Several years ago, a student of mine, named David, shared a telling story. It illustrates the difficulty of remaining true to one’s moral character while pursuing career success. David won an internship at a major international accountancy firm. He sensed a calling to public accounting because of the potential to contribute to society through ensuring the integrity of financial reporting. The internship became a job contest, a key metric in which was efficiency. Interns were to track time spent on tasks and were warned that under-reporting was a fire-able offence. As profits would only ensue from winning competitive bids for contracts, accountants needed to work at speed, to minimize labour costs. But David was the only intern to honestly report his time, as a consequence of which he was passed over for employment.

David’s story made me sad and angry. But his telling of it stimulated a lively classroom discussion about the realities of living in a sin-stained world. There was much admiration of his moral courage. Since then, I have often thought about the type of person David would have become if he had put his career above his integrity.

I had also wondered, perhaps as a cloistered academic, if it is possible for a business to nurture character/spiritual formation. But when I began producing a series of short documentary films called Faith & Co, I was surprised to find a number of businesses that prioritize employee well-being. One of them is Dayspring Partners, a firm based in San Francisco (USA) that has been described by a long-term employee as “what would happen if a monastery became a tech firm.”

We should influence our workplaces, but how do they shape us?

The global “faith at work” movement has rightly encouraged us to have a positive influence at work. But we also need to be aware how our employment shapes us. In Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, Eugene Peterson contends that “the primary location for spiritual formation is in the workplace.” Given that we devote over 90 thousand hours to it over a lifetime, we need to ask whether we are being nudged toward good or ill. As Robert Mulholland states, “we are either being shaped into the wholeness of Christ or a horribly destructive caricature of that image, destructive not only to ourselves, but also to others.”¹

James K. A. Smith argues that we are constantly being formed, often wittingly, through influences aimed at our affections. As these “cultural liturgies” direct those affections toward specific visions of the good life, they embed us in a lifestyle and shape us as moral and spiritual beings. This can happen even in seemingly innocuous activities like strolling through a shopping mall, or working on some task.² Whether in our leisure or in our work, we need to take care, therefore, that no harm is done to our souls.

Some have suggested that the best way to do this is through spiritual exercises, like prayer and sabbath keeping. But this may underestimate the power of organizational influences. These can only be addressed if businesses are re-imagined as virtue-sustaining “communities of practice,” to use a term used by the philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre. This would indeed mean they could roughly be reconceived as monasteries. But their tools of formation would be core business operations rather than overtly spiritual activities.
Through their rules of life, regular rhythms, rituals and practices, monasteries re-orient and form the lives of monks toward an alternative kingdom. Thomas Merton describes monasticism as “a protest against the organized and dehumanizing routines of a worldly life built around gain for its own sake.”³ Yet, while many monasteries operate revenue-generating enterprises (such as brewing and book binding), it seems sacrilegious to suggest that a business could be monastic. On the other hand, a monastery is – like all other human institutions – an imperfect expression of the kingdom of God. Addressing the narrowness of monasticism’s goals, Matthew Myers Boulton suggests that it is an attempt to construct “a special spiritual precinct,” rather than “an integral world, in all its variety and ruin, divinely called to both holiness and wholeness.”⁴

What would happen if a monastery became a tech firm?⁵

Dayspring Partners seems to successfully combine Merton’s protest with Boulton’s concern for an integrated world. As noted earlier, one long-term employee has described it as what would happen if you turned a monastery into a tech business. The kind of monastery this employee had in mind not only runs a profitable business, like beer brewing, but is also involved in the every-day life of the wider community.

Dayspring was started in San Francisco in the late 1990s by graduates of the University of California (Berkeley) and Stanford University. They met through Intervarsity Christian Fellowship and continued their affiliation through a church based in the city’s Mission District. From the outset, their aim for their company was for it to participate in God’s work of “reconciling all things” by supplying professional services. The vision was that the company would perform high-quality technology consulting work at market-based rates, but that employees would voluntarily accept below-market salaries. This vision was inspired by a theological understanding of justice informed in particular by the book of Amos, which emphasizes the obligations of the rich towards the poor. Consequently, the difference between billing rates and compensation would be used to fund community service and ministry initiatives, the first of which was providing job training for vulnerable young people.

Dayspring has roughly twenty-five employees and is involved in software development, e-commerce consulting, web design and brand design. Dayspring co-principal John Greenhill says:

Dayspring was established with a core set of values: justice, generosity, integrity, mercy, dependence upon God and partnership in the Gospel. Those core values were set out front. Even if these lose us money, even if they cause us to go under, we’re going to hold to them.

Unlike companies who seem to proudly display social initiatives and messages as promotional tools, Dayspring’s mission and values are binding commitments. Several years ago, the company became registered in California as a social-purpose corporation. This legally solidifies the firm’s mission and core values and gives it the legal backing to make decisions that de-prioritize profit maximization.

One of Dayspring’s most radical and risky acts was moving its offices from San Francisco’s downtown financial district to Bayview-Hunters Point. This is an underserved neighbourhood with relatively high rates of poverty and unemployment, where neither technology firms nor visitors to the city typically venture. Co-founder Danny Fong says of Bayview, “It’s not on any tourist maps of San Francisco. And, as someone growing up here, you were likely to be told not to go there because it was dangerous.”

To avoid the harmful presumption that they were moving to Bayview to “save it,” Dayspring’s founders and employees were clear from the beginning that their intent was to join in what God had already been doing there and to participate in the life of the community. Several of the organization’s leaders and employees subsequently moved into Bayview and neighbouring communities to deepen relationships with the community.

According to Dayspring’s co-founder and principal Chi-Ming Chien, “in order to love a place, you have to know it.” During a sabbatical, he spent several days a week walking the streets to meet other “people of peace” and to become acquainted with the existing assets and needs of the community. From the ensuing conversations sprang Neighbor Fund, a lending initiative that makes small ($3,000–$10,000) collateral-free loans to small businesses in Bayview. As these loans enable social inclusion on the part of the borrowers, Yu calls such lending “a practice of peace” that “builds the community up.” Loan amounts and interest rates (usually 3–7%) are determined through conversations between borrowers and lenders, preferably over a shared meal. Loan recipients are not selected by credit score but through letters of reference, a review of their financials and their ability to repay.

In addition to focusing on the well-being of its neighbours, Dayspring also has internal policies that are far different from its peers in the Bay Area technology industry. For example, the company employs what it calls its “Isaiah 40 Curve,” based on the verse “Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain” (Isa 40:4). To enable its lowest paid employees to afford the exorbitant cost of living in San Francisco, the company has a 3 to 1 pay ratio between its CEO and its lowest-paid employee. Given the high salaries technology professionals can command in the Bay Area, this scale jeopardizes the ability to recruit suitable candidates for senior positions. Consequently, Dayspring has to appeal to applicants who are attracted to the organization’s mission, whether or not they share its Christian foundations. Remarkably, many employees have stayed long-term (10.8 years being the average tenure).

It is perhaps ironic that a technology-based company should be concerned with combatting the disembodying and depersonalizing effects of technology. Since long before the post-pandemic “return to the office” movement, the company has encouraged face-to-face work in the office on three days per week. Friday walks around the neighbourhood with a colleague, to get to know each other and the community better, have formed one of the company’s regular rhythms.

Dayspring also tries to support a sabbath lifestyle and discourage employees to over-identify with their work. The company has a maximum working week of 40 hours, which is modelled by the executive team. Client work is sold and delivery dates are promised on the assumption that staff are not available after hours and on weekends. Dayspring will decline work if it would require violating this commitment.

Restricting working hours is also a way the company’s leaders seek to put into practice their dependence upon God for an adequate inflow of business. Another such practice, to avoid over accumulation, is keeping only three months of cash flow on hand as a matter of choice, rather than necessity. Chien refers to the biblical concepts of “manna” (Ex 16) and “a soldier’s ration” (1 Cor 9:4–11) to illustrate that God provides us with “just enough.” Consistent with this theme, Dayspring increased its giving from 10% of net income to 5% of revenue for five months during the COVID-19 shutdowns, despite business setbacks. This reflected the company’s view that the COVID-19 pandemic was a key moment to affirm its purpose.

Dayspring tries to translate its mission and core values not only into its policies but into its products and services. For example, one of the company’s products is the popular personal finance app, Good Budget. The product is based upon the classic envelope system of budgeting and was developed to help people align their finances with their core values. It encourages, for instance, financial transparency in relationships, to help break some of the damaging effects of taboos and secrecy.

While Dayspring is solidly values-based, practical wisdom still prevails. Chien is happy to admit that some policies (e.g., the three in-person days per week) are maintained with a lighter touch than others (e.g., the 40-hour working week). He does not, moreover, see the company as a definitive model of a company based on Christian faith but only as an attempt to be a faithful expression of that faith within the business sphere.

Dayspring’s mission and operational strategies and decisions were not chosen for the sake of the moral formation of its employees. The company’s practices were adopted, rather, as ways to express some of the implications of living into the story of God’s ongoing work of redemption. But these practices nevertheless function as “cultural liturgies” that form the character of employees, and some are clearly aware of the formative effects – positive and negative – that working in business can have. As Yu puts it:

The notion that business is primarily there for folks to earn as much money as possible, at whatever cost, and then (for the Christian) to give some of it to another mission or ministry, is malforming. I think it’s bad for our souls … My work needs to generate money but also to increase the well-being of a place, of a community. That’s going to form me into a certain kind of person, with a certain kind of character, and a certain way of understanding the world.

Dayspring is an outstanding example of a business that operates in ways that promote (as a by-product) character and spiritual formation. It is guided by a different story of what a “good life” or being a “successful business” entails, as its practices and policies are adopted to serve not only its own interest but the interests of others. I only wish David, my former student, could have had an initial experience in business like the one I suspect Dayspring could have provided him. I take solace in knowing that his act of courage has likely served him as his life unfolds, but I wish more business leaders could be attentive to how the pressures they put on their employees have a formative impact. Another word for “dayspring” is “dawn.” This company, like the dawn, gives me hope.

Dr Kenman Wong is a Professor at the School of Business, Government & Economics, Seattle Pacific University, USA.