By David W. Miller

About a hundred years ago, a businessman and a pastor each blew the clarion call for integrating Sunday and Monday. The businessman was interested in what lessons he could find in his faith to help his work. The pastor was interested in what lessons he could find in his faith to help society. 

Bruce Barton (1886–1967), a successful New York advertising executive and later a US congressman, read the Bible for the first time and discovered that Jesus is not a mild, meek, domesticated God whose relevance is relegated to quiet once-a-week visits—but a strong, vibrant being who lived in the rough and tumble of daily life, assembled a management team made up of both winners and losers, and built an organization from scratch that has outlasted most other known businesses, governments, and societies. 

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918), a theologian and pastor for years in New York’s “Hell’s Kitchen”—at that time a particularly dangerous slum—also looked at Jesus differently than did many of his day. (In fact church leaders criticized his theology.) He, too, saw Jesus as vibrant, someone who made some rather specific demands of his followers in the here and now, asking them to exercise their faith as part of their work.

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