Going Public with Your Faith
My proposition is simple: when we forget the importance of the workplace in God's plans, the cause of Christ suffers. We believe that this is both biblically and historically true. However, all over the world men and women are beginning to understand how tactically significant the workplace is to God's Kingdom plans. When the church calls its people to focus inward, it shrinks. On the other hand, when the church launches people into the world and honors their calling to the workplace, the church grows. We think that it's time for men and women in the workplace to fulfill their destiny as the leaders that God called them to be. That's why Walt Larimore and I wrote Going Public with Your Faith. In this ground breaking book, we propose four radical ideas that could change the way people think about work and evangelism.

Big Idea One: The workplace is the most strategic place of Kingdom influence for most Christians. Contrary to popular perception, you don't need to quit your job and move to a Third World country in order to make a significant contribution to the Kingdom of God and help fulfill the Great Commission. God has called most of His people to workplace vocations meeting a variety of human needsemotional, physical, and spiritual and wants to use them there for His Kingdom purposes.

Big Idea Two: Evangelism is a process, not an event. As we examined both the Scripture and our own experience, we stumbled on a fact largely ignored by modern evangelistic methods: evangelism is not an event, but a journey that takes place over a course of time as a person makes a multitude of small, incremental decisions leading to faith in Jesus.

Big Idea Three: Our job in evangelism is to discover where God is already at work in people's lives and join him there. This means that being a person of spiritual influence can begin with something as easy as having a cup of coffee with a colleague, listening compassionately when a customer shares why she's had a hard week, or doing something above the call of duty for a boss or employee who's under the pile. We need not be the office pariahs, poised to attack unsuspecting souls at the water cooler with Gospel tracts. Instead, small actions and simple acts of service in the course of everyday life have a bigger impact than the "spiritual interruptions" that we often attempt out of guilt.

Big Idea Four: Being a person of spiritual influence is every Christian's calling, not just the responsibility of a gifted few. The early church did not depend on professional evangelists. The evangelists of the first century were the nameless thousands of men and women who followed Jesus without fanfare or notoriety. But even the Apostles were quite ordinary men. Before they were biblical heroes, they were someone's neighbor just trying to make a living. They were street-level men with a noble mission that moved them beyond their fears and beyond themselves. Because ordinary men and women lived out and then shared the gospel with their colleagues, customers, and clients in their workplace, the early church grew from a few hundred to well over one-half million in less than seven decades. If men and women in the workplace today seize the spiritual opportunities they have and work together to have an impact for Jesus, who knows what extraordinary things God will do with the ordinary workplace moments they give to Him.