A Case for Corporate Prayer Rooms
This article was originally presented at The Christian Economic Forum 2019.
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The Christian Economic Forum hosts a world-class Global Event each year to connect the top industry leaders and experts from around the world with other individuals who are compelled to act upon the principles of God’s economy. The following paper was presented at CEF 2019.
In our postmodern world where religion has been privatized and individualized, living out our faith in the workplace is something that can end up being done in secrecy. As we all know, secrecy and solitude can quickly lead to a separation between our faith life and our professional life. Our prayers and disciplines of the faith end up directed inwardly at worst and merely towards the salvation of our co-workers at best. Thus our vocation remains completely disconnected from our faith practices.
How can we turn this around and integrate our faith in the workplace? How can we achieve faith-based fellowship at work? How can we build a solid platform for being salt and light in the company office? My answer, based on more than 10 years of experience in living this out, is corporate prayer rooms and corporate prayer practices.
A testimony from our beginning
We are a small IT company (18 on our staff), serving government and the social sector with specialized software that we build. More than 10 years ago, we started with a daily prayer practice in our company. Before this, prayer meetings at work had been more sporadic, but we made an intentional decision to make it a discipline—something we “just did”—like breathing. Soon after this started, we found ourselves between a rock and a hard place with one of our vendors. They were the largest provider of geographical information systems (map software) in our country at the time, and even though they were skilled, we didn´t end up with solutions that served our customers well. After presenting the case to the Lord in prayer, an unusual clarity came over me and I found myself exclaiming to my colleagues, “What we need is a land surveying company with somewhere between 5 and 10 staff—large enough to be capable yet small enough for our customers to matter to them!” Immediately after this statement, one of my colleagues said, “Anders! Your phone is ringing in your office!” I ran down the hall and unhooked the phone (this was before everyone had cell phones only), and on the other end of the line a friendly voice said, “Hello, we´re a land surveying company of 7 people, and we wonder if you guys might need some help?” We had not at all talked about this need outside of our prayer meetings, so for me this was a clear answer to prayer. God, who has prepared our tasks beforehand, walks alongside us as we carry them out. But sometimes I think He wants us to ask Him—to welcome His solutions by inviting His presence.
A testimony from when we developed a permanent prayer room
Seven years ago, after renting offices for many years, we finally bought our own—4,500 square feet of prime real estate across the street from city hall in our small suburban town outside of Oslo (the capital of Norway). After a few years of hosting daily prayer for everyone at lunch time in one of the offices, we finally could set aside space for a dedicated prayer room. When dedicating the room, we invited the local newspaper as well as the mayor of our town, and we showed the mayor that the view from our prayer room was to his workplace in city hall. We told him that if there were ever any prayer requests for needs in our local community, we were ready! This impacted the mayor so that he shared this with all his close colleagues at city hall. And they shared this with us, since some of them go to the same local church as some in our company.
A couple of weeks later, I talked to a manager of another quite large business in the same building. He asked if we had experienced problems with the office building being haunted. I am not a big believer in ghosts, but I try to meet such views with respectful curiosity, so I asked a few followup questions. It turned out the other company had felt this to be a problem for many years; in fact, it became such a big problem for them that they paid a shaman (occult priest) handsomely to come and do a “cleansing” of the building. I asked them when this shaman had been there, and when I looked up the date, I could witness to them by stating confidently, “I don´t think this newfound sense of peace in the building has anything to do with the shaman. The day you are referring to is the exact day we started up daily prayer meetings in the room just one floor above your offices. That is what has shifted the atmosphere here.”
Inviting the Lord´s presence is a mighty testimony in itself, but it is also how the Kingdom of God can break through just as we pray in the Lord´s prayer, so that He can have dominion and influence.
Daily prayer is mostly a very ordinary thing
The staff at our company are not exclusively Christian, but almost all are. They come from all walks of Christian denominations and faith practices. Most people participate in daily prayer unless they are travelling or in a meeting. Prayer time in our company is paid time, and it takes place in the prayer room at a fixed time before lunch every day. On a regular day, fire does not come down from heaven when we pray. Most days we pray for many of the same things. We often repeat ourselves. But that is ok. We don´t need this to be exciting. We need the discipline of inviting the Lord´s presence into our company and into our lives, both on glorious days and on days where we don´t feel a thing. It´s not about us.
Bear in mind that we are mostly engineers; charismatic expressions seldom occur outside of differential equations or well formed mathematical expressions. Our prayers are simple. We pray for our families, our fellowship at work, for performing our tasks well, for customers, and even for competitors. We thank God for the gift of creation and we praise Jesus for the gift of salvation. We pray for the Holy Spirit to speak to us individually and to move us in fellowship. We ask God to keep us humble and serving. If someone is sick, we ask God for healing. If we are in a sales process, we ask for God´s will. If we fail, we ask for grace to stand our ground humbly and in unity, and we ask for blessings on the client we lost. If we win the client´s business, we ask for even more grace and humility to serve well.
Inviting guests
When we have guests in the office, we often invite them to join us during our lunch time prayer, regardless of their views on faith. We make sure, of course, not to make the guests uncomfortable, so we always give them the option of doing something else while we pray. Prayer should always be welcoming and inviting, never intruding. Through this practice we have had everyone from pastors and heroes of the faith to agnostics joining us. We have had people receive prayer for healing and afterwards asking where to pay (There were no payments of course!). And we have prayed for “that darn neighbor to come to his senses.” It can be refreshing to join with people who are not active church goers and see how they relate to faith and the opportunity to address God Almighty.
Once when a large non-Christian civil society fundraising organization visited our offices, we gave them the tour of our offices like we always do. When we came to the prayer room, they were in shock and exclaimed loudly, “I am NOT going in there!” We told them it was completely fine and they did not have to join our prayer. We would never force our beliefs on anyone and we we assured them that we were just thrilled to be able to serve them through our software. Half a year later, the same people bumped into the leadership of a major Christian denomination at a fundraising conference. The denomination people were contemplating becoming our client, so they asked this civil society organization for their experience with us. They shared enthusiastically that our software served them well and that we were nice to be around. And then they shared, “And you know what; they even have a prayer room!” So now even non-Christians were bearing testimony of our faith practices to leaders in the church communities. It was no longer only strange to them, it had turned into a fascination.
Inviting the Lord
The famous Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper is credited with the quote, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’”
So often we as Christians ask God to come and bless our work and our ideas, or to rescue us when our ideas and our egos have put us in a heap of trouble. We make prayer all about us and we reduce God to someone who can help us. We remain the masters of the universe and God remains a puppet.
Our delusion might be that God is following us. But God´s truth is that we are called to follow Jesus Christ. We shouldn´t try to invent good works to impress our Father in heaven, but we should unravel His good works so we can join Him in what He is doing. Work is not worship in itself. Work becomes worship when we do it together with the Lord. It´s the fellowship and the alignment of our hearts with His heart that makes it worship—when we join in God´s movement of love towards His creation.
That´s why it is critical to let prayer be focused on God´s heart, and to seek Him earnestly to reveal His plans and to give you His perspectives on your circumstances. If you are facing a technical challenge, God already has the answer. He might want to give you the tools to be the blessing for this domain of His world. And even more importantly, He will give you His perspectives on the world and the people He loves so much that He chose to die on the cross for them. Seeking God´s will and aligning with His heart on a daily basis is what a daily prayer life comes down to so you truly can walk into the world and represent Him well.
What if I don´t have a prayer room at my workplace?
This paper is mainly targeted toward Christian business leaders and business owners who have the authority to establish a prayer room in their business. If you don´t have this level of authority in your workplace, just work with what you have. Ask your boss to let you use a meeting room before work once a week for starters, and ask regularly if there are business needs you might pray over. Very few bosses, Christian or not, will be negative to such a free and generous act towards the workplace.