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The ministry has placed 50 intercessors in businesses. For some, prayer is their sole responsibility. Others have additional duties but are free to pray when needed, Alves said.

"I don't want people to think intercessors are spiritual gurus who will pray the company into prosperity," she said. "The purpose is to see people come into God's kingdom."

With no registry or official record keeping, though, assessing the breadth of corporate intercession is difficult. Most participants link it with the larger, thriving marketplace ministry movement.

"It is very pervasive, but it's hard to measure because it's a very private practice," said David Miller, co-founder of the Avodah Institute of Key Biscayne, Florida. (Avodah is a Hebrew word that means both worship and work.) The institute, which Miller co-founded in 1999 with former ServiceMaster CEO William Pollard, advises businesses on spiritual matters. "There is a widespread trend to integrate work and faith, but prayer is just a subset of that."

Paul Stevens, professor of marketplace theology at Regent College in Vancouver, calls the new focus on workers' spirituality a positive trend. Yet he says business owners must avoid using prayer as a tool to "ratchet up" performance.

Church law expert Richard Hammar warns that workplace prayer must be purely voluntary. Otherwise, he said, employees may claim the practice violates federal or state bans on religious discrimination.

Sometimes, employers cross the line. Last summer, a federal court jury in Indianapolis awarded $270,000 in damages to six Catholics and a Unitarian for religious discrimination. They successfully claimed their employer, Preferred Management Corporation, required them to conform to the evangelical owner's beliefs. They also said under-performing employees had to pray with managers. The judge in the case issued a stay on the judgment pending an appeal.

Jennifer Kaplan of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) said employers are increasingly concerned about making reasonable accommodations for the faith of employees.

Spuler of Cardone Industries said the company avoids pressuring employees to participate. Workday prayer is optional. Most meetings are before work or on Saturdays, he said.

Even if employers respect others' views, Gene Brooks, the founder of an intercessory prayer initiative, frowns on paying employees to pray. Brooks, the former chairman of Mission Carolina, said paying intercessors could create conflict with non-Christians. Brooks taught a prayer workshop at this year's annual conference of the International Coalition of Workplace Ministries, based in Cumming, an Atlanta suburb.

"I can just imagine an unbelieving employee saying, 'I have to sit down here and balance [the books] every day, and you're … up with the boss, praying,'" Brooks said. "That's not conducive to winning people to the Lord."

Christians have to make allowances for God's sovereignty, too, the Avodah Institute's Miller said. A former executive at IBM and an equity partner at a private bank in London, Miller recently completed his doctorate at Princeton Theological Seminary.

"In business, are we praying to win against a competitor?" Miller asked. "I think it's … consistent with Christian teaching to pray for certain outcomes. But we also need to allow space for God's plan that may not be ours."

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July 2003, Vol. 47, No. 7