The Table Briefing: Faith, Vocation, And Women In The Workplace

By Darrell L. Bock and Mikel Del Rosario

[Darrell L. Bock is senior research professor in New Testament studies and executive director for cultural engagement at Dallas Theological Seminary in Dallas, Texas. Mikel Del Rosario is a doctoral student in New Testament studies, project manager for cultural engagement at Dallas Theological Seminary, and adjunct professor of Christian apologetics and world religion at William Jessup University, Rocklin, California.]

As pastors greet people each Sunday, what kinds of women do they see? Single women talking over coffee. Mothers holding babies by the nursery. Wives walking into church with their husbands. But these scenes do not tell the whole story. During the week, any of these women may report breaking news as a journalist, run a technology business, or facilitate the manufacturing of products locally and abroad. While their professional lives may seem veiled in a church setting, these women are not intentionally going undercover. They appreciate the church’s affirmation of mothers who stay at home to care for children. Still, they also want to know that pastors and ministry leaders understand the worlds of women who work outside the home.

At a Hendricks Center Leader Board event, Polished executive director Kat Armstrong revealed what she has learned ministering to millennial women: “Almost 80 percent of women over the age of 18 are working . . . and when you poll [working] women about the emotional support they feel from their local church, almost half would say they feel zero.” These women need encouragement and training for living as ambassadors of Jesus in the competitive, corporate world that awaits them after the worship service. Many are already integrating their faith with their work in remarkable ways. But how can church leaders better understand Christian women in the workplace if we don’t take the time to hear their stories?

To this end, we sat down with Inside Edition national correspondent Megan Alexander, Marinus Analytics president Emily Kennedy, and Akola founder Brittany Underwood to discuss how they approach integrating their faith with their vocations. First, Alexander relates how her position as a reporter allows her to be a Christian influence in the media. Next, Kennedy explains how honest work in the tech industry helps law enforcement better fight human trafficking. Finally, Underwood shares how her social business creates jewelry to help marginalized women and their families flourish. We close with suggestions for how the church can better support Christian women in the workplace.

Christian Influence In The Media

Before Megan Alexander was known as a woman of faith in the entertainment industry, she wanted to be known for doing good work—being a good reporter, interviewer, and host. Although some Christians initially cautioned her against entering a vocation they called “Satan’s playground,” she says that if believers withdraw from careers of influence, biblical values may go unrepresented in the media. For Alexander, integrating faith and work means naturally allowing her beliefs to shape her role as a reporter, the way she delivers for her team, and the way she responds to opportunities God places in her path to explain her faith.

Del Rosario: How do you integrate your faith with your job at Inside Edition?

Alexander: It’s life, you know. When something is important to you and it’s in your soul, it’s going to naturally come out. I don’t think there’s a perfect formula. My approach is to do excellent work first and get that seat at the table in the first place. I also love people. I’m a firm believer in building relationships and friendships, and just loving people where they are, and being grateful that they love me with all of my flaws where I am. Then, just looking for those little moments when people really get to know you, to have opportunities to share what your moral compass is, and what gets you excited about life. For me, that is being a lover of Jesus Christ and grateful for his grace over my life.

Alexander is a working mother who sees her family responsibilities and her dedication to excellence at work as key to earning credibility in her field, and by extension, allowing Christianity to get a fresh hearing among her coworkers. She says God presents her with unexpected tools and special opportunities to talk about the Scriptures and Christian values in the course of her work. For example, Alexander shared how God allowed her to explain biblical narratives at Inside Edition and use her platform to talk about sexual purity and abstinence in dating.

Alexander: When The Bible [miniseries] came out on the History Channel several years ago, it was rather humorous and fun for me. It was Sunday night, and I had a big party at my apartment in New York City and got a bunch of people together to watch. The first episode premiered to huge ratings. . . .

Monday morning, I remember my boss yelling out in the newsroom, “Did anybody watch this show The Bible?” because we recap the big hits over the weekend. I was the only person who said, “I did!” It became sort of this running joke that every Monday morning as we were recapping weekend shows, whether it’s Sunday night football or whatever, my boss would say, “What was on The Bible? Somebody get Megan!” I would walk into the newsroom with a captive audience and say, “Oh, this last Sunday it was about Daniel, and he’s in this lion’s den. And there are these lions circling him.” Everybody looked at me and one of my producers even said, “That’s in the Bible?” I said, “Yeah! You should open it up sometime!”

Bible stories I took for granted, that I learned as a child, a lot of people don’t know anymore. . . . I love that Mark Burnett and Roma Downey brought the Bible to life in such a beautiful way in this epic saga. That was a tool for me to use, and I had great conversations with people at work, including one where I was retelling one of the episodes and one of my producers said, “Do you really believe all that?” And I said, “Yes, I do.”

Del Rosario: That’s amazing. Now you’ve also been able to use your platform to speak on a variety of topics, including biblical sexual ethics, abstinence, and purity. How did that come about?

Alexander: Well, it was a decision I made in high school to wait to have sex until I was married. An important moment for me was when my high school had an alumni couple talk about why they waited.

I didn’t think I’d talk about it, Mikel, . . . but our pastor’s wife in New York heard that that was the decision that I made. She called me and said, “Megan, a women’s magazine reached out to me and they want to do an issue on sex, dating, and marriage in Christian circles. We want to put someone on the cover of this magazine that believes in abstinence and waited until marriage to have sex and works in the entertainment industry.” And she said, “We can’t find anybody.”

But she said, “We heard of you. Would you want to share your story and be on this magazine?” I said, “Let me get back to you, because my husband is the other half of this decision. If I share, he’s going to be sharing too.” I called my husband and I said, “What do you think? They want us to talk about our decision and it’ll be out there.” My husband said, “Meg, if it encourages one person, it’s worth it.” I thought back to that alumni couple in high school and how they encouraged me. But nobody talks about this anymore, especially in today’s society. I thought, “That’s right. If it encourages one person, it’s worth it.” And that has been why I’ve shared. I want young women and young men to know that it’s still an option [and to hear]: “It worked for me, it can work for you. Value yourself. Value life. Value all you have to offer. In terms of your dating and your relationships, let’s value each other, appreciate each other, respect each other.” It is a bigger conversation of just valuing and appreciating who we are as humans and how God created us and wanting to enjoy all that he has gifted us to its fullest.

I’ve had women in the entertainment industry say, “Thank you for sharing. I didn’t think anybody else was waiting anymore, and I’m waiting, and I appreciate that you’re encouraging me,” and guys too. I want to encourage the next generation.

Fighting Human Trafficking In The Digital Age

While working on her start-up, Marinus Analytics, Emily Kennedy sought to fight human trafficking while raising the bar of expectation for young women entering the tech industry. She was named a Toyota Mother of Invention[1] and listed as one of Forbes’s “30 under 30—Social Entrepreneurs.”[2] She first learned about human trafficking while travelling around eastern Europe at the age of 16.

Kennedy: I remember walking out of church thinking, “I want to do something about human trafficking,” as a teenager. But I had no knowledge of what was needed to solve the problem. It wasn’t until college that I started looking into the technology aspects of it and started to get a concrete idea of how one might build a solution. In the beginning, it was more of a desire and a calling that stuck with me. . . . I worked with researchers and programmers at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute. They were blowing my mind with “What is machine learning? What is artificial intelligence, and what tools can actually help us?”

Today, her company helps law enforcement turn big data into actionable intelligence. For example, one of their products uses facial recognition software to more quickly identify and rescue sex-trafficking victims, speeding up the investigative process by as much as fifty percent.[3] Kennedy’s conviction that human beings, created in God’s image, have value fuels her passion for doing the work, day in and day out, with honesty and integrity.

Kennedy: If we enable the rescue of one person, it’s absolutely worth it because that person has infinite value. . . . Ultimately that’s why we do what we do.

Del Rosario: How do you incorporate your faith with the work that you do?

Kennedy: It’s pretty simple. Just honesty, integrity. For example, good statistics are really hard to come across in the human trafficking space. That was another thing that motivated me to get into this work—seeing how little academic research was done on it at the time. Because the media and politicians and everybody’s talking about it now, I think there’s a motivation to make statistics as big as they can possibly be. . . . But a lot of times, when you look at the data, they’re old statistics.

Many of these studies that people quote all the time, [the authors of the studies themselves now say,] “This is a 20-year-old study; don’t use these statistics anymore.”

Del Rosario: Oh, wow.

Kennedy: If we can’t have integrity in that, then we’re not going to have integrity in our solutions either. And going back to the idea that a life is of infinite value, I understand the desire to say how big the problem is, but at the same time, we don’t have to have big numbers for it to be a big problem because each person is so valuable.

What we’ve done is be very conservative in our statistics. The study that I like to rely on is from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. I believe the latest stat is that one out of seven runaway children is likely to be exploited for sex. When you think about how many runaway children there are, that’s a lot.

If we’re not honest, and if we don’t have integrity about our statistics, even though we think we’re drawing more awareness, then when you get to the application side, like where we are with law enforcement, if they’re going off bad statistics, they might misallocate resources. They might miss big opportunities to put their resources toward things that would actually make an impact. . . . So we have to back up what we say. We have to have integrity, honesty, and that’s always what we’ve led with.

Kennedy strongly believes in doing her work without inflating statistics or perpetuating outdated data. She explains how her study challenged the pervasive belief that the Super Bowl is the single biggest day for human trafficking. In the end, honestly presenting the best research available helps law enforcement better allocate resources and more effectively fight human trafficking.

Del Rosario: How much more trafficking activity is going on around the Super Bowl versus other events? You looked into that, right?

Kennedy: Yeah, it was called “Looking at How Public Events

Affect Sex Trafficking Activity.”[4] NBC covered that research with an article.[5] We looked at the Super Bowl and compared it to 33 other events because it had always been said that the Super Bowl is the number-one human trafficking event in the country. I remember reading that back in 2012 and thinking, “Wow, that’s amazing. There must be some research to back that up. I’m so glad this problem is getting more awareness because of this.” But when you dig into it, there’s no research at all. There are a couple of anecdotal stories, but there’s no data to back this up.

We found that the Super Bowl did not have the most statistically significant increase in activity. . . . There was an increase, but it wasn’t extraordinary. It was a conservative increase. But then, when you look at the increase in activity during the oil boom in Minot, North Dakota, it is off the charts. It is what we would have expected for the Super Bowl. . . .

Armed with that data, law enforcement can make data-driven decisions because they’re putting huge resources towards this stuff. Detectives have said, “If we had these resources that were given during the Super Bowl, we could arrest the same amount of traffickers any weekend.” I think data-driven decision-making is so important to ensure that we’re using these really limited resources in the best way.

Fashion As Social Business

As a college student, Brittany Underwood met a poor woman in Uganda who took twenty-four street children into her home and sacrificially cared for them. This inspired Underwood to develop sustainable methods for economic opportunity so that families and communities could flourish. She established Akola, a nonprofit jewelry business that is extending common grace for the common good. They employ and train over five hundred women in crisis around Uganda and Dallas, Texas. The jewelry these women make helps them support themselves and about four thousand dependents.[6] At a Hendricks Center event, she explained how her social business model works.

Bock: What’s the model you’re using to sustain these women?

Underwood: We had to build the infrastructure for economic opportunity because we work in villages where there’s not even a tin roof. There’s nowhere for women to work, and once the business starts growing, it’s not sustainable for them to work under a mango tree. It doesn’t give them a lot of dignity.

We started building training centers around Uganda. We accompany that with clean water wells. We train women who are not artisans, women with no educational or vocational background, to make the products that we sell in the global marketplace. We design them. We create high-fashion products—it can’t be a charity purchase.

We’re working with five hundred women whose livelihood depends on our ability to sell this product. We started retailing our product around the US, and we’ve been able to offer the women dependable employment because the products sold well.

We were able to set a metric where women who were working full time made enough money to not only send all of their kids to school, provide for their health care, and rebuild their homes, but also invest in local businesses in their communities. Once these women realize, “We’re capable,” they realize they have dignity, opportunity, and they want to do more.

Instead of using microloans for them to start small businesses, we trained them to save a portion of the money and launched a series of classes in finance and business to help them be successful. That helps drive sustainability for generations to come. They’re investing that money in long-term solutions for their community.

Underwood was named among “The World’s Top 10 CEOs” in Inc. Magazine7 and received a Business and Interfaith Peace Award Silver Medal from the Religious Freedom and Business Foundation for her work helping to elevate “unemployable” women in Uganda and in her local area. She explains how their operations rely on Ugandan and American workers, many of whom have worked to overcome great hardships.

Bock: Take us through the start to the finish of a piece of jewelry. Where does it begin, and how does it end? What is it that the women over there are doing, and what is it that the women over here are doing?

Underwood: For one of our department store orders, we had women in six villages hand-rolling paper beads. Once we sold them the paper, they rolled the beads. We’d buy them back, and that’s our part-time workers. They make the core components of the necklace. We also have women who hand-cut Akole cow horn. They make the components of the necklaces. They’re assembled by either our full-time workers in Uganda or the women here in West Dallas. It’s interchangeable. Some stuff is produced there, some here, even in the same order. Then it’s distributed by women who have been referred to us by New Friends New Life and who have been formerly incarcerated or sexually trafficked.

Bock: That’s a local organization.

Underwood: Yes. They send us women who are ready to work, who have been fully rehabilitated in their program. In Dallas we focus on the training and employment, whereas in Uganda we do a whole suite of programs around their employment. There’s business classes and wellness classes to help their development.

Hendricks Center intern Kasey Summerer asked Underwood about the relationship of her work to her calling in life. She explained:

Underwood: It’s intertwined. People say, “You work so much.” But I don’t feel like it’s work. This is my passion. This is what I love to do. My work and my vocation and my calling and my faith—everything is tied together. If we look at different biblical references on what it means to really live out our vocation and our calling, we find that it’s discovering what we were created for and living that out. I’ve used every gift I’ve been given by God in this work, every talent. I’ve just pushed it as far as I can. I’ve exhausted every part of myself in this and feel like not only does my life have meaning, but I’m functioning according to the way I was designed. The way God made me is being fully used. That’s so rewarding. There’s nothing better.

Limiting the idea of calling to church or parachurch work clearly contributes to a sacred/secular divide that hinders Christians from seeing vocational work and all of life as part of one’s discipleship to Jesus. These three women exemplify how God is using women who intentionally integrate their faith with their vocational callings, taking what they hear from the pulpit on Sundays and living that out in the workplace. How can the church better support Christian women in the workplace?

Supporting Women In The Workplace

At a Faith and Work cultural engagement chapel, AT&T director of fiber broadband Elaine Kung told Bock that working mothers like her “wear multiple hats. We have home duties—the cooking, cleaning, and taking care of children. I encourage pastors to give extra support for the women in the workplace.” Similarly, Alexander told Del Rosario, “A lot of churches still offer Christian business events only for men. . . . This next generation of women are putting off marriage and having kids. They’re going after their careers. How are we serving and equipping them? I would love to see churches embrace the working woman more.” Consider a few ways to begin communicating to working women that the church values them: Include a sermon illustration about women working outside the home. Ask qualified women to use their professional gifts to serve the church on a committee. Introduce a women’s business affinity group that meets on the weekend.

Each weekend, pastors see different kinds of Christian women attending worship services. Many of them work outside the home in an array of industries. The church must value them and communicate an appreciation for the work that women do not only in the home, but outside the home as well. The working woman does not intentionally veil her workweek on Sunday. Let us take the time to reach out, listen to her story, and discover her giftedness. Let her know she is seen, include her gifting in the life of the church, encourage her, and equip her to integrate the biblical values and truths preached from the pulpit into her workplace as an ambassador of Jesus Christ.

Notes

1. “Learn How Facial Recognition Can Help End Online Sex Trafficking,” Toyota Mothers of Invention, accessed February 15, 2019, http://toyotamoi.com/portfolio/emily-kennedy-marinus-analytics/.
2. “Emily Kennedy,” Forbes, accessed February 15, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/ profile/emily-kennedy/.
3. Ibid.
4. Kyle Miller, Emily Kennedy, and Artur Dubrawski, “Do Public Events Affect Sex Trafficking Activity?” (Carnegie Mellon University, February 16, 2016), http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.05048.
5. Emmanuelle Saliba, “How Big Events Like the Super Bowl Fuel U.S. Sex Trafficking,” NBC News, accessed February 15, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/study-takes-new-look-how-big-events-fuel-u-s-n519071.
6. “Designing Her Story,” Akola Project, accessed February 15, 2019, https://akolaproject.org/pages/our-story.
7. Marcel Schwantes, “The World’s 10 Top CEOs (They Lead in a Totally Unique Way),” Inc.com, March 29, 2017, https://www.inc.com/marcel-schwantes/heres-a-top-10-list-of-the-worlds-best-ceos-but-they-lead-in-a-totally-unique-wa.html.