Business

The Christian & the Business World #7: Binding the Business Strongman

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I just want you to know you aren’t going to church with a crook…. More than anything else, I hope that my witness for Jesus Christ will not be jeopardized.

– Bernard Ebbers, church deacon, Sunday School teacher, self-proclaimed born-again Christian, and former CEO of Worldcom, speaking to his congregation at Easthaven Baptist Church after the scandal broke. The congregation responded with an enthusiastic standing ovation.

I believe in God and I believe in free markets.

– Ken Lay, former Enron CEO, son of a Baptist preacher and member-in-good-standing of Houston’s First United Methodist Church.

Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen, Adelphia Communications, Qwest Communications International, Tyco, Dynegy, ImClone, and Global Crossing. More often than not, those companies were run by Christians—at least in name, if not (as we now know) in actual practice. Go to JailIn one of the most damning articles I’ve ever read, The Wall Street Journal in July 2002 drew a correlation between the leadership of those disgraced companies and their (largely Evangelical) church affiliations. But Ebbers and Lay were not the only two Evangelical Christians to find themselves having to answer to the courts and shareholders for their fraudulent schemes. From the lowliest person involved in one of these well-known business scandals to the highest echelons of those disgraced companies, Christians were involved every step of the way promoting gross fraud and chicanery.

But how is this possible? How does your Sunday School teacher teach a great lesson on Sunday on telling the truth then turn around on Monday and defraud shareholders in his company to the tune of $3.8 billion?

It’s not Worldcom, it’s worldview.

As we saw in this series’ posts on The Industrial Church Revolution, Darwinian worldviews supplanted a coherent Christian worldview as the Industrial Revolution grew, feeding off the classism created by it. Not only were average Americans losers in this transition, but capitalism lost as well. The result was that the concentration of capitalism’s power moved from home-based economies in a divergent marketplace made up of individual families (largely governed by a Christian worldview that kept the purity of capitalistic ethics in check) to corporations that operated out of a survival-of-the-fittest mentality where the ends justifies the means. (Lest anyone think this is an oversimplification, try explaining the litany of ethically-bankrupt companies listed above any other way.)

Without a Christian worldview upholding it, capitalism takes on a truly wicked sheen. Darwin’s ethical base is…well, it doesn’t have one. It could be argued that ultimately the only ethic that can prevail in a system where passing on one’s genes (be it naturally or figuratively) is the only goal is “grab and maintain power at all cost.” This prevailing Darwinian ethic is remarkably similar to the ethics of many, if not most, of today’s large businesses. Matched with capitalism, Darwinian business practices become nothing short of hellish.

I live outside a city dominated by two enormous and exceptionally powerful companies lurking in the Top 10 of the Fortune 500. From my own personal experience, I can tell you that the mentality of those companies is that they would rather send entire departments within them to the guillotine than be #2 to any company in their marketspace. Microsoft, another company with a win-at-all-cost Darwinian worldview, regularly recruits ex-execs from both of those companies; the current leadership of the software giant reads like a Who’s Who of expatriates from both.

The question that must be asked here is if Darwinism has supplanted Christianity as the predominant worldview, then how can anyone expect the leaders of a company to operate the company in a way that is contrary to the soulless, anything-goes-ethics of Darwinism? The leopard can’t change its spots. So why do we think that the business world can change if the people running those businesses no longer operate from a Christian perspective?

Everyone here is tripping over the truth that the Social Darwinism that governs many businesses has a worldview that reeks of short-sightedness. Whatever is expedient in the moment is what gets the job done. Darwinism’s emphasis of passing on the genes of one generation to another totally foregoes the long-term view of life that Christianity possesses. Darwinism preaches just one generation, while Christianity preaches eternity. No wonder so many business decisions today lack any forethought other than “Let’s get through one more quarter and damn everything else.” So many of the recent trends in business—outsourcing, offshoring, age-ism, and so on—are based in short-term Darwinian thinking and not in a holistic Christian worldview that looks beyond a three-month chunk of time.

Apart from an expedient view of business, other odd things happen when a company lives by a Darwinian worldview. One of those oddities is that it renders Christians who work for a Darwinian company surprisingly mute at the most inopportune moments. In the city near me, one of those large companies came out in favor of a morally-questionable piece of local legislation designed to improve their recruiting pool. And while the company itself has many within it who are the bastions of their churches, those bastions did not speak out against the proposition. Worse still, they supported legislation elsewhere in the state that went against the company line, but they would say or do nothing locally to jeopardize their careers. Is this the example we should be setting for the generation that comes after us?

These examples are ultimately factors in the dichotomy that all Christians in the work world must face, yet the Church’s deathly silence on work issues is startling. Most people in a church spend eight or more hours a day doing their jobs, yet American Church leaders never speak to work issues. More often than not, those Church leaders are shown hobnobbing with folks like Lay, Ebbers, and Kozlowski. And though the name of the CEO here escapes me, a recent business leader who talks about his born-again Christianity was making the rounds of churches before his fraud trial, preaching from the pulpit. Somewhere along the line we have forgotten that “By their fruits ye shall know them.” And as for all the gladhanding too many Christian leaders give to corrupt business leaders, an old Southern aphorism is, “If you lie down with dogs, you get their fleas.”

The extension of this silence is that those who do stand up to corrupt business practices and pay the penalty for it are too often shunned by their churches. Congregants in many churches feel an unease when too many unemployed people start showing up around them. Yet if we Christians are to stand up to devilry in the marketplace we have to start rallying around Christians who take a stand against corporate corruption and the steamroller business trends that have their source in Darwinian thinking. It is one thing to tell a congregation that God does not care about image, yet if honing that image keeps a person in his job, what do we say to him when he stands up against that honing and winds up in the unemployment line? Remember, God takes care of the widows and orphans and can feed them from heaven with manna if He wishes, but He chose the Church to be His hands and feet. Yet what is the Church in this country doing to help Christians who take a stand and run afoul of Darwinian business practices?

This is the environment we face today, and though some think worldly answers like Sarbanes-Oxley will hold businesses in check, the only way to get past the brutal short-term Darwinian thinking that infects the majority of the business world—even within supposedly Christian businesses and organizations, as Nancy Pearcey so rightfully notes in her book Total Truth—is for Christians to not just lobby for a room to hold lunch-break Bible studies in, but to dig out the corrupt Darwinian foundation underlying business and install a Christian worldview. Christian leaders must refrain from endorsing business leaders who operate out of Darwinian principles even as they are reaching out to help pull down Darwinism within corporations. Christian leaders must start speaking to work issues and also offer businesses some incentive to endorse Christian means of running their businesses. God’s original call to work by “subduing the earth” should never mean “leaving a wake of Darwinian destruction behind in the process.” Let me tell you, God hates that kind of short-sightedness. If we cannot make the case that a Christian worldview trumps a Darwinian one when it comes to long-term health of businesses and the communities around us, then God help us all because the scandals and broken lives that result will only increase.

In the next installment of this series, we’ll take a look at several business issues being ignored by American Church leaders and what we can do about righting them. Tune in to The Redemption of Corporate America coming up soon.

Previous post in the series: The Christian & the Business World #6: The Industrial Church Revolution, Part 3

Next post in the series: The Christian & the Business World #8: The Redemption of Corporate America

Work (and Everyday Life) Redeemed

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In my exploration of why men are missing from the Church (see “The Church’s Missing Men“), I touched on the issue of work, showing how the intersection of work life and everything not work is simply not occurring in a reasonable way with many men. Church and parachurch organizations heap increasing loads of requirements on men already burdened with record levels of work time as they strive to avoid the next downsizing.

The Church must find a way to shield men from having to bear this burden alone. It must find ways to free men—and women for that matter—from their time traps, giving them the time they need to do all the things that are asked of them.

One way to break this cycle of pressure is to rethink community and work, two profoundly important issues the Church in America is not addressing well. The early Church provides insight here:

And all who believed were together and had all things common. And they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, according as anyone had need. And continuing with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, they shared food with gladness and simplicity of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily those who were being saved. (Acts 2:44-47)

I believe that we in the Church are suffering from a massive overload of duplication. Each of us has become a little island unto ourselves (families, too) and it results in an astonishing amount of wasted time and money.

My own family’s situation is informative. I live in a rural area. My neighbors and I all have some decent-sized acreage. To handle this, each one of us has a farm-sized tractor. I use my tractor about once a week. The rest of the week, it sits in my pole barn. My property has a couple hedges on it. Since they are large, they need a good trimmer to keep them in shape. I trim them a few times a season. Since I didn’t have a cordless hedge trimmer, I went out and bought one. Now it hangs in my pole barn 362 days a year, rusting.

Every day, I prepare dinner for three people. Then I clean up that meal. Meal prep, shopping for the food, and cleaning up afterwards consumes a considerable amount of time every day. And this is repeated three times a day, every day.

When I go to the market, I pay for various items of food. That food incurs a markup consisting of money above the cost of production. In the grand scheme of things, that markup is money that I have essentially “lost” to the market.

Goods are not the only things that are infrequently shared: I have practical skills and so does my neighbor, yet rarely do we call on each other for those skills.

What I am getting at here is that we in the Church are doing a very poor job of handling the money, time, and skills God has given us. Everyone in every church across the land duplicates effort every day at an enormous cost of keeping each family’s little island an island.

When we talk about community in the Church, we simply do not understand what is at stake. As long as I have been a believer, I have seen all kinds of communities, but very little community. Our lack of reliance on God (since we usually have cash to pay for anything that faith would ordinarily cover) translates into a lack of reliance on others within the Body of Faith.

We do not see how pressing the need for real community is. I believe the Church has to start girding itself. I think that tax exemption for churches is going to go away sooner than we think and a lot of worshiping bodies are going to find a financial millstone—their church building—around their necks. There is no reason to believe that the next time the economy tanks we won’t see the same layoff situation that plagued millions during this last downturn. In fact, those cycles of boom and bust may become more frequent, with the busts outlasting the booms each time.

To this, the Church must have viable solutions that address the real needs of real families. The answer must come from our living out a vital community.

I think that we need to start encouraging sets of four to six families to start living in little sub-neighborhoods, either within an existing community or by building one together. A mature group of Christian families could buy a large plot of farmable land, build a few decent-sized houses and a common building, and live together in community, replicating the pattern across a metroplex.

In the planning stages for the community, families could work to combine sets of skills so that certain members of the community would work in “regular” jobs, some would farm the land, others would take care of the kids and teach them; with this, the duplicate items, time, and effort could be eliminated. Meals could be shared in the common building and cooked on a rotating basis or, if agreed to, by whomever wants to do the cooking all the time. Each family would have an agreed upon amount of money for its own needs, but also contribute to a common pot that would be used not only as a “tithe”, but also to buffer the community itself in the event that people lose jobs (and also to help fund the farming and the family, or families, that perform that role within the community.)

In these communities, money could be saved by eliminating duplicate items. Fewer vehicles would be needed. Childcare is concentrated and homeschooling materials are not duplicated. No need for each family to have items that sit and gather dust—everyone can use them. Having the agriculturally productive land helps feed everyone in the community and the overflow of that can be brought into the larger church community. (It also helps if food distribution gets dicey some day through terrorist attacks, persecution of believers, or other disaster-related events.) A variation on this would be to have a community of all farmers supporting a community of all city workers and vice versa, though there might be distance issues to work out.

Families in our churches struggle needlessly because they are attempting to be islands. The amount of money alone that can be saved would be extraordinary. We could all live with less and be happier. The buffers for those who get down on their luck would actually work, rather than being merely talked about. And most of all, I truly believe that such communities would not only dramatically lessen the amount of time each of us spends each day rushing from place to place doing work to keep our island an island, but I think that this would free people to do the one thing none of us seems to be doing very well: taking the necessary time to draw near to God.

We’ve ratcheted everything up tighter than a watchspring and we cannot keep on jogging on a speeding treadmill without an imminent collapse. The Church has got to find ways to live in real community and also solve the problem of the increasingly frenetic job world if we are to be what Jesus intended us to be.

The Church’s Missing Men

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For all intents and purposes, the Christian Church in America is not growing. George Barna’s organization has been on top of this plateau for years, so the numbers are easily verifiable. There are some that might even argue that the Church is slipping because the number of unchurched adults is up from 21% in 1991 to 34% today. Men comprise 55% of the unchurched, a number that is made worse when we consider that men are less than 50% of the population (49.2% according to Census estimates.) Worse yet, only 38% of those who claim to be “born again Christians” are men .

These are disturbing numbers and demand some analysis. Why is the Church so disproportionately female? I believe that a partial answer to this is that most men are overwhelmed by the demands currently being placed on them by our culture in general, and Christian churches and parachurch organizations specifically.

To start, men are getting many messages from their churches (and parachurch organizations) that simply do not line up with realistic expectations of home, family, and work. It would be no stretch of the imagination to think that the average Christian man is asked to…

1. Be the primary—and optimally sole—breadwinner

2. Set aside time for marriage enrichment (planned dates, marriage enrichment classes, and couple getaways)

3. Set aside important daily growth and development time with his children (often extending to homeschooling)

4. Perform other husband-related duties at home

5. Be part of a coed Bible study or small group with his wife

6. Be part of a men’s Bible study or small group

7. Maintain a community presence by being actively involved in his local government or community affairs

8. Maintain a daily Bible reading/study time

9. Devote a meaningful amount of time to prayer and meditation

10. Volunteer at his church

I’m certain most people reading this will agree that this list of 10 accurately reflects the reality portrayed to Christian men as being the “godly ideal.” A culling of the present message of family-oriented Christian ministries from radio, TV, Christian bestselling family-oriented books, and pulpit messages will find these ideals repeatedly reinforced, often with the not-so-hidden message being, “If you do not do all these things—and do them well—you are not fulfilling your role as a Christian man.”

But when we consider the ways in which the Church and families are operating in this country, is this a realistic expectation?

Depending on which survey you read, the average American is spending between 47 and 49 hours a week at work. Of those varying figures, there is one agreement: Americans work more hours every year. As companies further downsize and ask more of their workers, this trend shows no sign of letting up.

There is also countercultural pressure from within churches and parachurch organizations (such as Focus on the Family) to give their imprimatur to households in which the father works outside the home as the sole breadwinner while the mother stays at home with the children, preferably homeschooling. ( And though I cannot find exact figures to support this assertion numerically, my personal experience of more than a quarter century in the Church has been that this is true—and growing more widely accepted as the norm.)

Given these two factors, it can be projected that the average Christian father will spend more and more time working, with less time devoted to family life (or any of the other nine items on the list.) This situation is simply not being addressed by church groups, even as the picture of what constitutes a “good, Christian father” is continually expanded to include more “must do’s.”

What comes of this contradicting message is that the other items on the list suffer—often greatly. Since the 1990’s, the emphasis has been on marriage and family time, and for the most part, Christian men have responded to this favorably. Faced with the fact that Christians, even those claiming to be “born again,” are divorcing at rates equal to their secular counterparts, churches and parachurch organizations have gone into overdrive preaching the message of hearth and home. No sane person would argue against this need.

But something has to give, and I believe that it is the spiritual life of men that is in decline. The move of churches away from traditionally teaching through the pulpit and adult Sunday School classes, instead preferring small home group teaching (often led by less experienced leaders), means that men are getting their Christian Education from less reliable and less focused sources. Small groups often trade off teaching and study with relationship building. While making stronger relational ties is an admirable goal, the horizontal cannot supplant the vertical. Yet increasingly, this is the case.

Forced to carve time for more outward, visible proofs of Christian devotion (those most rewarded by Christian society currently), private Bible study and prayer time are becoming luxuries to many Christian men. For all we are asked to do, though, how can fifteen minutes a day in private prayer and Bible study ever hope to ground us deep in the Lord, able to meet the day’s demands? There simply is no possibility that an overcoming Church, grounded in spiritually vital men, will arise in our lifetimes if this is the extent of our personal devotion. What rushes in to fill the vacuum left behind by the loss of a powerful, manly Christianity with teeth is a gentle, emotional, feminized version that men find lacking. Faced with this standard, men become disenchanted. Well-described in the phenomenally popular Wild at Heart book that is the backbone of nearly every Christian men’s group, the resulting spiritual malaise becomes an increasing source of an angst that seemingly has few answers. John Eldredge claims a solution in his book, but his response—go hunt bear with nothing but a pointy stick—ultimately misses the fact that men are not communing with God in any helpful amount because they are being torn in too many directions.

None of this is lost on men. As they find themselves rushing to pursue every “all-important” Christian requirement placed on them, God Himself becomes an option. Can anything but burnout result? Men outside the church see this burden—who can escape its omnipresence—and decide they don’t need to stack their days with any more requirements, so they take a pass. Or in the cases where they do attempt to “walk the Christian walk,” they find a To-do list, eventually fail at meeting the list’s demands, and drift away.

In the midst of all this activity, the vital relationship with Christ is being eroded. Devoid of the deep, abiding presence of the Spirit, Christianity instead becomes a series of manmade attempts to live and minister. Failure is assured. No wonder that many men find more reassurance in the glow of the television tube. At least it makes no demands and does not judge when nothing more can be given.

In the future, I hope to devote a closer look to what I believe is the only real solution to this problem: rethinking how Christians work. With work occupying so much of our daily existence, is there any question that something will suffer from our increasingly vanishing free time? Unless the church and parachurch are actively working to help men come to grips with their employment strain, they should not continue to tie heavy burdens around men’s neck, burdens they cannot adequately fulfill.

For now, though, the call to churches and parachurch organizations is to understand that too much is being asked and no means is given to ease the strain. At a time when everyone feels harried by life’s “necessities,” it is no surprise that men have weighed the current message of the Church and found it wanting.

Update! A 4/20/05 follow-up to this issue is available: Another Look at the Church’s Missing Men.