things like, "Have them write the check out to Unicef." Just have him writing, saying, "Oh boy, this is going to hurt." It goes back to that great Corinthians passage, you can do all of these things, but if you do them without love, it's worthless. We're trying to figure out how to illustrate that. What I love about Screwtape, what I love about the Gospel is all this external behavioral stuff that too often people confuse as central to our faith, is just an element of it. What really matters is the outpouring of love and the reflection of love.

It strikes me how much "God is love," and when we love what we're doing and when we get other people to love it, there's truth in it. I'm excited to see what comes out of it.

I wish I had said that. That's very well said.

>> Read Part 2 of our interview with Micheal Flaherty