Faith and Work

Review: Working for Better

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Cover image of "Working for Better" by Elaine Howard Ecklund and Denise Daniels

Working for Better

Working for Better, Elaine Howard Ecklund and Denise Daniels. IVP Academic (ISBN: 9781514011263) 2025.

Summary: A data-driven approach to understanding the challenges of fostering faith at work identifying five key tensions.

Christians have been writing about faith in the marketplace for at least fifty years. Much of that writing has been informed both by theological convictions about the nature of work and workplace experience. Much of the latter is either testimonial or drawn from anecdotal evidence. Traditionally, much of this has focused on vocation, service, witness, and righteousness.

Elaine Howard Ecklund and Denise Daniels are social scientists (at Rice University and Wheaton College, respectively). They have engaged in an extensive research project on faith at work. They surveyed 15,000 workers, interviewed 300 individuals, and worked with several focus groups. Out of this research they identified five tensions in the faith-at-work movement. In paired chapters, they discuss each tension, considering both traditional approaches and newer ways of engagement, based on their research. The five are:

Understanding of Work: While the focus has always been on all work being done in service to God, this is not always widely shared on the ground. They identify four dimensions of calling along axes of intrinsic-extrinsic and within the workplace-beyond the workplace.

Religious Discrimination and Accommodation: They trace the experience of both Christians and those of other faiths in this regard, noting where discrimination and lack of accommodation have occurred. At the same time, they recognize the opportunity for engagement in focusing on the protection of others and not only one’s own rights.

Focus on personal and systemic responsibility: Many Christians have focused, and rightly so, on personal ethics and discussed ways they faced challenges with immorality and ethical compromise. They also explore the opportunities for systemic engagement to address organizational change for ethical behavior for the common good.

Men and Women in the Workplace: They looked at different ways men and women express their faith and the different levels at which each reported unfair treatment in the workplace, including religious workplaces. They consider ways the church can support flourishing for both men and women as well as the support women may be given in terms of harassment and models and mentors.

Expressing Faith in the Workplace: They identify the many ways Christians express faith in the workplace. Given the growing presence of other faiths, they advocate a principled pluralism approach. This means respect for all while not muting the distinctiveness of any.

As the authors conclude, they discuss the practice of rest. What was surprising was the silence of their research results on the subject. They explore healthy rhythms of work and rest on a daily weekly, monthly and longer term basis. And they offer challenges for churches, workplace leaders and all workers.

Summing up, the things I liked the most about this book were its data-driven nature, listening to non-Christian voices, and the expansive vision they cast in each of the five tensions. They focus on moving beyond personal godliness and self-protection to constructive organizational engagement. They offer an attractive and compelling vision for the next season of faith at work.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Working from the Inside Out

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Working from the Inside Out, Jeff Haanen. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, (Forthcoming December 12) 2023.

Summary: In a disintegrating world, outlines how five dimensions of inner transfornation can, in turn, transform our outer world of work and our life in society.

It is hard to read a book in recent year that doesn’t speak to personal struggles with despair, the divisions of our public lives, and the fragmentation and disintegration so many of us feel. Work often feels that way. We are urged to “bring our best selves” to our work. But how is that even possible? Jeff Haanan, who founded the Denver Institute for Faith and Work believes that a faith that transforms us from the inside out offers hope for the reintegration of our work life and life in society.

He believes transformation is grounded in five principles:

  1. Seek deep spiritual health: Haanan invites us to become self-aware, to understand the desires that motivate us, and to cultivate consistently the spiritual practices that nourish our delight in God.
  2. Think theologically: He treats theology as the story that frames our lives and appeals for a commitment to taking time to think well and clearly, no matter what job we are in.
  3. Embrace relationships: Healthy relationships involve the ability to differentiate while staying connected. We can grow relationally through feedback like 360 reviews. In our Zoom age, Haanan stresses the importance of face to face meetings and paying attention to each other.
  4. Create good work: Good work recognizes that we long to create as those in the image of the Creator, stewards gifts well, including workplace conflict, and practices sabbath, setting limits on our work.
  5. Serve others sacrificially: Reconciling all things including redemption with God, our lives, our relationships, our systems and structures, and our created world.

Haanan devotes a chapter of the book to each principle, illustrating each with workplace stories.

The final chapters develop how this plays out in work and life. Haanan explores how change happens and how the various factors of suffering, community, feedback, and our spiritual disciplines all work together. He tackles the subject of translating faith into the workplace, and how the life of love weaves through and requires the five principles.

One of the things I like the most of the book is the sidebars on professional versus working class perspective. So often, this is lacking in faith-at-work discussions. For example, early in the book he contrasts the workplace identity that is so important in the professional class with the communal identity focusing on family among working class, who view a focus on workplace identity as narcissism. He also draws on the work of Tracy Matthews who founded Attune with its focus on both self-understanding and spiritually attuned workteams. Having gone through Attune training this spring with Matthews, I would affirm the value of this work in pursuing shared spiritual health in teams. Even good teams can get better.

The subtitle of this book, “a brief guide to inner work that transforms our outer world” is so accurate in summarizing this book. Haanan offers a brief and memorable rubric that business leaders can use in their personal contexts. The numerous stories show the connection of inner and outer in practice and how the life that integrates faith and one’s daily work is possible, even in our fragmented, divisive world.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: Visions of Vocation

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The main thesis of this book is that to live as a called person is to be implicated in what one knows, to have a sense of responsibility that flows out of understanding the world and our place and work in it.

Steven Garber writes this book out of a lifetime experience of helping people discern the calling of God in their everyday lives. He has particularly worked in recent years among young leaders who come to Washington, DC on various internships as the principal of The Washington Institute for Faith, Vocation & Culture. Much of this book is a weave of thinking about vocation and stories of calling culled from the many people he has walked with on this journey.

He begins with talking about what it means to know the world as it is in all its ugliness and love it. Such a love is sacramental and joins with God in his care for the world. Later on, Garber speaks about how those who know and love most deeply also mourn deeply while yet living in hope. Seeing and knowing for a person living attentively to God’s call must eventuate in doing. Yet as he talks about in his chapter “the landscape of our lives”, we live in the midst of a mind- and soul-numbing glut of information that can leave us indifferent to any and everything. He talks about the sobering example of an Eichmann who could read Goethe, listen to Schubert, and plan the destruction of thousands of Jews and somehow see himself not implicated in their deaths.

Perhaps the only remedy, Garber thinks, is to “come and see” afresh the incarnate Christ, the Word become Flesh. The coming of Jesus tells us that words have to become flesh and have to be lived out in our actions in the physical world. He then gives us narratives of friends who have done this in fields as diverse as cattle ranching to health care in indigent communities. He tells of Kwang Kim, who starts asking as a student “what should the world be like” and “what should I be doing” and has translated that into decades of work in the World Bank shaping development plans that are sustainable for loan recipients and not just profitable for the bank.

The latter part of the book explores the dangers of cynicism and the necessity of realizing that all of our efforts to live out our callings will be proximate rather than perfect. We realize that we live between the already and the not yet of the kingdom and do what we can rather than what we cannot. He concludes with the story of his father whose life brought him joy and was contrasted with the high-roller with whom he was a seatmate on a flight and was stopped in his boastful tracks by the simple question of whether any of this had brought him happiness. We are left to conclude that only the life lived attending to the call of God to love the world for the good of the world can bring a deep sense of joy and satisfaction with one’s life. Garber’s book both leaves us wanting that and points the way.