Are you the kind of person that believes that religion is like opinions… everyone has them, but the world’s a better place if we’d all keep ours to ourselves?
I’m not a fan of religion. I follow a person, Jesus, and try to conform my life to what his book says. Most people don’t seem to object to my personal faith. But I’ve noticed that when we get together and get organized we aren’t nearly as likable. Each year, it seems organized religion has less influence and we grant the church less authority than we did the year before.
Think about it. For years, we have a growing distrust for and have withheld authority from just about any organization. We think less of government, of US Congress, industry, business, and “Wall Street”, so why wouldn’t we also feel a decreasing respect for churches, denominations, or religions too? In fact, my whole life, we’ve been dismantling organizational authority. In the 60’s we had the hippies, and in the 70’s it was Rock and Roll. Our world has been on a youth-oriented anti-establishment journey since the 20’s. We’ve had open rebellion against organized authority going on since the end of World War II.
As a result, if you’re like me, you don’t come into contact with organized religion much any more, unless you go out of your way. For Christians, most of us have to get up on Sunday morning and get dressed and go someplace to interact with religion. Or maybe we watch it on TV or the Internet where we don’t have to interact with anyone. And for other religions, I don’t know exactly what they do, but I don’t see them much in my daily life either. There’s the occasional Supreme Court case in the news or terrorist actions blamed on religious zealots, or some type of characterization of a person or a faith in a movie or TV show, but that’s about it.
My project for 2015 is to write a book about the application of Christian faith in everyday life. I’ve learned our who-we-are is more influential than any other single factor. I believe the best leaders are people who are influential because of who they are. So my passion is helping people be their best which will help them become the best leader they can be. And our core who-we-are is made up of our experiences and our beliefs. So for the book, I’d like to know a bit about how, if at all, you experience people’s religious faith in everyday life.
To that end, I’ve created a survey about faith in the workplace. Would you consider taking it? And if you’ve taken it, would you ask your friends to take it? I hope to get 2000 responses by the summer of 2015. Will you join us?
I’ll also be writing about my thoughts on the subject and interviewing survey respondents. The goal is to get the manuscript completed in 2015 while encouraging people to live their faith. We can live our faith in the world without being obnoxious or organized. I’m confident if we do, we will be more interesting and influential and more of our life will have meaning. Sound interesting? Please check out the survey and share it with your friends.
And feel free to share your thoughts below. What do you think of the idea or the survey? Is there anything you think we need to be sure and include? Let’s not run from the topic of everyday faith but let’s address it in a rational and understanding way. How can that hurt?
Photo by Duncan Andison 123rf.com
Mike Henry Sr. 