Extra Care Needed-Christians at Work  by Don Mathieson QC Article from Affirm magazine Summer 1997

Susan's Story

Susan graduated with BA and BCA degrees three years ago, and was quickly snapped up by a firm of merchant bankers. She was a committed Christian who had been carefully nurtured in her faith by loving parents. She was a regular worshipper. She had been a Sunday school teacher and helped to lead the parish youth group. At university she had many Christian friends and attended two TSCF conferences. She was ready to start a long career of devoted service to the Lord as a thoughtful and intelligent member of her local Anglican church.
 
 

After she had been at work for a few months she was called into the Executive Director's office. She was asked to be responsible for liaising with tax lawyers in a tax avoidance scheme and to report to the partners with recommendations. She was told that it was such an ingenious scheme that the firm would probably end up paying hardly any tax on its trading profits. This made her think. Obviously, if the scheme succeeded it would have an advantage over the firm's competitors. "What is my position on this as a Christian?" she asked herself. "I know it's immoral. But it's not a matter of my personal morality. I owe a duty of loyalty to my employer. I'm paid to do what's best for the firm. But is that the final answer? What would the Lord have me do?"
 
 

She decided to seek help. She consulted her Bible, which didn't seem to yield any guidance, and her library of Christian books which contained nothing helpful. She prayed, but she received no definite word. She saw her vicar, who listened sympathetically and gave spiritual but unspecific advice. She then talked with some of her non-Christian peers who were all very ambitious. They impressed on her that upward mobility depended on pleasing the partners or the boss. That is exactly what she did. When she made that decision two other thoughts emerged - 'If a person is going to operate in the secular world, it has to be on the world's terms,' and 'The Church is irrelevant to my work situation.' Susan didn't analyse these thoughts. She did not suffer a Damascus road experience in reverse.
 
 

Over the next few months she went along less often to church. Recently she stopped altogether, at the same time pulling out of a home group. Susan is still with the merchant banking firm and is ambitiously eyeing the next promotional rung. The tax avoidance scheme is in place and producing the anticipated results. An attractive and vivacious woman, she spend much of her weekends partying. She retains a deep love for her mother and father, has a deep sense of personal morality and occasionally opens her Bible. But the observer would be hard pressed to distinguish her values and behaviour from those of her work colleagues. She's working about 10 hours a day, hardly sees her flatmates, and reckons that her long standing Christian faith 'doesn't connect with what's really going on in the modern workplace.'
 
 

Following a survey of 108 leavers from evangelical, pentecostal or charismatic churches Alan Jamieson commented:
 
 

"If you ask church leavers why they have left, the most common answer is that they simply do not find church relevant to faith or life any more. Going to church does not connect with their work or family concerns, their concerns for the world at large or their sense of spiritual proximity to God." 1.
 
 

Along with a sense of the Church's irrelevance can easily go a sense of utter isolation, even although most modern Christians would much prefer the comfort of prayerful, knowledgeable support to heroically going it alone.
 
 

Reclaiming the Culture?

There is much talk today about 'reclaiming the culture'. In his 1992 Orange Memorial Lecture Harold Turner spoke of 'a new mission to our post-Christian and largely pagan culture.
 
 

The culture experienced today is largely a work culture. The workplace and its demands are central for both young people starting on their careers and many pre-retirement people. Work consumes more hours of the day than the family or hobbies and sports. The work culture confronts the Christian with a host of ethical issues. Because the Church is not equipping its own people to think through those issues and deal with them, it is increasingly experienced as irrelevant. No matter how much the Church is able to help its people in areas of worship, personal ethics, theology and family and other relationship, if it is unhelpful when it comes to the problems of the giant organisation or the smaller office many people will gradually come to feel that Christian faith and real life travel in separate compartments. We are left with nothing distinctively Christian to address to the culture, nothing with which to Christianize this central part of our modern culture.

A recent American book titled Reclaiming the Culture is subtitled Focus on the Family and the foreword asserts:
 
 

"We have lost our culture because we have lost the family, and we have lost the family because we have lost our faith." The introduction contains this sentence: "If the family is to be saved and if American culture is to be restored to goodness, it will be because God has raised up men and women who act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with Him." None of the following chapters has any discussion of daily work.
 
 

There is a danger here of reductionism. We may erroneously reduce the culture to family and relational matters, leaving out the workplace altogether. Of course families are under great stress. But the restoration of cultural values, should we think it desirable to devote energy to that end, must involve more than promoting a return to old-time values in our families. We must grapple with the many strands which are woven together in a many-faceted culture. (Sport too, and our changing attitudes to it, is another one of those cultural strands.)
 
 

Some clergy have made a practice of emphasising the importance of 'the mission field out there, beyond the door of the church.' They should continue to do so. We Christians talk about witnessing to the gospel at work, and taking the opportunities of speaking about our faith in a sensitive way. (In my experience, but not in that of others, these opportunities are very rare and therefore precious when they occur.) We need to be accompanying that emphasis with a concern for the pervasive problems of our secular and significantly corporatised culture.
 
 

Christians have done some significant thinking too, about the economic direction of the nation, about poverty, about whether the market is an adequate regulator of prices, and user pays - the names of Richard Randerson and Charles Waldegrave come to mind. If evangelical Christians were ever inclined to downplay social justice or practical love of neighbour that time is long past. But we must also address those questions pertaining to the nature of work in the 90s.
 
 

'The Church is irrelevant' can sometimes be a glib excuse for refusing to go along to an Alpha course, or otherwise take the Christian faith seriously, but the catch-cry of irrelevance can contain an important ingredient of psychological truth. It is a sloganistic way of saying that the Christian faith does not seem to be connecting with the oppressive, worrying issues which the non-Christian is facing.
 
 

Some may object that the experience of being a Christian professional is so different from that of the Christian business person or plumber that what we really need is more focused attention on the different occupations one by one. Almost nothing has been written, for instance, about what it means to be a 'Christian lawyer' - as opposed to being a lawyer who on Sundays and in her spare time busies herself with worship and good works. But that is a different subject. While we certainly need to address those issues more seriously, with laypeople making the running and writing up their results for wider consideration, we also need to identify and address some of the pervasive problems of the modern workplace - those which transcend the occupational boundaries.

Pervasive Issues in the Workplace.

Let me make a start by identifying some of the more significant ones.

There is the unrelenting pursuit of profit which drove the tax avoidance scheme the morality of which Susan briefly wrestled with. Profit is prioritised ahead of people, and people are discarded if profit-making requires a rationalisation or a restructuring.

The dark side of personal relations present in the workplace - the destructive gossip about others' work performance (or sex lives), backstabbing, the display of naked ambition, and the wrongful abuse of power over subordinate employees - readily condemned by the secular world as long as it expresses itself in sexual harassment.

Overwork, undue demands on others, anxiety and stress. You often hear complaints about the lessened ability to spend quality time with one's family; inability to take part in sport; the consumption of most of the weekend by reason of Saturday and Sunday trading. Jesus admonished his followers not to be anxious about anything but to be carefree as well fed sparrows and as unconcerned as the gracefully adorned lilies of the field. But how can we make that real; how can we really be free from anxiety when the all-important job keeps presenting us with demands, crises and deadlines? The pressures of competition may encourage corporate efficiency but they do little for individual happiness. The sheer number of working hours is also a problem - the much vaunted technology-induced 'age of leisure' has never arrived. In Australia, recent surveys show one in every four men, and almost as many women, now work at least 49 hours per week. It was also discovered that women work seven and a half times longer than men on laundry, ironing, and clothes care; they work three and four times as long on cleaning, child care and cooking.

Petty or not so petty dishonesty. Recently at St Mary's, Karori, Alistair Davis gave a powerful talk on evangelism and witness in the workplace. He mentioned the problem of the Toyota photocopier. When he first joined Toyota everyone used the photocopier without paying for their private copying. When he inquired what the charges were he was met with blank incomprehension. He insisted on paying. Now, as a result of his insistence everyone pays. He also discovered some not so petty dishonesty. Why were some supply contracts always going to the same firm? It was because there was a regular system of paying backhanders. He made himself unpopular in the cause of uprooting a dishonest practice. The employee primarily responsible was eventually dismissed.

Career path, employer loyalty and personal advancement. For today's secular young man or woman loyalty to one's employer or company is often more a sign of weakness and lack of career sense than of strength. Yet the apostle Paul's advice was, 'Look not only to your own interests but also to the interests of others.' (Phil 2:4). How do we translate that into the typical modern work environment? It is arguable that the work-place culture is increasingly foreign to our Christian heritage. For instance, there is more uncertainty. Careers are getting shorter, sharper and harder. Male and female employees are getting stuck in 'flat hierarchies' and suffering a drop in morale and commitment as a result.

Dehumanisation. Employers are increasingly demanding graduates trained to do specific tasks rather than educated in a generic discipline to understand the 'big picture.' Employers are simultaneously favouring less secure, short fixed-term contracts so that they can maximise flexibility. The current approach to work in Western countries regards people as units capable of performing certain tasks and knowing certain information. Although this has always been the case, the difference now is that the units must fit into certain clearly defined classes. These classes often disallow the usefulness of people with diverse combinations of knowledge and skill. I'm told that this can be likened to one of the current philosophies of computer software design - the Object Oriented Paradigm. The modern view of humans is one of humanity becoming moulded in the images of the processes and artefacts developed by human ingenuity to solve practical problems. Do modern employees see themselves as objects to perform tasks, being discarded or selected as required? I believe this is increasingly so. The contrast between such a notion and the Christian doctrine of humankind is obvious and stark.
 
 

Christians in the Business Organisation.

So far as I am aware, almost nothing has been written on the New Zealand business organisation from the viewpoint of Christian participation in it. We desperately need such literature from laypeople with significant experience in different kinds of modern organisations. (Full time clergy rarely have recent personal experience of ordinary secular work.) Perhaps some journals have focused on the everyday problems of participation in a large organisation or at the workface generally but I have not come across such discussions, not even in AFFIRM magazine. Such discussions need to be scripturally based but to go much further than exposition, using case studies, drawing on the insights of recent managerial philosophy and thoroughly connecting with the everyday.
 
 

A provocative list of questions appears in Robert Banks' 1987 book, All the Business of Life. Banks' comments remain true, "As yet, we have scarcely begun to come to terms with the all-pervasive effect that the work environment has on the way most of us look at life and conduct ourselves." 2.
 
 

A search of Latimer Library turned up no literature in this area except Zadok Perspectives for August 1996. Is there room for a Latimer ministry here in offering the Anglican Church a useful resource for group discussion? Intelligent grappling with the pervasive problems of the workplace could assist in reversing the perception of irrelevance, and even play a small part in attracting the missing 20-40 year olds back to many of our churches. Two other questions - Why have groups for men only fallen into major decline? and, Why is it often difficult to get men interested in home groups? - may be partially answered by the fact that what occurs at these groups is of little help with the pressures and problems of the workplace. To quote Robert Banks again, a writer who has stressed the importance of developing a Christian approach to everyday life, 'We must recognise that the dilemmas most Christians confront are often as intricate, subtle and perplexing as those that fill traditional theological textbooks.' 3.

This article first appeared in Affirm magazine, Summer 1997.

Dr Don Mathieson is President of Latimer Fellowship. The above article was adapted from his Orange Memorial Lecture delivered to Latimer Fellowship in Christchurch on 17 October 1997. Don was previously Professor of Law at Victoria University of Wellington. Recently he helped found the Timothy Trust which in 1997 has conducted day-long seminars about legal ethics from a Christian perspective in Wellington and Auckland.
 
 

End Notes:

1 'Should I Stay or Should I Go?' published in TSCF's 1997 Canvas newsletter.

2 Robert Banks, All the Business of Life, (1987) pp 76-77.

3 Banks, p.118
 
 

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