Around Town: Faith at work, Pregnancy Care Centres, religious freedom case . . .

What the Bible Says About Work . . . Business As Mission . . . Entrepreneurial Leaders Organization . . . Evangelicals on the Job – we hear a lot about Christians in the marketplace these days.

Times have changed. A common complaint, years ago, was that Christian leaders focused too much on Sunday and not enough on the rest of the week.

The phrases above describe local events and an article – many groups are urging pastors and pew sitters to engage more actively as Christians throughout the week, especially in the business world.

For example:

• last weekend, the Institute for Market Transformation led a ‘What the Bible Says About Work’ conference at West Point Grey Baptist Church;
• yesterday there was a Business As Mission Luncheon with Marcela Corzo at the B House Restaurant;
• next Wednesday (November 13) ELO Forum will “bring Christians in business together to connect, learn and grow” at Paradox Hotel Vancouver;
• Comment recently posted Evangelicals on the Job by David Robinson, who teaches marketplace theology at Regent College.

And this is also an international trend. At the Fourth Lausanne Congress at Incheon, South Korea in late September, for example, the Workplace Track was a key focus and plenary sessions one day focused on ‘Christian Witness in the Workplace’ and ‘God’s Mission in Cities and the Workplace.’

During Lausanne 4, the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) and Lausanne Workplace Network (LWN) announced the launch of the Global Day of Faith at Work, a worldwide event to be held annually starting May 1, 2025.

Dr. Kim Tan

ELO Network (Entrepreneurial Leaders Organization) holds several annual conferences. In Vancouver next week, Dr. Kim Tan, Chairman of SpringHill Management in London, UK, will be presented with the Entrepreneurial Leaders Award.

I posted an article last year which touched on both the increased significance of marketplace issues in the Christian community and on Kim Tan in particular. World Evangelical Alliance Global Ambassador Brian Stiller wrote:

I never expected that at a global conference [Future of the Gospel Forum, October 8 – 12, 2023] in Turkiye I would be captivated by a Malaysian who had gone to England early in his life to earn a PhD in micro-biochemistry and ended up running a global fund that seeks to fight poverty.

Amidst about 250 church leaders, mission organizational representatives and specialists in missiology from 61 countries, Kim Tan surprised us all by his clear resolve to motivate major global funds to invest in businesses that are socially transformative and sustainable.

For example, he took 40,000 acres and transformed it into the Kuzuko Game Reserve in South Africa, with a vision to bring employment, societal renewal, profitable business and human improvement to the area.

The ELO Network . . .

. . . was started in 2005 by Dr. Richard (Rick) J. Goossen with a mission to become the world’s leading organization to connect, equip and celebrate Christian marketplace and entrepreneurial leaders. Since then, we have created ways to bring Christian CEOs, senior executives and business leaders together to connect, learn, and grow.

Go here if you are interested in learning more about the ELO Forum or registering.

Evangelicals on the Job

In a valuable book review in the Cardus publication Comment, David Robinson encourages deeper consideration of the current trend, asking, ‘Is faith-work orientation always a good thing?’

He begins by noting that for fundamentalists in the early 20th century:

It was a period characterized by a ‘new clericalism’ that tended to reduce Christian work to ‘the ministry.’ This background explains why evangelicals have been so eager to hear that their work ‘matters’ to God.

A century later, the Sunday gathering still elevates certain spiritual roles over other forms of work. Meanwhile, the Monday economy of advanced capitalism pressures believers to compartmentalize their faith.

Yet evangelicals have good reason to resist the separation of their work and religious lives, given their inherited legacy of whole-life faith commitment. As a result, there has been an ‘unprecedented explosion’ of initiatives to overcome the Sunday-Monday divide. At least one new evangelical faith-and-work organization has been launched every year for the past two decades.

Robinson goes on to review Andrew Lynn’s new book, Saving the Protestant Ethic: Creative Class Evangelicalism and the Crisis of Work, “the definitive sociological account of the evangelical faith-and-work movement in America.”

He notes:

In Lynn’s terms, movement leaders have drawn people from a faith that subordinates work to other ends, such as evangelism or contemplative piety, to a faith that sacralizes work, casting it in conventionally religious terms. But while elite evangelicals have succeeded in finding religious significance in the workplace, in doing so they may have forfeited the ability to subvert given economic arrangements.

While they can be committed to standards of excellence within a work environment, they seem to lack external moral leverage. This is the cost of integration.

Go here for Robinson’s robust comment. He, in turn, recommends reading Lynn’s book while differing on some points.

Pregnancy Care Centres

The Christian Advocacy Society of Greater Vancouver celebrated an anniversary November 5 at the Italian Cultural Centre. The gathering celebrated “35 years of caring for those in crisis,” based on its mission:

The mood was positive as the group prepares to carry on its work – but one concern was raised.

As CTV News reported on the issue October 29:

The Liberal government is introducing legislation to require charities that offer pregnancy counselling to disclose whether they also offer abortion and birth control or referral to those services.

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland made the announcement Tuesday during her weekly news conference with other cabinet ministers, including Health Minister Mark Holland.

The government says it wants to crack down on anti-choice groups masquerading as organizations that offer full-service pregnancy supports, when in reality they push women away from accessing some services such as abortion.

If the legislation passes, organizations that don’t clearly disclose their services could lose their charitable status.

Go here for the full report.

Pregnancy Care Canada responded with a media release October 30:

We respectfully ask Prime Minister Trudeau and Ministers Freeland and [Marci] ien to stop using false labels and mischaracterizations of the good work done daily across Canada at local pregnancy care centres and online.

Their words impede the access, freedom and choice of the very women they claim to protect. Canadian women deserve better, and Canadians expect more from their leaders than to see charities used as a pre-election political wedge.

Although we have ideological differences, Pregnancy Care Canada (PCC) agrees that medically accurate information and transparency of services are important.

Pregnancy Care Canada is a national, best-practice, faith-based affiliation of 80 local pregnancy care centres and online support. From our perspective, the government is manufacturing an issue that doesn’t exist to divide and mislead Canadians.

The disclosure requirements outlined in their backgrounder “Protecting reproductive freedom by preventing abuse of charitable status”[3] are already part of our recommended best practices, and have been for years. 

Go here for the full statement.

Religious Freedom case

The British Columbia Court of Appeal heard a religious freedom case. ARPA Canada, a “grassroots Christian political advocacy organization” which has offices in the Fraser Valley and Ottawa reported on the case November 4:

British Columbia’s highest court recently held a hearing on an important but complex religious freedom case. Vabuolos et al v. British Columbia is a case to decide whether church meeting minutes and other religious records will be exempt from unnecessary government oversight.

ARPA participated in the hearing as an intervener, also known as a “friend of the court,” to present submissions to the court about the institutional aspects of religious freedom. The issue in the case is whether a former congregant can demand access to information about himself that is held by a religious body.

The appeal involves a dispute that began when BC’s Privacy Commissioner ordered the elders of a Jehovah’s Witnesses congregation to hand over records related to the disfellowshipping (excommunication) of former congregants. The elders refused to comply, challenged the order in court, and challenged the legislation on which the order was based, namely BC’s Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA).

To be clear, the Commissioner had not ordered the elders to disclose the records to the former congregants. Rather, he ordered the elders to disclose the records in question to the Commissioner to determine what, if anything, must be disclosed to the former congregants. PIPA only requires disclosing information about a person who requests information about himself, while protecting information about others (e.g. by redacting information about other people if it appears in the same record).

The elders lost at the B.C. Supreme Court earlier this year, before appealing to the B.C. Court of Appeal.

Go here for the full article, and here for ARPA Canada’s legal arguments.

The B.C. Humanists were also interveners in the case. Go here for their (quite different) take on the issue.

Events & Jobs

Some events are listed below, but there is also an Events page and a Jobs page on the Church for Vancouver site.