Ken Eldred gave the keynote presentation at the February 2012 Believers in Business MBA Conference in New York City, hosted by the Yale School of Management Christian Fellowship. Afterward, he was interviewed by Phil Stone of CBMC:

Post-BiB Conference interview

Here’s another example–Bill Job, an American who moved to Xiamen, China in 1987 to study Chinese. He ended up starting Meixia, a company that produces exceptional stained glass products. The business is Bill’s ministry, and as you’ll see in the video below, there are a number of ways in which he’s furthering the kingdom at Meixia!

Spiritual capital represents one of the deep connections between faith and work. It explains why an economy in which personal piety prevails will be more successful. It explains why the top of the GDP-per-capita list is almost exclusively occupied by nations that have a long history of Christianity. It also explains why decades of pumping billions of dollars in financial aid/investment into Africa hasn’t improved the situation there.

The embodiment of biblical values is what really makes a nation and an economy successful. A recent piece in the Wall Street Journal makes this point as well:

Social capital, [Robert Putnam] wrote in “American Grace,” has not disappeared. It is alive and well and can be found in churches, synagogues and other places of worship. Religious people, he discovered, make better neighbors and citizens. They are more likely to give to charity, volunteer, assist a homeless person, donate blood, spend time with someone feeling depressed, offer a seat to a stranger, help someone find a job and take part in local civic life. Affiliation to a religious community is the best predictor of altruism and empathy: better than education, age, income, gender or race.

Much can and must be done by governments, but they cannot of themselves change lives. Governments cannot make marriages or turn feckless individuals into responsible citizens. That needs another kind of change agent… It needs religion: not as doctrine but as a shaper of behavior, a tutor in morality, an ongoing seminar in self-restraint and pursuit of the common good.

One of our great British exports to America, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, has a fascinating passage in his recent book “Civilization,” in which he asks whether the West can maintain its primacy on the world stage or if it is a civilization in decline.

He quotes a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, tasked with finding out what gave the West its dominance. He said: At first we thought it was your guns. Then we thought it was your political system, democracy. Then we said it was your economic system, capitalism. But for the last 20 years, we have known that it was your religion.

Incidentally, participants at RightNow’s Work as Worship conference (November 3, 2011 in Dallas, Texas) will receive a complimentary copy of The Integrated Life.

There are two strategies to reach the world. The first one is to recruit the people of God to use some of their leisure time to join the missionary initiatives of church-paid workers. And the second one is to equip the people of God for fruitful mission in all of their life.

Mark Greene, Executive Director of the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity, at the Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelism (Cape Town, South Africa, 2010)

March 8, 2011

Dear Ken,

As you can well imagine, I receive hundreds of books. I generally skim through a few and figure out what they’re about and that’s it. I just don’t have a lot of time.

I started reading yours, however, and was absolutely captured by it. The Integrated Life is filled with very valuable insights and wisdom. I knew you were an amazing guy, but this book really confirms that fact. You’re not only a success in business and a great entrepreneur, but you’re a very good thinker and writer.

I especially loved what you said about work; the compartmentalization, as you call it, is absolutely appalling. There’s a work side of life, a family side of life, a pleasure side of life, a church side of life—this is nonsense. That’s why your title is so much on target…

I’m about two-thirds of the way through the book, but I didn’t want to wait till I finished to write and tell you how much I appreciate it. I have already made notes through the book and have some great stories and examples to use to illustrate my points. This is really great stuff…

God bless you, dear brother.

Yours in His service,

Charles W. Colson

Ken Eldred gives an overview of The Integrated Life. Watch Ken describe how God was at work in his business life:

AFA Radio interview

Grounded interview

What you may not know is that one of the unifying statements of this amazing event powerfully affirms integration and ministry in and through work. When The Cape Town Commitment: A Confession of Faith and a Call to Action was released, I was pleased to find the following section titled “Truth and the workplace.” It’s a strong indication that the church is realizing the harmful effects of the sacred-secular paradigm and the general failure to equip believers for ministry at and through work:

3. Truth and the workplace

The Bible shows us God’s truth about human work as part of God’s good purpose in creation. The Bible brings the whole of our working lives within the sphere of ministry, as we serve God in different callings. By contrast, the falsehood of a ‘sacred-secular divide’ has permeated the Church’s thinking and action. This divide tells us that religious activity belongs to God, whereas other activity does not. Most Christians spend most of their time in work which they may think has little spiritual value (so-called secular work). But God is Lord of all of life. ‘Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men,’ said Paul, to slaves in the pagan workplace.

In spite of the enormous evangelistic and transformational opportunity of the workplace, where adult Christians have most relationships with non-Christians, few churches have the vision to equip their people to seize this. We have failed to regard work in itself as biblically and intrinsically significant, as we have failed to bring the whole of life under the Lordship of Christ.

1. We name this secular-sacred divide as a major obstacle to the mobilization of all God’s people in the mission of God, and we call upon Christians worldwide to reject its unbiblical assumptions and resist its damaging effects. We challenge the tendency to see ministry and mission (local and cross-cultural) as being mainly the work of church-paid ministers and missionaries, who are a tiny percentage of the whole body of Christ.
2. We encourage all believers to accept and affirm their own daily ministry and mission as being wherever God has called them to work. We challenge pastors and church leaders to support people in suchministry – in the community and in the workplace – ‘to equip the saints for works of service [ministry]’ – in every part of their lives.
3. We need intensive efforts to train all God’s people in whole-life discipleship, which means to live, think, work, and speak from a biblical worldview and with missional effectiveness in every place or circumstance of daily life and work.
   Christians in many skills, trades, businesses and professions, can often go to places where traditional church planters and evangelists may not. What these ‘tentmakers’ and business people do in the workplace must be valued as an aspect of the ministry of local churches.
4. We urge church leaders to understand the strategic impact of ministry in the workplace and to mobilize, equip and send out their church members as missionaries into the workplace, both in their own local communities and in countries that are closed to traditional forms of gospel witness.
5. We urge mission leaders to integrate ‘tentmakers’ fully into the global missional strategy.