Work, Worship and Warped perspectives
Most of us are dualists. If we lived in the early centuries of the Christian Church, we’d be condemned as heretics.
Whoa! That’s a bright and breezy way to introduce an article. After that encouraging and affirming first statement you may decide not to bother reading on!
Dualists? Heretics? What do you mean?
Dualism is a way of thinking and living which divides the world into two.
While it takes many forms, the type of dualism I’m referring to here is our tendency to consider certain parts of life (and certain activities) as “spiritual” and others as “unspiritual” or unrelated to God.
We even have a word for this second group of activities – “secular” – those matters that are disconnected from God and maybe, by implication, that God is disinterested in.
The dualist doesn’t genuinely believe that all of life is sacred, all of it is spiritual.
Most of our churches are intensely dualistic. The way we do “church”, the way we relate to each other and what we give priority to, all betray our dualism.
So what is it about our church life and our way of living as Christians that might suggest that we live and think dualistically, subconsciously categorizing things into “spiritual” and “secular”, all the time rating various types of activities according to how important or unimportant we think they are to God? Well, how about the following examples of our dualistic thinking:
- We pray for and commission pastors and elders but rarely do so for teachers and bus drivers, shop assistants, lawyers and caregivers.
- We spend little time in the church helping each other to work out our followership of Jesus in the workplace – apart from encouraging people to exercise honesty and integrity, “witness” to workmates and give a percentage of our money to the church.
- We spend even less time thinking and talking and praying about how our faith might impact everyday life issues such as housing, time, cars, sleep, shopping, eating, fashion and the environment.
- We sing very few songs and pray even fewer prayers related to the stuff our Monday to Saturday life is composed of – it’s as if our meetings together are completely disconnected from the rest of our lives – like we’re in another stratosphere.
- We feel content to attach the word “ministry” to certain types of activity such as leading a Bible study and sharing our faith, but not to office tasks or fixing a car for our neighbour.
- When we read the Bible we note (for example) how much a man of prayer Nehemiah was, while missing the challenges he had working for a foreign pay master who didn’t share his faith commitment, and ignoring the radical lifestyle choices he made as a very well paid public servant. (in other words, when we read the Bible we miss the fact that most of the people it writes about weren’t “professional Christian workers” – they encountered God in the everyday).
I think a lot of our dualism results from a poor understanding of what exactly God is doing in this world of his. For example, why is it that we think God is only into “redemptive” activities such as “witnessing” but not about caring for and maintaining creation? And even when we do think about God’s redemptive work, it’s generally from a very limited perspective on what might be “redemptive” – which fails to appreciate that God’s desire is to redeem the whole of creation – not just people’s relationship with God.
When we look at Scripture, we should be able to identify a whole variety of ways that God is working in our world. For example, Genesis 1 is all about God actively working to create. And yet even this creative work hasn’t just stopped at the end of the creation story! God continues to create – in all kinds of ways.
The God we observe in the Bible is also involved in sustaining or maintenance work. Not all God’s work is spectacular and flashy. There’s some very mundane, even boring work that must be done to keep this universe from coming to a grinding halt. This is part of God’s involvement in our world.
So God is actually involved in a huge variety of work. And if we were able to catch a glimpse of this it would transform our perception of the kinds of work we engage in which are of interest to God.
This would directly affect how we view or value our own work.
Which raises an interesting question: How do you think about your work?
What attitude do you have to your work – paid or unpaid? And what value do you attach to it?
As I’ve talked with numerous people over the years, it seems to me that, broadly speaking, there’s three main ways Christians think about their work:
1. WORK AS A MEANS TO AN END – “I work to live”
The most common attitude to work is one that views it as a means to an end. We work in order to “live”. This approach to what we do betrays a very low view of work and it’s often fed by the kind of dualism I touched on at the start of this article.
For many people, at least some of their work is viewed as somewhat futile or meaningless, often expressed in such statements as:
“I can’t wait for the weekend”
“When I earn enough dosh I’m out of here”
“I do this job because it gives me the money to really live”
“I work at the bank but it’s really just a means to an end – what I really love to do is serve God by being involved in the church band, or by doing street evangelism or whatever…”
A number of years ago my friend and writing colleague, Alistair Mackenzie, conducted an extensive survey of Christians and their attitude to work. One of the questions he asked was “What is it that you struggle with most as a Christian in your work?”
The results were startling, even shocking. Many responded by noting not the challenging work environment or culture, nor that they were asked to do things that compromised their faith, but rather that they were deeply embarrassed and often annoyed by the behaviour of other Christians in their place of employment.
The source of such difficulty was varied. For some it was the “superspiritual” and often insensitive utterances and behaviour of excessively zealous believers, who often seemed to take their faith very seriously, but not their work.
For others it revolved around the “sub-Christian” behaviour of some who publicly identified themselves as believers. Still others noted the poor ethics of certain “Christian” firms, who had a reputation within their industry for not paying bills on time, treating their employees poorly, and indulging in dubious competitive practices.
Alistair was also surprised by the number of employers who said they were quite wary of hiring staff who were Christians. Many felt that Christians often expected to get preferential treatment and special exemptions from Christian bosses. This gave rise to tensions with other staff. And for others the wariness revolved around the past experiences of some “Christian” employees being poor workers – who did not seem to take seriously their responsibility to work hard and well for their bosses. (Just Decisions, p151)
Now, why would so many Christians be perceived as behaving so poorly in their employment? The simple answer is that if you carry a low view of your work and its place in God’s economy, these kinds of behaviour are all too likely to be the result.
If our work is seen as largely a means to an end, we’ll fail to see the connections between what we’re doing and what God is about. Our work will be separated from our worship. It will be trivialized and underrated. We’ll fail to take seriously enough what it might be to be faithful to both God and our employer (or employees). Such a low attitude of work ultimately leads to becoming “idle” in our work – at least as far as engaging in realizing the potential of our work to serve both God and others.
2. WORK AS ALL-CONSUMING – “I live to work”
A second and also very common attitude to work is one that is so caught up in it that life revolves completely around what we do. We end up “living to work”.
When our work becomes all-consuming we really have taken on a too high a view of our own work. We make work an object of worship – it becomes an idol.
We do this by giving our work more importance than it’s due. We separate our work and achievements from what God is doing and wants to do – basically pretending that we can re-arrange the universe by our own efforts. We become compulsive in our work.
Our culture, of course, has a word for it – workaholism. This word describes it well, as it’s easy to become addicted to our work. When this happens, our identity and value become so closely intertwined with our work that we can’t separate them. This is very dangerous.
One of the ways our culture does this is by causing us to significantly define who we are by the work we do. Notice when you meet a new person, that the question they ask fairly soon in the conversation is – “What do you do?”
Now at one level this is a fairly innocuous question so I don’t want to make more out of it than I should. However, when we contrast how important in our culture it is to find out what work a person does, compared with that of many non-Western cultures, it does suggest a tendency toward our work and our identity being fused.
Alternatively, in traditional Maori culture, one’s identity would be based more around our whakapapa (who we’re generationally connected to). And when I spent time in the Philippines in the 1980’s I was intrigued how infrequently the question of what I did came up in an introductory conversation. People there wanted to know about my family. This indicated the relative value the Filipino culture placed on family relationships rather than work.
It’s important to note that allowing our work to become all-consuming is not the same as treating our work seriously. Neither does it mean that we shouldn’t work hard. Nor that we shouldn’t be passionate about our work.
At its best, work should be energizing and deeply fulfilling. However, there’s a difference between loving and working hard at what we do, and being addicted to our work
3. WORK AS WORSHIP – “I work as an expression of my worship of Christ”
This balance is best found when our work becomes an act of worship. For work is meant to be neither the most important thing in life, nor to be degraded. It shouldn’t lead us to idol-atry, but neither should it lead us to idle-ness.
A biblical view of our work understands that work has dignity; it has value. And God has worthwhile work for all of us to do.
Eugene Peterson writes that,
Biblical work is neither compulsive, nor senseless and useless. It doesn’t glorify work as such, but it doesn’t condemn it either. It doesn’t say “God has a great work for you to do, go and do it” nor does it say “God’s done all the significant work himself, so you might as well go fishing!”
The Bible reconnects our work with our worship. In fact, our work often seems meaningless because we fail to work at finding ways of connecting our work with that of God’s work. But when undertaken in partnership with God and his work, our tasks find significance and they become an expression of our love for God.
This means that we can worship God by working with Him when we’re:
- changing the nappies,
- renovating a kitchen,
- repairing a car,
- looking after our grandchildren,
- studying for an exam,
- helping a customer find the right material,
- fixing a computer etc.
In Colossians, Paul puts it well when he states: “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. For it is the Lord Christ you are serving.”
One person who discovered this and lived it out was Brother Lawrence, the medieval monk who wrote the book Practising the Presence of God. “Relegated” to doing menial kitchen tasks, the young monk had his understanding of what type of work was important to God turned on its head. Slowly over time he began to develop an everyday spirituality that was able to take delight in serving Christ through even the most boring and repetitive of tasks. Finding value and purpose in all he was asked to do, Lawrence no longer felt compelled to aspire to certain more “spiritual” tasks but instead was able to find joy and dignity in playing his role well, to the glory of his Master.
Enlarging our vision for our work
We need to learn similar lessons to that of Brother Lawrence. For generally, our vision for our work is too small. This is true for both those who “work to live” and others who “live to work”. Whether we subconsciously think God is just not interested in what we’re doing, or whether we’ve become consumed in our own world of work, disconnected from God, our vision for our work is too small.
I’ve found that the following questions and prayer are helpful anchoring points for me as I go about my daily work – both the exciting and challenging, and the mundane and boring. They help to enlarge my vision and cause me to find points of connection between God’s work and my own.
1. In what ways does this task/job present opportunities for me today to:
- serve others
- grow skills and gifts
- be creative
- show compassion and mercy
- develop relationships
- share Christ
- tell the truth
- build community and promote harmony
- care for creation
- be resourceful
- work for justice
- bring healing, understanding and reconciliation
- help develop others’ gifts and character development
2. Is there anything that would help me to remember than when I work this coming week, I can do so as an act of worship – knowing that I am serving Jesus?
Prayer
We are your people Lord, called to follow, love and serve you.
We acknowledge afresh our dependence on you.
We want to be your co-workers in your mission to this world.
Empower us by your Spirit we ask.
Give us vision to see what you want us to do.
Give us insight to see what you are already doing.
Give us humility to serve without complaint, in whatever tasks are before us.
Give us courage to testify to your goodness and faithfulness.
Give us patience and endurance in the race you have set before us.
Give us hope to believe that ultimately you will reign in all places and all hearts.
Transform us, we ask.
May your kingdom come, here on earth (particularly in our places of work!) just as it is in heaven.
Amen
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