<blockquote>The New York Times October 31, 2004 Sunday Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section 6; Column 1; Magazine Desk; Pg. 40 LENGTH: 7616 words HEADLINE: Faith at Work BYLINE: By Russell Shorto.
. . . 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. 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. And I pray, Lord, that you grant me the wisdom to give them the best advice to meet their financial needs.''
The bank is F.D.I.C. approved. It has a drop ceiling and fluorescent lighting. Current yield on a 30-year mortgage is 5.75 percent. The view out Ripka's office window is of an Embers chain restaurant. 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 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. In that time, deposits have jumped from $5 million to more than $75 million. The phone rings; it's a woman from Minneapolis who has $1.5 million in savings and wants to transfer it here. ''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. Jesus Christ has blessed them because they are obedient to his will. Jesus told them to take his word out of the church and bring it to where people interact: the marketplace.
Chuck 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. An auto-parts manufacturer in downtown Philadelphia. An advertising agency in Fort Lauderdale. An Ohio prison. A Colorado Springs dental office. A career-counseling firm in Portland, Ore. The Curves chain of fitness centers. American Express. Intel. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The I.R.S. The Pentagon. The White House. 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. Well-established Christian groups, including the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and the Promise Keepers, are putting money and support behind the movement. There are faith-at-work newsletters and blogs and books with titles like ''God at Work,'' ''Believers in Business'' and ''Loving Monday.'' . . .
Os Hillman, a former golf professional and advertising executive in Georgia, is an unofficial leader of the movement. ''We teach men and women to see their work as not just where they collect a check, but actually as their calling in life,'' he says. ''We teach them to see what the Bible says about work, to see the spiritual value of their work.'' Through two organizations, the International Coalition of Workplace Ministries and Marketplace Leaders, Hillman and his wife, Angie, offer workshops, publish books and organize conferences. More than 900 ''workplace ministries'' are listed in I.C.W.M.'s member directory, and Hillman's faith-at-work e-mail devotional -- which features stories noting that Jesus and the apostles all had jobs and that most of the parables in the New Testament have workplace settings -- goes out to 80,000 subscribers daily. . . .
Looked at in light of some recent trends, there is a certain logic in all of this. First came the withering of the mainline Christian denominations and the proliferation of new, breakaway churches. Then consumerism took hold: today, many serious Christians are transient, switching churches and theologies again and again to suit their changing needs. With traditional institutions fragmenting and many people both hungry for spiritual guidance and spending more time at work than ever, it was perhaps inevitable that the job site would become a kind of new church. . . .
Then again, the idea of corporations dominated by a particular religious faith has a hint of oppressiveness, a ''Taliban Inc.'' aspect. As it is, Christian holidays are the only official religious holidays in 99 percent of American workplaces surveyed by the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding. Religious-discrimination complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have increased 84 percent since 1992 and 30 percent since 2000. Georgette Bennett, the director of the Tanenbaum Center, attributes the rise in part to the influx of workers from Asian and African countries and an overall aging of the largely Christian homegrown workforce, leading to a clash of traditions. ''Added to that is the way in which religion has entered the public square and been politicized,'' she says. . . .
On-the-job evangelism extends far beyond Ripka's community. In 2001, Angie Tracey, an employee at the Centers for Disease Control, organized what she calls a ''comprehensive workplace ministry,'' among the first officially sanctioned employee religious groups within the federal government. She says that many colleagues have been ''saved'' at her group's Bible studies and other gatherings on government property, and she describes the federal agency's not-yet-saved employees as ''fertile ground.'' Her program has spread rapidly within the C.D.C., and employees at other divisions of the federal government -- the Census Bureau, the General Services Administration, the Office of Personnel Management -- have contacted her about bringing the Word into their workplaces, too. . . .
Praying with customers is one thing Riverview has become known for. Gloria Oshima, a teller, was hired because of her previous experience at the nearby First National Bank of Elk River, but her faith, which she describes as ''bold,'' was also apparent in the job interview. ''When Gloria came applying for a job, I had a vision of her praying with customers,'' Ripka says. Referring to the bank's drive-up window, Oshima says: ''The Holy Spirit speaks to me when certain people drive up. A young lady pulled up one day. I looked at her, and she had tears in her eyes. I said: 'Are you O.K.? Would you mind if I prayed for you?' She said O.K. I said, 'Inside the bank, or right here?' She said, 'This is fine here.' So we prayed. I asked the Lord to remove the hurts within her and bless her day. She came again later, into the lobby this time, and she said, 'I'm doing so good, and I just wanted to thank you for your prayers.'''
Considering that many bank customers -- those seeking loans, say, or involved in bankruptcy -- are at a vulnerable moment in their lives, some may see this as preying on the weak. But the people at Riverview say they are only doing their jobs -- their real jobs. They seem to have realized that they are in a unique position not only to offer comfort to people who are going through difficult times but also to zoom in on lost souls. Nemerov says that none of the bankrupt or overdrawn customers she has offered to pray with have ever said no, and she is confident she knows why: ''Their hearts are already broken down and ready for it.'' . . .
The laws governing religion in the workplace are technically fairly clear, but in practice they can be nearly impossible to enforce. While proselytizing is legal, what is forbidden is religious harassment, the creation of a hostile work environment or using religion as a basis for hiring, raises or promotions. . . .
There's a matter of competing rights in all of this. When you apply for a loan, or walk into a grocery store, or take your seat on an airplane, do you have a right to expect a secular atmosphere, uncontaminated by religiosity? Or is the greater right that of the company's owners to express their faith? For a long time, Alaska Airlines has included a prayer card with in-flight meals, a practice that was instituted by a former executive. ''It has received mixed reviews, some people liking it and others writing to tell us they don't appreciate it,'' a spokesman for the airline says. No one has taken the airline to court over it, and in a case of the bottom line trumping all, the prayer cards have largely vanished as in-flight meals have. But the salient point is that under United States law, freedom of religious expression trumps many other rights.
A related factor is the surprisingly vague status of the workplace in the eyes of the law. You might think that the establishment clause of the First Amendment forbids religious expression in a federal workplace, but in 1997, President Clinton issued guidelines creating a broad area of religious freedom for federal employees, including the right to evangelize, while forbidding government endorsement of a religion. Curiously, the situation regarding corporations is less clear. Is a bank -- or a restaurant or a factory or a corporate headquarters -- in the public or the private realm? ''The separation of church and state is as firmly established as any doctrine can be, but the separation of corporation and state is not nearly as well defined,'' says Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. ''An issue like the role of religion in the workplace is fuzzy because we've never defined the public nature of a corporation. And I think many corporations themselves have been confused about how to deal with it.'' . . .</blockquote> -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>