×
Editors’ note: 

The weekly TGCvocations column asks practitioners about their jobs and how they integrate their faith and work. Interviews are condensed.

Chuck Proudfit is the founder and president of At Work on Purpose, which guides working Christians to integrate faith and work. He lives with his family in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he also leads a consultancy called SKILLSOURCE.


How did you first become interested in integrating your faith and your work?

I wasn’t raised with a Christian worldview. In fact, I didn’t even become a Christian until I was in my 30s. At that time, since I was spending most of my waking hours at work, I tried to find out what the Bible said about it. Unfortunately, though, not many churches were talking about faith and work.

How did you find out more about it?

I started reading the Bible to see what the early church was doing. In the process, I discovered that one of Paul’s main staging areas in Ephesus was the marketplace. In Acts 19, for example, the silversmith Demetrius most likely made his speech at the commercial agora, where merchants and craftsmen sold their goods. It was a central gathering place and near the theater where Paul was dragged by those loyal to Demetrius.

Did anyone guide you through this research?

It was hard to find mentors working in this space, but I did meet a few people—mainly by reading their books, like John Beckett, who wrote Loving Monday: Succeeding in Business Without Selling Your Soul and Mastering Monday: A Guide to Integrating Faith and Work. My biggest influence, though, was my pastor, Jeff Greer. As a young believer, I brought this idea of faith and work integration to him, and he immediately encouraged me to bring it to life. Neither of us was familiar with the terrain, but both of us were curious. He was the one who told me, “Don’t make this a ministry of our church; make it something that can serve any local congregation.”

How does At Work on Purpose support the local church?

We love the local church and, whenever a door opens for us to serve it, we walk through it. As a result, we call ourselves an “interchurch” organization, not a “parachurch” organization, because we work with almost a dozen local churches in our community. For example, we helped the pastor of Parkside Christian Church develop Mission2Monday, a DVD curriculum to guide his congregants toward faith-filled lives at work. We’ve also worked with my church, Grace Chapel, to build a campus of self-sustaining enterprises, like a food pantry, a worship center, a hair salon, a thrift store, a pizza place, and more. This “bizministry” is one way that we show hospitality to our neighbors.

How does your faith affect your for-profit consulting work?

At Skillsource, we see every project as an opportunity for ministry and, therefore, try to bring biblical principles to everything we do. To us, the return on investment (ROI) is really about the people. We have created a spreadsheet model, where the vertical columns are the various stakeholders in our company (employees, contractors, and so on) and the horizontal rows are the four main principles that Jesus teaches in Luke 10:1-24 (blessing, fellowship, ministering to felt needs, and proclaiming). Then we ask questions for each nexus, like, “How are we blessing our competitor? How are we proclaiming Christ to our contractor?”

 

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
But the Gospels are historically reliable. And the evidence for this is vast.
To learn about the evidence for the historical reliability of the four Gospels, click below to access a FREE eBook of Can We Trust the Gospels? written by New Testament scholar Peter J. Williams.

Podcasts

LOAD MORE
Loading