A Faith at Work Blog is a journal of one person’s faith engagement with the real world through work. It is theology in practice. Challenges at work, generate tension and questions. Faith goes looking for answers in God’s word through prayer. Theological reflection then informs response. Personal and workplace transformation are the result.
Some call this the hermeneutical circle. Interpretation begets understanding. Understanding begets action. Action begets transformation. Transformation doesn’t exactly work the way one thinks it should so it begets new questions, which go looking for new interpretations and so on. This is how faith ought to inform work or how work embodies faith.
Blogging this experience has a twofold purpose. Firstly, it enables me to examine critically how I work, why I work and how my faith informs my work, so that I can work better with increased integrity. Secondly, it gives me the opportunity to share this experience with you so that you are encouraged to enter the circle and have your faith inform your work as well.
Christians at work must stop living a divided life, operating in Christian faith in religious activities and secular faith in work activities. Many Christians are theists in presentation, but functional atheists in practice. For us to live an authentic Christian life this has to change. For us to bring the gospel to our workplace, we must prove it by demonstrating it through our work so that we can recommend it with integrity. This happens through the process I have described and will be journaling on this site. It also happens as other discover the importance of this process in their daily life at work. We need all Christians at work to be involved in this circle of transformation.
So I am coining a new term for the Christian blogosphere – “FAWB”. A FAWB is a Faith at Work Blog! We need to stake our ground in the Christian blogosphere and just as there is blogging and bloggers there needs to be fawbing and fawbers. Why? Because fawbing is a particular type of blogging that has as its goal the search for insight that will make a difference in the way we work.
Insight often arrives unexpected as we wrestle with a challenging situation in our work. We pray, we search the scriptures, we dialogue with friends, we allow our faith to inform how we respond. Then there occurs to us insight into the problem at hand. The insight applied allows us to change and to grow and to make a difference. Through this process we are transformed and we bring transformation to our world. Fawbing is a means to helping us do this. Journaling has always been helpful for people working through issues in their lives, Blogging has been touted as a means to self discovery. Fawbing is a means to transforming our work as well as ourselves.
Doing this in dialogue with others through the technology of the blogosphere allows this insight to be quickly and widely distributed thereby bringing the opportunity for transformation to others, to companies, to industries to our world.
So I encourage you to start FAWBing! Tell us how your faith informs your work. Register your FAWB with the blog rolling link on the right side of this page. Let us know what works and what does not work in applying faith to daily life in your workplace. Share your stories of how life in Christ at work makes a difference to your world. I am excited for this new technology that it will help us create a community of fellow FAWBers. Lets us dialogue to together and let us change our world together!
UPDATE: Check out LaborProf blog on the dangers of blogging about work and the risk of dismissal.
