By Esther Chin, Media and Communications, Swinburne University
How can we, as Christians, express our faith appropriately in our professional life and in our relationships with our colleagues?
City Bible Forum[1] is a Christian organisation that opens up spaces in Australian cities for workers of diverse religious beliefs to come together to explore how God is relevant to our individual lives. One of these sets of spaces is Life @ Work[2], which City Bible Forum targets at Christians, and which focuses on how a Christian’s relationship with God might be relevant (or not) for his/her work life.
Recently, members of the Simeon Network participated in City Bible Forum’s third annual Life @ Work conference, titled ‘Witness: Word & Deed’[3]. This conference offered an opportunity for Christian academics to engage our occupation/industry-specific experiences with broader conversations about the relationship between our personal faith and our employment in mainstream roles.
Such a conference can be a regular exercise through which we develop our individual capacities to reflect critically on our worldviews and interact effectively across religious boundaries. Beyond our development as individuals, our sharing, feedback, and collaboration at such a conference can establish a Christian culture that engages distinctively and seamlessly with our local mainstream cultures.
Kate Bracks demonstrated how Christian faith can be situated distinctively and seamlessly in mainstream culture, when she shared her experience as a contestant of the popular reality TV show Masterchef. By authentically disclosing the reality of her everyday life, she managed her media image and accurately showed that Christian lifestyle is not necessarily extremely different or culturally distant from mainstream lifestyle. In a situation in which Kate was compelled to act according to her distinctive Christian values and express the boundaries between her faith and mainstream practices, her distinctive approach attracted curiosity and questions that were natural opportunities to share with a ready audience how her faith functions as a basis for practical action.
Reality TV is one of the most popular mainstream genres of mass media, and the Masterchef format is a ratings winner. As a contestant who eventually won the third (2011) series of Masterchef, Kate Bracks’ experience illustrates how the communication of faith-based decisions in mainstream mass media can be relevant and receptive.
But why can faith be a sensitive topic? Sam Chan suggests that one’s position on faith is deeply personal, yet faith is often introduced abruptly and prematurely in conversation, before the conversation has become safe enough to raise such a deep issue.
Such relational safety is established as my colleague and I share our lives reciprocally and as our conversations progress from public spaces to increasingly private spaces such as our homes. Instead of imposing my agenda on my colleague, I will relate more effectively with him/her by listening and responding to his/her invitational cues to develop our relationship. For example, it will be more appropriate to invite my colleague to join me at an event at my church, if I have first accepted their invitation to share their life by going to one of their events.
Sam Chan has a PhD in theology that focused on how speech act theory applies to preaching. He also lectured in theology and works as a medical doctor. Yet what he shared was based on reason and personal experience, accessible and practical to workers across a broad range of occupations.
Although video recordings of the conference are now freely available online, those of us who participated in person were able to discuss our own experiences of faith and professional life over two nights of dinner and, on the final night, in industry-specific groups. Academics from the Simeon Network joined the Education group, gathering around a table with other Christians who work in schools. We discussed the challenges we experienced in developing relationships in the midst of work commitments and the institutional contexts that shape the boundaries of appropriate communication.
How can we, as Christians, express our faith appropriately in our professional life and in our relationships with our colleagues? By developing authentic, reciprocal relationships with our colleagues. In these relationships, we gradually extend the scope of what we share and increase our mutual sense of what we have in common. In areas where we are different, we are honest about the extent to which our faith shapes (or does not explicitly shape) our everyday lives, while respecting the environment we work in and the experiences of the people we relate with.
[1] http://citybibleforum.org/
[3] http://lifeatwork.org.au/conference