Life@Work

June 27, 2005
Beginning with Charlie, a hard-charging businessman and recent Christian convert who feels himself torn between "Charlie Love" and "Charlie Money," the authors lament that the church, looking on the secular workplace with distance if not suspicion, has little to offer the Charlies in its midst. The authors—Graves and Addington are producers of Life@Work Journal
and Maxwell is the foremost leadership guru among evangelicals—deploy a wealth of quotations and illustrations, loosely organized around themes of skill, calling, service and character. Although the book seeks to inspire Charlie and those like him to "reforge" their work and faith selves into a double-edged sword, it runs long on cheerleading but short on insight or practical guidance. Discussing the important and difficult subject of calling, the authors assert without apparent irony, "Like a giant job-match service in the sky, Jesus pairs His children up with His kingdom tasks." Among the book's frequent references to Jesus, his teaching is rarely discussed; most curiously, his comment about the incompatibility of serving God and Mammon is never mentioned. Although team authorship can produce excellent business books, the approach stumbles here as uneven quality and multiple authorial "I" 's give the text a cut-and-paste feel.