Welcome back to the Christian Business Podcast, an initiative of the RTW Dunham College of Business at Houston Christian University. I'm your host, Darren Shear, and this is a show that helps Christian business leaders integrate biblical values into business. On this episode, we're joined by Stephen McAlpine, all the way from Perth, Australia. We're interrupt actually interrupting his uh his bedtime right now to do this interview. Uh, so we're especially grateful for him. Um, Stephen is an author, blogger, and speaker who has worked in pastoral ministry and local churches for three decades in Australia. Uh, he's been involved in planting churches and has a keen interest in helping Christians navigate the world of work in an increasingly post-Christian context. Uh he's a national communicator for third space, an evangelistic endeavor in Australia, established by Workplace Ministry, a city Bible forum. His current role includes helping faith-based schools uh navigate the sexuality and gender debates in terms of their pastoral and employment implications. Uh his book, Being the Bad Guys, How to Live for Jesus in a World That Says You Shouldn't, was Australian Christian Book of the Year in 2021. Stephen, uh, thanks for uh taking some time out of your sleep time to be with us. We appreciate it.
SPEAKER_00Uh no, I've been looking forward to it. And I'm I've become used to um figuring out where I'm speaking to someone at what time of day in the US and the and the UK at the moment. No one seems to uh, you know, Perth is not exactly the most friendly time zone in the world, but uh for most other people in the world, I think.
SPEAKER_01Well, excited to dive into our topic today. Um, so the as we were talking before, the bad guys is kind of a pop, there's a big song about it. There's a movie um called The Bad Guys that my kids love, good animated film. Um, do you find that the label of bad guys resonates with Christians today?
SPEAKER_00Well, it was interesting when I wrote the book. Uh, I'd use the term from the movie Falling Down, where um the main character is suddenly the bad guy at the end of the day after starting off as a good guy, and he's sort of confused. How come I'm the bad guy? How did that happen? And I think Christians, when I wrote the book, it seemed to just touch a nerve that Christians were saying we moved from being part of the solution in our culture and part of perhaps um sort of neutral to uh being people are seen as part of the problem, as uh, you know, it's euphemistically and funnily termed the bad guy, but it seemed to ring with what people's experience was, especially in the workplace in the modern world, which seemed to have agendas that Christians couldn't sign up for that put them in the position of you're probably uh you know an impediment to where we're going in this workplace. And that was a it was something that was interesting to me as a Christian leader in churches to see that on Monday morning people weren't feeling that they weren't feeling as confident going to the workplace with their Christianity as they used to.
SPEAKER_01And Daniel in the Lion's Den is kind of your case study in the chapter of your book on related to the workplace, and you made the statement sex is the new imperial cult. Um, what do you mean by that as it relates to the story there?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, I I guess with with Daniel, he had his own issues to do with the whole Babylonian experience. And uh he was faultless in the way he uh worked for the king, uh, which is interesting itself that he would be faultless in serving a king whose agenda was probably not exactly Jerusalem's agenda. But uh currently at the moment, what I call this a secular age, it's a secular age, but issues around a gender identity and sexuality are almost uh a religious, there's a religious terminology to it, a religious feel to it. That um if we're going to move forward in our culture, uh it seems that uh who we are sexually and who we are in terms of gender are actual prime issues for our cultural framework. And if you step over the line or against some of the frameworks and take a biblical perspective to those things, uh you can get shot down pretty quickly. It's not neutral any longer to say that I hold to a Christian perspective on these issues. You're seen as a little bit, well, it well, you you take the homophobic word or you take the bigot word, and no one in the workplace wants to be seen as that. And so in the book of Daniel, what you have is this very uh here's the direction the culture is going, the king sets the agenda, and if you fit in, that's fine, but if you don't fit in, you know, there's going to be trouble. It's not a diverse workplace in the same way that the Babylonian Empire had one way of looking at the world, and if you fall afoul of it, as Daniel did because of the laws of his God, as his opponents could, they only thing they could have against him was the laws of his God. And I think that's the it's the same today. We go to our work, we want to be godly, we want to be kind to our work colleagues, we want to be honest and hardworking. But the laws of our God and the way we are to look at what it means to be human in terms of sexuality and identity, those are falling afoul of what I call that imperial cult in our culture at the moment.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And and so what are some of the evidence and recent evidence that sex is the new imperial cult in um in today's workplace?
SPEAKER_00Well, a couple of things, and uh I'll I'll give you a situation in a moment, but just the amount of money that's poured into it by cooperations, especially large uh multinationals. So there are a lot of multinational companies in Australia involved in, you know, all the big ones that you'd have around the world of ferns in Australia and then the big mining companies as well, because mining's big in Australia, more oil and gas, that sort of thing. Um, and what you get, you've got a lot of money poured into programs that are about uh diversity. But when they say diversity, they actually mean sexual uh diversity and gender issues. And a lot of money is poured into promoting those. And just last week in Australia, our major football code, uh Australian Rules Football, uh, which is an intriguing game to say the least, and it's a very it's got a reputation of being quite um, you know, it's a it's a it's a rough and tumble kind of world, the world of Australian rules football, but they've taken on a very strong agenda to sign up with these um with the new sexuality agenda. And the CEO of one organization was appointed and one day later lost his job, or he was forced to resign because he was aligned with a an Orthodox conservative Christian church that uh journalists found sermons from nine years, nine years ago before he was even at the church and said uh he can't be the CEO. Now, the irony of that is that he resigned because he said, you know, okay, I'm sticking with my church. Uh he was also the CEO of a major bank in Australia for many years, where he was in charge of everything, including the diversity program that had to be rolled out. So he was able to hold the tension himself and say, okay, not all my views are the views of everyone in this organization. But when it came to the football club, they wouldn't allow him to hold that tension there. That has caused a huge issue in Australia because it's not so much about him, although it focused on him. It's that people down the food chain who aren't earning, you know, who haven't got $10 million in the bank from long-term CEO roles are going, well, maybe I'm next. Maybe when I'm going to apply for a job or a seniority position, I might have to, you know, digitally cleanse my Facebook feed of any of the things I'm involved with with church. And these are major issues. How do you live with your deep differences in a culture which views Christianity's perspective on these things as not only wrong, but increasingly as evil. So people are going to the workplace, and this is the experience I had when I wrote the book. People are going, yes, I feel like Daniel and Babel. It does feel that the heat's been turned up, that the weak point in my life, in this the stress point in my workplace, is what I believe about God and who he is, and how that affects all of my life. Because at the moment we're saying post-pandemic, bring your whole self to work. Well, people are going, I don't want to bring the whole self to work now. It could get me sacked.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So what was Daniel's strategy for uh for dealing in this environment and how do we apply that today?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, look, I I've I've looked at the you know chapter six of Daniel very for a long time, and the whole book of Daniel, the perspective, but he he he made sure that first of all, that the only fault that could be held against him was his the the laws of his God. So Daniel's strategy in life was to work honorably in everything he did. So he it was never going to be that they could say, well, he's a gossip. You know, that he they couldn't pin things on him. He would he wasn't the person who would take credit for something he hadn't done. He would always be the person who would um you know own up to who he was. And I think that was a critical issue, that he was faultless in this perspective. But the other thing, too, was that he was prepared to put it on the line. He actually trusted that God could keep him, even if he um if he lost his job, he was gonna lose more than his job in Daniel 6. But it says when he heard the king's edict that no one could pray to the king, uh to anyone except the king for 30 days, it says he did what he had done before and opened the windows towards Jerusalem and prayed. And you you can't take out of the bank what you haven't put in. Uh, Christians going to the workplace today have to know that their identity, their safety, their future is tied up in God, not in the bright, shiny, you know, bank that they work for with, you know, in with the biggest tower in the in the city. So Daniel already had a strategy that he was going to trust God, whatever the outcome of anything. So he would work hard for the king, but he would say, Thus far shall you come and no further. And I think that's a critical issue that we had to start getting people ready now to think, what would it mean if things did tighten up for us in the workplace? Let's be prepared now to stand up and trust that God has got this for us. And by opening the windows to Jerusalem, he was saying, My hope is not in this beautiful place called Babylon. It's in this rubble heap called Jerusalem where I think salvation is coming from. And I think as Christians together, churches could do well to help their work the people who work Monday to Friday in office places to sit down and help them process that as a disciple. How do we send you out as disciples Monday to Friday without scaring you that you're going to lose your job? But also saying, God, you know, there is there's nothing that you can give up here that you won't get back hundred timesfold from God and the Lord in the age to come. Jesus promises that to his uh disciples when they say, haven't we left everything to follow you? And he goes, Really? You know, it's it's not quite that way. And I think we're entering a period in life where it's going to be harder in the workplace to be a Christian, especially in public corporation life. I think that's going to be the real test case. Uh education. So all the public sector areas and the big corporations are going to be places where you'll you'll become a Daniel pretty quickly if you're not careful, or and or even if you are careful.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah. And you teach that we're to be fearless, faithful, and faultless. Do you have uh an example of somebody in the modern workplace that that you would say has really led this out?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, look, I I do actually. Um uh someone I know at uh one of the churches that where I was involved with helping plant is high up in the public service um government official, uh government department here in Perth. And he has stood up in a workplace setting uh that's been rolling out a diversity program and uh around sexuality, and uh the he said, you do realize that the indigenous population of Australia, Indigenous Australians, are much more conservative on these matters than white middle class Australians tend to be. And he was told, well, they'll just have to come to terms with that. And uh that was a big call, but it got him pushed sideways and eventually out of the department that he was working in because he said, hang on, if you want to be diverse, let's be truly diverse and across a range of diversities. And he stood up for not just Christians but other ethnic minorities and also the indigenous population, which is fairly conservative generally on these matters, and he's still an influential person in the public sector simply because they can't get past the point of this guy is really good at what he does. So he holds the tension quite well. And I have another uh friend in Perth who works in a high-level job in a in a big oil and gas company, and he has really started to navigate the workplace in a very strongly godly way with in a workplace that's full of gossip and there's all these other issues going on. And he said, No, regardless of what happens with this other stuff, we have to be seen to be faultless so that it's hard to say to us, you're doing the wrong thing. You go, look at my track record. Here's the evidence of how I behave in the workplace. It's no good being the person who is a Christian, you know, on Sunday, but on Monday, they're just like everyone else, and then them crying foul if something happens. I think you have to have a consistency about you because people are watching us.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah, and it's not just the you know, the big diversity programs, and you've gotta you gotta be willing to kind of join forces and advocate for some of this this uh just corrupt sexuality that's being taught and promoted, but just the things like like you said, Daniel wasn't a gossip. I mean, if he was doing that, then he would have lost his his credibility. I really like the story that you shared in your book um from the the police department. Um could you just share that that story?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, when I first uh was involved in uh getting into into church ministry, I'd done my uh qualifications, uh theological qualifications, but I did get a job uh for a while. And I ended up working in the police uh traffic camera section. What a job that, you know, everyone wants everyone hates you. Uh but um it was a hotbed of immorality, to be honest. It was full of it was public servants on one hand and then police officers on the other. And it was a lot of ungodliness, I think, in just how people are related to each other. And uh another colleague I'd met, he and I were the only Christians there, and we would pray as we drove, we'd live with each other each day, and we would pray as we went into work that we would be a godly influence in that place because it was full of adultery, it's full of uh just hard attitudes towards people. And there's this party girl that used to work with us as well, and you know, she was the brassy girl who uh was loud and everyone was all the men used to hang around. And one day, very loudly, in the middle of all this kerfuffle, she said, How come these two guys are the only guys who in this place who speak about their wives as if they love them? And there was this silence, almost shame came across people. And I wasn't feeling proud, I was just going, that's what I'm supposed to be like in the public setting. And they know that they should be like that too. And someone who wasn't a Christian called it out. And I think it's that day, it's the day-to-day way you live your life, you know, in the in the low-grade little issues of life that show who you are. You'll never go to the wall for Jesus on a big issue if you're not every day dying to self in the workplace and serving others and seeing your job not as a place for self-aggrand, you know, aggrandizement, but a place to serve. And that that's just the difference, I think, that Christianity can bring to the workplace because we have a master above us who's watching everything we do.
SPEAKER_01And you also say there's a growing need for Christians to set up businesses that fund their lives and ministries rather than relying on the state purse or that of corporations hostile to their faith. Um can you give us maybe some examples of this?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, look, that's an early stage thinking for me, but I have friends who are entrepreneurial here in Perth, and we were talking about this issue just recently after the whole issue with the football club. And they're saying the future for many Christians is to become more entrepreneurial, to set up businesses that they control the environment, and that uh they're the ones who can, well, they can actually employ people who are diverse, they don't have to just employ Christians, but that we we need to start seeing that there will be jobs that are no longer available to Christians and start to think of ways of setting up mini institutions, I suppose, and little co-ops of how we do business together. And it's not as if we want to be in a cloistered environment, but we've got to think that uh we've got to find ways of being creative in how we work and ways that will help uh create spaces for Christians to work in when other places are closed to them. And you see this happen in the health system as well, that um even in psychology and psychiatry, in order to be a psychologist or psychiatrist in the next 10 to 15 years for a Christian in a public setting, you're going to have to sign off on things that you don't believe. And you shouldn't. But those jobs will end up becoming closed to Christians. And we have to think about how we involve our lives in business settings that allow us the freedom to employ people uh based on our values and framework. So we have to become a little bit more entrepreneurial, uh, and I think we also have to be a little bit communal. How are we going to support Christians who do lose their jobs? Do we think about a fund that we can set up to if we can't send, as I say, pastors can't send uh people to work tomorrow by and outsource their bravery. You know, the pastor has to say, I want to help you in the Christian, in the non-Christian world, and we want to find ways to support you should it cost you. And I think that's what the Christian community has to do.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Are you in Australia? Are you facing similar pressure from the government? Um, such as like there in Houston, there were pastors who had their sermons subpoenaed uh to by the mayor, a very liberal, uh a very liberal mayor who wanted to see if if they were teaching anything that could be perceived as having a lack of you know diversity.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the the in the state of Victoria in uh in Australia has um brought in legislation around conversion therapy issues, but they're very they're very broad, and they've said to churches that here's what you're not allowed to pray for people around issues of identity and gender and sexuality, and we may start looking at sermons. And that is a big call, that is a massive reach. The you know, the separation of church and state was designed to protect the church, not the state. And now we're seeing that the state's overreach is massive. So it's going to be state overreach in churches. So churches, I think, are safe at some level compared to businesses, but the door is starting to creak. I think there's been a push. Some I've said recently maybe you might want to think about which sermons you put online. You're supposed to be as wise as a snake and as innocent as a dove. So it's time for a little bit of wisdom in how we put things up. But that those are worrying things across the Western world, and that shows the overreach of government and corporations into the thinking life of their employees and their citizens.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So, Stephen, what are you working on now? You you've got the book Being the Bad Guys, How to Live for Jesus in a World That Says You Shouldn't. We want people to get a copy of that. Uh, City Bibleforum.org is the website. What do you want to say to us about what you're working on now?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, look, I I think I'm doing some stuff in schools, especially Christian schools, as to how they can hold their employment um distinctions. That's the big thing in Australia at the moment. Uh, I'm going into schools to speak to Christian schools to say, here's what's coming. You need to make sure that your theological center in your school of your chaplaincy program is very firm and tight because you may not be able to staff the way you wish to because of discrimination legislation, anti-discrimination legislation. At the same time, for City Bible Forum where I'm working, there are still evangelistic opportunities to speak into people's lives. So I'm uh we run some programs I'm doing, I'm speaking nationally in a few weeks' time on um. What's the point of history? And it's an open event for workers to say, is erasing history a really good idea? And we've seen that happen the last sort of few years of we're going to erase history, you know, statues going down and things like that. And I'm speaking into that space because I think there's a there's still a place for an apologetics framework. There are still people in our workplace who are going, you know what, I don't really agree with what the boss is saying about this, but I'm going along with it anyway, just for a quiet life. And often those people will come to you and ask you questions about where life is at. And I think uh there's still evangelistic opportunity in workplaces, and you can take those opportunities. And post-pandemic, we've found that people are struggling to find how to reconnect with people back in the workplace. They're a bit uh iffy about making friends in the workplace compared to what they were before. And uh you you you've heard the term quiet quitting. You know, people are just uh doing the base level amount of work they should. And I think Christians can, we can encourage Christians to not be quiet quitters, but to do their utmost unto as unto the Lord in all the work. I mean, the slavery world of right of Rome uh wasn't going to allow you to quiet quit. But people found ways to not do their job well. But if you're saying to Christians, we want to equip you to work well in your workplace, knowing you've got a master above, and that he will give you opportunity to speak to his praise and glory and the gospel where he will, I think we can encourage Christians that while there's still time, you can still take your place in the workplace in secular settings. Uh, you just may have to adjust how you do that in the coming years.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Stephen, what's one action you'd want people to take as a result of uh what they've heard? You've given us a lot of actionable uh wisdom. Um, what would be your parting advice?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, it's interesting. It's probably a stance rather than actual do this. Um, another Australian author, Mark Sayers, has a book called A Non-Anxious Presence. And he bases that on um Milton Friedman's family systems therapy, where the the most influential person in any system, the person who is the most shaping of the culture of a place, is the person who's not anxious, the non-anxious presence. And I think Christians in a workplace, their their name may not be on the CEO door, they may not have the title of you know floor manager, but if you can be the non-anxious presence in a workplace who doesn't lose their head, who's not, you know, not the gossip, not the person who's always um taking credit for something you didn't do or trying to absolve yourself of blame, if you can be the non-anxious presence in the workplace, you will be very influential in people's lives. And I think to do that as Christians in the future, when so many people are anxious about where's my work security, uh, what the what is this job going to look like in five years' time, to be the person who is not anxious will give you a reach and a witness to the gospel that you didn't think you had. And we can get together at church or during or during the week and equip each other to not be anxious. I think that's a critical thing going forward.
SPEAKER_01Wow, that's well said. Um be anxious for nothing. Stephen, thank you for taking the time out for our listeners and and sharing your wisdom and um just helping to embolden us to be more fearless, faithful, and and faultless uh before God so that we can redeem uh this this culture.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, look, it's uh appreciate it. As I say, it's it's around the world. It's a Western world issue, it's not just Australia, it's the United States, it's Britain, it's it's I think God has equipped us by the power of the Holy Spirit with the same equipment to do this wherever we are. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01We hope you've enjoyed this episode. And if so, we would greatly appreciate it if you'd leave us a quick rating and review for the Christianity in Business podcast on iTunes. You can get more information about HSU's Center for Christianity and Business and sign up to receive free access to all issues of the Christian Business Review journal by visiting our website at Christianityinbus.com. Thanks for listening. And remember to keep integrating biblical values into your