Essay on Living a Biblical Worldview in the Workplace: What it Means

Introduction

There are worldviews guiding all work done by humans. Every individual holds a worldview as a basis of interpreting realities as well as answering the important questions in life. Christians face the temptation to plunge into the dominant secular worldviews in their workplaces and to conform to the prevailing marketplace paradigms. Practicing Christianity in the workplace means much more than conducting a Bible study or evangelizing to colleagues and clients. It is rather reflecting on the implications of the word of God and submitting your entire work-life to God’s kingship. The world often finds it more persuasive when Christians demonstrate a balance of competence, compassion, and moral conviction in the marketplace.

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My understanding of a Christian worldview is that our motivation for work should be to serve God and to glorify Jesus. God intended work to be the stewardship of his creation. It means all work has great dignity and intrinsic value. In their work, Christians are God’s fingers and hands caring for and sustaining the world he created. Christians also need to work from biblical principles, ethics, and values. My prospective future career is to work with the United Nations in humanitarian causes around the world or a diplomat representing the American people abroad. I would like to be an ambassador of peace, especially in less developed parts of the world. A career committed to helping others improve their living standards and realize social progress is related to the Christian worldview of servant leadership. According to Davis (2017) servant leadership is a type of leadership that emphasizes improving one’s followers and community as well as building the society in general. As a civil servant working with the United Nations, my future work associates with these tenets, as it is concerned with actions that inspire peace, hope, and better livelihood.

Principles of Servant Leadership

The primary drive of servant leaders is the desire to serve others. The foremost aspire to serve others and the work of offering leadership only comes as a result of their service to others. The values that a leader gives the highest priority will always reflect on the results of their work (Crowther, 2018). The individuals served by a servant leader ought to grow. While receiving the service, they should become servants themselves in addition to being more autonomous, mode developed, freer, and healthier. The United Nations uses the least privileged among the beneficiaries of their humanitarian work as the benchmark for their services. The communities that do not get more advantaged as a result of UN work are likely not to have received servant leadership.

Moreover, servant leaders have outstanding communication skills. They actively listen and communicate with their followers, and then take time to reflectively think about their concerns (Davis, 2017). Taking a break from the pressure of leading allows the servant leader to think about the best way they can use themselves to serve. Staying in constant contact with the people they lead increases awareness of the servant leaders. It is this awareness that makes a servant leader the instinct to make decisions. Servant leaders often function better than other leaders because of their closeness to the ground (Crowther, 2018). They have exceptional intuition because they can see and hear things as they are.

Servant leadership has two key attributes, which are vision and initiative. Leading requires the ability to take care of the possibility of failure. At the same time, the servant leader needs to have an all-inclusive purpose or a goal that gives direction to his/her work. Besides these attributes, several biblical principles support servant leadership (Roberts, 2015). Three of these principles that are related to my future career as a civil servant working for the United Nations are integrity, stewardship, and empathy.

Integrity

Integrity is arguably the most important characteristic of a servant leader (Roberts, 2015). Nearly all other desirable leadership qualities revolve around integrity. The Bible says, “To do righteousness and justice is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice” (Proverbs 21:3 New King James Version [NKJV]) This scripture reminds Christians that God expects us to do what is right and align our actions with the faith we profess in Jesus. The world teaches people to do anything it takes to become successful and influential. Motivational books tell people to believe in themselves and act and dress some ways to get attention. But Jesus taught his followers to humble themselves and have integrity.

Integrity is a lifestyle that a leader deliberately chooses to lead by portraying an overall reputation of good character and honesty. However, it does not mean that a servant leader cannot have weaknesses. They certainly stumble in some areas and fall short of the desired standards because they are humans. Therefore, a true servant leader should have no difficulty confessing their weaknesses and failures to the people they lead (Roberts, 2015). There is no better way for a Christian to witness to the people that look up to them than to live their lives with integrity.

Integrity is an essential quality required in my future career as a civil servant working with the United Nations. The United Nations develops true servant leaders because it has systems in place to prevent workers from manipulating, lying, or cheating their way to the top. Anyone interested in pursuing a career at this level is called upon to be completely countercultural and do something very different, which is to uphold honesty at all times. All UN workers are monitored by the UN Ethics Office, which is an agency charged with upholding an honest organizational culture founded on its core values of respect for diversity, professionalism, and integrity.

Further, UN personnel observe a code of ethics that requires all work to be done with respect for human rights, accountability, integrity, impartiality, loyalty, and independence. Through the Ethics Office, the Un Secretary-General ensures that all the workers of the organization perform their roles in regard to the highest integrity standards consistent with the Charter of the United Nations. The UN promotes the culture of integrity by providing a secure confidential working environment in which workers can freely share about issues and report misconduct without any fear of retaliation.

Stewardship

The second principle of servant leadership in the civil service is stewardship. God requires all human beings to be responsible caretakers of his creation, including fellow human beings (Ewest & Weeks, 2018). This principle is based on the creation story in the Bible, where God entrusted humans with the care of the earth and everything in it. “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and overall the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth” (Genesis 1:26 NKJV).

While God wants us to be good stewards of our own resources and gifts, he equally wants us to steward fellow humans he has put under our charge. In Peter 4:10, God gives Christians this responsibility to serve one another with their gifts. “As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God's varied grace” (NKJV). Servant leadership should not only be focused on the management of material resources but rather view people as precious to God and take care of their needs and rights.

Stewardship is at the core of humanitarian, international cooperation, world peace, and development work, which I aspire to do in my future career. I dream to work for UN agencies such as the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), to lead and drive partnership in taking care of the environment. An opportunity to work in this office can enable one to help, inform, and inspire people and nations to better their quality of life while conserving resources for the future.

Besides UNEP, I look forward to being assigned by the UN as an employee or leader to any of its other agencies across the world to lead humanitarian, developmental, and political operations from the frontline. A career in UN work is an opportunity to contribute to the advancement of sustainable development and peace in one’s own country as well as abroad. They are stewards of fellow humans as they spend their time helping individuals and communities to lead safer and healthier lives as well as to address their challenges (Patterson, 2012). Such initiatives are all founded on the belief that every human being bears the image of God and thus deserves protection and respect.

Moreover, when responding to the needs of others in crisis, UN workers treat all people equally regardless of their faith and traditions (Patterson, 2009). This work culture is consistent with the servant leadership worldview, which guides Christians to be advocates of inter-religious harmony and cooperation. Therefore, servant leadership is crucial in crisis situations.

Empathy

The Christian worldview of civil service as an opportunity to offer servant leadership is based on empathy. The Bible teaches Christians to empathize identify with and share in the experiences of others. "Be happy with those who are happy, and weep with those who weep. (Romans 12:15 NKJV). A servant leader should be concerned with the welfare of people who are hurting, helping them to overcome their struggles (Tansill, 2008). It begins with developing the ability to understand the feelings of others by visualizing oneself in their position.

Empathy is very important in leadership. Sometimes, leaders focus too much on the work that needs to be done that they forget about the people. There is no denying that work and achievement of goals are important for an organization. However, as Patterson and Gill (2015) stated, leaders need to take care not to see their followers as problems that need solutions rather than human beings that need dignity and love. Jesus who is the principal example of Christian walk took time out of his day to share in the feelings and experiences of the people around him. Jesus had compassion whenever he came across a person who was in a situation that needed help and often took action. Therefore, each time we empathize with others, we put ourselves in his shoes.

The huge amount of responsibility that goes into leadership might make it look intimidating. But servant leadership offers an opportunity to interact closely with others and help them in ways that other leadership approaches cannot fully allow (Bravo, 2017). In my future career, I may work for the UN or the American people as a humanitarian worker, and that means I will get exposed to the areas where my services are needed to inspire empathy in me as a leader. While a leader may think they understand the worries and pain of the people they serve, it is quite a different thing to experience the crises personally. When the humanitarian workers get to face epidemics like Ebola and dwell in refugee tents like the victims, they develop a virtual reality of the humanitarian situations they are trying to mitigate.

Becoming aware of humanitarian disasters in other parts of the world through real-life experience should change how a civil servant treats other people. Virtual reality enables people to be part of stories in which they would otherwise be only passive spectators.