Is Kingdom working?  

Can Christian values and modern best business practices genuinely align? And if so, how?  

New blog series in which Phil Hanson and Terry Young explore how human longings and behaviour play out in making business a platform for the Kingdom
 

The longings of people 

Blaise Pascal observed a God-shaped vacuum in every heart that only God could fill. In our secular world, not everyone identifies the hole as necessarily being God shaped. Others see it not so much as a vacuum that needs filling but a set of innate longings, needs or appetites, even a missing sense of significance. It’s not just Christians, either: there is a wealth of secular material, out there. 

In this and the following four blogs we – Phil Hanson and Terry Young – expand on our recent exploration (Great to Goodness: Investing in Kingdom Excellence) into how human longings and behaviour play out in making business a platform for the Kingdom. 

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is widely understood: our physiological needs (clothes, food, water, etc) must be met before we can address safety needs (health, security, etc.). The top layers of his model concern self-actualisation and transcendence, so while jobs keep us clothed and provide a measure of safety how much transcendence to most people experience at work? 

Meanwhile, Tara Burton (reviewed here) describes secular religions that offer: 

• Meaning: why the world is as it is and how we must change it. 
• Purpose: direction for our lives with transcendent experiences. 
• Community: spaces to meet and practice (including on-line). 
• Ritual: activities that frame our lives. 

Dan Strange (reviewed here) describes five pulls dragging our society along: 

• Totality: how to connect to a greater whole. 
• Norm: how to live. 
• Deliverance: a way to better things. 
• Destiny: what controls our lives. 
• Higher Power: beyond the everyday. 

More surprising is the discovery of something like religion emerging from the workplace. Read about Amazon’s pay policy to combine equality with aspiration (Bryer and Carr, Working backwards) or Netflix’ approach to openness (Hastings and Meyer, No rules rules). You may complain that this salvation is only for exceptional performers, but it’s salvation of a sort, and it’s a start. 

Meanwhile, William MacAskill cofounded 80,000 hours. After 40 years of working 2,000 hours a year, you want to feel it all mattered, so there is a research charity to help, and in Doing good better, MacAskill tells you how. It’s bit like those altar calls to trade your workplace for the mission field, except there is no Jesus to give your life to or for, but a vision of a better world backed by numbers that show how you can make the biggest difference. 

There is no consensus about the shape of the vacuum, the number of basic instincts, needs or longings, but clearly something profound is driving us all. Moreover, we are starting to hear a new brand of prophet telling how to fulfil our need for significance by leveraging work for greater good.

To examine human hungers and the workplace, we start with the virtue triplet from 1 Corinthians (13:13) – faith, hope, love – and ask what hunger or longing each virtue satisfies. It may be an awkward leap, but it’s an unexpectedly productive one and it anchors our analysis in Scripture. 

One connection is straightforward. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,’ (Matthew 5:6), which echoes the Mosaic injunction to be holy, as God is holy (Leviticus 19:2; 20:26). Jesus amplifies it later when he urges us to copy our perfect heavenly Father by being perfect (Matthew 5:48). For those who long to be nicer people or free from besetting sin, Jesus offers God’s perfection. The great shock in the gospel is that this hunger is satisfied not by trying harder, but by faith. When we ask our upside-down question – what need does faith meet? – the answer is that it satisfies our longing for perfection. 

Elsewhere, the hunger question is even broader – ‘Blessed are you who hunger now,’ (Luke 6:21) – which we take as permission to search for additional primal hungers. Since there are three virtues, we are looking for three primal hungers, after which we can ask ourselves whether our discoveries look like the basis for understanding ourselves and our work. Love clearly satisfies our longings for relationship, and in Christian thinking can only be fully satisfied as it connects us to the heart of God. 

But what about hope? Christian hope is an odd bunny and certainly nothing like the experience of aspiration mixed with desperation that we often fuel with fear. Cutting to the chase, we propose that if faith hungers for perfection and love hungers for relationship, hope hungers for glory – significance, creative outlet, meaning, even – and can only be satisfied ultimately with the glory of God. 

There isn’t time for detailed analysis so we will get no closer to a proof than to show how the search for perfection, for relationship and for glory, align with best practice in business. Faith, hope and love also provide a lens that shows how business codes fall short for all they claim to serve. 

We will see, then, in best business practice a relentless pursuit of fewer defects, less waste, and more value for money. We will observe how, particularly in the past 50 years, relationships inside and beyond business have come to the fore. The quest for glory in the form of creativity, enduring achievement and significance, is also moving rapidly up the agenda, not just for bosses and business owners or their customers, but for workers, too. Which is why people are searching for transcendent experiences of perfection, relationship and meaning at work – and why they are writing their discoveries up. 

Throughout this series, we will be asking where God fits in. Is God there purely in the personal experience of Christians at work? Are the forces driving today’s commercial scene responding to echoes of primal hungers that God placed there first? Are the ethical altruists strangely right in asserting that the workplace is the new mission field? 

To understand this, we’ll need to focus on the Kingdom, so our next blog will try to understand the kingdom without parables.


Image | Jason Goodman | Unsplash

Phil Hanson is an engineer by profession. For the latter part of a 30 year career in IBM, he was Lead Principal for IBM’s Manufacturing Industry Consulting Practice. Since IBM, he has been Principal Industrial Fellow at the Institute for Manufacturing at Cambridge University and a Special Advisor to UNIDO for supply chain projects in Africa. He is ordained in the Church of England.

Terry Young is a missionary kid who read science and engineering. After a PhD in lasers, he worked in R&D before becoming a professor, when he taught project management, information systems and e-business, while leading research in healthcare. He set up Datchet Consulting to have fun with both faith and work and worshipped at Baptist churches in Slough for 19 years before moving to the New Forest. 

 

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