Executive Influence: Impacting Your Workplace for Christ

Rating:
Summary: Each contributor relates how they kept their faith
Review: Compiled and edited by Christopher Crane and Mike Hamel, Executive Influence: Impacting Your Workplace For Christ offers testimony from fifteen high-profile business executives who are also devout Christians. Each contributor relates how they kept their faith, sharing their love of Jesus Christ proudly without abusing the trust and responsibility of their business roles and responsibilities. A moving and deeply spiritual testimonial compendium of balancing one's spiritual calling with the duty of daily work, Executive Influence is highly recommended reading for any Christian with corporate management responsibilities.

Rating:
Summary: Nothing is stronger than words
Review: Contrary to a previous review, nothing can "bear a stronger testimony to their faith than their words". The gospel is in words, and not in example. Scripture does teach us to be good examples, but that is to demonstrate the content of the gospel, as expressed in words. Even a Buddhist can exhibit what appears to be a good example, but that does not make his faith acceptable.

The idea that deeds are superior to words is, historically, in fact a romanticist idea at least partially designed to contradict biblical teaching, and thus Faust's distortion of John 1:1 into "In the beginning was the Act", instead of the Word (logos, which could be translated Wisdom or Reason).

I recommend the writings of theologian-philosopher Vincent Cheung, who explodes the myth that deeds are superior to words. All his books are free for download, but his book, THE LIGHT OF MIND is especially relevant to this topic. Search the web for "vincent cheung" or "vincent cheung theology", and I think you will find him.

Rating:
Summary: Good Teaching by Example
Review: In this light, accessible book, Authors Crane and Hamel give us fifteen stories of unique Christian professionals who understand that their business practices can bear a stronger testimony to their faith than their words. Some of them formed their businesses with these convictions; others learned how to apply their faith in the middle of their careers. Each of them have zealously pursued serving God in business and community. Like Merrill Oster says, they now consider it "normal to serve God in every situation."

The book opens quoting Dallas Willard's The Spirit of the Disciplines. "Possession and direction of the forces of wealth are as legitimate an expression of the redemptive rule of God in human life as is Bible teaching or a prayer meeting." On that premise, Crane and Hamel offer fairly uncritical descriptions of Christian executives striving to honor the Lord through business policy and personal leadership. If concepts like this are better taught by example, then this book hopes to give its readers ample exposure to several examples of God-honoring professionalism.

Those examples often follow a theme of respecting people--employees, vendors, and customers--as valuable in themselves, not as means to profit or self-glory. The people in a company, whatever their role, are to be loved as neighbors who bear the image of God, even if they are uninterested or hostile to the gospel. One example focuses on deliberately building a diverse work force in order to live Christianly in front of those on the other side of our natural dividers, that is, of different ethnicity, education, or social understanding. Another example describes an assisted living community started out of love for senior citizens by a couple who "had seen the dark side of eldercare." Though some admit to overzealous witnessing and personal failures, the majority of those interviewed relate their successes, both big and small, over the years.