What workers want from their local church
From an article by Made to Flourish
Working Christians want their churches to provide encouragement and support for their work, provide guidance for how to engage faith at work and have more empathy with respect to the demands of their work.
more...
From outsourcing to ethical sourcing
From a report by Clean for Good
Every employer has the power to effect significant social change right now – through their purchasing and outsourcing decisions. Three key tests..
more...
Lessons learned from B Inspired
From an article by Nishita Dewan of CollaboratEQ
A conference hosted by B Corps attended by over 600 people looking to explore the changing role of business in society. Some insights from a delegate.
more...
Good Business: Ethics at Work
From a publication of Quakers and Business Group
Quakers and Business Group have published an updated edition. Acts as a guide and inspiration to running a better and ethical business for the benefit of all its stakeholders.
more...
Ethics and artificial intelligence
From an article on Digital Insurance
AI systems learn by looking at data from millions of examples. It is difficult to predict how they’ll behave in new scenarios outside these examples. How can we get artificial intelligence systems to behave ethically?
more...
Going against the current
Froma vlog by WorkMatters
"You don't drift toward holiness because the currents that we live in are all drifting toward the values of a broken world, the easy path, a lukewarmness that Jesus spat out."
more...
Online - Building Kingdom Culture: Lessons from a $6 Billion Company
@
How can we create a kingdom culture in our team, in our organisation? And how can we sustain it? A former senior Boeing executive and workplace ministry pioneer, Al Erisman will plunge us into the story of ServiceMaster, a cleaning company with a remarkable culture sustained through five successive leaders over 70 years.
Founded in the US in 1929, ServiceMaster found success against multiple measures, and by 2000 it was a multinational, publicly-traded company valued at $6 billion, with profit increasing year after year. The Financial Times rated it in the top 20 companies in the world. David Heskett of Harvard Business School described it as having ‘cracked the code’ in the service business by helping workers find a sense of purpose and meaning in their work. In an industry plagued by 500% annual staff turnover, ServiceMaster became known for employees finding a career, giving dignity and honour to work and workers who usually don’t get it.
So how did they do it? ServiceMaster’s focus, with a corporate objective ‘To Honor God in All We Do’, and deeply rooted in the Christian faith of those five leaders, provides lessons for any organisation. Their practices echoed the principles many of us have learnt through Covid: the vital role of essential workers, the importance of ethics, the need for purpose beyond profit, and the call for a new kind of servant leadership
It is possible to run a business or organisation, large or small, this way in a competitive world. Illustrated how through stories, practices, and principles.
22/02/2021
19:00
Online - Everyday Ethics
@
We all know the ‘golden rule’: ‘love your neighbour as yourself’. It’s as simple to understand as it is hard to live out.
A scholar once asked Jesus about the rule: ‘Who is my neighbour?’
It’s a question that resonates today more than ever. Who is my neighbour in this hyperconnected and globalised economy? When our purchases impact working conditions on the other side of the globe, our politics bleed into our social media feeds, and our plastics are filling the earth and the oceans, we might well wonder how a Good Samaritan might spend his two denarii if Jesus retold the story today.
These kinds of ethical questions are head-scratchingly complex for all of us, Christian or not. So how can we make sense of it all, and how might an understanding of ethics that flows out of Christian discipleship help us in the 21st Century? What is God calling his church to do, and who is he calling us to be?
22/03/2021
19:00
Online - Reimagining Race?
@
Ten months after George Floyd’s murder sparked Black Lives Matter protests, how might we lament together, seek healing, and find hope for a unified witness?
It’s time to stop perpetuating the idea we have to choose between believing ‘Black lives matter’ or ‘all lives matter’. Time to move past the tired binary of systemic injustice versus personal responsibility. Time to stop playing the blame game while nothing changes, sitting in silent collusion.
Like the prophets of old, we need eyes to see through the flames to ‘the fire that has been raging for over 400 years, consuming successive generations of Black lives’ as Leicester Cathedral Canon Lusa Nsenga-Ngoy so vividly reminds us. We need ears to hear in the riots the cries of the unheard, as Martin Luther King Jr declared a generation ago.
This is not simply someone else’s issue. As Azariah France-Williams revealed this summer in his new book Ghost Ship, institutional racism continues here at home, requiring reform among Christians so the whole UK church can truly become a place of Black flourishing.
We all agree, racism is evil and an affront to God. So how will we play our part? And what practices on our frontlines support this overdue reformation?
25/03/2021
19:00