Workplace Witness

By Aaron Kauffman

“Hola, Profe!” Hello, Teacher! This was how I was often greeted in the streets of La Mesa, Colombia, during our three years of missionary service there.

As a rare foreigner in a small town, I had a recognized and respected role in the community, teaching English at the local Mennonite school. It was known as the best school in the region and open to all. Every year they had a waiting list for families to enroll their children. And that’s how people knew me, through my role at the school, even people whose children did not
attend there. Profe. Teacher. I loved it.

I have never served in business, but my experience as a teacher gives me a window into what it is like to have a genuine and readily understood role in a cross-cultural context. Locals are more likely to see you as making a valuable contribution to their community. They are more likely to consider you one of their own.

This is only one of many reasons we have embraced the Business for Transformation (B4T) movement, also called business as mission. B4T offers a way for Christians to be authentically present in cross-cultural settings where traditional mission work is not allowed or understood. As a business leader, one can build trust and enjoy a recognized role in the community.

Business also benefits communities by creating jobs. Patrick Lai, a leader in the B4T movement, shares the story of visiting Senegal to do consulting with a local charity. After getting to know the only English-speaking taxi driver in town over the course of several days, Lai asks the driver what he thinks the charity should invest in. Clean water? Medicine? Schools?

“Don’t waste your money on any of them,” is the terse reply from the taxi driver. Then he adds, “You asked me what we need. What we need are jobs. If the [charity] creates jobs for us, then we can decide if we need water or medicine or education.”¹

So business provides Christian workers with a genuine role and an authentic way to bless communities. Our deepest longing, however, is for spiritual transformation. In the workplace, Christian values are on display and create natural opportunities for people to inquire about “the reason for the hope that [we] have” (1 Peter 3:15, NIV).

It was in the classroom that one of my students learned about my faith in Jesus. His cousin then invited him to church, where he eventually put his trust in Jesus, too. Now a young adult, he was recently named the national youth director for the Colombian Mennonite Church.

Workplace witness is an approach to mission that all of us with jobs can practice. May we let our light shine—in the classroom, the office, and the marketplace—and so bring glory to God.

1. Patrick Lai, Business for Transformation: Getting Started (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 2015), 4-5. ↩︎