The faith-at-work movement finds a home

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - It will take a long time to settle on an explanation of exactly what happened in Tennessee, but whatever it was, it wasn’t really all that unusual.

Thirty Muslim employees either were fired or walked out on their jobs last month at Dell Inc.’s logistics facility in Nashville. The workers, most of them recent immigrants from Somalia, said supervisors gave them an invidious choice: work or pray. Not both.

Dell called the dispute a misunderstanding, but Nashville’s Human Relations Commission is investigating, and 21 of the workers have hired the Council on American-Islamic Relations as legal counsel.

Formal allegations of religious discrimination in the workplace have almost doubled in a decade. In fiscal 1992, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission received 1,388 such complaints under Title VII of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964. In fiscal 2004, it received 2,466 complaints.

In Arkansas, a critical mass
Next door in Arkansas, a button-down crusade by business leaders, consultants, ministers and scholars is trying to reverse that trend. In this industrial and farming region around Fayetteville, a movement to welcome faith into the workplace has taken flight in the heady atmosphere of Southern evangelicalism and corporate megamoney.

A thriving cottage industry has evolved to help embed Christian principles into corporate structures. Life at Work, the much-admired journal of spirituality and leadership, was published here before its recent acquisition. The journal’s founders continue to write, teach and run a high-powered business consulting group from here, called Cornerstone, coaching senior corporate executives in how to run more ethical businesses by integrating faith into the workweek.

On the outskirts of town, WorkMatters, a nondenominational ministry, helps companies absorb Christian principles into their work. A few miles down the road, in Siloam Springs, the Soderquist Center at John Brown University, a private Christian institution, teaches “the transforming power of ethical leadership.”

In the nearby suburbs, one of the nation’s most prominent evangelical figures, the Rev. Ronnie W. Floyd, hosts a weekly lunch for business leaders that regularly pulls in heavy hitters like Wayne Huizenga, former CEO of Blockbuster Entertainment; John H. Tyson, CEO of Tyson Foods, the world’s largest meat producer; and the late Reggie White, the pro football superstar and minister.

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“It is fascinating to look at the fact that the world’s largest company — Wal-Mart, of course — is based there in Northwest Arkansas, and Tyson Foods, a Fortune 100 company that’s booming and growing, is based there, and J.B. Hunt and other companies,” said David W. Miller, executive director of Yale University’s Center for Faith and Culture.

“There are certain geographies that gain a critical mass, and exciting things happen in the business community, [like] Silicon Valley. ... Northwest Arkansas seems to have become a booming, creative, interesting place for businesses, which means they attract people from all over the country.

“Combine that with a wonderful heartland America sort of feel, where people are not embarrassed by who they are or what they believe, and that creates an environment where it would be a fertile soil for the faith-at-work movement to take root and blossom.”

Accepting the Great Commission
Ronnie Floyd is a man at home in both the church and the boardroom. A former chairman of the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, he manages two neighboring churches with more than 14,000 members, a pre-K-through-12 school, a sports ministry, a publishing and multimedia division and a television, satellite and streaming-video outreach with a worldwide audience estimated in the millions.

“It’s one thing to have a rabid right-winger” talking about God, Floyd said, gesturing good-naturedly at himself during an interview at his sprawling First Baptist Church in Springdale. It’s quite another when the Great Commission of the Gospel of Matthew — “Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the nations” — is an inspiration for the head of a corporation with access to a worldwide network of contractors, suppliers and retailers.

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