A few months ago, I joined a LinkedIn group of small business owners in the "Houston Bay Area" — which means the area between Houston and Galveston, including places like Pearland, Clearlake, and the rest of the area around NASA's Johnson Space Center. I'm not based in that specific suburbia, but it's only a 25-mile drive from my Houston location to NASA, which depending on the time of the day can take between 30 minutes and infinity. As a fledgling independent consultant with existing connections in Houston, I figured the networking could be useful.
The group leader soon started organizing in-person meetings at a Mexican cantina near NASA. After missing the first opportunities, I went to a happy hour in January. My initial impressions were cautiously favorable: while many people were in unrelated fields (construction, real estate, insurance) there were a few members doing IT work. They were not directly competing with me, so there seemed to be good cross-selling opportunities. There were also contract personnel agencies, and while they typically deal with clerical and accounting positions, I thought they might occasionally need to find a part-time IT expert for a client, which I could do for a few days, even if it was "filler work" at a lower rate than usual. Business cards were exchanged, and I went to a second time for a luncheon meeting in February. I volunteered to give a not-too-geeky talk about IT trends at the March 11 lunch, a proposal which was accepted with very positive feedback.
About a week before my talk, as I was putting the finishing touches to my presentation, I got e-mails telling me that a couple of new posts had been added to the group's discussion board. I went to the site, and discovered a message from a pastor, asking the rest of us something about how we would answer God if he met us at the "pearly gates" and asked us some question I have now forgotten. The second post, by the group's manager, Mary Sullivan, was to re-emphasize the pastor's message and tell us to re-read it and think about it. And then there was a third message, by another member who said that yes, he had re-read the question, and would still be able to answer God in the affirmative.
At that point, I wrote a polite but a bit "challenging" message, saying that while I respected everyone's beliefs, this discussion had nothing to do with the purpose of the group, and that it should be taken offline. I remarked that I was aware that some Christians tend to assume, in this very religious country, that everyone else is one too, and that it is okay to mix religion and work. However, I pursued, this is not okay because people from other religions, or with no religion at all, would feel discriminated against, and at any rate this was the "Houston Bay Area LinkedIn Group," not the "Houston Bay Area Christian LinkedIn Group."
At this point, Mary Sullivan replied that she wasn't going to change the direction of the group (which she did not restate, which was convenient since she would have been hard pressed to find any mention of a religious focus or assumption in the group's mission statement). She stated that my remarks indicated that I was intolerant of Christians. She informed me that she had asked the pastor who has posted the initial note to open the next meetings with a prayer; and that, since she did not want me to feel "uncomfortable" at that point, she had already secured an alternate speaker to replace me on March 11.
I sent a quick reply, where I remained polite but pointed out her hypocrisy (she had cancelled my talk, so who was being intolerant of whom?) and immediately thereafter I left the LinkedIn group, as it seemed the most appropriate course of action to avoid further confrontation and move on to more productive things.
As far as I am concerned, the incident is closed. I actually hope their group falters because I think it is a disservice to its members to have hijacked it for a hidden religious agenda. It was dishonest to create the group and invite people in the first place without clearing stating the assumption that members were Christians who wanted to discuss their business in the context of their faith (or vice versa). It may seem mean-spirited to wish them failure, but my point is that the sooner the group makes itself irrelevant, which may or may not happen given that this is Texas after all, another group can be formed to fill the void — one that will be unrelated to the practice of any specific religion and will serve its stated business networking purposes directly and honestly. If such a group gets formed at some point, I am certainly interested in joining it.
Oh, and my slides on "IT Trends" are ready, and will remain current for a little while!
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