Worship through Work
BY DR. JAY MOON
For more details, see: “Worship Through Work.” Asbury Herald 125(1): 5-7.
I recently had lunch with a young, freshly minted, law school graduate. As he finished his pie, he looked at me with a sincere yet perplexed expression, confessing, “I don’t really know how my faith in Jesus relates to my work.”
He openly shared how he struggled to make sense of the two – faith and work. For him, they were separate entities, where one encroaching on the other was not only advised against, but also seemingly impossible. This is a sentiment shared with millions of Christians in what they consider to be “secular” professions, as they are unaware of the peril this school of thought lends to their lives. The danger of never connecting your faith and your work leads to investing forty hours a week of time, emotion, and activity isolated from God. That eventually equates to a life devoid of meaning.
Worshipping God in the marketplace is a topic that is crucial for influential, thriving Christians to live out, but it can be difficult to understand. Why, for instance, do we lay hands on and commission our missionaries and pastors, but not our lawyers and teachers? Even worse, how do we approach professions that are seemingly so detached from the Kingdom of God? For example, lawyers are often the targets of many jokes (even in church), as if to infer that this profession is inherently selfish, arrogant, and driven only by monetary gain. So where does Christian worship fit into that lifestyle?
I know that my friend is not alone – he feels that he worships God on Sunday but the rest of the week his spiritual batteries run down. He survives the workweek, yet looks forward to Sunday worship for re-charge. Our lives were built for something much greater, much more meaningful than a 9 – 5 that only gives us a paycheck. God longs for each and every one of us to discover this, and unlock our place in the Kingdom. The following article begins to uncover how we start identifying our role in this plan and ultimately, worship God in our work.
Meaningful Work Dignifies Us
The Garden of Eden was designed as a place of perfection and solace – where God walked with Adam daily and all of nature lived in harmony. In this ideal picture of what Earth originally intended to reflect, God created work for Adam in the form of caring for the animals and plants. Work, then, is not a result of the fall; rather, work was always designed as a gift from God so that we could flourish and thrive as a society.
Even today, meaningful work dignifies us. If you don’t believe it, look at someone who has been out of work for an extended period of time and observe the effects on their self-esteem and confidence. Willard (2104:203) states, “Business is an amazingly effective means of delivering God’s love to the world by loving, serving, and providing for one another.”
Wesley’s concept of prevenient grace helps identify God’s role in the marketplace. God goes ahead of us in the marketplace, providing footpaths for people to receive saving grace. Consider this – the marketplace is largely a relational network whereby people make exchanges, and the desire for this transfer of talents/services connects us with people that we would otherwise never cross paths or even interact with. Without us even knowing it, God established business so that we would continually interact and serve others. In this relational web, God sends Christians to worship through doing their jobs with excellence and above all, love. Dorothy Sayers (1942) aptly describes this struggle,
How can anyone remain interested in a religion which seems to have no concern with nine-tenths of life? The Church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sunday. 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. Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly – but what use is all that if in the very center of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry? No crooked legs or ill-fitted drawers ever, I dare swear, came out of the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth.
The first form of worship is to perform our work for the glory of God – with excellence and care, treating and valuing your coworkers and your clients above your paycheck, above your promotion, and above your ego. Perhaps this is what Paul had in mind when he said, “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God” (I Corinthians 10:31). I’m not saying it would be easy because, let’s face it, obedience to God rarely is. Work that is done with excellence finesse, without a possible explanation beyond a divine relationship with God, is a true act of worship.
Collective AND Individual Worship
Our theology limits our understanding of worship when we fail to balance work with rest, and we fail to distinguish between collective and individual worship. Jay Slocum (2104: 72) describes it this way,
If Christians see work as a worshipful act, while also seeing Sabbath-keeping as a way of offering our rest to God, a very large part of our life becomes worship. Moreover, when we realize that God desires to gather us for corporate worship (on Sunday, for instance) and then scatter us throughout the world in an offering of individual worship, the only time worship is not taking place is in our sleep! And if one prays before going to bed and invites the Lord into one’s dreams, I see no reason why we cannot argue that the whole of our lives can be offered to God in worship.
Suppose that doctors, lawyers, engineers, dentists, etc. understood the difference between collective and individual worship. While our church services provide collective worship, the real intent of this gathering is to send people into the marketplace for individual worship each day on the job. This concept of “sending” leads to another reason that we often miss the value of work – we misunderstand the nature and mission of God.
Mission in the Marketplace
People often associate the term “missionary” with those who are called to go far away from home. While this does occur, mission is really about God sending people to any location to reach others. Notice the entire Trinity engaged in the mission of God through this sending, “Again Jesus said, ‘Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.’ And with that he breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’” (John 20:21-22). The missio dei is then God’s sending of people to any place that they are needed. Couldn’t this also be in the marketplace? As a result, could the marketplace then become a venue for worship?
Working seven years as a professional civil engineer, I experienced the difficulty of finding God’s place in a corporate environment. As I rubbed shoulders with other engineers, clients, and contractors, I gradually wondered if God had sent me to this place, to these people, for a distinct purpose. After sharing with some of my co-workers during a coffee break one day, we decided to start a “Bible break.” Gathering on Fridays for lunch at a local restaurant, we read/discussed Scripture, prayed for each other, and invited others to our gathering. While the gathering ebbed and flowed, we gradually found that even engineers can worship God in their daily jobs!
I know what you’re thinking – “But you don’t understand the people that I work with; that could never happen at my job.” What I left out is the amount of time and prayer it took to be able to broach the subject of God. But God calls us to be persistent, and as bold as lions, seeing our work as part of God’s larger mission, as God continues to mold and shape the hearts of the people around you.
Some are taking their worship of God at work a step further by asking, “Why not start a business with the intent of birthing a church?” For example, an entrepreneur in Tennessee started a coffee shop as a means to gather people to form a church. Another example is a restaurant worker who weekly invites co-workers to his home after work at 11:30 PM on Thursdays for a “simple church” gathering. A third example is an IT professional who saw his business as an opportunity to provide flourishing for the community that started a large church in India. While the actual businesses and venues vary, what they have in common is this – they recognize that God sent them into the marketplace because they realized that worship was not limited to Sunday morning.
Here’s some good news – you don’t have to start your own business or be a pastor to let that insight refine and change your life. Once you internalize the fact that God calls us to worship every day in our office buildings, job sites, and homes, you begin to live out the Kingdom of God.
As we finished the meal, my young lawyer friend thanked me for discussing how worship and work can be engaged in the marketplace. “Living for something greater” and “making a difference” are not just Instagram hashtags or idealistic notions thrown around by a lost culture seeking a divine appointment; they are the true intent that God has for our lives. It’s up to us to realize this and…worship!
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References Cited:
Sayers, Dorothy. 2012. “Why Work?” In Faith and Learning: A Handbook for Christian Higher Education, edited by David S. Dockery. Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing.
Slocum, Jay. 2104. “Made for Worship.” In The Pastor’s Guide to Fruitful Work and Economic Wisdom: Understanding What Your People Do All Day, edited by Greg Forster and Drew Cleveland. Madetoflourish.org.
Willard, Dallas, and Gary Black Jr. 2014. The Divine Conspiracy Continued: Fulfilling God’s Kingdom on Earth. New York: Harper One.