Worldview in the Workplace1

The Summit Church is excited about bringing Christ and the Christian  worldview into the places that you spend 40-50% of your waking hours-  your job.  Here’s how one of our small group leaders brings his faith to his job:

“I work as a technology consultant for the largest information technology company in the world.  As a byproduct of that fact, I have to talk to a lot of people to get anything done, an overwhelming majority of whom are highly technical in their job description and expertise.

After working in this industry for a few years, I became more aware of something I had first noticed as an undergraduate in the engineering department of my university:  that my industry has a very peculiar vocabulary.  What makes it peculiar is that it is rife with religious overtones.  Examples:

Daemons-  A background process that your computer operating system runs.  It gets its name from the Greek philosophical  and religious usage for a spirit that is neither divine nor mortal.

God Class-  A bad programming model that gives too much application knowledge and control to a single program.

Technology Evangelist- A person who is in charge of building support for, and spreading the good news of, a new piece of technology.

Religious War-  A foolish situation within a customer account where two parties are fighting over which technology to use and neither will make concessions.

Come to Jesus Meeting-  This phrase isn’t unique to IT, but is commonly used to describe high pressure situations where a customer or development team has to make a major decision.

I could give dozens more of these examples.  Once I started noticing how frequently my peers were using religious language to describe situations relating to IT and business, I began to ask the obvious question, “Why?”

Earlier this year, I read a great book by Nancy Pearcey called Saving Leonardo in which she, heavily influenced by Francis Schaeffer, made a compelling case for the importance of art in the church while, along the way, giving some great context and history for the major philosophical worldviews over time.

One example was the “Enlightenment” worldview.  Many of you remember this phrase from high school.  The major theme of Enlightenment worldview was that nature was a great machine.  If we could decipher the laws by which the machine operated, we could be in control of it.  In essence, we could be like our own gods through science and mathematics.  This is the period of time in history that gave rise to what we know as modern science.  Though the “Enlightenment” was 350 years ago, traces of this worldview can still be seen today.

It was while reading Pearcey’s book that I realized many in the IT professionals, or at least the ones in my company, are enlightenment thinkers.  Technology has made incredible advances, the computer and computer software are monuments to those advances.  By learning the laws of nature, we can create electricity which flows through circuits, capacitors, logic gates and resistors, which get interpreted as binary code and translated into machine language to then execute assembly language code that runs a compiler to translate object oriented programming languages into machine executable code.  When that code runs correctly, we see cats acting crazy on YouTube.

Many of my peers function within a worldview that says, at work they are like a god because they can create anything their mind wants.  They control the computer with absolute authority.  Many of these same peers have no discernible faith or purpose in life apart from their job and the pleasures that their salary brings them.  What can you learn from this quick sample of my workplace vocabulary in the IT profession?

I began to understand the worldview of the people I work with and I changed the way I related to them.  Their metaphor for life is the machine in which they have absolute control and in which control and progress are the only goals that matter.

What I now do is bring a more organic metaphor to my conversations to challenge their framework, but also relate the gospel in accesisible terms.  When discussing customers, I speak in terms of the customer’s felt needs and how we can make them feel more capable of doing the work that is important to them, rather than in terms of new feature functions that can be developed.  When speaking about protracted sales cycles, I don’t talk about “wandering in the desert” or “fighting religious wars,” I talk about hope and the possibility of progress-  not through superior technology, but through superior relationships.  When talking about management headaches, I don’t complain and assert my autonomy, I talk about getting requests done quickly to keep the people to whom I submit happy.

These small changes make me stick out, so that when the opportunity presents itself, I can relate the gospel to them in a way that they can appreciate in light of our shared work environment.  Right now, they are intrigued by the absoluteness, plausibility, and necessity of a loving savior.  It may sound a little formulaic, but if by understanding my work context and my peers’ worldview, I can be a more effective evangelist then I commend it to my fellow believers in different work environments, as well.”

The need for discipleship within professional fields is vast, but presents some exciting possibilities.  We here at the Summit are looking to foster an environment in which Christians are thinking Christianly about how to approach their work.