The idea is that Christians have for too long practiced their faith on Sundays and left it behind during the workweek, that there is a moral vacuum in the modern workplace, which leads to backstabbing careerism, empty routines for employees and C.E.O.'s who push for profits at the expense of society, the environment and their fellow human beings. There are faith-at-work newsletters and blogs and books with titles like "Believers in Business" and "Loving Monday." Well-established Christian groups, including the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and the Promise Keepers, are putting money and support behind the movement. Thousands of businesses and other entities, from one-man operations to global corporations to divisions of the federal government, have made room for Christianity on the job, and in some cases have oriented themselves completely around Christian precepts. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A career-counseling firm in Portland, Ore. An advertising agency in Fort Lauderdale. An auto-parts manufacturer in downtown Philadelphia. Jesus told them to take his word out of the church and bring it to where people interact: the marketplace.Ĭhuck Ripka says he sometimes slips and says to people, "Come on over to the church - I mean the bank." He's not literally a man of the cloth, but in the parlance of the initiated, he is a marketplace pastor, one node of a sprawling, vigorous faith-at-work movement. Jesus Christ has blessed them because they are obedient to his will. "I heard about the Christian bank," she tells Ripka, "and I said, 'That's where I want my money."' Because of people like her, Riverview is one of the fastest growing start-up banks in the state, and if you ask Ripka, who is a vice president, or his boss, the bank president, Duane Kropuenske, whose office wall features a large color print of two businessmen with Christ, or Gloria Oshima, a teller who prays with customers at the drive-up window, all will explain the bank's success in the same way. The phone rings it's a woman from Minneapolis who has $1.5 million in savings and wants to transfer it here. In that time, deposits have jumped from $5 million to more than $75 million. The bank opened 18 months ago as a "Christian financial institution," with a Bible buried in the foundation and the words "In God We Trust" engraved in the cornerstone. Yet for all the modern normalcy, the sensibility that permeates the place comes straight out of the first century A.D., when Christianity was not a churchbound institution but an ecstatic Jewish cult traveling humanity's byways. The view out Ripka's office window is of an Embers chain restaurant. Current yield on a 30-year mortgage is 5.75 percent. It has a drop ceiling and fluorescent lighting. And I pray, Lord, that you grant me the wisdom to give them the best advice to meet their financial needs."
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When he's not approving mortgages, or rather especially when he is, Ripka lays his hands on customers and colleagues, bows his head and prays: "Lord, I pray that you will bring Matt and Jaimie the best buyer for their house so that they have the money to purchase the new home they feel called to. Chuck Ripka is a moneylender - that is to say, a mortgage banker - and his institution, the Riverview Community Bank in Otsego, Minn., is a way station for Christ. It was where change happened, where ideas lighted from one mind to the next.Īnd so it remains. The market was the central place of human interaction.
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And as it did, it transmitted itself less in houses of worship than in the tents of carpet sellers, in wine shops and bakeries and maybe most of all at the tables found in every market town where stacks of coins signaled the indispensable presence of the moneylender.
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Across the Judean desert, over the opal waves of the Mediterranean, along stone-paved roads that scored the plains of Syria and Asia Minor and carried into the heart of Rome, the Word spread 20 centuries ago.