What I love about my in house Christian group - Chris

I work at CBA in the Digital Technology team. I've been here nearly 6 years. What drew me to work for CBA was that I knew there was a large Christian in-house group network.

After a short time I connected with some members of the group and got involved in various activities, including a Bible study, an Evangelistic Prayer Team and helping out with Christmas and Easter outreach events.

Our small groups are scattered across different offices, and we have people in nearly every state in Australia. We communicate via a Yammer group (like Facebook for business) and have over 320 members.

What is great about a workplace group is that you have colleagues with whom you have something in common: your Christian faith. You can pray with them at a moment's notice and encourage one another. When work is stressful, my workplace group gives me perspective, reminding me that I’m part of something bigger.

During the COVID lockdown we were unable to meet in person, but we continued meeting in small groups at lunchtime over Skype. This has been a great sustenance to my own faith in the middle of the workday especially with the additional isolation of working from home. Sometimes I’m tempted to retreat socially, but I found that being part of a prayer team gets me out of my shell and helps me to think about how to be a blessing to my colleagues who are also doing it tough.

CBA has a yearly grad program where young workers just out of university get a taste of working in different areas of a major bank. I read every bio introducing them and if there's a common interest, I'll reach out and say “hi”. By doing this I've found several fellow Christians and invited them to join the CBA Christian network.

Diversity & Inclusion is valued at CBA, which encourages employees to come to work as their “authentic” selves.” This has to be handled with wisdom, but gives us a great opportunity to bring Christ into our workplace and invite Him into the work we do.

[City Bible Forum works with numerous Christian workplace groups inside companies, firms and government, for example KPMG, CBA, Westpac, Reserve Bank, Qantas, Cochlear. We aim to help these groups, especially the leaders, by providing resources, training, speakers for events and peer to peer encouragement.

Please contact Craig Josling if you would like to start a workplace group in your organisation, link up with an existing group or get some help for your group.]