I talk about us being a missional church, a people who would live all of life with intentionality, building bridges that take us outside the comfortable, safe walls of the church to display and declare the truth of the Gospel. I say we want to see people meet Jesus. We want to see individuals, marriages, families and our community transformed by the power of the gospel. We want to be a church that brings hope and reconciliation to the people in our community. I preach these things from the pulpit, I talk about them in personal conversations, I promote this way of life in our small group. And yet, I talked to someone in our church last week who is trying to live that way, but he feels like his work is outside the church and it disqualifies him from leadership inside the church. I would love to dismiss the conversation and chalk it up to a guy who just isn’t listening and who doesn’t get it. But what if I’m the guy who doesn’t get it? And if I’m the guy who doesn’t get it, then it means that our church is probably filled with others like this friend, who feel, at worst, that their vocation and ministry “outside the church” doesn’t count in God’s eyes, or at best, their vocation and ministry “outside the church” doesn’t count in their pastor’s eyes.
I felt compelled to clarify for myself, and for our church, how God sees our vocation and relationships “outside” the church, not as separate from Christian ministry but rather as essential to Christian ministry.
In Genesis we find that God created man in his very own image. This is exceedingly important because God establishes, from the beginning, that man’s activity doesn’t establish his identity but rather emanates from his identity. Work is not a consequence of sin but an essential component to our lives as image-bearers of God.
In Genesis 2:15, in a still pre-fall creation, we are told that the “The Lord God took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden to work it and to keep it.” Adam did not pursue a career, he received a calling from God. He didn’t select a vocation, God sent him. Adam’s calling and placement by God was not as a pastor or ministry leader in a church. God called Adam to bear His image to all of creation by diligently working a blue collar job, cultivating God’s creation and making a valuable contribution to the ongoing work of creation. This calling is a high calling even if it seems a common calling. Performing common tasks with an uncommon perspective is one way that God’s people are to be distinct from all other people on the earth. But like everything, our understanding of work has been corrupted through sin.
In His infinite wisdom, God designed our work to be fruitful and fulfilling but sin introduced frustration and futility to our labors. As a result, rather than reflecting the image of God in our work, by cultivating and creating as an act of worship for God’s glory, our understanding of work is distorted. In his book, Work Matters, Tom Nelson considers 3 specific distortions of work.
Workaholism
Workaholism distorts the design of work by elevating work to the place of ascendency. Work becomes an idol when we seek to derive our identity from the accumulation of wealth, the ambition of status, the achievement of success or the more palatable pursuit of the assurance of significance. Workaholism further justifies itself as loyalty to the organization or supervisor, a deep sense of duty and responsibility, or as the necessary sacrifices on the path to promotion and security. A workaholic grounds his identity solely in his productivity and places his ultimate hope in his own performance. For a workaholic, work isn’t a way to worship God. Instead, work is the object of worship and the office is the place of worship.
Slothfulness
Slothfulness distorts work as unimportant and yields the throne of one’s life to the idol of leisure. A sloth only does as much work as is necessary to survive at their job or as much as is required to fund their next fun activity. They are likely to hide behind a facade of rightly prioritizing relationships and rest in relation to work. The reality is that they are experts at finding any reason not to work. A sloth may also resist responsibility and foster low expectations so that he never has to break a sweat. Slothfulness is what drives the work-for-the-weekend mentality of so many and the modern day retirement mentality that amounts to culturally sanctioned version of slothfulness - it’s just a much longer week followed by a much longer weekend. A sloth distorts the image of God by completely divorcing work from his identity. Instead of approaching work as a gift from God and worship to God, a sloth views work as an enemy of the one true god, their idol of a Good Time.
Dualism
Dualism distorts work by drawing an unbiblical distinction between full-time work in the secular sphere and full-time Christian work. This distortion is every bit as common as workaholism and slothfulness, but sadly, it is much more broadly acceptable among Christians. Dualism considers vocational ministry, either in a church, religious or ministry organization, as a higher calling than work in the business world. Dualism distinguishes between the sacred nature being a pastor and the secular nature of being a plumber. In the American church culture, it is common language to speak of a pastor or missionary being “called” into ministry, to proclaim Christ to others and to love and serve people for the glory of God. We elevate the importance of such roles. But to our peril, we neglect the importance of this common call of all Christians to full-time ministry.
"All vocations are intended by God to manifest his love in the world.” - Thomas Merton
As a pastor, it is my privilege to have God demonstrate His love by showing care, concern, patience, devotion and compassion for others, by teaching biblical truth and proclaiming the gospel, by giving leadership and vision to our church, by opening our home and lives to others and by countless other means entrusted to me by God. In the very same way, before I was called to be a pastor, I was called to be a pool service technician, a job through which God also demonstrated his love for people. Swimming pools certainly don’t seem sacred at first glance, but if you have ever seen families, and children in particular, enjoy a swimming pool, then you know God is loving those people through providing such an avenue for fun, fellowship and enjoyment.
When pools are dirty, pumps are broken or pipes are leaking it is a reminder that nothing has escaped the effects of sin, that everything is subject to decay. Both my parents, and my wife’s parents have swimming pools and I can tell you that the futility and frustration that stems from the fall in Genesis 3, extends deep into maintenance of swimming pool. The calls around summer celebrations such as Memorial Day, Graduations, Brithdays, Independence Day and more, would flood in because the pool is essential to pool parties. People would call, stressed and worried that their pool wasn't going to be ready or working for that party a day or two away and I was often God's way of showing them that He was in control and He would take care of it.
With responsive and patient customer service, product knowledge, quality workmanship, diligence and integrity, God used me often to show his love for people. I certainly didn't have a perfect track record in that vocation, neither in practice or in perspective, but as I grew to see a job I once resented through a biblical grid I came to understand, and even delight in God's calling on my life to be an expression of his love and care for the people he positioned me to serve. People of course don't always recognize God's love expressed through the work of one of God's children. However, we aren't called to govern the responses of men to God's love, only to be a channel of His love.
Clarifying Your Calling
Despite what you may have thought, or what messages have been sent by pastors, church leaders and even well-meaning Christian business people, if you belong to Christ, you are called into full-time ministry. Like Adam, our activity is supposed to flow from our identity. You are called and placed by God in your particular vocation to worship Him and to manifest His love in the world. You are in full-time ministry. You are a missionary. Your job is sacred.
Dorothy Sayers writes that "The Church's approach to an intelligent carpenter is usally confined to moral instruction and church attendance. What the church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.... Let the church remember this: that every maker and worker is called to serve God in his profession or trade - not outside of it... The only Christian work is good work well done." The role of pastors is not more sacred than the role of engineer, accountant, physician, educator, contractor or software developer. Neither is the role of pastors to recruit men and women out of their ministry context of the workplace in favor of ministry in the church. The role of pastors is to equip God's people for the work of ministry in order that the body of Christ might be built up, not used up (Eph. 4:12). Too often the message we send is that people must do more for the church and in the church rather than giving great vision for and recognition of that which they are doing as an extension of the church.
Monday through Saturday are sacred days, involving sacred activities like work and recreation. It's time that church leaders and lay people alike started to see all of life as such. If you you have a job, then you have a calling. Your calling is to see approach your vocation as an opportunity to image God the way He intended, through working with excellence, as an expression of God's love to others, for His glory and for your own joy. And as you do, know that you are not working apart from or outside the church, but you are working from the church as an extension of the church into our culture that desperately needs their own distortion of work reshaped and restored by the hope of the gospel. So go... do good work and do it well.
