 Like most seminarians, David Miller learned to translate ancient biblical Hebrew and Greek to modern English. But it is another language gulf that concerns him as he begins his Ph.D. work—the chasm between the language of theology and that of business. Or, more aptly, the chasm between the world of the church and the world of the workplace.
Yet the decision to change his life direction didn’t seem radical to Miller. “I was happy in banking, and in London,” he says. “But slowly, subtly, through my prayer life and in conversation with my wife, Karen, I began to feel tugged toward ministry. It seemed a natural thing to do, to connect my faith in God with the business world where I had spent so much time.” Linking these two worlds is now Miller’s passion. “The church needs to reach out to the business community,” he says. “Many people working in corporate America feel the church has no place for them. Christians can tend to separate the church and the work world, often painting the marketplace as bad and materialistic and the church as good and pure.” Yet the marketplace is exactly where Miller believes Jesus spent much of his ministry. “Of Jesus’ thirty parables, more than half take place in a marketplace setting,” he points out, citing the parables of the talents and the laborers in the vineyard. Miller also points to the stories of the tax collector Zacchaeus (“the Donald Trump of his day”) befriended by Jesus and the wedding at Cana, where Jesus “celebrated the material things of life as good.” While an M.Div. student, Miller had a chance to test “workplace ministry” as part of his field education placement at Nassau Presbyterian Church in Princeton. He began a “Faith in the Workplace” group that met two Saturdays a month at the church to address the pressures and ethical issues the participants faced on the job and to offer them pastoral support. “Some were church members, but others had not set foot in a church for years,” he says. The group was an immediate success. In 1997 Miller and two local executives sponsored a retreat called “Soul in the Work-place: Exploring Issues of Faith and Work” that attracted fifty people. In 1998, they followed up with a retreat on money—“how people’s worth is measured by what they are paid, and how feelings about money are grounded in childhood experiences with it.” In his work, Miller rejects the church’s proclivity to write off business as bad. “Rightly used, well-invested money can help feed the hungry and clothe the poor,” he says. “The church needs to be savvy about money, and to concern itself with productive justice, not just distributive justice.” He envisions the church as salt and light to the world of the marketplace—stinging where there is inequity and shining light on healthy business practices. Miller wants the church to concern itself, too, with the spiritual needs of men and women who work in America’s boardrooms, law offices, and assembly lines. “I want to help people glorify God in their workplaces,” he says. “To do this, they must feel valued and supported. That sometimes means helping them to reframe their worlds, even to seek new employment. More often, it means helping them to take more control over the parts of their jobs they can control.” The idea of integrating the ethics of business with the pastoral nurture of people in their work life has enticed Miller to apply to Princeton’s Ph.D. program, where he will work in the areas of religion and society, social ethics, and pastoral care. “I want to explore how the church can offer ethical and theological guidance in the marketplace and also address the real human needs of the people who work there,” he says. A post-Ph.D. career as parish minister is unlikely,
although Miller does hope to be ordained. “I’d
love to teach seminarians to pay attention to these
issues or to teach ethics in a business school,” he
muses. Or he might find himself on the speaking
circuit—lecturing, writing, and consulting with
business management teams or with pastors. What surprises
him most is how comfortable he feels with the
uncertainty. Whatever Miller's future calling is, it will take
advantage of his unique "bilingual" abilities.
"Christianity is one of the important voices in the
marketplace," Miller says. "We must learn to
speak there. But we must also listen to what those in the
marketplace are saying."
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Princeton Theological Seminary |
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Miller has lived in both worlds. Before
entering Princeton’s M.Div. program in 1995, he was
an investment banker living in London and immersed in
corporate finances, mergers, and acquisitions. At one
point he managed 500 people and $150 billion in client
assets.
