Well, the Faith in the Workplace survey is complete. We closed the polling May 31. Thank you very much for taking the survey. We used Polldaddy, which is the polling service built into WordPress.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be evaluating the responses. We had 591 complete surveys taken. Another 259 were not completed (30%). Of the completed surveys, 517 people offered to allow us to ask some follow up questions and we’ve already talked or emailed with about a dozen. We plan to reach out to some other people in the next month or so.
I’m grateful and amazed. To everyone who took the survey, thank you very much. Of the completed surveys, 90% or 534 people self-identified as Christian by answering “yes” to the question, “Do you consider yourself a Christian?” Another 50 people answered “no” to the same question, while 4 answered “I’d rather not say,” and 3 answered “I’m not sure.” Of those identifying as Christian, 43 people said they were employed full-time by a church or para-church organization.
Many people questioned the survey. My goal was to get answers from those 3 groups of people: Christians who worked for an organization directly involved in the faith, Christians who did other, non-faith-related work, and non-Christians. The questions for each group were different, and several people asked why. The reason was we were looking for different information from each of the groups. For the non-Christians, we wanted to know about their perceptions of Christians with whom they have had a personal interaction. For the Christians in the secular workplace, we wanted to understand their attitudes about how they live and share their faith in their everyday lives. And for the Christians who work for a church, we wanted to get their perceptions of those Christians who do not work for the church.
In the end, we are extremely pleased and grateful for the results. We got a variety of responses, but some themes cross all the groups. For example, I still have some analysis to do, but the overwhelming majority of respondents mention something about the need for Christians to wait to be asked before talking about their faith. Most also feel Christians shouldn’t assume they’re right and everyone else is wrong. I’ll be evaluating the results for a few weeks and will have more to say on the blog and in what I hope becomes a book very soon. In the end, since this was my first survey, I have learned much and expect to learn a lot more as I analyze, interview and write. Again, thank you for your interest and participation.
A total of 357 people entered the drawing. The winner was Rita Pauley. Her name was selected randomly and she received a $100 Amazon gift card. Congratulations to Rita!
Do you have any other thoughts about my idea or the survey? Please feel free to share below. This is part of a project to write about how Christians can be more relevant in the world today without being a pain in the you-know-what. We (yes, I’m a Christ-follower) can and should live our faith individually, responsibly and in a way that serves our friends and community rather than ignoring or offending them. As always, your thoughts are welcome. Thanks again.
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Mike Henry Sr. 