Why don’t we pray for business?
Giving God the business Forty years ago you had to search hard to read about Christian faith in business. Books on the topic were scarce, unlike today when you can find thousands. One gem of the times was God Owns My Business by Stanley Tam, which caught the imagination of a whole generation of Christian entrepreneurs when it was published in 1969. It told the story of an Ohio businessman who started a company (silver reclaiming first, then plastics) and after a few years decided to give God control with 51 percent of the company. It took a bit of legal footwork to pull it off, but eventually it worked, and from that point on Tam was an employee and minority shareholder. Eventually Tam turned over the remaining 49 percent, making God the sole owner of the entire company. Tam was paid a salary, and profits were sent to Christian charities. Early readers may have wondered what happened to Stanley Tam. It turns out that at the age of 94 he is still involved in the company that he turned over to God. The company has 90 employees and ships out $40 million worth of plastic goods a year to customers around the world. Profits still fund various kinds of Christian outreach; officials say tens of millions of dollars have flowed into missionary enterprises over the years. (Marketplace Ministries)
The Marketplace July August 2010
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I’ve been participating in church worship services for 50 years. I’ve heard or offered thousands of prayers in the context of congregational worship. Yet I cannot remember either hearing or offering a prayer that focused on — or even mentioned — business. In my pastoral prayers I would regularly intercede on behalf of government officials, teachers, police officers, firefighters, parents, grandparents, pastors, churches and mission partners. But I cannot remember offering prayers for bankers, lawyers, realtors or salespeople. Nor can I recall praying for business institutions: banks, law firms, corporations, small business, brokerage firms, etc. This seems especially odd to me now, given that the majority of working people in my church were in business settings such as those I just mentioned. Why didn’t I pray for them in the activity that took up so much of their time and meant so much to their lives? Why didn’t I pray for the companies they worked for or, in many cases, owned? I believe this is the norm for Christians, both in their private lives and especially in their corporate worship. Now, I’m sure that individuals pray about their own businesses and jobs. And I would sometimes pray for people’s jobs when they came to seek my pastoral advice about situations they faced in their work life. But for some peculiar reason these private prayers did not impact my public leadership of prayer in worship. If pastors and others who pray in worship services began on a fairly regular basis to pray for businesses and business leaders, for bosses and employees, for church members in their professional roles, that example would have a powerful impact on the prayer practices of the congregation, both in corporate and private prayer. — Mark D. Roberts in Faith in the Workplace newsletter
