Joining God at Work: Week 3: Practical Habits – Chuck Proudfit

Now is it on? Oh, now it's on. Good morning, Lifespring. It's so good to be back with you folks. I had the privilege of speaking here a few years ago and when Jeff reached out to me in the context of this series, I was thrilled to be able to return and just share with you a few thoughts about the habits of integrating faith with work, being faith active at work. And I think as I open up this morning, I wanna just plant a seed. We're assembled on the weekends, but we're assigned through the work weeks. You often hear we're gathered and scattered, gathered on Sunday and scattered through the work weeks, but most of the time when I talk to working Christians about the word scatter, what they hear is we're disoriented, discouraged, disconnected, but actually what God wants is exactly the opposite. Not just individually, but collectively, that we are in the habit of viewing our work as worship. And that's what we're gonna talk about this morning. As a context for all of this, I wanted to briefly share my faith testimony with you because God used my frustration with work to lead me to faith and then called me to bring faith into work. So in my own story, there's this whole full circle idea that work is worship and faith and work go together. I grew up in Colorado, so I am an import to Ohio. I was the son of two English professors and I was therefore a college brat. My folks had walked away from the church for different reasons, so the household I grew up in was generally happy, but definitely not holy. I knew there were people out there who were religious, but I didn't have any context for what that looked like. When I got to Harvard University where I was studying, very cosmopolitan place, I met lots of people from lots of different faith traditions and all of them had found God's truth and I observed that they were more centered when life got stormy. I was puzzled by the fact that their truths were contradictory and truth doesn't contradict itself, but that was kind of on the back burner because my front burner was a career, right? It was graduating from school and going out into the workplace and as somebody who wasn't a believer, my frame of reference for work was I wanna get ahead. I wanna get moving. I wanna climb the corporate ladder and I ended up getting employed at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati. That's what brought me to Ohio. Much to the horror of my parents, by the way, who had taken out a second mortgage on our house to send me to Harvard. They thought I might go into academia and instead I moved to what they viewed as the parochial Midwest and then I got to work for greedy corporate America and then Procter & Gamble assigned me to toilet paper, which P&G calls bath tissue. So about a week into my job, mom gives me a call. My mother's always been very direct and she said, Chucky, you're flushing your career down the toilet. Honestly, when you're a young guy, I was 22, I didn't wanna listen to mom, but about six months into my fledgling career, I started to wonder if maybe she had a point. I'd been assigned to what was then White Cloud Bath Tissue. It's now Charmin Ultra for those of you who care. But back in the day, White Cloud was struggling. It was a super premium product, but it was softer and thicker than most people wanted to pay for to flush down the toilet. So I spent my first six months in focus groups traveling all over the country to listen to consumers talk about toilet paper. And these were female heads of household, age 25 to 54, who over and over again said, you know, there are lots of things I like to spend money on, but it's really hard to justify spending this much more for toilet paper when I'm just gonna flush it. And at the end of the day, after six months of exhaustive research, the conclusion that we reached was that we needed to take what's called a sheet count reduction. Now, in today's world, it's called shrinkflation. You know, like when you buy a bag of potato chips and it looks so full and you open it up and it's mostly air, you know, and you got some chips on the bottom. Well, that was essentially my job. That's what got me promoted. So I worked with manufacturing plants across the country. We took 30 sheets off of each roll. We wound the rolls more loosely, so the diameter was the same as before the sheet count reduction. We took a tiny increase in the thickness of the paper and we marketed it, I had to market it, as new and improved. New because it had 30 fewer sheets and improved because it was thicker than ever. And I was less than inspired. I remember walking home from downtown Cincinnati up Columbia Parkway to Mount Adams, a hill that looks down on the skyline of the city, and I thought to myself, I'm gonna get promoted for short sheeting the consumer. It felt so empty. And by the way, for the P&G people in the audience, there's nothing illegal about this. Everybody does it all the time. However, for me, it did not feel fulfilling. And I didn't know what fulfillment would look like at work. What is purpose at work? In fact, I didn't even know what purposeful life was about. But I remembered back to those days at Harvard that some of my friends who'd found faith seemed to have more ballast to weather the stormy seas. And I wanted that. I didn't know what that was, but I wanted that. So I began studying comparative world religion and philosophy, and 10 years later, in the midst of a corporate career, I committed my life to Christ. So I become a Christ follower in my early 30s, a 30-something young working professional who is passionate to bring my faith into all of my life, including work. And during the work weeks, I'm spending most of my waking hours at work. So it's a very important slice of the pie, so to speak. And my passion for it was also grounded in the habits of the early church and the ways that they integrated faith and work. And as I read Scripture, work life was plastered all over it. You know, time and again, these climactic moments of biblical history take place in the workplace. And if you stop and think about Scripture and you look at it through the lenses of faith at work, you see work implied or integrated throughout. For example, take the Great Commission, Matthew 28, 19 through 20. Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing and teaching them to obey everything I've commanded you. Essentially, write up what you have on that wall. To discover faith, to develop spiritually, and to duplicate yourself, right? Matthew 28, 19 through 20. That commission, that mission for all of us in community, that will never take place in full unless we include work. That is a transcendent opportunity for us spiritually in our everyday work if we look at it from that frame of reference. Or take Ephesians 2.10, that God has prepared good works in advance for us to do. So not only do we have an overarching purpose in life and purpose at work, but God has prepared specific assignments for us in the workplace. Or take Colossians 3, 23, 24. Do your work as unto the Lord, not unto men, knowing that you will receive an inheritance as a reward. In other words, yes, we have human employers, but our ultimate boss is God. And we work for an audience of one, so we should be bringing our best to him, regardless of what our earthly circumstances are at work. Or what about Romans 8, 28? God works for the good of those who love him, who've been called according to his purpose. In other words, God is working alongside us in our everyday vocations as we work to bring heaven to earth, to advance God's kingdom in and through the workplace. So as a new believer, I'm passionate by the example of the early church, their habits for integrating faith at work. I'm passionate about how scripture speaks to faith at work. And then, as I'm getting more and more involved at church, I'm stunned to discover that the vast majority of us separate rather than integrate faith and work. We go to church on Sunday and work on Monday. Statistically speaking, only 28% of working Christians even aspire to bring faith to work if the conditions were perfect for faith expression. Only 9% of us ever consider our faith wisdom when tackling challenges at work. And only 5% of us, one out of 20, consistently bring a Sunday faith to a Monday work. Those are really lousy statistics. So I started to realize that God was calling me to change this. It's one of the things that prompted me to launch At Work On Purpose as a ministry for greater Cincinnati for the tri-state area to guide working Christians to integrate faith and work. And the question is, how? What are the habits? How to do that? What I wanna do today is plant a seed with all of you. I wanna give you a very practical tool that we can use across the board. And before I go into this tool, let me just reference that the things that constrain us, that hold us back from bringing faith to work, I found that they usually are three constraints. I wanna touch on these briefly because I would expect that all of you have encountered these two. The first one is that we are ignorant of spiritual opportunities in our everyday work. And I don't mean that in a demeaning way. I mean, we simply don't see them. We don't see work as a form of worship. We don't see the people around us at work as a mission field. And it's understandable that we often don't. Why? Well, we're told by the workplace that work is secular, right? And off limits to faith. But scripture tells us that there is no such thing as secular. Anything that isn't sinful is sacred. And we also hear many times from the church, hey, we could really use your talents. Would you quit your job so you could come into full-time ministry with us? As if the work that you do every day isn't a form of full-time ministry, and it is. So we have been conditioned to be unaware of all the spiritual opportunities that surround us at work. This is stinking thinking that we need to start to remove from our brains. Here's another one. We're intimidated. What does it look like when we bring up the name Jesus or we are talking about faith at work and we're afraid that the HR department's gonna get us in trouble or we get fired or we might get hauled in front of the Supreme Court because we make a spiritual stand and then we get roasted for it? And I understand those pressures, they're real. But here's what many of us as working Christians don't realize. In the United States, the case law, the body of legal cases that's been built up over the years provides protection for faith expression if it's permission-based. That's the principle. Here's what that means. If people ask you about your faith, if they're inquiring about the spiritual side of your life, you have permission to answer their question. The issue isn't whether we're faith expressive at work, it's how we express our faith. We need to be strategic about it. And then there's the third area, we're ill-equipped. Most of us don't know even a first place to start for bringing faith to work. And lots of times when I spend time with working Christians say, well, what would a faith life at work look like? The answers that they give me typically are bringing things we do on Sunday to Monday. So for example, I wanna pray for my colleagues in the workplace and that's a great thing. That's certainly a place to start. Or I'd love to have a Bible study maybe over a lunch hour in the place where I work and there's nothing wrong with that. But I would suggest to you that work is the primary place through the week that we have the opportunity to bring heaven to earth, to advance God's kingdom in and through work, to literally redeem the things that are broken around us, to shape and change them, to influence the culture. You know, we talk a lot about Christians as wanting to promote a Christian worldview in the world. How do you think that happens? That happens when we bring that perspective to policies and procedures and business and curriculum and teaching and education and legislation and governance in the public square. That's what it looks like. So these are all the things that are on the inside for us that we need to understand. But then if we're trying to work outwards to the people around us at work and in a practical way, you know, start to bring faith to work, how do we do that? And Jesus actually spoke to this in Luke chapter 10. This is where Jesus is sending out the 70 or 72 disciples, depending on your Bible translation, to surrounding towns and villages in teams of two to spread the good news. And in the New International Chuck version, the way that that scripture goes, it basically says, hey, when you show up in these different places like at work, give a warm greeting, be a friendly presence. If people are unfriendly to you, then dust off your flip flops and move on. But if they are friendly, build a relationship with them. And then as you get to know them, find out what their felt needs are so that you can be a source of encouragement and support, that you help them, you know, heal the sick, minister to felt needs. And then when they come to you because you have reached out and gone the extra mile for them and they ask you why, they've given you permission to share Christ as the reason for your motivation, to share your faith testimony, to walk them in to the spiritual side of your life. In Luke 10, Jesus lays out four steps, bless, fellowship, minister, and proclaim. I would also suggest that there's a fifth step, which is to disciple, to make disciples, to discover, develop, and duplicate. And it's great if we have the privilege of leading somebody to Christ at work, it's great to connect them to a local church. The thing is though, most of us spend an hour or two on a Sunday at church and maybe we're part of a small group through the week, something like that. So maybe it's a few hours a week. But if we have walked with somebody spiritually at work and we're now working with them every week, we're spending 40 or 50 hours a week with them, who's in the best position to disciple them? It's not the local church, it's us as the church. And we see this example in scripture, this is what is called the Paul and Timothy model, right? Where Paul is discipling Timothy so that Timothy is raised up to then become a Paul, to discover, develop, and duplicate. So imagine now, for those of you who are left brain, imagine a spreadsheet where the rows are bless, fellowship, minister, proclaim, and disciple. And the columns are the stakeholder groups or constituencies in our sphere of influence. You know, the average local church in the United States has a congregation of under 100 people. But the average Christian in the workplace has a sphere of influence of over 300 people, three times the size. If we start to see all those constituencies, all those people groups that we work with through the week as our mission field, it changes everything about how we understand our work. All of a sudden, we start to think to ourselves, wait a minute, I'm not just employed, I'm deployed by the Lord to be the church where I'm working. I don't just have a position at work, I have a platform for spiritual influence and impact in and through my everyday work. In fact, for those of you who are financially geared, instead of a return on investment, what about a return on involvement? That's the name for this grid. So that as we involve ourselves in the lives of other people spiritually at work, we literally build up treasures in heaven, a return on involvement. So what would a grid like this look like filled out in practical terms? Well, let's imagine you're a teacher. One of the columns would be the students that you're teaching. Another column would be the other teachers who are on the faculty. Another column would be the administrators that are running the facility where you're teaching. Another column might be the Parent and Teachers Association. Another column might be the National Federation of Teachers that you belong to. See where I'm going with this? All of these are constituencies or stakeholder groups in your sphere of influence. And then you ask yourself the question, what does it look like for me to be a blessing to these different groups of people, to build relationship with them, to minister to their felt needs, to share with them spiritually when they ask, and if I get the privilege of walking with somebody who becomes a new believer, to even disciple them? What if you're a small business owner? Those columns might look like your employees, your contractors, your suppliers, your vendors, your investors, your regulators, your competitors. See where I'm going with this? What does it look like to bless a competitor? That's an interesting thought, isn't it? Pray for a soft landing when you beat them out on a project, right? Something like that. But this tool provokes practical thinking. What if you're a stay-at-home parent? That's a job too. That's very important work in our society. So one of those columns is the children that you're caring for. Another column is maybe other parents that you spend a lot of time with. Another column might be people in the neighborhood that you're very closely connected to. Maybe you do homeschooling, and there's like a whole homeschooling community. All of these are constituencies, and how are you engaging with them? Or what if you're somebody who is retired? You know, the workplace might say you're out to pasture, but what if you said you're re-fired instead of retired? What if you say to the world, someday I'm going to expire, but I'm not going to retire. I'm going to use the gifts, the skills that God has given me, and I'm going to leverage them to make the world a better place than I found it. So I'm going to keep serving in my refirement, and I'm going to have some constituencies. You know, I'm going to volunteer in this organization, and inside of it, there are all these different people groups. What does it look like for me to live out Luke 10 in practical terms in my mission field, in my sphere of influence, and in doing so to generate a return on involvement? And imagine, just dream with me for a minute. It's exciting if you think about one Christian that starts to do that, but imagine if we all started to do that at work. And radiating out from each one of us is this giant map of engagement with people across this tri-state region, the nation, ultimately the world. And isn't that really what Jesus was talking about in the Great Commission? You know, that we would bring this forward from Jerusalem to Judea to Samaria to the ends of the earth through the workplace. This is a practical tool that is available to you. So there's a QR code. You can download a writable version of this. It's a Microsoft Word document where you can literally fill it in. And let me encourage you here, don't feel overwhelmed that you have to like go in and fill all of those cells out on that grid all at once. Just start with one or two. The things that the Holy Spirit prompts for you right out of the gate. Begin with those and then fill it out as you go along. I want to invite Jeff back on stage so we can have some interactive back and forth. Awesome. Thank you, Chuck. The questions have been coming in. So buckle your seatbelt. We're going to jump right in. At my work, there is another Christian who walks up to visitors on tours uninvited and starts preaching Jesus to them. Management has asked them to stop doing this, but they did it again. What advice would you give this person? I'm assuming he'll get fired soon. Yes, that person may well get fired soon. And the advice that I would give him would be what I shared with you guys earlier. In the workplace, we need to be gentle as doves, but wise as serpents. We have to be strategic about how we engage. There's absolutely an avenue for faith expression, but we need to have people open the door so that we can walk in. If we try to push our way or pound our way spiritually into their world, we're in big trouble. And I'll share a brief story with you guys. Back when I was working at Procter & Gamble, so this is the late 1980s, okay? So when I describe an inbox and an outbox, I do not mean like email. I mean like in the old days, you had trays in your cubicles at offices with an in tray and an out tray. And I had a friend of mine named Brian who had become a Christian and he was fervent for his new faith and he decided to put Bible tracts in the inboxes of all the colleagues that I had on the fourth floor of Procter & Gamble. And then he vanished. And about a week later, I was asking her, what happened to Brian? Well, he got fired. And the tragedy of this is that when the pre-believers who are out in the workplace, if they see that form of faith expression, the problem is that they conclude that that's what it's like to engage with us as the church. So instead of inviting them in, we're actually driving them away. What does the spectrum of success look like as people start and grow to maturity in integrating faith and work? Ooh, these are really good questions. All right, I've got a few thoughts that are coming to mind. The first one is that I think as we start down this path, the thing that we learn right out of the gate is that this is a journey as much as a destination. I remember years ago, I started taking martial arts, taekwondo, and I eventually made it to black belt. But it was interesting because the better I got at martial arts, the more I realized I didn't know. Has that ever happened to any of you where you start to get more proficient at something, but then the more aware you are of how much there is, the more you realize you haven't figured out yet? So I have found that faith at work is very much like that. We get started down the path, and then we start to see more and more possibilities. But it is this constant journey. It's important not to think of it as a one and done or something where you reach a certain level and that's it, but instead, it's this constant journey. The second thing I would say is that at the end of the day, we need to remember that our job is to be obedient in bringing faith to work, but God is in control of the outcomes. Let's say, for example, that you are investing spiritually in somebody and praying that they come to faith, but you never see that happen. Did it mean that you failed in the way that you were trying to represent the church at work? No, it doesn't. It's our job to be obedient and faithful, but it's God's job ultimately in His sovereignty to win the harvest. So we need to be in the battle, but God wins the war. And I think it's important to keep that context because we can feel some days like we're failing. The last thing that I would say is that in our journey to bring faith into our work, it isn't just what we're doing for the Lord, it's how we're growing in Christ through the experience. I would suggest to you that we talk about sanctification in the church, right? Salvation is coming to Christ. Sanctification is becoming increasingly conformed to the image of Christ, to be more and more Christ-like. So much happens to us, not just through us, in our work. We grow spiritually as people. It's not just what we do, it's who we become. Well, related to that, how do you actually live for an audience of one and not get distracted by or tempted to live for other audiences in your life? Bosses, coworkers, friends, family, et cetera. So how do you actually live for an audience of one and not get distracted? Wow, that's another great question. I'll answer it the way I have tried to do it over the years. When I am assigned with something at work, the first place I go is to my boss, the Lord, and say, God, what are you looking to accomplish with this? What would success look like, right? So I'm trying to begin with the end in mind, but God's ends, right? And then from there, I step two. I'm thinking to myself, well, what does the world want out of this project? How does the world look at success? And as you guys well know, those are often two different things. So then what I need to figure out, this is step three, is how do I honor my employer where I'm doing the things I'm being asked to do, but I'm contextualizing all of that in the ultimate pursuit of what God's calling me to do? And most of the time, most days for most of us, the things that we're being asked to do fall adequately in line with biblical principles and so forth, so we're not put in that awful place where we're being asked by our employer to do something that God would disown. But every once in a while, that happens. And that's when we need to step forward and say to our human employer, you know, I know that you're asking me to go sell this product, but we already know that it's failed in the test market. So if we go ahead and we're just expanding this when we know it's a flawed product, we're just bringing something to the market that doesn't really work, and it just doesn't seem like that's what we're about as a company. I have found about 80% of the time when you bring a conflict like that to an employer, they will seriously reconsider, and in most cases, they'll adapt direction because you were the voice. Every once in a while, they won't. And then you need to ask the question, should I be working here? Do some of you remember the subprime mortgage crisis that led to the financial crash in 08? There was a person in our At Work On Purpose community who'd been working in a mortgage company that was selling those mortgages. And she brought to her employer the reality that they were giving out mortgages to people that they already knew were not gonna be able to sustain them. So these people were gonna default on the mortgages. And she felt that although she was getting a commission every time she sold a mortgage, that she was basically doing the wrong thing. And the employer refused to change, and so she quit her job. And she and I had some great conversations about that. It was hard, right? I mean, this is like your livelihood. But she was faced with a confrontation, and it was about three months later that the whole subprime market crashed. I think we probably have time for one more, and sorry for everybody else. Maybe I could email you the other questions that came in. And you could- Sure, I'll go to work answering questions. Actually, maybe I'll answer your questions this week. And I'll sign it, Chuck. God has used my business to separate me into a place where He alone is my helper. He has grown me up through my business. How do you encourage believers to step out and trust God if He is calling them to this walk? And there's a verse of scripture here. It's to seek to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business, and to work with your own hands as we commanded you. So the question again, how do you encourage believers to step out and trust God if He's calling them to this walk, this walk of God alone is my helper? Wow, these are fantastic questions, you guys. I've got a couple thoughts that are coming to mind for that one. The first one is just close to the ground, okay? Very practical. I have found that community is critical when we're starting to pursue active faith lives at work. In other words, don't go it alone. Have you ever thought about that? I mean, here we are today, it's Sunday. We're here together. We have this sense of community. You're inspired by the worship music. You hopefully get a good message on stage from the person who's presenting. You've got, you know, celebrate recovery in small groups and all this support, right? And then you go to work on Monday morning, and there's nothing. Like you are alone. It feels so isolated. My encouragement, in other words, is the first place to go is to find some companions for that faith walk at work so that whatever you are aspiring to do, whatever you sense God is bringing you towards, that you're able to walk that path with others rather than alone. So that's just a very practical suggestion. But the second thing, many of us can feel overwhelmed at the prospect of trying to step out of what is familiar and comfortable. And I think it's important to dig deep into our faith to say, if God's calling me to this, then he'll make a way for this. You know, and think about some of the scripture that speaks so hopefully to this. God can do immeasurably more than we could ever ask for or imagine. That we could encourage ourselves with God's word at a time when we need to step out in faith with courage that may be hard to come by. That's a good word. Give it up for Chuck. Thank you so much. And thank you, God. I'm gonna have the band come on up. And just a couple of things. Guys, there's a video that's gonna play and it's an opportunity. It's linked in your Digging Deeper handout in the bulletin or linked online. And it's an additional resource. It's a course that Praxis provides. It's a promo video. I wanna encourage you, if you feel alone in your work, think about who you could invite to doing this with you so that you could have a teammate. The whole Luke 10 thing, it was go out two by two. We're not supposed to do this alone. So check this out.