Graham Hooper was converted in Tanzania while living and working on a game reserve as a young civil engineer. That same year he met his future wife. Since then, he’s moved between continents as work has taken him to Mauritias, Papua New Guinea, Dubai and Australia with a stint at theological college in the UK somewhere in the middle. So he knows a bit about what it’s like to live with the tension of being a Christian in the secular world.

Graham is no stranger to the challenges people face trying to integrate their faith with the rest of their life, and he’s passionate about helping people become more wholistic in their approach to their faith. His new book Undivided was published by IVP April this year, and it’s all about closing what Graham calls the “faith-life gap”.

“I’m fascinated how Jesus lived such a totally integrated life and that what came out of him was what was inside him, if you can say that reverently. He was uniquely a whole person.

“But with us, there’s all sorts of gaps: there’s gaps between who we want to be and who we are; the gap between how we like people to think of us and how we are; the gap between what we want to achieve and what we actually get to achieve; there are all these gaps, and behind it all, the gap between us and God. That’s what this book is about.”

Having worked as a senior executive in a global infrastructure company, Graham has based the book on personal experience. He says Christians are constantly facing ethical questions and relationship issues which challenge them to live in line with the Gospel, to bridge the gap between the world and their faith, and it’s not an easy task.

“There are times when in the infrastructure business I was in, you bid for a contact and you lose. How do you deal with failure? Or you go for a promotion and you don’t get it. How do you deal with that? How do you deal with conflict in the office? How do you deal with difficult people? How do you deal ethically in complex financial transactions – how do you maintain integrity? Life is not black and white, there are several shades of grey, and how do you learn where to draw the line in your own morality and ethics in the light of the word of God?”

Answers to those questions, Graham argues, need to be thrashed out in the public, between friends and Christian colleagues, where accountability and support can thrive in a safe environment. He says churches need to be the first to provide a forum where men and women can share the challenges they face at work in a non-threatening environment in light of the word of God.

“A fundamental issue that I’ve encountered in my life is the need to be honest with one another about the problems. When I became a Christian the only books I ever read about Christianity were really along the lines of, you know, don’t cheat on your tax returns; don’t steal pencils from the office and try and be a witness in the office. And there were no forums I ever encountered for people to share what’s really going on in their life at work.

“You have people coming to church on Sunday- managers of companies, people who have just been made redundant, people struggling with complex negotiations with trade unions and employers, people in boring jobs who can’t see any point in what they have to do, and you know they smile and chat with people and say everything’s fine, but they haven’t got people they can share with about this.”

Sharing one another’s burdens is important, Graham says, but honesty with God is the first priority.

“I think that is the whole challenge of the Christian life on this earth. It begins with honesty. When you come to Christian faith, you have to be honest with God. The Bible calls us to repent, which means to change. To change, we’ve got to recognise we need change. The first step in this really is to continually be out in the open with God and not to pretend. We also need to try and bring that honesty into our worship.”

Graham says people need to recognise where the gaps can creep in, to bring those tensions before God and ask others to pray for them. He says often we’re facing multiple problems and it’s a case of being honest about where we’re struggling, so instead of being overwhelmed by the disconnect in our lives, we can feel connected to God and to one another.

“Problems don’t arrive at us like an orderly succession of waves on a seashore. It’s more like a stormy maelstrom sometimes, when you’ve got a whole stack of stuff going on in your life: work problems, maybe relationship problems, maybe church problems, maybe your own spiritual struggles and doubts.

“This may be all happening at once and of course it’s all inter-connected because we’re such complex beings so problems are going to affect our relationships, our work and our spiritual life. One spills over into another. And you know, God sees the same person Monday to Friday, Saturday to Sunday, whatever we’re doing. And our whole life is to be worship to him, not just Sunday. That’s really the theme of the book from the prayer in Psalm 86: Lord, give me an undivided heart.”

Undivided is out now through IVP as a paperback and ebook.