By Mark Ellis, Special to ASSIST News Service
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA (ANS - October 12, 2015)
-- She would like to be the first woman president of the United States
and is openly challenging Hillary Clinton for that honor. For many years
she thought of God as a benevolent ‘super CEO’ and the resurrection of
Jesus as allegorical, until a prominent pastor prodded her to embrace a
deeper faith.
“When I was a child and into
young adulthood I believed in a personal relationship with God through
Jesus Christ,” Carly Fiorina told a conference arranged by Opportunity
International (OI) last year.
Raised Episcopalian, her father
was a prominent law professor who became a deputy U.S. attorney general
and later, a judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals. Her mother was an
abstract painter, which may explain her precision-oriented, steel-trap
mind and the artistic sensibilities of her makeup.
Growing up, Fiorina attended
five different high schools, studied philosophy and medieval history at
Stanford, then worked as a secretary and receptionist at various firms
until her spectacular rise through the ranks of AT&T, Lucent, and
Hewlett-Packard.
As the focus on her career gained ascendancy, she drifted from the simple faith of her childhood.
“I still prayed every day,” she
told the summit arranged by OI. “I still knew our souls didn’t die,
that this isn’t the end. I had faith that good would triumph over evil
and we do reap what we sow,” she maintained.
She viewed God through a
business prism, as a benevolent executive. “I had come to view God as a
super CEO of a big enterprise. He had created the universe. He had put
in place quite a sophisticated set of management processes and those
processes kept things running, not necessarily smoothly every day, but
basically in the direction he intended over the long arc of time.”
The God she envisioned,
however, was not very personal. “He didn’t attend to every detail. He
didn’t know every person; how could he possibly? But he did somehow
receive regular management reports that directed him to the strategic
issues that required his attention or intervention,” she noted.
Her view of the foundational
doctrines of the Christian faith was unorthodox. “The virgin birth, the
resurrection, the divinity of Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit – these were
powerful allegories that drew people toward the right idea,” she
thought.
“They were profound ideas at the heart of a sophisticated governance system, but I wasn’t really sure they were real any more.”
An invitation and a prayer
But
her uncongealed faith was challenged after she received a phone call
and invitation from Bill Hybels, the founding pastor of Willow Creek
Community Church, to speak at his global leadership summit.
Fiorina accepted Hybel’s
invitation, but was “a little nervous” about speaking at a
religious-oriented venue. “I had been charging hard in the corporate
world for quite a long time so I didn’t usually speak in that kind of
setting,” she noted.
Fiorina met with Hybels in his office ahead of their interview and Hybels asked if he could pray with her.
Photo captions. Pastor Bill Hybels. 2) Carly and Frank.
About the writer: Mark Ellis is senior correspondent for the ASSIST News Service and also the founder of www.Godreports.com
, a website that shares stories, testimonies and videos from the church
around the world to build interest and involvement in world missions.
You may republish this or any of our ANS stories with attribution to the ASSIST News Service (www.assistnews.net).
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