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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.
 

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?

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?