Employment

Introducing “Employ the Body!”

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Anyone familiar with my writings on both the business world and the necessity of Christian community knows I have some strong opinions. I’ve been writing for years that we Christians, as much as we talk about community, see our family units as little islands, that while floating in the same Christian sea as other islands, never truly touch. Couple that view with my view on business and you have today’s post, the introduction of a solution to some of that disconnectedness.

I’ve added a page to Cerulean Sanctum. You can see it up top. It’s called Employ the Body!

Employ the Body! is my attempt to help Christian freelancers (like yours truly), the self-employed, or those who own small businesses, leverage the power of the Web to help generate business. It’s also my way of increasing the Google Page Rank for those who would otherwise wind up buried in a sea of Google results should someone type in graphic designer or mechanic.

I’m offering this page as a free opportunity for you to link your business’s Web site on a blog with a large readership. No strings. No cost. No hidden gotchas. To get listed, you need to meet the following requirements:

You are a freelancer, self-employed, or the owner of a small business.

You are a born-again Christian.

You are a commenter on Cerulean Sanctum or have emailed me outside of blogging. In other words, I need to recognize your name. (The exception to the rule concerns spouses. If you are a regular commenter or emailer but your spouse isn’t, he/she still has a connection through you, so his/her business can be listed here. Spouses must also be born-again to qualify.)

Any business is welcome so long as it is legitimate. I will add additional business classifications to the page as necessary. (I do reserve the right to reject a listing that I deem inappropriate or contrary to the nature of the conversation here at Cerulean Sanctum.)

To be listed, I need your company logo (125 px in height), the name of your company, your name and title, the URL to your Web site, and, if you have one, a LinkedIn profile page link.

Those are the very simple rules.

I do have a request, though. It’s not mandatory, but it makes the whole idea work:

If you wish to be listed here, and you have a blog or Web site, I would gratefully request that you either link to the Employ the Body! page or reproduce the page on your own site in its entirety.

I say that because many small, Christian businesses can’t generate enough links to get a decent Page Rank in Google. In other words, the Internet noise drowns out a legitimate signal. That’s where the backlinking makes a big difference. With more and more people using the Web to locate companies, the difference between success and failure for a small Christian business can be a few dozen clicks. Seriously.

Employ the Body! has the opportunity to help other believers. If you’ve read this blog long enough, you know the improtance of community in tough times. If we can’t help each other, how then can we say that we are the light of the world through Christ living in us?

For those of you reading who aren’t freelancers, self-employed, or small business owners, you can still help your brothers and sisters in Christ who are by linking to the Employ the Body! page on your own blogs or by using the services of the companies listed there. (Understand, though, that I can’t vouch for the services rendered by other parties listed on that page. As with anything, wisdom is called for when dealing with any business, whether it calls itself Christian or not. In other words, your mileage may vary.)

Lastly, many people have asked how they can support me. Some have donated to Cerulean Sanctum, and that’s a huge blessing to my family. I realize, though, that not everyone has the means to do so. That’s perfectlyt understandable. You can help in another way. If you have a blog or Web site, please consider linking to the Employ the Body! page and to my freelance writing and editing business, Ethereal Pen Productions. It would mean a lot to me and to those listed on Employ the Body!

And if you ever need a writer or editor who can make documents sizzle, I’m right here.

Thanks, as always, for supporting the writing at Cerulean Sanctum. Now you have a free way to support other brothers and sisters in Christ, too.

Blessings,

Dan Edelen

Banking on God: Crisis, Part 2

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The people will wander through the land, discouraged and hungry. In their hunger and their anger they will curse their king and their God. They may look up to the sky or stare at the ground, but they will see nothing but trouble and darkness, terrifying darkness into which they are being driven.
—Isaiah 8:21-22

The Lord’s Prayer is one of the most familiar passages of the Bible. As much as each of us has probably prayed it a thousand times over in the course of our lifetimes, one portion stands out in these times:

Give us this day our daily bread.

If you’re like me, you have no idea what it means to live that verse. Most of us have some sort of fallback position that prevents us from ever being in a condition to truly need “our daily bread.” We open our pantry and the food practically bulges out. The refrigerator can’t hold any more than what we’ve already packed in. Daily bread? What the heck does that mean?

And does it extend beyond food?

A few years ago, my wife and I were carrying a private insurance policy not paid for by an employer. It had a high deductible and was intended to get us through a period of unemployment. Bread line, soup line, unemployment line...During that time, I got a sinus infection and the doctor strongly recommended I get a series of X-rays taken to judge the severity of the infection. When I found out how much the X-rays would cost, I passed on them.

That was the first time in my life I wondered what it would be like to be poor and have to forgo medical care. In the years since that time, the reality of being unable to afford basic medical care hits home harder and harder. Less and less is covered by increasingly costly insurance. Now the majority of employers offer no group plans at all. What’s amazing is that even with insurance, many people can’t afford to pay what their insurance will not. (Ask me about my family’s out-of-pocket dental outlays in the last few years.)

The Wall Street Journal today said that hospitals are now checking people’s credit histories before treatment. The way things are going (especially if RealID comes to pass, as it looks it will), you may one day be turned down for necessary medical treatment because your credit score is too low. That the hospitals are being granted access to your credit history is bad enough, but if things go as they are, it might get worse than that.

What does it mean for us to pray Give us this day our daily bread ?

I once went on a five-day, water-only fast. Most people don’t handle a single day of fasting well. Try five. The strange thing about fasting is the euphoria you begin to feel around day four. It’s a bizarre sensation. Oddly enough, by the time you reach day four, driven by that fasting “high,” you could probably hold out for another week or so before physical damage sets in. The hunger that gnaws at you those first few days passes. A giddiness replaces it.

I don’t want to think we’re at a point where more and more people will acquaint themselves with the strange rush of starving to death. But I’m nevertheless convinced that any time we had to buttress our positions against such an inevitability may have come and gone.

Give us this day our daily bread.

Here’s the questions an unprepared church must face:

  1. Companies lay off workers and giving goes down. Now how do you pay for your building and staff when the collection plate is half-filled and you budgeted for a full one?

  2. The bastions of the church start discovering that they need an extra job or must take service industry jobs that work strange hours, hours that overlap most church activity times. Suddenly, your lay leaders aren’t available to lay lead because they are busy making ends meet any way they can. Who is left to run all your discipleship programs?

  3. Churches that bet the farm on small groups, hoping they will sustain the flock during the week, now find that most people are busy trying to make a living and have no time for small groups. Now what?

  4. The most vulnerable people in the church start suffering. Who will care for and comfort them when you’ve been forced to reduce paid staff numbers and lost to job-related issues the 20 percent of non-clergy who do 80 percent of the ministry?

  5. When people lose jobs, they lose employer healthcare benefits. When they take part-time jobs (if available), they don’t get health insurance. What do you do when one of the cornerstones in your church tells everyone he has cancer and will need at least half a million dollars for a course of therapy?

  6. Scared people start making runs on banks and grocery stores. The ones who still do have some money clean things out. How will the people in your church eat?

  7. People in misery do stupid, desperate things. How do you react when an important person in your church goes down in flames and possibly goes to jail for it?

  8. What network connections has your church forged with churches who may have anticipated this trouble and planned better than yours did? Were you castigating their theology all these years, only to have to go to them for help now?

  9. People start losing homes. How will you shelter them?

  10. People start moving out of the worst areas to find work in better areas. Your church isn’t in one of the better areas. What do you do when you start losing people to nomadic lifestyles, or worse, to a falling away because of hard times and persecution?

Give us this day our daily bread.

We need two things: the faith to pray Give us this day our daily bread and the clear thinking to address terrible issues with radical answers rooted in the Gospel.

In the next installment of this series, I’ll offer some ideas of what we can do to better weather bad times and be a Church that is not only prepped for battle, but knows how to live by Give us this day our daily bread.

Stay tuned.

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Banking On God: Series Compendium

The Evils of Community?

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Tuesday, I wrote on the need for us Christians to understand that community and relationship with others is at the core of who we are as Christians, especially as it relates to the Great Commission and meeting the needs of others. You simply can’t have a ministry without people.

Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal ran a sidebar column that absolutely blew my mind. It shows exactly what we Christians are up against when it comes to fighting for depth in community. I almost never reproduce an entire article, but this one (“What’s Hurting America? Widespread Homeownership“) contains mind-boggling assertions in nearly every sentence:

Widespread homeownership has proven benefits for the nation but the Atlantic‘s Clive Crook says it brings some serious economic drawbacks with it. Citing research from Warwick University economist Andrew Oswald, Mr. Crook says the main problem with homeowners is that they are less mobile than renters. Less willing to leave their homes for greener pastures when the local economy falters, homeowners slow the nation’s economic growth and exacerbate unemployment issues by staying put. Communities of homeowners also often suppress new development by calling for new zoning rules.

On the plus side, homeowners are more invested in their communities, more likely to vote and work harder to improve their neighborhoods, but the overall societal good in homeownership isn’t clear-cut, Mr. Crook says. To that end, he questions the wisdom of the mortgage-interest tax deduction, a subsidy set up to ostensibly encourage widespread homeownership.

Mr. Crook said the deduction often promotes over-borrowing and higher spending, thus artificially increasing home values and placing borrowers in greater financial risk during downturns, such as the current housing market crunch. On a broader level, higher investments in housing †“ fueled by the tax deduction — come at the expense of investments in areas that expand the economy, such as commercial building and spending on business equipment, he says. — Troy McCullough

This is what we Christians are up against. If we fight tooth and nail to preserve our communities, we’re labeled “malcontents” for doing so. Bad! Bad house!We “exacerbate unemployment issues by staying put” and cause untold hardship fighting for zoning laws that restrict sprawl and consumerism.

Unbelievable.

Want to hurt the Church in this country even more? Increasingly force congregants to move every few years to chase jobs.

Want to bring most ministerial works within a church to a standstill? Keep changing the mix of people in the church so the wheel must constantly be reinvented.

At least nomadic tribesmen stay together as a tribe, but the kind of thinking listed in that article pretty much ensures alienation and disconnection.

Americans are already some of the most mobile people in the world. Studies show most families stay in one spot for less than seven years. Multiply that by a hundred families in a church and it’s no wonder little gets accomplished for the Kingdom. Everyone’s constantly on the move. People don’t get extended years ministering Christ to each other or to their communities.

This constant nomadic existence chasing fleeting jobs from one part of the country to another is why the Church in America MUST start speaking to issues of work and the revitalization of local and regional economies. The world is telling us that we can’t be good citizens if we want to put down roots and minister for years in the same community.

I’m not saying that we petrify in one spot. Even Jesus said that those of us who leave houses and lands for the sake of the Gospel will be blessed. Still, I suspect that most people in my town aren’t born again, so what is my obligation?

If my living situation is so transitory that I never truly get involved to any depth in the lives of those around me, then I’m less effective as a messenger of the Gospel. Just the disorientation of having to adjust to a new place means people who move are preoccupied with everything BUT ministry. The amount of bureaucracy and paperwork alone that accompanies moving within the same city is a nightmare, much less chasing jobs from city to city. That constant disequilibrium is the world’s way of distracting us from what truly matters.

We Christians have got to get serious about creating our own alternative/underground economy. We’ve got to be better networked so that people in our congregations don’t have to leave town to find work. We’ve got to start thinking of innovative ways to bring in income, even if it means exploring communal living arrangements that eliminate our need to duplicate goods to survive . If we can be freed of the need for the kind of jobs that force us to move from town to town looking for work, then let’s start working toward that goal.

I keep hoping and praying that someone on the national Christian stage will start speaking up about these issues. They play into the busyness that is crippling our effectiveness as the ambassadors of Christ in a dying world. If we’re constantly having to plan what city we’re going to move to next so we can follow the jobs willy-nilly, we’ll be distracted and ineffective our entire lives.

And that’s just what the Enemy wants.

(In similar news, it looks like we’ve been lied to for years about the lack of engineers and scientists in this country. If anything, there’s a glut. This hasn’t stopped Congress from continuing to demand H-1B visas to bring in more foreign workers to displace American engineers and scientists. I’ve been saying for years that the shortage of tech workers is a lie. Now the lie comes out. I think our government owes us former tech workers an enormous apology. If I had a Benjamin for every tech worker I’ve met who was forced into a nomadic existence to find work, or who bailed from tech altogether, I could’ve retired by now.)