Weaving Work Truth into Church Life (Part Four)

This series of blogs explores how your local church can include God’s truth about daily work in the Sunday agenda. Part Four offers brief descriptions and links to videos of various lengths that can be used in meetings of the gathered church. (Part One) (Part Two) (Part Three)

Theology-of-Work Video Resources

In the classic Acres of Diamonds, published in 1890, Russell Conwell relates a legend he heard in India. A farmer, learning of the immense value of diamonds, sold his farm and went on a lifelong search for them. He failed, went broke, and committed suicide. But the man who bought his farm discovered it was loaded with diamonds.

Sometimes a treasure-trove lies unnoticed right under our noses. That’s the case with theology-of-work resources. Many members of the wider Body of Christ have created a wealth of work-truth assets—videos, books, articles—that can easily be tapped into for the benefit of those you meet with on Sundays. Yet far too few church leaders and Christians know of these riches.

Your church can make use of such resources in any number of ways. Videos of whole messages—powerful ones—can be shown occasionally during the sermon time on Sunday mornings. Shorter video clips can effectively illustrate points made by those who usually preach or teach. This blog will offer some brief descriptions of just a tiny sampling of video resources now available:

Tim Keller: “Why Work Matters”

—23 minutes. Why does your work matter to God? And why does God matter to your work? Tim Keller speaks to each of those in this video. He quotes from Martin Luther, who “talks about how wrong it is to think of dividing Christian work into spiritual work and secular or worldly work.” Luther wrote: “There has been a fiction by which bishops, priests, and monks are called the ‘spiritual estate,’ while princes, lords, artisans, and peasants are considered the ‘temporal estate.’ This is an artful lie and a hypocritical invention.”

Keller also quotes Robert Briner, author of Roaring Lambs, as saying: “There should be no less support or attention for an earnest Christian young person who's been accepted to Julliard School of Music than for one going off to a theological seminary. The church needs writers, performers, artists, speakers, politicians, businessmen and businesswomen, and workers in every craft and trade. In God's eyes there should be no hierarchy—there certainly should not be in ours.” Click Here

Tom Nelson, “Work Matters: Connecting Sunday Worship to Monday Work “

—20.4 minutes. In this video, Tom Nelson, who pastors Christ Community Church in Leawood, KS, describes how, after a decade in pastoral work, he confessed his “pastoral malpractice” to his congregation:

“About ten years into my ministry, I stood before my congregation and confessed to them. . . . I'd come to the conviction that as a pastor I needed to confess my pastoral malpractice. . . . For the first ten years of my ministry . . . I had failed to help people connect Sunday to Monday. . . . I had failed in my pastoral vocation to equip people for all of life. In other words I had spent the majority of my time equipping my congregation for what they were called to do the minority of their lives. This majority-minority disparity is rampant across the pulpits of America. It is fundamental that we understand that we need to address this Sunday to Monday gap.” Click Here

Dennis Bakke: “Joy at Work”

—13.3 minutes. Dennis Bakke co-founded and served as the CEO for Applied Energy Services (AES), one of the largest energy-supply companies in the world. In that company, he developed and tested a biblically-based approach to managing a business. In his book, Joy at Work, he describes how he implemented it in AES.

In this video, Bakke describes the purpose for which God puts us here on earth as, “to steward the resources, to meet needs in the world, and to evangelize. When we understand those things, it will change everything about how we work . . . it will change the way we operate our churches—it will change us, and we will truly experience joy at work.” Click Here

Bob Doll: “Following Christ in the Workplace”

—10.5 minutes. In this video testimony Bob Doll, chief equity strategist for Nuveen, a global investment company, addresses the Lausanne Global Leadership Forum in 2013. He relates how God used the loss of his job to deepen him and to shape his character. On the need for Christians to find and encourage each other, he says, “people in agnostic or sometimes God-hostile environments often need someone else to take the lead before they step up and share the fact that they are of faith as well.” Click Here

Mark Greene: “The Sacred-Secular Divide”

—3 minutes. In this video, Mark Greene of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity describes the “devastating impact” of split-level thinking among believers. Green includes the testimony of a teacher, who says:

“I teach Sunday school once a week for 45 minutes and my church asks me to come up the front so they can pray for me. For the rest of the week I'm a full-time teacher, and yet as far as I can remember, no one has ever asked to pray for the work that I do in school. It’s as if they want to support half my profession and not the other half. It's difficult because no one would say that teaching Sunday school is more important than the work I do for the rest of the week. But that's the unspoken message that I get. If you look at it this way, I've got 45 minutes once a week with children who are generally open to the gospel, with parents who are supportive of the faith. Or 45 hours a week with kids who have very little knowledge of Christianity and parents who are either as ignorant or hostile to the faith.” Click Here

“Workaholic”

—2.5 minutes. This video, produced by RightNow Media, takes a humorous look at a most serious topic—the danger of turning our work into an idol. Click Here

“Work is God’s Good Gift”

—2.3 minutes. This moving video is visual-musical poetry. It concludes, “There is beauty in work when we work as worship.” Click Here

Colleen Theron: “My Faith at Work”

—1.25 minutes. Colleen Theron, an environmental lawyer, tells how she had felt “almost guilty” about working in a non-church-related job. Church work, she thought, would prove that she was “really in ministry and doing the right thing.” But after years of feeling this way, she began exploring Scripture and finding “so many examples of God using people in their actual workplace.” Click Here

These are just a few of the many excellent video resources that can help you weave work-truth into church life. Hopefully, these samples will send you on a search to find additional videos.

Making Whole-Life Disciples

Whole-Life Discipling: What Is It?

Last month I spent a week in Manila taking part in the Lausanne Global Workplace Forum. As mentioned in the previous blog, we heard from a variety of speakers and—around tables of six—discussed what they had said. One of the presenters, Mark Greene, unable to join us in person, addressed us in a video. Greene serves as Executive Director of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity established by John Stott.

As he spoke, Greene called for churches that are “gripped by the whole-life vision of the missio Dei [mission of God].” Again and again, he spoke of our need to “make whole-life disciples.” What did he mean by those words, “whole life”?

Visualize Your Church as If in a Video

What did you just see in your imagined video? A building with crosses? A group of people sitting in chairs or pews looking toward an elevated stage where a band performs and a pastor speaks?

If you saw the first, you weren’t looking at the church at all. If you saw the second, you were seeing the church in its gathered form. Let’s say the meeting in your mental video went on for an hour and a quarter. For each one in the gathering, that represents how big a slice of his or her week? I’ll spare you the math. Those 75 minutes make up less than one percent of the 10,080 minutes in a week. Picture it like this:

So if your mental video showed you God’s people in gathered mode, you were seeing only a tiny fraction of the church’s life. Goid’s people spend far more time scattered. Members of the body of Christ allocate that dispersed time in various ways. But the percentages may typically look like this:

Whole Life Leaves Nothing Out

“Whole life,” then, includes everything people do in the 168 hours of their week. “Making whole-life disciples” means helping prepare them for all they engage in during those scattered-church hours—working, playing, resting, parenting, neighboring, and so on. Here comes the hard question: On what do churches typically focus most equipping efforts? On getting believers ready to serve Christ and his Kingdom in their scattered-church roles—with families, co-workers, neighbors and others? Or on training them to carry out gathered-church duties—serving in or leading programs, ushering, maintaining the building and grounds, pledging, running the sound system, decorating, practicing for praise bands, and other in-house chores?

Work—paid and unpaid—is one of main things Christians do in the scattered church. Many will devote 36 percent or more of their waking hours to their work (red blocks). You might think we would spend a significant portion of our gathered-church time gearing them up to serve Jesus in that world into which he has sent them. But how often does the work we do on weekdays come up in the gathered church on Sundays?

The Church’s Silence on Work

Greene quoted Dorothy Sayers, a British Christian writing in the mid-20th century. In her essay, “Why Work?” she said: “In nothing has the Church so lost Her hold on reality as Her failure to understand and respect the secular vocation. She has allowed work and religion to become separate departments, and is astonished to find that, as a result, the secular work of the world is turned to purely selfish and destructive ends, and that the greater part of the world’s intelligent workers have become irreligious or at least uninterested in religion…. But is it astonishing? How can anyone remain interested in a religion which seems to have no concern with nine-tenths of their life?”

Tim Keller and Katherine Leary Alsdorf open Chapter One in Every Good Endeavor by saying, “The Bible begins talking about work as soon as it begins talking about anything—that’s how important and basic it is.” The Bible does more than just begin that way. The word “work” appears hundreds of times. And Scripture shows us all kinds of working believers who lived out their faith in the whole-life context. Here are some samples:

Whole Life in Shared Church

A shared-church meeting offers those from the scattered church opportunities to encourage the gathered church with whole-life reports on what God is doing out there. Does a shared-church meeting include hearing from those gifted and qualified to teach? Absolutely. The gathered church needs to hear from shepherds and teachers who can correctly explain what the Bible is saying.

But most pastors spend little if any time “out there” in the world’s workplaces. As one speaker in Manila put it, pastors literally “have no business there.” Their “business” mainly involves working with the gathered church.

So pastors need to make room in congregational meetings for those whose business is in the work world to tell what God is doing in and through them there. If such contemporary stories are not heard, it may appear that God has little if any concern for everyday work. The responsibility for making whole-life disciples, then, belongs not only to pastors but also to the entire church body. “The whole body . . . grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work” (Eph. 4:16).

Think of the typical Sunday-morning agenda of your church. Then ask:

• Would a Daniel have any opportunity to tell what his toxic coworkers did and how God rescued him from their scheme?

• Would a Joseph be able to share how God was at work for good, even through the sexual harassment he suffered in his first job in Egypt?

• Would an Esther find an opening to encourage fellow believers by describing how God protected her and her people?