“The journey”

I work at a railway engineering company in Melksham, Wiltshire. This is our personal workplace story.


Witnesses - 5th Gospel

The word says “You shall be witnesses”; there is no choice. “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden.” Matthew 5:14.

As a Christian at work you quickly discover that if you have expressed your religious beliefs in anyway to anyone then quite a lot of other people get to hear about it. You may have only mentioned going to church, it might because of a fish symbol on the back of your car; it might even be that you have already stepped out a little and offered to pray for someone. Whatever started the witness, you need to aware that the eyes of the world are watching.

We become ambassadors of Christ whether we knowingly accept that or not. The people we work with may not have read the four gospels, but our lives are more easily read by all those around us. They see in real terms what it means to be a follower of Christ; they may see this as strength or a weakness because of what we say and do; at worse they may be ambivalent to it. To them we are like a 5th Gospel.

Firstly we should not feel burdened by these things, because God promises to give us the words to say in every situation, when we are prepared to take Him at His word.

Commitment

My starting point was a group that already existed which I joined, but you may have to start one if you are unsure. You are probably not the only Christian even if you feel you must be. Check out the company’s intranet site, you may be surprised, you could check for cars in the car park for fishes, Spring Harvest / New Wine stickers.

To advertise we found that a simple page on our Intranet site has helped to uncover some existing employees and new starters that are Christians, and some who have not been obvious enough to know who the were. The intranet advert simply advertised that we existed, what we are, and who to contact.


There has to be some element of commitment to a workplace group, but it is all too easy to become critical of those who perhaps won’t come along or are irregular attendees.

It was around 2001 that we had our first vision for the group:

The starfish vision:
This spoke us to very directly that we must not exclude or see any of our membership as more or less important as any other. Some are at the centre of the starfish, and others at the extremities, but all are part of one body, the body of Christ.

To encourage this we arranged to watch the ‘Transformations’ Video together. It shows the transforming power God at work in a hillside metropolis run by Colombian drug lords, to a rural village in Kenya and even Metropolitan Southern California. We will be returning to this important video later in the story.

Revelation & Mission

The revelation for us was that we had been placed among the lost for a reason; as C.S Lewis puts it in the Screwtape letters “the safest road to Hell is the gradual one, the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts”. We believed we had an obligation to provide a clear signpost in the opposite direction.

The workplace is often the deep pool of non-believers, compared to often the shallow waters of our personal lives. You may have been concerned that God was going to send you to Outer Mongolia as a missionary; well it might just be that you already are right in the midst of exactly where God wants you to be.

We had another vision at this time which affirmed this belief that God wanted us to reach everyone within our workforce with the gospel message. No one was to left off the ‘list’, and not given the opportunity to hear and receive the gospel.

The Schlinder’s list vision:

   


We knew we had to respond, but how?

Unity

As a group we were very aware that we came from different denominational backgrounds. This had led to some very heated discussions in the early days. Convinced by the Starfish vision, we realised that having a ‘spirit of unity’ was not enough, and that we needed ‘unity of the spirit’

After much discussion and drawing up of various ‘statements of belief’ we ended up agreeing to the Christians at Work Statement of belief. It was complete enough but worded loosely enough to allow an acceptable interpretation for all us of us to accept.

“Looking back I see this as a key turning point in our workplace group.”

The outcome of this unity is I believe paraphrased from Psalm 133:1&3:

Where there is unity, the Lord commands a blessing.


Prayer

The power and importance of prayer must never be underestimated. Communication is vital in any relationship for it to be healthy and beneficial to those involved. It builds, strengthens. At work I believe God calls us into a partnership relationship, and we need to be both attentive in hearing and seeing what He is already up to in an organisation so we can build with Him.

Almost immediately following our newly found unity, we witnessed some miraculous healings of a bladder and high eye pressure within our own group membership. We took this as a strong affirmation.

We have learnt that God cares for every single aspect of our personal lives, and work lives, and we have seen many responses to prayer on the personal level and in our daily work lives and business projects. He makes no distinction and neither should we; I would encourage you to be bold and not support any policy that says leave God at the doorstep. Being a Christian is a definition of what we are – we are a new creation, and we are that wherever we are.


Vision

Throughout our times together our group was blessed with many more words and visions, most of which were either affirmation of our actions or visions of things to come.

They were:

A city on a hill cannot be hidden – you shall be witnesses
Bobbing Boats – Bringing people into the safety of Gods Harbour
Tidal Wave Vision - Vision of revival coming towards the UK
Nehemiah – building the Kingdom of God in the workplace

I would encourage anyone involved in this type of ministry to actively seek the heart of God for their organisation, ask for words and visions, and record them with the best pictures you can find to represent them.

During the next three years we went through a factory move which split our group in half (previously we were formed from two separate companies on the same physical site), however our group was strengthened by some new members.

In 2006 our story picks up again with renewed visions and a real call to evangelise in the workplace on a level we could not have previously believed was possible.

We also spent some time checking out some challenging DVDs from the Sentinel Group including ‘The Approaching Fire’ and ‘The Quickening’ which really got our hearts fired up for what was happening in the world, how God was intervening where people fervently sought Him, and the potential should that same thing occur in the UK.

More information can be found here: http://www.sentinelgroup.org/

Remembering back to 2001, we realised that the Transformation videos contained a ‘blueprint’ for reaching a nation, and realised that these principles could also be applied to a workplace ministry. We started to revisit these ideas and record what we saw as key catalysts for transformation and revival.

To help us do this we also watched many other encouraging DVDs together as a group such as ‘Robber of the Cruel Streets’, and talks by Selwyn Hughes on revival, and a dramatisation of the Welsh revival.


Organisation as Entity

At this time we began to see the organisation itself as a spiritual entity, which could be prayed into, just as much as for individuals with specific prayer requests.

We even did some digging into the history of the company just to understand any potential spiritual strongholds over it. We started prayer walking around our factory in the surrounding fields. We literally encircled the factory by these actions, praying, talking, and walking claiming the ground for God.

Further visions:
Iceburg – We are only seeing a fraction of what the Lord is doing in the workplace
Harvest – Some of our evangelism work will see quick fruits, others in another season

Blessing

We entered a season that was fully supported by openness from our Human Resources Dept to do many things. We made it a rule to always approach them first (after prayer, and a leading by the spirit to go), and have on every occasion received approval to put up boldly worded posters and hand people flyers for our planned DVD presentations. We took full advantage of the in-house multimedia facilities in showing Christian DVDs suitable for outreach type events.

The forms of outreach have been:

Article in internal magazine
DVD outreaches – ‘Tough Talk’, ‘Discussing the Da Vinci Code’, ‘Evolution’ – Dr Gary Parker, ‘So who is this Jesus?’
DVD drops – at Christmas 2006 and 2008; we gave copies of the ‘More to Life’ and the ‘Ian McCormack testimony’ to every employee, wrapped in Christmas paper and labelled from our group.

We saw the time before the DVD presentations as an open season to pray, invite, and talk to people about the presentation, our own story, or just to get a little closer to those who perhaps had life issues which we could pray into.

In the weeks running up the event we spent time to specifically pray by name for each individual we had invited.

Following the first DVD presentation (Tough Talk) we had further visions:
Damaged Circular Tower – to us this spoke that we had broken out from the confines of our group and were starting to make an impact in the workplace.
The ‘strongholds of men – we needed to attack with our outreaches the specific things which hold people back or block the word of God.
Salvation Machine – It was as if what is being constructed spiritually within the workplace was ‘a machine’ that produces the opportunity for salvation.
Ripples on a lake - All are reached. It can be easy to think a particular mission or outreach event has failed, and we took this vision to mean that some are touched more directly, while others although on the edges are still affected.

A greater call – a call to revival

From our gathered data during our exploration of revival, we began to summarise everything we had, trying to boil it down to some basic principles.

We felt strongly that the Lord was calling us to work hard at this, and we were led into creating what we now call “The Battleplan”. This is a summary of the principles we have adopted, have learnt, and are learning to put into practice in our workplace right now.

The core scriptural directive within this is:

2 Chronicles 7:14

“If my people who are called by my name, humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land”


What other organisations can help me?

Along side Christians at Work, there is some excellent material and support to be found from the Transform Work UK organisation

I also encourage you to explore the material produced by World Trumpet Missions.

Finally, one of our own members was released by redundancy into a position to fulfil their personal call for this very matter;

The UK Revival Network has been established for the very purpose of seeking to connect like minded organisations who are working on the ground to bring the gospel to where the people already are at, and to ultimately provide a single source for teaching on applying biblical principles of restoration and revival.

More information can be found here: www.uk-revival-network.com