SXSW 2010 
What’s the Big Idea? 
"I Had a Great Future Behind Me"
This winter, as headlines around the country trumpeted the comeback of the economy, 47-year-old Jost Lunstroth entered his eighth month without a job. Like thousands of other formerly successful Texans, he's found himself mired and humiliated in the harrowing new world of unemployment— with no end in sight.
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UNDER NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES, IT WOULD NOT have occurred to Jost to turn to Christianity for help. First of all, he is Jewish, and second, he had already sought and failed to find help at his own religious institution. "They didn't think Jews got laid off," he said of his temple. But then a Muslim friend told him about the Between Jobs Ministry (BJM), located in a church just north of Houston, in Spring. Many local churches had seen the benefit of employment services during hard times—they boosted membership—but Northwest Bible Church, which housed BJM, was by far the biggest and most zealous, with more than two thousand members. Resigned to the fact that nothing else was working, Jost decided to visit the ministry one morning last September. He was so nervous about showing up at an evangelical church that he had to pull over and take a short nap before going in.
The sanctuary, located inside a modest A-frame building nestled in a grove of pines across from a skating rink, had seats for about four hundred, but only about one hundred were filled when Jost arrived. Waiting for the meeting to begin, he flipped through the packet of information he'd been handed at the door, a series of flyers packed into a Ziploc bag. A red flyer contained the ministry's mission statement ("To assist in all areas of a person's life as they are involved in a job search"). A bright yellow pamphlet contained interview tips. A beige sheet suggested "Forty Ways for 'Between Jobbers' to Bolster Their Financial Future," which included avoiding ATMs, lottery tickets, and e-trades. ("Buy and hold for forty days," the pamphlet advised.) The remaining sheets were religious tracts, which Jost ignored.
At nine-thirty, a pale, reedy man took the pulpit and welcomed the crowd that was slowly filling the sanctuary's metal folding chairs. Jost spied Indians, Asians, blacks, and Hispanics—men and women—but the majority of the guests looked just like him. The church was filling up with white guys of a certain age, dressed for Casual Friday, bearing cell phones and soft briefcases. Like Jost, they shifted uneasily in their seats as the pastor, Roy Farmer, began to speak. The scene was not unlike a Depression-era soup kitchen, but instead of supper following the sermon there were job leads, and instead of hobos there were former engineers and software developers.
Farmer said that the idea for the ministry came to him at three o'clock one morning eleven years ago, when "the Lord laid on my heart and gave me a vision." That vision was to create a ministry to bolster the sagging egos of his unemployed parishioners. Not much happened until the tech crash of 2000 and Enron's collapse in 2001, but then, Farmer recounted, "The thing exploded." While most churches took a low-key approach to job counseling, BJM offered day-long sessions to teach people interview and résumé-writing skills, and members created a Web-based job bank. "I don't care what the world tells you," Farmer insisted. "You are special. And today, more than five hundred people have agreed to help you find a job." Jost looked around. It was ten-thirty, and every seat was full. Jobless people stood against the walls, two or three deep. He would later learn that BJM regulars came late, just as the sermon was ending and the networking sessions were beginning.
Jost scanned the confidential BJM pamphlet with its five hundred exclusive job listings, pocketed a free box of "Holy Altoids" ("A sheer killer in an interview is bad breath," Farmer preached), and stayed on to work on his interview skills. He left feeling strangely hopeful. He wasn't alone.
In his home office later that day, Jost logged on to the BJM message board expecting to survey its job listings but surfing instead into a squall of prayer requests. One, for instance, came from a man with a master's degree who had been looking for a job for two years. Just as he decided to go back to school for a doctorate, he found a contract job with hourly pay and no benefits. He took it. "I thought maybe God wanted me to go back to work instead of school . . . I appreciate all the prayers you have given me during the last two years," the man wrote.
Jost kept surfing, his desperation growing, until he found someone who had actually found a full-time job. "Please feel free to share this message with other BJMers," he wrote. "My schedule is quickly filling up, but I am willing to help others in their search when possible. . . . Also, a special thank you to those who have been praying for me during this time. I will continue to pray that BJMers find fulfilling positions soon."
Jost had just a few questions. What if two people from the group were up for the same job and both prayed to God for it? Did God pick one over the other or just ignore both?
Was he starting to lose his mind?
IN OCTOBER JOST FINALLY GOT TWO job interviews, his first in five months: One was with Questia, the online encyclopedia once associated with Enron. The other was a temporary position to replace a woman at Texas Instruments while she was on maternity leave. It was, of course, a contract job.
Being a temporary worker had seemed a great idea when Jost was assisting Exxon—he was free of the calcified corporate bureaucracy, and in those days, short-term jobs paid extremely well. But now he was experiencing the downside. Once, anyone who was breathing was hired as contract labor. Now, with so many people on the market, companies wanted to interview all the available talent before filling a temporary position—and then they wanted to keep looking for someone better. Still, the recruiter made it sound like this job—managing TI's online store—might lead to something permanent. The position was billed as "E-business manager with a multinational." Jost was excited. "This is not just a keep-the-chair-warm gig," he wrote in his blog. "They want strategy and ideas and work."
Just before Halloween, the recruiter called Jost for prescreening, an interview to determine whether he could be passed on to the company for an interview. Even though the meeting was conducted over the phone, Jost was dressed nicely, in a button-down shirt and khakis. "I'm available if it's the right position," he told the recruiter crisply. He listened, cradled the phone to his left ear, and poured himself a cup of coffee. "I'd like to get $35 an hour plus." He listened some more. "Oh, okay," he said. "A four-day workweek would be fine." The money was already shrinking.
Describing the job, the recruiter confided that she had also placed the woman he'd be replacing. "Oh, interesting," Jost said. "A contractor replacing a contractor." The job, she warned, was loosely defined, scaring off some people. "That's good for me, because I thrive in unstructured environments," Jost chirped.
He aced the interview. The recruiter called a few days later to tell Jost she was forwarding his name to the company's HR department and recommending they speak with him. In the meantime, Jost occupied himself by talking to a neighborhood group on behalf of Bill White. For just an instant, he felt like a normal working man again: "The audience listening to your words and watching for mistakes, the mind searching for the perfect phrase, just the right answer to their questions or just the right humorous phrase to make them laugh," he wrote. "One of the worst things about being unemployed is losing touch with the part of you that works, that thinks about things and interacts with other professionals. The part of you that . . . knows how to solve problems . . . I miss the race and want back in."
TI's recruiter was scheduled to call at eleven-thirty a few days later. Again, the phone call was a time saver for the employer—no use meeting someone in person if he was a dud on the phone. "I hate these," Jost told me as we stared at the phone on his dining room table. "I did a phone interview with eight people in the room once." The phone rang. "This is Jost," he said sharply, as if he were in a nice corner office.
Outside, it was a lovely fall day, the streets dotted with colored leaves and fallen acorns, the light yellow and soft. But Jost was much more interested in the world of cramped cubicles and beeping phones. As the woman described her company's online store—the one Jost might get to manage temporarily—he took diligent notes on a pad emblazoned with the name of a cholesterol-reducing drug. Rebecca had brought the pad home from her part-time work with a medical ethicist; in addition to her studies, she now had three part-time jobs.
"And this is a public Web site," Jost asked, "open to the public?" The woman said it was. "Oh, wow. Okay," he said. "And it's a service differentiator as well?" He took some more notes. "Rrrright," he said. She asked about a particular kind of technical expertise. "Have done and interests me," he answered, upbeat.
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