Faith & Vocation: Beka Johnson

As part of a year long project focused on faith and vocation we are highlighting various parishioners by having them answer seven questions.

Meet Beka Johnson!

How long have you been in Seattle and what do you most enjoy and struggle with about living here?

I moved to Seattle in 2015 when I was recruited to work for Pushpay, a mobile giving company for churches. I enjoy most things about living here—especially the weather. I love Washington’s moody skies and beautiful views. I also love the high concentration of nerdy board game folks. Cost of living is a struggle though—I’ll probably never be able to own a home in this area, and I don’t love the idea of being a forever renter.

How long have you been at your current place of work and do you see this as a place of longevity? Why or why not?

I’ve been at Logos since January of 2019. Logos is a Bible app company based out of Bellingham. It’s been around for over 30 years now, and I work alongside numerous people who have worked there for 15, 20, 25+ years. So, it’s clearly the sort of company that encourages employees to hang around a while. 

The people, culture, and mission are what keep me at Logos. I regularly have opportunities to take on new, interesting projects, and my leaders are invested in me and my career. My team is incredible—I love working with them day in and day out and making niche theology jokes in Slack. I could see myself staying at Logos a long time under our current leadership.

Do you see your calling and your career as the same or different?

My role at Logos combines things I love: education, theology, technology, and marketing. There are elements of my job that I very much feel called to do.

I think there’s a sense in which we’re called to walk in whatever God sets before us—even if I hated my job, I believe I would be called to do it to the best of my ability with diligence, excellence, and joy. But I do find a strong sense of purpose and influence in the work I do—I’m happy to be paid to do work I actually love.

I’m also thankful my financial needs are met through my work so I am free to volunteer and contribute my time to our church and diocese as well by managing our website and app and serving on the diocesan council. 

What are some of the things that you find most enjoyable about your work?

Our editorial meetings are some of my favorite meetings. We usually work three or four months in advance scoping out all the topics we want to cover within our monthly theme, determining the SEO targets we’re going to run after, and talking through who the ideal writers would be for each piece. We get to work with some really incredible writers—some very well known. But beyond the meeting itself, it’s very fulfilling shipping a new article and watching it soar to #1 on Google. 

I love when our senior creative director and I get to go tackle a project together. A while back, we got to redo the company’s core values. The senior leaders gave us a list of priorities that needed to be included, and our two teams got to work refining them down, making them super catchy and fun, and working through the change management needed to roll them out to the company. We ended up throwing a big all-company launch that was so much fun. And today, these values are embedded in our culture. It’s fun to work on something from beginning to end and see it alive and in the wild. 

Finally, I love when someone just hands me something that’s a mess and asks me to sort through it, organize it, and bring structure and efficiency to it. Operational efficiency is one of my team's strengths. We love bringing order to chaos.

What do you find particularly challenging?

I’ve had to learn how to create a lot of my own reporting simply because there was nobody else available to create it for me. This sort of work doesn’t come naturally to me, but I’ve gotten a lot better over the years. 

How do you see your faith intersecting with your work?

I work in a mission-driven company that primarily serves pastors, small group leaders, and intellectual Christians. So, all day long we are working on content and messaging and projects that are designed to reach those audiences.

It would be very difficult to do the work I do, if I didn’t believe in what we do and the products we have created because I’d be manipulating people I cared about. It would also be very difficult to work at Logos if Logos practiced any sort of religious manipulation with its employees and/or conflated work and church somehow, but they’re really good about this sort of thing and have fostered a vibrant, healthy culture.

There are plenty of folks who work at Logos and have no church background at all, but many of our employees came to Logos because they were drawn to the mission or love the product themselves. 

I’m sure most people don't get to talk about faith all day long at work, but I do. It’s part of my job.

If there was something the church could do to support you more, what might that look like?

I feel like we have a great group of young professionals at our church and plenty of people to compare notes with. I’d definitely attend any events we put on around faith and vocation. But I feel very supported by our community.

For my specific work, I’m also looking to better understand pastoral and small group leader pain points so I can craft the right messaging, influence the right feature creation, and more. I’m always curious about where technology is not filling a gap it should be filling (and where it’s getting in the way, too). So, if there are ways I can learn more about that from our community, that would be great.