What Is a Person Worth?

At the end of chapter 11 of Loving Mondays: Succeeding in Business Without Selling Your Soul, John D. Beckett says this:

“I’m convinced most employees want to see their companies prosper. They know their success depends on their employer’s success, and they will work hard to contribute. But they must be provided a dignified and supportive work environment. They must be viewed as valued, important, worthy. They bear God’s own image. If they are of infinite worth in his eyes, they certainly deserve no less from us than profound respect” (page 92).

Years ago, when I first became a “people leader,” I had all of three days to prepare for a people review session coupled with succession planning. As we gathered together for an all-afternoon meeting, things went much as I expected them to, except when we began to discuss one of my two new direct reports.

“Big Boss wants John fired,” my boss said.

What?

“He thinks he does mediocre work at best. We have to do something.”

Then the person John had reported to for five years before me spoke up. “Yeah, John’s a real problem,” she said. “It’s probably best that he leave.” Other heads around the table nodded in agreement. The HR person sat quietly, not saying a word.

I first had to resist an urge to reach across the table and slap John’s old supervisor. Then I said, “And how many times has John been told this in his performance reviews? How many times has he been told his performance is lacking? How many times over the past five years (a figurative instead of a literal slap) has he not gotten a bonus because of performance problems?”

Silence. An uncomfortable silence.

“The answer to all of those questions is zero, right?”

“It doesn’t matter,” my boss said. “He has to go.”

“I’m not going to fire him until he’s been told he has performance problems and is given the opportunity to improve.”

“I think that’s the wisest course,” the HR person said.

“You’re wasting your time,” my boss told me.

“You’re probably right,” I said. “But I have to do it this way.” I knew John’s performance problems as well as anyone. I knew them better, in fact, because I had done that kind of work and job before.

So I had a conversation with John, and explained the problem. He was surprised but not shocked. He had felt people’s expectations for him were low. And he struggled to do things better but was never given any guidance.

So we agreed on a 90-day plan. Part of that plan was for him to get himself familiar with a radically new approach to the work – which was one of the reasons I’d been put in charge of the team. There were other things he had to do as well. We had weekly check-in meetings to look at progress.

At the end of the 90-day plan, we had a talk. And I asked him how he thought he did. “I feel like I did great on some things,” he said, explaining. And I agreed. “But on others, like the new way to get the work done, I feel like I missed the boat. I see what you’re asking for, but it’s just not me.” And I agreed with that, too, asking him what he thought the next steps should be. “I need to find another job,” he said, “either here or elsewhere. But I expect you’re probably going to need to get someone in this job pretty quickly.”

Three weeks later, John left the company. We worked out a severance package of three months pay and medical benefits until COBRA kicked in. A few months after leaving, John found a job he was much better suited for.

The HR person asked me why I went through all the hassle, time and trouble when everyone, including me, knew what the outcome was going to be.

“You won’t like my answer,” I said.

“Try me,” the HR person said.

“Because I believe every one of us is made in God’s image, and because of that, we each have the same inherent value in God’s eyes. It doesn’t mean that our skills and abilities and talents are the same. And it doesn’t mean we all perform the same. But it means that I have to value people like God does, and treat them with the dignity and respect they deserve. And John deserved dignity and respect.”

HR didn’t know what to say.


Over at the High Callings Blogs, we’re discussing Beckett’s Loving Mondays. The discussion is led by Laura Boggess. This week, we’re focused on chapters 12 through 14, covering the ideas of individual value or worth, the blueprints for our lives, and trouble finding us at work. Check here for last week’s discussion.

Related posts:

High Calling Blogs: Blueprint (this week's discussion on Loving Mondays)
Monica Sharman's Snowflakes and Fingerprints
L.L. Barkat's Loving Mondays: Blueprints
Lyla Lindquist's Loving Monday: What are we doing here?

A World Split in Two

Ideas have consequences. But I didn’t know that a question I was asked when I was teaching an adult Sunday School class had its roots in the Pietism movement in the 17th century.

For two years, I attended a lecture and study course called Salt and Light taught by Jerram Barrs of Covenant Theological Seminary. Barrs, who had studied with Francis Schaeffer at L’Abri, was teaching about culture and faith, and that the gospel was the transformational message for all of life, and all of creation, including the arts, education, the environment, the public sphere, work – everything that is the world we live in.

When I finished the series, a pastor at our church asked me to teach the material in an adult Sunday School class, and I readily agreed. The class was well attended, and things went fine until we hit the lesson on work, and I repeated what Barrs had emphasized again and again, that God saw work as another area to be redeemed, that we were to live and be our faith in the work place, that God saw all work as holy, and there was no difference between a pastor’s work, a missionary’s work, an accountant’s work, a salesman’s work, a writer’s work – it was all work in God’s eyes.

You would have thought I had just lobbed a live and very angry skunk into the middle of the room. The reaction was surprise. I was asked if I meant what I said. The reaction went to shock when I said yes.

Everyone was polite, but some people did not come back to the class.

The idea that full-time ministry or missionary work is “higher” than any other work came from, among other ideas, the Pietism movement in the 1600s, which, as we find out in John D. Beckett’s Loving Mondays: Succeeding in Business Without Selling Your Soul, started a good thing but evolved into the kind of two-tiered reality envisioned by Plato. This was a division between the material and spiritual world, with the “spiritual” being on a higher plane than the “material.”

And that was what prompted the question in the class – what was thought to be Biblical turned out to be Platonist, or cultural. And it’s defined a lot about how Christians view the world they live in.

Ideas have consequences.


Over at the High Callings Blogs, we’re discussing Beckett’s Loving Mondays. The discussion is led by Laura Boggess. This week, we’re focused on chapters 8 through 11 (the chapters are short and easy to read), covering the cultural and philosophical background of a Biblical understanding of work. Check here for last week’s discussion.

Related posts:

Lyla Lyndquist at A Different Story: Just Another Piece of Pie
L.L. Barkat at Seedlings in Stone: Chocolate Bread and Stripey Cookies
Monica Sharman at Know-Love-Obey God: Jesus Was More Than Hands On

Update: Jerram Barrs' newest book, Learning Evangelism from Jesus, was today named by Outreach Magazine as book of the year in the evangelism category.

Loving Mondays

Over my adult life, one of the things I’ve thought and prayed about has been work, and specifically, what it means for me as a Christian to live my faith in the workplace.

Some assumptions are packed into that statement. First, that my faith has a place where I work and in what I do. Second, for a Christian, work is a ministry field, and it doesn’t matter whether I’m a full-time missionary working overseas or a full-time writer or PR person working in a Fortune 500 company. The mission field is the mission field.

This doesn’t mean I preach in the hallways or hand out tracts in the cafeteria or corner people in their offices or cubicles and ask questions like “Have you ever thought about eternity?” That’s not me.

Instead, no matter where I’ve worked, I’ve tried (note I didn’t say “succeeded”) to live my faith. That is, I’ve strived to make my words and actions speak for my faith, or, more accurately, be my faith. Work is a gift from God, and like all gifts, there’s an expectation I be a good steward.

It hasn’t been easy. In fact, it’s been downright hard. I’ve tripped up. I’ve made mistakes. I’ve struggled with all of the contradictions and inconsistencies and failings that are the workplace, and that are me. I’ve seen the workplace soar with human achievement, and I’ve seen the workplace descend with a viciousness and human destructiveness that’s astounding.

The workplace is a lot like life because it is life.

Over at the High Calling Blogs (HCB), Laura Boggess is starting a discussion of Loving Monday: Succeeding in Business without Selling Your Soul by John D. Beckett. The book is about the application of Biblical principles to the workplace. I’m joining the discussion, and I’ll be blogging here on Mondays for the next several weeks about what I’m reading and thinking, and commenting on the posts at HCB.

Laura is one of the editors at HCB, and she blogs at The Wellspring. I did a blog post about her back in December. She’s a great, and faithful, discussion leader, and this promises to be a deep and wide discussion.

Read her first post on Loving Mondays.