The Monkey

No doubt you know the monkey...perhaps all too well. Every sincere Christian is familiar with him. He's most noticeable on Mondays, especially if the sermon that Sunday was about being a vibrant witness for Jesus Christ.

The monkey shows up just as you're getting settled in for a new week. As you finish up your morning coffee, you're pretty pumped about being one of the good guys—a Christian—at work. Then one of your coworkers stops by to share a new joke and to fill you in on the wild party he had that weekend. As every illicit detail is described, you think of the sermon you heard the day before. Suddenly, you feel the monkey—the unmistakable weight of responsibility to stand up for your faith in a world that needs God.

If you're like me, you'll start to rationalize with the monkey. Surely, I'm not just supposed to start talking about God now...right in the middle of a story like this! Gradually, the unspoken dialogue evolves into a theological discussion. Does this person really think I'm just another one of the guys? If so, then I must not be much of a witness. Maybe I'm not as spiritual as I thought. Maybe my salvation didn't really stick. Since you obviously haven't been a very good witness up until now, you can't help feeling some pressure to give the right response—one that would honor God and let this guy know whose side you're on. Unsure of what to do, however, you fake your best laugh at the joke, despite its crude overtones. After all, you don't want to alienate yourself from someone who obviously needs God. Even Jesus wouldn't do that.

Later that day you're sitting in a strategy session to brainstorm ways the company can reduce turnover among its employees. You can't help recalling the Christian book you finished recently about how to treat people the way that Jesus did. You remember how moved you were when you read about God intervening to help the people who put Him first. You would love to be part of something like that. Maybe God showed you those principles so you could suggest them in this meeting. Maybe it would start a new movement in your workplace. Maybe that's part of God's purpose for your life's work.

Then again, maybe they'll just think you're crazy. They might laugh behind your back for months. You might lose all respect at work, and along with it any chance for having any Christian influence. Besides, maybe it's God's purpose that you just earn a good living for your family without rocking the boat. The monkey feels even heavier for the moment.

The monkey can show up just about anywhere. It's the burden we Christians feel when we remember we're supposed to be making disciples. But all along we're struggling to understand what it means to share our faith in a country where it's politically incorrect to "impose" our beliefs on others. So we learn to work within the boundaries. It's okay to mention God, just don't talk about Jesus. It's okay to do Christmas as long as it's about Santa and winter rather than what's central to our faith.

As Christians, we get pretty good at blending in. And for a while, the monkey goes away.

Then along comes a speaker at church telling stories about boldly sharing his faith on an airplane or something. We hear of people instantly turning to Christ, all because of the faith of someone who was willing to risk it all for God. We can't help wondering if we're supposed to be doing something like that...something profound—something God-sized—with our lives. Maybe being a Christian in the workplace should look a little more like that guy on the airplane. After all, he had only a couple of hours to operate; we've got forty every week. You have to wonder if we're really doing all we're supposed to as Christians. Is God truly pleased with our lives?

Wait a minute. There I go again, overthinking things. Enough already. Spirituality is important, but it's not everything. All things in moderation. Besides, God just wants me to be at peace.

Then again, maybe sharing my faith in my workplace is what it's all about. After all, here I am, a pretty serious Christian, and I'm surrounded by people who don't really know the difference between religion and a relationship with the living Christ. I'm supposed to be a light in the darkness. I've been charged with carrying out the great commission. There's got to be something I should be doing around my coworkers. Surely He didn't intend for me just to blend in.

The monkey can make you feel overwhelmed—there's a burden of responsibility when you're talking about someone's eternal destination. The monkey can make you feel guilty—what if you are denying your faith by not speaking more openly about it in the workplace? The monkey can make you feel frustrated—it's hard to know how to share your faith without looking like a superstitious simpleton to all your coworkers. What good would it do for God or your career if you lose your credibility?

When I first started to experience all this confusion years ago, my first instinct was to pretend the monkey wasn't there. After all, I looked pretty good compared to most of the other Christians I knew. But the more serious I became about my faith, the harder the challenge was to ignore. When you drive from a men's prayer breakfast to an office that's hostile toward God, the contrast is undeniable. It's hard to gloss over the fact that you possess a treasure that could change the lives of everyone around you, if only you were willing to share it.

I've even tried running away from the monkey. What better way to exercise my faith than to start my own "Christian" company? And if I surrounded myself with enough Christians, maybe the tension of having to deal with all those non-Christians would go away. But it didn't. Deep inside, I still knew there were people out there who needed to hear about the God who runs deeper than religion.

So, over the years, I've emerged from that struggle over how to share my faith in the workplace with a clear picture of what it means to be about my Father's business. I have learned that there is no greater career accomplishment than to make my workplace my mission field.

In the pages that follow, I've distilled what I've learned into a strategic method for sharing Jesus Christ in your workplace. You are about to discover some eye-opening principles that will change your whole approach to your work and to your faith—no more uncertainty about when it's appropriate to speak up or whether your timing is right. I will also share a powerful assessment model that can help you identify the most strategic opportunities in your workplace. You will be able to see more clearly where God is calling you to focus your efforts—no more awkwardness or blurting out holy hand grenades in a desperate attempt to bring God into the picture.

Best of all, I want to share some of the true stories of God at work where I work. You see, this is not evangelism theory or theology. This is a very practical account from someone who's been there. I went from being a fellow struggler to a confident follower of Christ who has learned when it's time to speak up...and what to do in the meantime. I've seen the most unlikely agnostics move into a vibrant relationship with Christ. This is not because I'm a great evangelist, but because God came alongside me to show me what to do. I had made "sharing my faith" into a gut-wrenching event. But now I've learned that I am most effective when I follow a slow, natural, even comfortable process. I feel like a load of guilt has been taken off my back and that being an influence for Christ in the marketplace is now something that's doable!

And now I want to show you how you can do it, too. Because you, too, can be a confident, effective witness for Jesus Christ where you work. And when you are, you will have the joy of going to work each day knowing that you are truly about your Father's business.

Chapter 1
The Curse?

Work.

It seems destined to be a four-letter word. No matter how you spell it—job, career, calling—it still has curse written all over it. Maybe that's just the way it's supposed to be. After all, it was the original curse word, as Adam first lived out the consequences of his cursed life by working the land for food. To this day, work ranks among the leading obstacles in many people's lives.

It seems the dreams of most working people revolve around arriving at a place where they'll no longer have to go to work. That's not to say we don't enjoy some of the challenges along the way. But if you could dig beneath the surface, the primary objective of most people's career is to eliminate the need for it.

Advertisers play to this sentiment, tantalizing their target audiences with depictions of financial freedom and absolute autonomy. Statewide lotteries are funded, one dollar at a time, by the pipe dreams of would-be early retirees. While money is the number one obsession in our culture, the ultimate end of wealth is emancipation from the workplace.

It is common sentiment that work is something to be avoided.

Work is universally portrayed as something that gets in the way of all the other things we'd rather be doing. Work calls the shots. It's the factory whistle that awakens us each day from the dream of a life of leisure. Work drags us from our homes and subjects us to traffic jams and the shark-infested waters of competition. Work drops us back home in a heap at the end of the day, or at the end of a long business trip. Work tells us where we can live, what we should wear, when we can go on vacation, and how much we can spend in between. Wherever our hearts turn in life, work is there dictating the pace and saying yes or no to our heartfelt passions and desires.

As young children, we are encouraged to dream of what we want to be when we grow up. Our educational system is oriented around shaping us into one of the molds that will define us as bachelors in business administration, economics, English, science, or education. Eventually, we refine our identity to the point that we fit nicely into one of the categories that can be found in the yellow pages, or a title on the organizational chart of the company where we work. And after all is settled, one of the first questions people ask when they meet us is, "What do you do?"

In our culture, we are defined by what we do. And everything else revolves around it. Wherever the career opportunities take us is where we raise our families, attend our churches, and join the neighborhood pool. What we do precedes who we are.

There's just one problem. We don't want anything to tell us what to do. We love autonomy. So, in allegiance to our human nature, we make it our goal to cheat the system. We work for rapid promotions, we invest for early retirement, and we play the lottery to increase our chances of getting our freedom as soon as we can...winning back control of our lives while we are still young enough to enjoy it.

As the headline for a retirement fund ad put it, "Life is two periods of play separated by forty years of work."

So work is a curse to be endured. At least, that's how the average person views work.

Surely, we Christians hold a more enlightened view of work. We have beheld the truth that work was ordained by God even before Adam and Eve invented apple pie. We know that God Himself worked and called it good. We embrace the ideal of working "heartily, as to the Lord" (Colossians 3:23, NKJV). We read the Bible and learn that God uses work to mold our character and meet our needs. We understand that work will be one of our joyous assignments in Heaven, not just the lot of those condemned to the other place.

We have learned that work is not really a bad thing in God's eyes.

And yet, when it comes to being a Christian at work, many believers don't feel that way at all. We understand that work is not quite the curse we once thought it was. But in our quest to be a beacon of light to a lost world, we often see work as something that gets in the way. We long to live out our faith Monday through Saturday, but we have to go to work instead. We dream of how effective we could be for the Lord...if it weren't for this lousy job.

Somehow, we develop an either/or mentality: I can either be in the secular work world or I can be in ministry, but not in both. We have bifurcated work into these two distinct realms rather than seeing the both/and possibility. What if we could be in the marketplace and be in ministry at the same time? Suppose we saw our workplace as our church and our jobs as our ministry. Suppose we went after our workplace ministry with the same fervor and passion as a twenty-six-year-old youth pastor just out of seminary.

The idea of being in ministry at work was something I had shied away from. I had been a pretty good church member, but work was a whole different ball game. Let me tell you my story, and you'll see why ministry was pretty far from my thinking in my early career.

I was a rising star at AT&T. At age thirty, I was promoted to division level, one of the youngest ever. At thirty-three, I was to be nominated for the company's Sloan Fellowship Program, a key prerequisite for moving up the corporate ladder.

But on the heels of a transfer from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Atlanta, I experienced a major disruption. What had been a smooth career path suddenly became rocky. At the same time, my marriage was in trouble, the consequence of eleven years of putting my career above everything else. Realizing that I couldn't hold my life together by myself any longer, I turned to God for help. On a starry night I will never forget, I walked out in the backyard and told God I was finally His. I gave it all up to Him. "It's You and me, Lord," I said. "I am going public with my faith. I'm going to stand for something. Whatever happens, happens!"

I was changed forever that night. God gave me a new heart and a new attitude based on a deep gratitude for His forgiveness and His acceptance. I knew that I was loved for the first time in my life. I was ready to live for Him 24-7, but from that point forward, it got even harder to live a dual life.

Away from the office, I devoured Christian books and Bible teaching to feed my spiritual growth. At work, however, I struggled to live out my faith in a world that seemed completely disconnected from the God I was getting to know. I don't mean I was struggling with sin and backsliding. For once, that wasn't the problem. It's just that I lived in a spiritual place that had meaning and purpose, yet I worked in an earthly place that now seemed antiquated and irrelevant. I wanted to move on to my new life, but this old environment—work—kept getting in the way.

As much as I tried, I couldn't seem to reconcile those two worlds. Attempts to tell my story and share my faith at work were awkward. And my efforts to operate by biblical principles seemed hypocritical in light of the old reputation that still followed me around. I wanted people to see a reflection of God in me, but I was convinced all they could see was the same old me on a new religious kick. I felt shackled to my past.

I was so grateful for God's forgiveness, I could hardly contain myself. He had started to restore my marriage; I was in love with my wife and kids in a way that I hadn't known before. And I was in love with God. I needed to do something bold. I kept dreaming of how effectively I could serve Him, if I could just get away from my job.

Inevitably, I concluded that I should leave the old world and relocate permanently to a different one. After all, the disciples left their nets to follow Jesus.

So I left the world of AT&T behind and started a consulting business where I could live out my new life-purpose statement: "to glorify God by teaching biblical principles to sales and marketing executives."

At last I was free to be the new me without the constant reminders of what I once was. I could freely talk about my faith without apprehension that I might look like a hypocrite on religious dope. I was free to play on my Christian playground without fear of interruption.

At least, that's how I saw it.

But as I look back on that experience, I've come to realize I may have walked out on an incredible opportunity. What better place to fulfill my new life-purpose statement than as Division Manager of Sales at AT&T Information Systems? We had thousands of employees, hundreds of offices...there was unlimited potential. The more I understand about how God uses Christians in the marketplace, the more I realize that I had been sitting on a spiritual gold mine back at AT&T. I just didn't recognize it.

Over the past two decades, I've had successes both in business and in helping business people come to faith. Ironically, it took only one year for God to use the consulting business I started to lead me right back to a leadership role in the marketplace—the world of profit and loss, hiring and firing, performance reviews and sales incentives. God was faithful to bring me back to these work environments because that's where effective ministry can occur. And after being in several situations that more closely resembled the one I left, I eventually figured out how to reconcile those two worlds into one.

Surprisingly, God didn't need me to be a perfect Christian with a long history of faultless integrity. He just wanted me to seek His kingdom and His righteousness while I excelled at my work, family, church, and community life. Sometimes it's enough if we're willing just to stick around and let people watch God take over our hearts. That simple example, with all its awkwardness and blemishes, can be the most convincing evidence of God they will ever see.

I've now spent more than twenty years helping people see how relevant God is to our everyday lives. As a friend of mine says, we need to "turn Bible leather into shoe leather"...to get God out of the stained glass and into our relationships.

After all those experiences, I'm left with a haunting question. How many Christians are ignoring the monkey? How many would like to make a difference, but just don't know what to do? How many are surrounded by a ripe harvest, but just don't know how to recognize it?

I mentor eight young men each year, so I'm continually around young Christians who remind me of myself twenty years ago. They struggle with living out their faith at work. I'll bet I've had a dozen guys ask me about quitting work and going to seminary or starting their own "Christian" business. And others simply settle for the compromise of living a dual life, confining the focus and energy of their Christianity to church activities while keeping a low spiritual profile at work.

They're not alone. As I look across the landscape of believers today, I see a lot of Christians wrestling with what a true disciple of Christ should look like in the workplace. Somewhere along the way, we've lost our vision for how Christ would conduct ministry at work. Over the last century, the business culture has been constantly reinventing itself with new technologies and innovations. But Christianity, it seems, has been left behind. That's not to say there aren't Christians in the marketplace. It's just that they lack the zeal and confidence that's truly representative of what God is doing inside them. Or they just don't know what God would have them do.

The problem is that when a person begins to grow in his passion for God, it creates tension at work. We know how to express our true feelings in church or in private, but how should we act around the office or in the field or in the factory? What does it look like? Should we come on strong and risk offending people? Or should we take the long road and hope our faith just rubs off on others over time?

It only takes one or two awkward experiences for Christians to realize that an enthusiasm for God doesn't exactly blend seamlessly into the American business culture. We learn quickly that you can't be careless about it. Subconsciously, it's easier to suppress our kingdom calling in order to ease the clash of cultures we face each day. When we're not sure what to do, it's safer to do nothing. Why rock the boat?

Eventually, Christians tend to adopt one of two solutions to relieve the tension they feel at work. They either run or they hide.

The run response comes from the idea that it would just be easier to make a clean break—to start over in a new environment or to withdraw completely by enrolling in seminary and going into ministry full-time. There was an element of this driving my decision to leave AT&T and start a consulting business. Rather than make my current workplace my ministry, I ran away to create an environment that was more comfortable and controllable.

The hide response is nothing less than a subtle surrender of the mission. Unsure of how to interface our exuberance for God with a workplace that may not appreciate it, we tone it down around the office. And the fervor we feel on Sunday gets squelched a little from Monday to Friday. Essentially, we hide our true self from the work world.

Somehow we can't quite grasp the vision of our work as an opportunity to share our faith. I'm the first to admit that it doesn't come easily. But after twenty years of practicing marketplace ministry and teaching these principles to others, I've come up with an approach that will give you a clear vision for your calling to be about our Father's business at work.

You see, regardless of how uncomfortable the tension may seem now, God doesn't call us to run. And He doesn't teach us to hide. Chances are He wants to use you right where you are. How else will people who don't go to church find out about the relationship their Heavenly Father longs to have with them? It's not like it's talked about in the places they frequent. But because of your unique position in their lives, you have the opportunity to be someone God can use to tell them. And it doesn't have to feel awkward. When you understand your role in the process, it can be one of the most natural and rewarding experiences you will ever know.

The disciples may have dropped their nets, but they didn't run or hide. They spent the next several years living and ministering among many of the same people that already knew them. Often, we must prove faithful in our current mission field before God will entrust a new one to us. And as we'll see, sometimes God does powerful things when we simply hang around long enough to allow others a chance to witness the transformation in our lives.

In the pages that follow, I'd like to give you a step-by-step plan for how you can begin the work of ministry right where you are. You will learn a strategy for assessing your workplace, identifying your opportunities, neutralizing the primary obstacles, and boldly enjoying the mission God gives you.

Work is not a curse for Christians. It's a place where you live out your faith, showcasing what God is doing in your life. In light of eternity, the ministry you accomplish at work can be more important than the money you earn or the career you sustain. And once you see the impact God can have through you on the job, you will never look at your workplace the same again.

If you want to experience true joy in your life (both this one and the next), if you want to do work that really matters, if you want to have peace in your life all the time, and if you want to have a fulfilling work life, commit yourself to the process that I'm going to show you.

Go to your job and do great work, but while you're at it, be about our Father's business.

You can do this!

Excerpted from About My Father's Business - Taking Your Faith to Work by Regi Campbell © 2005 by James R. Campbell. Used by permission of Multnomah Publishers, Inc. Excerpt may not be reproduced without prior written consent of Multnomah Publishers, Inc. Please contact info@amfb.com.

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