1. What was the single most important event that prompted you to pen Doing God's Business?

R. Paul Stevens: There was no single event that prompted my writing Doing God's Business. Rather, there was a series of events and almost continuous contact with people in business who did not feel that what they were doing had any lasting value especially when it was compared with doing a Christian ministry. Not only that, but as I became increasingly a person who would listen to sermons (as I visited churches), rather than one who gives them (as a pastor, when I was one), I despaired that so little preaching applied the Word of God to the workaday world, something which actually requires acrobatics since the Scripture constantly deals with work and people in the workplace and issues of the workplace and the workplace as a source of metaphors of the kingdom of God. There are a good number of marketplace books that are testimonials of how this or that business person found meaning and ministry in her or his work, but almost nothing that answered the questions "How?", "Why?", and "How come?" That's what this book is about.

2. What do you think separated God and business in the first place? Were they even ever together?

R. Paul Stevens: God and business were together before sin entered the human family. Each human being is unique and has a contribution to make to others. This necessarily involves exchange. And that is business, even if it takes a different form from the work of a multinational corporation. But when sin entered the human family, we started a long history of dis-integration. This was aided and abetted by Greek dualism (that those involved with commerce and anything to do with the body were engaging in an inferior way of life) and incarnated in the two-level spirituality of Medieval monasticism: the upper for the priest, nun and monk and lower for the person working in trades and commerce. Tragically, much that passes for evangelical and "biblical" Christianity today has merely transferred this dualism to a hierarchy of occupations with missionary and pastor at the top and business near the bottom.

3. You state in the book that your father was in steel fabrication and had a difficult time with the faith and business dichotomy, did he ever manage to come to a reconciliation of these two competing responsibilities?

R. Paul Stevens: I worked in my father's business in almost everything except the President's office: punch presses, warehousing, book-keeping, payroll, filing, and shipping. It was a wonderful experience and gave me a deep appreciation for how my father actually conducted himself in a Christian way in doing business. His door was always open, and he showed continuous hospitality to his employees. Just recently I heard from one of the cleaning persons who worked in the building some thirty years ago that he was "my President." But I don't think he had, in the end, a sense that he was doing "the Lord's work." He always looked at pastors and missionaries as really doing something of eternal value while his work was merely temporal. He did belong to a business fellowship but the emphasis of that group was primarily devotional, providing inspiration "to keep going."

4. You travel globally quite often to lecture on this topic. Where have you found the most receptive audience?

R. Paul Stevens: It may be hard to believe, but I have found the most receptive audience in Korea where pastors are held in almost transcendent awe and many of the churches are enormous, almost mammoth. But there is a generation of pastors and working adults that are hungering to know why and how they can live out their business life to the glory of God. They do not want merely to work to support missions or even to see their workplace as mission-fields, as good as this is, but to see their work as part of the mission of God. Almost equal in responsiveness, I would have to mention Singapore where business people and professionals seem to be miles ahead of North American colleagues in the integration of faith and work. Two teaching institutions in Singapore are entirely devoted to this: Biblical Graduate School of Theology and the Marketplace Bible Institute. Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship has, over the years, had a profound impact on University students with the result that Singapore now has an extraordinary percentage of Christian professionals.

5. We often hear about the wrenching consequences of globalization as well as its many benefits. Where should Christians start when trying to formulate a response to this ongoing phenomenon?

R. Paul Stevens: Globalization is here to stay, in spite of protests to the contrary. But it needs to be transformed. And it is most likely to be transformed from within. So I encourage people to work in multinationals, for example, where they may have some influence in respecting local culture and seeing that wages are fair. Perhaps the multinational today is like the lost unreached tribe of yesterday. On the consumer level we should insist on things like fair-trade coffee and chocolate. The cumulative effect of a widespread consumer awareness and action can truly make a difference.

6. Do you think that the ethical dilemmas for Christians in the marketplace are getting larger? Or are they just getting more complex?

R. Paul Stevens: On the grand scale of history, I don't think the ethical dilemmas for Christians in the marketplace have changed much. It has always been hard. Complex. Demanding. But in more recent times when there was a Christian consensus forming values in Western civilization, there was support for ethical behavior. Now in the largely post-Christian West, moral foundations based on the Judeo-Christian influence is lacking and we are left with business done in the context of raw paganism or heartless secularism. Globalization and technology have both added factors that increase the complexity. The first by thrusting us all into the mosaic of cultural ambiguities (what's wrong for us may be right in another culture), and the second, technology, by increasing the "virtual" nature of many transactions resulting in further depersonalization.

7. What is the best advice you can give to young Christians just starting out in the marketplace?

R. Paul Stevens: My advice to young Christians starting out in the marketplace is three-fold: (1) find or create a support group where you will study and pray together to raise consciousness of what you are actually doing in the marketplace; (2) find an older Christian who has truly integrated his or her faith and work and ask him or her to mentor you; (3) make a nuisance of yourself by asking integrative questions of your pastor and request that your pastor visit you in the workplace (not just meet you at the door to have lunch down the street).