Workplace Worship: How to Practice Your Faith Without Preaching a Word, And Grow Your Career in the Process

By James Paine Jr. Ph.D.

Workplace Worship was written for professionals looking to accelerate their careers, find meaning in the mundane, and avoid having to check their faith at the door. It's a compelling case for how spiritual influence works at work and provides insights on how you can build a career that esteems God, inspires others, and positions you for succ

• Language: English
• Publisher: Painefree Publishing
• Release date: Jun 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9780996291415

Book preview

PAR

T ONE

LAYING A FOUNDATION

CHAPTER 1

Work as a Type of Worship

And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

Col. 3:17 NIV

YOUR WORK IS IMPORTANT TO GOD. No matter what you do, how much you earn, or what your title may be, know that your work matters to God. In fact, the very idea of work is so important to God that it’s one of the first concepts introduced to us in the Bible, first by demonstrating the act of productive work in the narrative of creation and then by God Himself commanding that we labor within this newly minted creation in responsible stewardship.

God designed work, in its original format, to accomplish three important and mutually exclusive outcomes in the lives of human beings. First, it was to give man a responsible share in God’s creation. Second, it was to provide a medium through which to fulfill God’s command to be fruitful and productive in the world. Third, it was to establish the foundation for a trusting and limitless collaboration between God and man. It leverages boundaries as the primary means through which to build and strengthen man’s capacity to successfully negotiate between his delegated authority to subdue and create and his divine responsibility to yield and obey.

From its origins, work was God’s way of inviting man to join Him as a colaborer in providing creativity, innovation, and dominion over the earth. God’s desire from the beginning was to work in harmony with us and to deepen the nature and meaning of our relationship with Him through our work. An example of this desire is how God demonstrates His creative expression in the earth as a pattern for us to observe, and then He encourages us to follow His revealed pattern.

In the same way that God expressed His creativity and dominion over creation by naming the day, night, heaven, earth, and seas, He allowed man to exercise an equal position of creativity and dominion by bringing all the living creatures to the man to name them. Whatever Adam named them became both their names and their representative functions in the earth (Gen. 2:19–23).

Throughout the Bible we see the power of naming, associated with purpose and repurposing, along with many other expressions through which God seeks to colabor with man. This idea of shared experience typifies the relational context God had in mind when He first gave man dominion (Gen. 1:26) and then placed him in the garden to perform his work (Gen. 2:8). Therefore in its purest form, our work should be representative of a coexistent harmony between God and man—a harmony that’s rooted in a collaboration that accomplishes God’s divine purposes in the world.

But somewhere along the line, we lost our way and veered far away from God’s ideal plan for our working lives. And in so doing, we traded God’s authentic best for us for the counterfeit offering of an unstable, self-indulgent, and ever-shifting culture—one that doesn’t value God and fails to identify the meaningful correlation between our work and how it connects us to Him.

In fact, many Christians even hold a decidedly nonbiblical view of work. Some view it as a curse that occurred after the fall, or at least part of the curse of living in a fallen world. Others make it into an idol and depend on it to provide them with their identity and purpose in life.

Those who hold these secular views of work often believe that life is best divided into two disconnected parts—the spiritual and the real, with God being relevant in the spiritual dimension and work being relevant in the real dimension. They believe that these two have nothing to do with each other and should never cross-pollinate. God stays in His corner of the universe, work stays in its own corner of the universe, and these different realms never interact.

One of the core problems with this secular view of work is that it sets us up for disappointment, because if we leave God out of the picture, we’re left to find our sense of importance, fulfillment, and reward from someplace else: our work. Work then becomes our answer to the question, Who am I, and why am I important? And that is a very shaky foundation to build upon because what happens if you lose your job? You’re suddenly a nobody, and you are not important because you are not employed.

The secular view of work tends to make idols out of our careers, and our careers then become the number-one priority in our lives. Our relationship with God takes a backseat, family takes a backseat, and even our relationships with other people take a backseat because of the inappropriate position into which we sometimes place work in our lives. When this occurs, everything gets filtered through the question, What impact will this have on my career? However, the more appropriate question for believers is, What impact will my career have on God and the advancement of His kingdom on earth?

How Do You Manage the Workplace?

When you hear the word workplace, what instinctively comes to mind? Perhaps you visualize a work pile left on your desk awaiting your return to the office. Or maybe you experience involuntary feelings of anxiety or nervous energy surrounding a larger-than-life project, due soon, that you’ve yet to begin. Generally speaking, when we hear the word workplace, we don’t intuitively think of this physical space as being one of the most profound spatial environments within human society from which to advance the kingdom of God on the earth and effect positive change in the lives of people. But in reality, few places offer such vast opportunities to do both.

For most, it’s almost counterintuitive in our politically correct society to correlate our personal faith with our workplace. At first glance it seems logical and certainly appropriate that our personal faith should remain personal and at a safe distance from any entanglement with our workplace. Yet while this paradigm seems logical and widely influences how most people engage the workplace, this is not the paradigm that best honors God. By the end of this book, you’ll likely challenge this and many other assumptions you may have about your workplace, your worship space, and how best to honor God in each.

We were created to bring God glory through our life experiences (Col. 1:16). Yet the same God who created us for His glory also commands that we work to provide for our life essentials and basic needs (2 Thess. 3:10). This often means that on average, the overwhelming majority of working adults spend more of their waking hours at work than they do anyplace else.

This reality triggers a question. If God expects us to worship Him for His glory, and likewise commands us to work for our provision, how does He suggest that we strike a balance between these seemingly contrasting commitments? Does He expect our worship to extend beyond the weekly services we experience in our churches? And is He sympathetic to us if our worship is confined to the limited time and opportunities left available to us after we have given the majority our strength and creative energy to our jobs?

Or are there other meaningful ways that God expects us to express our worship and allegiance to Him, even within the context of our work and the spatial confines of our workplace? And if there are, how should this play out in daily practice?

Workplace Worship, a New Paradigm

When people of faith discuss worship in relationship to their workplaces, they typically do so in a way that describes this experience as an organized social meeting. It’s one in which people of a common faith—who also share a common employer, office building, or industry—gather physically or through technological means to pray, study, or otherwise demonstrate their collective allegiance to and reliance upon a commonly accepted deity in some meaningful and collaborative way.

However when the words worship and workplace are merged together to create the term workplace-worship within the context of this writing, the intent of this new term is to expand upon the normative usage of each distinct word and to redefine the scale, scope, and intent of what these two words can mean when posited together. When the term workplace-worship is noted in this writing, it’s not at all referring to the collaborative gatherings to which you may associate with your department, office-building colleagues, or professional associations.

Instead this term is referring to how you personally steward your current work responsibilities, either for your customers as an entrepreneur or for your company as an employee of a major corporation. The term workplace-worship refers to how you intentionally and strategically demonstrate your hope and faith in God through your excellence in service to others.

Honoring God in how we approach and regard our work is perhaps among the greatest of opportunities available to us to present ourselves as living sacrifices (Rom. 12:1–5) and effective witnesses for the faith of Christ. And it is by far the most effective tool available to us in the workplace to win favor and positively influence people who may not believe as we believe or hold the same assumptions and convictions that we hold (Prov. 11:30).

The willful decision to serve your employer, your customers, and the marketplace well extends your capacity to positively influence the lives of people more than handing out tracts to coworkers, saying, God bless you when a colleague sneezes, or even visibly reading your Bible during break periods. Serving others in a spirit of excellence provides an enormous platform from which to stand and demonstrate your faith in God. Serving others well in this way has the potential to cause those who observe and experience your excellence in service to become curious about the meaning and driving force behind your commitment and conviction to serve others well. And curiosity is often the launching pad for progress.

Service is the rent we pay for the space we occupy.

—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Please hear me well when I tell you that the idea of serving well, and frankly service in general, has absolutely become a lost art. My wife and I often joke that good help is hard to find, but truthfully there is little jest in our observation. The reality is that the world has seemingly lost its zeal to serve others in a spirit of excellence. Today we live in a society where it’s all too common for a person to spend his or her hard-earned money on a product or service, conclude the transaction, and never receive a word or gesture of gratitude from anyone in the organization.

And unfortunately this resistance to serving well is not limited to secular society but can also be found among those who profess a passionate, informed, and committed allegiance to Jesus Christ (the Lord of service) and the tenets of the Bible. But how can this be? How can we maintain our authenticity as true believers if we neglect the responsibility to serve in the pattern of the one on whom our faith is founded? And how did we become a generation of professing believers with the capacity to boldly declare our faith on Sunday, only to give way to apathy and ineffective stewardship less than twenty-four hours later on Monday, just when it’s time to put our faith into practice on the world stage in the context of our work?

This sense of neglect for effective stewardship and service to others occurs when we incorrectly compartmentalize the life of faith as merely a set of predetermined expressional experiences. This is where we dress up and have church in our religiously adorned buildings among a gathering of people who, with few exceptions, dress as we dress, think as we think, behave as we behave, and believe as we believe.

We often limit our own effectiveness in reaching others because we fail to understand that authentic faith requires a fully integrated lifestyle, in which our faith is intentionally integrated into every facet of our lives. The reality is that if