Want to Love Your Job? Church can Help, Study Says

The catch: The church you attend has to emphasize faith-work integration—and you have to show up.

If they can be tempted away from their workplaces to worship, churches can make parishioners happier with their jobs, new research shows.

Regular attenders who frequent a church that teaches God is present at your workplace, work is a mission from God, or that faith can guide work decisions and practices is a good sign for your career, according to a recent study from Baylor University.

Those who often attend churches with that philosophy are more likely to be committed to their work, be satisfied with their work and look for ways to expand or grow the business.

The effect isn’t huge, but it is statistically significant, he said. Park and his fellow researchers point out in the study that the small effect size might be meaningful in another way: As an indication that current survey questions and methods do a poor job of measuring the importance and influence of religion in respondents’ lives.

(CT previously reported on the anomalous non-Christians who say they interpret the Bible literally, and The Atlantic pointed out the difficulty of asking survey respondents to decide if religion could answer all the world’s problems or is old fashioned and out of date.)

“Being at a church identified as emphasizing faith-work integration was not sufficient to predict job satisfaction,” said Baylor researcher Jerry Park. “Similarly, just going to church, regardless of what is being taught, has little effect on job satisfaction. However, when one frequently attends a church that emphasizes faith-work integration, job satisfaction increases.”

As Park points out, one challenge might be in getting to church in the first place: 24 percent of religiously affiliated Americans mention practical difficulties, …