Weaving Work-Truth into Church Life (Part Three)
This series of blogs explores how your local church can include God’s truth about daily work in the Sunday agenda. Part Three suggests several theology-of-work teaching themes that will help prepare Christians to do their work as service to God and to people. (Part One) (Part Two)
Teach God’s Word on Work—Often
Forty years ago, books on serving God on the job were rare. Now they number in the hundreds. But most working Christians—for various reasons—won’t be reading any of them.
Countless hours of YouTube videos provide teaching on the theology of work. Yet chances are no one in your church has seen even one.
Today, an entire website, theologyofwork.org, offers hundreds of pages on faith in the workplace, small group studies with videos, and much more—but few working believers have heard about it.
Where, then, will that Christian who spends 2,000 hours a year on the job find biblical teaching on how to work with a Kingdom-of-God heart and mind? Only in a local church where the Sunday menu frequently includes work-truth. Church leaders who want to move in that direction may well ask:
Where to Begin?
Instruction in the theology of work should start with the truth that God himself is a worker. Three times Gen. 2:2-3 refers to God’s creation activity of chapter 1 as “work.” “By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done” (emphasis added). Later Scripture pictures God as engaging in a variety of work roles: potter, gardener, architect, garment maker, warrior, builder, singer, shepherd, judge, refiner, and more.
Next, the theology of work focuses on the fact that the working God made people in his image and likeness. We work because God does. This gives dignity to all honorable work, whether manual or mental. God put his human creatures into a garden and assigned them “to work it and take care of it” (Gen 2:15). So, contrary to what many think, our work did not result from God’s curse (Gen. 3). His curse on the ground made work difficult—thorns, thistles, sweat, painful labor—but did not erase the essential goodness of work.
Where to Continue?
God the worker made us to be workers: biblical work-truth rests on that foundation. What after that? Teaching should assist believers in exploring the richness of how the Gospel transforms our labor days. The bullet points that follow offer a sampling of the areas that belong in a biblical theology-of-work teaching menu. Such instruction will help equip Christians in the workplace to:
Grasp God’s original intention for human work—and its renewal in Christ. God made people to serve as his property managers over his real estate—the earth. We carry out that role by working. Sin has made the job difficult, but in Christ God has restored our capacity to care for his creation. “We are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Eph. 2:10). We are “created . . . to do”—to work.
Sort out biblical (and unbiblical) motivations for working in the world. Scripture gives us at least seven reasons for getting up and going to work each day. Mondays transformed!
Identify and break free from the idolatries of today’s working environment. Making a living is one godly reason for working. But when money trumps all else, it quickly takes over as a false god. Pursuing power for power’s sake also forges an idol.
Choose a biblically informed direction for one’s life work. I’ve taught a graduate-level theology-of-work course for seven-plus years. In each class, students have surveyed at least five Christians doing non-church work. I now have the results from nearly a thousand respondents. One of the questions asks: “Before you entered your life’s work, had you received any biblical instruction on how to go about choosing it?” Seventy-two percent say no. Young Christians, especially, need to know how to discern how God has gifted them and how this can help them discover his calling on their lives.
Make god-honoring decisions about difficult right-wrong dilemmas on the job. Scripture does not speak directly to most of the ethical knots Christians must sometimes unravel in today’s workplaces. For example, you observe a coworker violating company Internet policies. Do you turn a blind eye out of love for him? Or do you notify the owners out of love for them? In addition to prayer, Christian workers need some ethical decision-making frameworks to help them be “as shrewd as snakes and innocent as doves.”
Practice God’s call to rest, avoiding both underwork and overwork. Pressures in U.S. culture can push employees to become work-idlers or work-addicts. In Men Without Work, Nicholas Eberstadt writes: “By 2015, the number of prime-age inactive men [in the U.S.] was over 7 million.” By contrast, a recent study revealed that about 30 percent of the U.S. population is affected by workaholism. A biblical theology of work teaches the wisdom of God’s work-rest rhythm—one he himself modeled at Creation.
Distinguish the truth from the lies about earnings and profit. Far too many Christians live in two minds about making money. Input from advertising and the media only make the subject of profit and wealth even more confusing—and sometimes guilt-inducing for believers who want to honor God. Those whose pay comes from so-called “secular” enterprises need sound biblical teaching here.
Recognize and avoid the pitfalls of the unbiblical sacred/secular divide. Centuries of church tradition have conditioned Christians to think of work in higher/lower terms. In this distortion, the work of pastors and missionaries ranks well above that of salespeople and grocery clerks. But the biblical author Daniel worked as a government employee. Abraham raised sheep and cattle. And Jesus served many years as a carpenter-builder. In the surveys among Christians in non-church work conducted by my students (see above), 42 percent said they wished they could quit their jobs and take a church-related job. The sacred/secular divide must go.
Seek Out and Encourage Fellow Christians at Work. Scripture instructs us to “encourage one another daily” (Heb. 3:13). That’s next to impossible in a congregation of even 100 people whom you may see once a week and speak with even less often. On the other hand, Christians who work for the same company may cross paths nearly every weekday. Looking back on decades of Sunday instruction, I cannot recall even once hearing a call to intentionally seek out, encourage, and pray for fellow believers in one’s work circle.
Shine as light in the work world: glowing without glaring. God calls each Christian in the workplace to represent Christ in that setting. We are, as Jesus said, “the light of the world.” That includes our call to shine in the work world. Jesus said our light will shine through “good works” (Matt. 5:16). Light enables seeing. But a spotlight aimed directly into the eyes can blind. We are to glow in the dark, not glare like oncoming high-beams. Christians need help in learning how to be workplace witnesses with an appropriate balance of deeds and words.
Many pastors, lacking significant work-world experience, may not feel adequate for teaching these and other theology-of-work topics. But most congregations include people with years of on-the-job background. Those currently in the work force as well as the retired Christians make up a typically untapped pool of workplace experience. Together—they, with their workplace insights, alongside pastors, with their biblical depth—can bring the gospel-enhancing theology of work within reach of everyone in the congregation.