Questions We Don’t Ask at Church

React or Angular? Is G Suite ready for enterprise? RAID10 with spinning disks or RAID5 with SSDs? Stay technical or get into management? What’s interviewing at Amazon like? How much should I negotiate the offer?

I spent most of my career in the technology industry, and those are some of the many questions that I had to contend with. Where would I typically go for such answers? Most of the time it would be my colleagues, my ex-colleagues, Stack Overflow, Gartner, Reddit or Glassdoor. I might even pray!

But rarely would I ask my church community. Why is that?

Untapped resources

I recently scrolled through the list of people who are part of the Hoboken Grace Professionals Group on LinkedIn. Just on the first page I saw half a dozen software developers. I saw three quite senior technology managers, including a CTO. I saw a number of sales executives across various industries. A handful of attorneys and HR executives. We even have a CEO in the group!

It began to dawn on me that there are thousands of years of technical and leadership knowledge already in our community. People with battle scars and experience gained from dealing with bad bosses and unreasonable clients. Experience pitching to VCs, managing IPOs, building and managing organizations of thousands of people. And, yes, people with experience of React and Angular!

In short, our church has some really accomplished people, many of whom are already eagerly sought-after for their knowledge and experience. Strangely, that doesn’t include those of us who could benefit most – people from the same faith community!

I know we could benefit from those in our community because not only do these people have the right expertise and experience, I know we align on values and priorities and will be considering problems in the same way.

At Hoboken Grace, we encourage people to find a “Paul” (mentor), a “Barnabas” (peer) and a “Timothy” (mentee). I don’t know about you, but I’ve often found intentionally identifying these people quite hard – but aren’t they relationships that we often carry effortlessly in our work? 

As I continued looking at the impressive list of professionals in our community, I also found myself thinking, “they just took this job – I wish they would have talked to me before they did that,” or, “I’d love to learn about how they hired 200 people in three years,” or, “they have the same job as me, I wonder if they have the same challenges as I do?”

How do we respond?

1. Join our group and get your friends to join the group – the network becomes exponentially more powerful as it increases in size.

2. Use the network to fill your circles.

3. As you do this, recognize we’re not just finding new ways to network. Instead, let this also be a way we allow God and our church family into our Mondays-Fridays! And a way to support and encourage one another as we go about our work, impacting those around us.