Faith and Work News ~ Links to Interesting Articles
- The Working Genius Podcast with Patrick Lencioni. Patrick Lencioni is one of my favorite authors. Enjoy his new podcast The Working Genius.
- Gospel Driven Productivity: Getting the Right Things Done. Hugh Whelchel writes “What’s Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Doneis a book that I wish someone had given me forty years ago. Read it and you will be literally astounded by all the things you do.”
- You are Called to New Work. Howard Graham writes “We all have the opportunity to do new work every day. Many of us miss our opportunity for new work because we confuse our calling, vocation, and our job.”
- A Reflection on Procrastination. Russ Gehrlein looks at the important topic of procrastination.
- Your Work is Worship: Kara Martin. Watch this message from the 2023 Center for Faith & Work Los Angeles National Conference. “We often separate out worship and work, seeing our Sunday as distinct from our Monday. However, this is not what the Bible teaches. You will learn how right from the beginning work was part of our worship of God.”
Click on ‘Continue reading’ for:
- More links to interesting articles
- The Top 10 Faith and Work Quotes of the Week
- Faith and Work Book Review ~ Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson
- Quotes from the book Agents of Flourishing: Pursuing Shalom in Every Corner of Society by Amy Sherman.
- Called to Lead. My book Called to Lead: Living and Leading for Jesus in the Workplace is available in both a paperback and Kindle edition. Read a free sample (Introduction through Chapter 2).
- Your Job is More Than a Mission Field. Jordan Raynor writes “If we want to be effective at the Great Commission in this cultural moment, we have to stop treating the Great Commission as the only commission Jesus gave us.”
- Working with Dan Doriani: Rico Tice. On this episode of the Working with Dan Doriani, Dan visits with Anglican pastor Rico Tice.
- Mere Christians: Matt Rusten. On this episode of the Mere Christians podcast, Jordan Raynor visits with Matt Rusten, President of Made to Flourish about practical ways for your pastor to encourage Mere Christians in their work.
- The Saltiness of the Christian Life. Gage Arnold looks at the way in which your vocation, the work you do each day, might fit into these categories of seasoning and preservation.
- 6 Powerful Questions to Steer Life & Work. Steve Graves writes “A new year is always a good time to pull over and look under the hood even if the warning lights are not blinking. Be systematic and disciplined in asking the six powerful diagnostic questions, and enter the new year with incredible momentum.”
Top 10 Faith and Work Quotes of the Week
- God prizes faithfulness, not success. Dan Doriani
- God created us as His coworkers with various talents so that He could meet all of the complex physical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual needs of people. God loves people through our work. Russ Gehrlein
- As a Christian in the workplace, your faith is going to be challenged. Count on it and do not be surprised or shocked when it happens. David Goetsch
- Work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. Dorothy Sayers
- The Sabbath is a declaration of freedom from the tyranny of workplace identity placed on us in culture. Tim Keller
- When a man or woman is called to a particular job of secular work, that is as true a vocation as though he or she were called to specifically religious work. Dorothy Sayers
- The priesthood of all believers” did not make everyone into church workers; rather, it turned every kind of work into a sacred calling. Gene Veith
- Just as the cessation of work is an incentive to make the work on our other days more focused and faithful, the promise of sabbath’s weekly festivity—not some distant holiday or vacation, but every seventh day—reorients us toward the truth about God and God’s very good world. Andy Crouch
- Because we bear God’s image, work is necessary for our flourishing and also for the fulfillment of our calling as God’s workers in God’s world. Scott Sauls
Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson. Simon & Schuster. 688 pages. 2023
****
I read this book for two primary reasons. First, to learn about Elon Musk’s leadership, and second, because I had enjoyed the author’s book about Steve Jobs. Musk allowed the author to shadow him for two years, encouraged his friends, colleagues, family members, adversaries, and ex-wives to talk to him, and exercised no control over the book. A core question about Musk is whether his bad behavior can be separated from the all-in drive that made him successful.
Musk was born in 1971. His parents divorced when he was eight. Today, neither he, nor his brother Kimball, speak to their father. He was bullied and beaten in his public high school. Reading was Musk’s psychological retreat. The Hitchhiker’s Guide, combined with Musk’s later immersion into video and tabletop simulation games, led to a lifelong fascination with the tantalizing thought that we might merely be pawns in a simulation devised by some higher-order beings. Strategy games—those played on a board and then those for computers—would become central to Musk’s life.
Musk would move on his own from South African to the U.S. at a relatively early age. He attended Penn, where he majored in physics and business.
Musk has Asperger’s, a common name for a form of autism-spectrum disorder that can affect a person’s social skills, relationships, emotional connectivity, and self-regulation. We read that in times of emotional darkness, Musk throws himself into his work, maniacally.
From the very beginning of his career, Musk was a demanding manager, contemptuous of the concept of work-life balance. He genuinely did not care if he offended or intimidated the people he worked with, as long as he drove them to accomplish feats they thought were impossible. One of Musk’s management tactics is to set an insane deadline and drive colleagues to meet it. He has a maniacal sense of urgency, and a willingness, even desire, to take risks.
The book goes into Musk’s relationship with women, including the mothers of his children (he has ten surviving children, with Nevada dying of sudden infant death syndrome). One son, Xavier, transitioned to female at age sixteen, is known as Jenna, and is estranged from Musk.
Musk’s leadership philosophy includes “the algorithm”, which has these five commandments:
- Question every requirement.
- Delete any part or process you can.
- Simplify and optimize.
- Accelerate cycle time.
- Automate.
Musk is guided by the principles of physics. A goal is to colonize Mars, so humans can survive when Earth is uninhabitable due to climate change. He is also striving for “Full Self-Driving” vehicles, which he promises will revolutionize the world.
The book discusses Musk’s political evolution. As he became more concerned about wokeness, Musk’s party loyalties shifted.
The author spends a lot of time discussing Musk’s eventual purchase of Twitter (now X), where he cut 75% of the workforce. The author details that in the period after the Twitter deal, Musk spun out of control.
At the time of the book’s release, Musk was amazingly running six companies: Tesla, SpaceX and its Starlink unit, X, The Boring Company, Neuralink, and X.AI.
Elon Musk is a massive (nearly 700 pages), and detailed biography of a fascinating leader. It is hard to summarize in a short review such as this. Regarding Musk’s leadership, his innovation and vision are to be admired – his people skills not so much. How much of the latter is due to his Asperger’s is hard to tell. In some ways, his leadership reminded me of that of Steve Jobs.
Going back to that core question about whether Musk’s bad behavior can be separated from the all-in drive that made him successful, I would agree with the author when he states that one can admire a person’s good traits and decry the bad ones.
Faith and Work Book Club – Won’t you read along with us?
We are reading Agents of Flourishing: Pursuing Shalom in Every Corner of Society by Amy Sherman. Sherman is also the author of Kingdom Calling: Vocational Stewardship for the Common Good, a book I first read in my “Calling, Vocation and Work” class at Covenant Seminary.
Every corner, every square inch of society can flourish as God intends, and Christians of any vocation can become agents of that flourishing. In this book, Sherman offers a multifaceted, biblically grounded framework for enacting God’s call to seek the shalom of our communities in six arenas of civilizational life (The Good, The True, The Beautiful, The Just, The Prosperous, and The Sustainable).
This week we look at Chapter 13: A Strategy for Cultivating the Prosperous. Here are a few helpful quotes from the chapter:
- Congregational leaders need a robust and creative vision of the positive ways their investments can bring healing, empowerment, and new wealth creation for the flourishing of their communities.
- We cannot steward well that which we fail to recognize we possess.
- The people power of congregations is their most important asset.
- The real value lies in congregants’ vocational power and passions: their wide-ranging skills, expertise, experience, and networks.
- A 360-degree inventory helps leaders identify latent assets that—with some creativity and planning—can be activated for community good.
- For churches to make a meaningful, sustainable contribution to the economic lives of neighbors in their community, three movements are needed. The first is a movement from relief to longer-term, relational, and holistic investment in the lives of those struggling economically. The second is a shift from a needs-based approach to ministry to an asset-based one. The third shift is one from focusing solely on supplementing people’s income to helping them build assets.
