Paul Stevens has been exploring this question since his earliest working days in his father’s steel business. His Doing God’s Business tells how readers can find lasting and satisfying meaning for marketplace involvement in the light of the Christian faith and tradition. Stevens explores the potential of business as a location for practicing everyday spiritual disciplines and as a source of creativity and deeper relationship with God.
259 pages; dimensions (in inches): 6 x 9; 2006
Contents:
What Business Is God In?
PART ONE
Meaning: Towards a Marketplace Theology
Is Business a Calling?
The Business Side of Ministry
A Praiseworthy Form of Community
Marketplace Mission
Globalization
PART TWO
Motivation: Towards a Marketplace Spirituality
Going Deep
Cultivating Integrity
Being Creative
Letting Life Speak
Pursuing Holiness
Epilog: The Contemplative Leader
Reviews
Max De Pree— former CEO of Herman Miller Inc.
“Paul Stevens has given us a challenging and beautifully worthwhile book. It is scholarly and thoroughly argued. For those who do not understand or who mistrust the marketplace, this is a clarifying study.”
William Messenger
— Director, Mockler Center for Faith and Ethics in the Workplace
“For many years Paul Stevens has been recognized as the seminal voice in the Christian theology of work. Yet his writings appeared mainly as sidebars in books on other subjects. Here at last is Stevens’s comprehensive theology of work in a single volume, expanded, deepened, and focused on the crucial topics facing actual working people. Calling, community, globalization, integrity, creativity, and above all the meaning and value of work — Stevens explores all of these with clarity, authenticity, and biblical insight, using real-life cases. Doing God’s Business is the new backbone for the theology of work, immediately practical yet lacking nothing in scholarship.”
Richard Higginson
— Director, Ridley Hall Foundation, Cambridge
“Paul Stevens has put us in his debt with a virtuoso exposition on meaning and motivation in the marketplace. He brings together telling biblical insights, wisdom borne of mature character and varied experience, and fascinating real-life scenarios in an intoxicating mix.”
Peter Chao
— Founder and President, Eagles Communications, Singapore
“Paul Stevens takes seriously biblical theology and marketplace realities. He addresses the deep longings of the Christian in the marketplace — to honor God, find meaning in enterprise, and be successful in the marketplace. This is a comprehensive volume that any Christian in a market enterprise who desires to make his or her life count for God’s kingdom must read.”
William E. Diehl
— author of Thank God, It's Monday
“Why wasn’t this book available when I started out as a young businessman fifty years ago? It would have given me a much-needed theology of the workplace at a time when businessmen were the ‘bad guys’ of sermon illustrations and when the notion of having a ‘calling’ to the workplace was considered a heresy. Doing God’s Business would have greatly eased my struggle to see that I had a calling in the workplace. I would have recognized that I had a Christian ministry where I worked and that my company was a ‘praiseworthy form of community.’ Finally, I could have learned a theology of mission in my workplace. Readers will not be disappointed with the section on motivation. This book should be read by all people, young and old, trying to discern their callings in life. Stevens’s theology is solid and understandable. The book is loaded with excellent case studies and discussion questions.”
David W. Gill
author of Doing Right: Practicing Ethical Principles
“Doing God’s Business is a superb and essential contribution to today’s growing interest in marketplace discipleship and ministry. Amid the current flurry of well-meaning but superficial books, Paul Stevens’s book stands out as biblically rich and on target, theologically deep, savvy, practical, and wonderfully written. It deserves to be read everywhere by Christians who go to work.”
Robert Banks
— Macquarie Christian Studies Institute, Sydney
“Building on the theological foundations laid in his earlier writings on lay ministry, as well as his personal encounters with Christians around the world, Paul Stevens investigates the all-too-often-neglected spiritual dimensions of everyday work. He explores such crucial topics as calling and ministry, integrity and community, creativity and holiness, witness and mission. As always, he does this in a fresh and refreshing, luminous and illuminating way.”
Allan Bussard
— Integra Venture, Bratislava, Slovakia
“Paul Stevens is a marketplace theology pioneer. He was doing, thinking, and writing on ministry in the marketplace before most of us even realized what the issues were.”
ISBN: 9780802833983
Catalogue code: N/A
Publisher: WM B EERDMANS PUB CO - published 15/07/2006
Format: Paperback