The faith-at-work movement finds a home

Floyd pointed to Wal-Mart, in nearby Bentonville; Tyson, the world’s largest meat company; and J.B. Hunt, a transportation giant, and noted that all three were built by a “founder or founding team that had close connections to faith and Christianity.”

The concentration of faith and money here has drawn the attention of Promise Keepers, the charismatic men’s ministry, which has aligned itself with the faith-at-work movement since re-emerging from financial difficulties. It says it expects to draw tens of thousands of men to its conference in June at the football stadium at the University of Arkansas downtown, one of the first it has ever held outside a major metropolitan area.

The last taboo falls
The faith-at-work movement has emerged for a lot of reasons, but basically it was because when you go to work, you take your faith and values with you. In an NBC News poll released this weekend, 58 percent of respondents said their religious beliefs played some role in the decisions they made at work, and 65 percent said those beliefs influenced how they interacted with co-workers.

“Twenty or 30 years ago, there was a sense, particularly in the Northeast, that there were certain topics that just weren’t suitable for the workplace: politics, sex and religion. Now we see that people are able to talk about sex very freely, and politics everybody talks about now,” said Miller, of Yale. “It seems like it’s almost a logical extension [for] faith. ...

“Many people started to say, ‘Wait a minute — that’s a central or constituent part of who I am, and for me to be in denial about that just doesn’t make sense.’ For me to leave my soul in the parking lot when I walk in the office isn’t a healthy thing to do.”

Over breakfast at a bakery near his office, Stephen R. Graves, co-founder of Life at Work and a partner in Cornerstone Consulting Group, draws boxes, circles and lines on a legal pad and identifies four “frameworks” of modern life: family, government, church and work. Lines connect all the frameworks, tracking their interrelatedness. Only church and work are unconnected.

“I’m convinced most men and women of faith, they’re looking to be untied,” said Graves, who, with his partner, Thomas G. Addington, is a co-author of influential Christian-themed business books with John C. Maxwell, an intellectual guru of the movement. “They’ve got one hand tied behind their back trying to integrate their faith, and they want to be untied. They just don’t know how to do it.”

One way many companies try to do it is to make chaplains available in the workplace as part of their benefits packages. Most companies that go that route hire outside firms to provide chaplain services, but here in Northwest Arkansas, Tyson Foods hires its own chaplains.

Most of the company’s chaplains are evangelicals, but John Tyson said he was committed to broadening the diversity of the chaplain staff beyond evangelicalism and even beyond Christianity. Chief chaplain Alan Tyson — no relation — supervises seven Catholics and a few other non-evangelicals among his 109 chaplains and recently hired his first Muslim prayer leader. If the need arose, he would look for a rabbi, he said.

Bringing the church to business
What separates today’s emerging faith-at-work philosophy from earlier church-centered programs — long based in Catholic dioceses, mainline Protestant denominations in the Northeast and the progressive religious political movement — is its firm grounding in the business world. Of course you should be right with God, the thinking goes, but it’s also good business.

Although the movement as it is expressed in Northwest Arkansas has grown out of mainline Protestant thinking, much of it evangelical, it is mostly nondenominational — non-sectarian, even, in its broader application. After all, it’s unrealistic to expect to impose Christian philosophies on a workforce of numerous faiths spread over an enormous country.

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