One of the most popular highlights of Karam Forum 2022 was our Friday morning session titled “Christian Entrepreneurship: Communities Thriving in a Changing World.” The session consisted of two parts. The first part presented research findings on Christians in business, with particular attention to entrepreneurs; the second featured local business leader Helen Young Hayes. (We’re planning to bring you the second part in next month’s newsletter, so stay tuned!)
In the first part of the session, Denise Daniels of Wheaton College discussed the research she and a colleague had been conducting for five years on Christians in business. While evangelical churchgoers are showing especially high levels of faith/work connection, this effect is concentrated among those who have higher positions at their organizations. The good news is that a simple conversation is often enough to help people make those connections (although that’s also bad news, because it shows that we could very easily be doing a much better job than we are!). Daniels also highlights how people find meaning in work both intrinsically and extrinsically, and both by serving people close to them and by serving people who are distant.
Below are selections from Daniels’ presentation. Check out the full video for more!
Some Good News: Evangelicals, Especially Churchgoers, See Work as Meaningful
This is kind of a good news story at the beginning. We wanted to see what kinds of connections there were between people’s experiences at work and their faith communities. And this story, like I said, is largely positive for the church. In particular, people’s experience of meaning and purpose at work is influenced by their religious identity.
One of the things we measured was whether people identified as a religion of some kind. And then we also measured a number of other factors with respect to their religious practice, which will come out in just a second. But just in terms of who they identified as. And we you can see that [among] evangelical Protestants, eighty-five of our respondents said that their experience of meaning and purpose and work is influenced by – well, the question we asked was: “My faith or spirituality helps me experience meaning and purpose in my daily work tasks.” So eighty five percent of our evangelicals agreed with that statement. Sixty-five percent of our mainlines agreed with that statement, and then you can see that it generally goes down from there for other faith identity groups.
So again, one good news story. There’s something that’s happening in our church context that’s influencing people positively in the workforce, and particularly with respect to their experiences of meaning and purpose at work.
We also found that the level of these folks’ participation in their faith communities is connected with their experience at work. And so, here you see two different questions. On the top, overall: “I’m very satisfied with my current job.” On the bottom: “I feel a strong sense of commitment to the organization I work for.” And we broke these out into people who attended religious services at least once a week – that’s the bottom, the orange-ish line – and on the top is people who say they never attend services.
And so, there’s some really significant differences here, where folks who say that they’re satisfied with their jobs, folks who say that they have a strong commitment to the organizations they work for – you are more likely to say that if you are in a context where you are attending religious services regularly. Religious people also tell us that they experience benefits of their faith at work.
So something about faith, that people are recognizing, influences the experiences that they’re having at work, the ways that they’re doing their work, and the importance of their work for them.
This particular effect is significantly stronger when you compare people who attend church regularly versus those who never attend. And so you’ve got a huge difference. People who go to church regularly, eighty percent of them say that that’s true.
Some Bad News: People at the Bottom Are Being Left Out
Okay, so far this has been sort of a good-news story for churches, and now we get to, maybe, not so good of a news story. So far we’ve been talking about meaning and purpose and satisfaction and commitment, and we found that religious identity and practice intersect with these workplace experiences. So it would seem likely that people who are religious would also say something about how their calling is influenced by their church, or that they feel a sense of calling. And, in fact, that’s not really what we see, although we see some patterns that are kind of interesting….
Here is a comparison between all of the data versus the 2021 data with entrepreneurs in particular. The question we asked was: “I see my work as a spiritual calling.”
I’ve got four lines here. The one on the left is entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs agree at thirty-six. These are not necessarily religious people. These are just entrepreneurs. As it turns out, entrepreneurs are more likely to be religious people, but thirty-six percent of entrepreneurs say, yeah, I see my work as a calling.
The next three lines distinguish people by level in their organization. We asked them, in your organization, are you at the top, are you in the middle, are you at the bottom? So they self-identified in terms of where they are in the organization.
And twenty-six percent of those at the top said, yeah, I see my work as a spiritual calling, About a quarter, twenty percent, in the middle saw their work as a calling. If you’re at the bottom of your organization, it is really unlikely that you view your work as a calling. Only sixteen of folks in those roles have that experience….
The takeaway is, entrepreneurs are about twice as likely as the average worker to say that their work is a spiritual calling.
Some Really Fascinating News, I: All It Takes Is a Conversation
This was all based on the survey data, but I told you that we talked to people. We did a bunch of interviews with folks, and in those interviews we wanted to ask them more about this issue of calling.
We actually pried quite a bit! And it turns out that a lot of people who said in our survey, oh no, I don’t have a sense of calling – when we talked to them, they would come around. And at the end of the statement they could, like, oh yeah, I guess that is a calling.
It’s super interesting that in the course of a conversation, they would start to recognize the ways that they had a calling. And we were not, you know, telling them! “Oh, you know, you have this calling.” We were asking them questions about how they experience their work. And they were coming to this conclusion.
Which I think is actually a really important takeaway for churches, because I think it’s really important for churches to have those conversations with people, to help them to start thinking through: What is the meaning of my work? And how is it experienced as a calling?
Some Really Fascinating News, II: There’s Intrinsic Value in Extrinsic Value
All right. So when we interviewed people we wanted to get at the factors that made them feel like their jobs were calling. We found that there were two dimensions on which people thought about their work this way….
Each dimension has two end points, and people can find themselves anywhere along the continuum. And actually, people can sometimes find themselves at multiple places on the continuum.
This first dimension looks at whether or not people find intrinsic or extrinsic value in the work that they are doing. Intrinsic, what does that mean? That means that people who are doing that work feel like the work itself is valuable or meaningful, or it provides something that’s good. So it’s the work itself. Extrinsic is the work really is a means to an end. The work itself may or may not be important, but the work is doing something that is important for the people who are doing that work.
Both of these are good and important. And I think sometimes, particularly in the faith and work movement, we tend to focus on that left end and we say, intrinsic, that’s really good, really important.
Extrinsic – you know, the churches have talked about this for a long time, and churches have said things like, yeah, we want your money, so extrinsically, work is good because it can help you pay us to, you know, stay in business. But in the faith and work movement we’ve kind of dismissed that end.
And I think that’s a mistake. I think it’s important for the faith and work movement to recognize that both of these aspects on this continuum are important, and important for people to start thinking through, in terms of, is my work of calling? Why is it? Because it’s intrinsically purposeful and meaningful?
Some Really Fascinating News, III: Helping People See a Bigger World
The second dimension has to do with the location where the service of the work is directed. And the words I’m using here: proximal and distal. But really that’s because I’m an academic. I should have used, like, “close and far away.”
Proximal is close, very close to the worker. This could be things that are internal to them. In other words, they feel like their work is meaningful because it does something for or to them personally. It can also be associated with people that they work with, or people who are close to them, so people that they interact with closely. Those are proximal relationships.
If the location of the service is farther away, that’s the distal component. There is meaning associated with what the work is doing for people out there, people in the world, people beyond the person, and the people that they relate with on a regular basis.
Interestingly, if you had to guess, where would you think entrepreneurs are more focused, the proximal or the distal end? [Surveys audience] So you guys are [saying “distal”]. I would have thought, too! Still, I was wrong. It’s proximal, as it turns out. Entrepreneurs end up focusing their sense of meaning on what is close to them.
And I think this is a place where, again, the church, I think, can reach out and can help people think about their work, particularly for entrepreneurs. Who else is it serving? Are there things out there outside of you and the folks that you’re talking to on a regular basis? Are there folks that the work is connecting with and impacting?
