Work: Prison or Place of Destiny (Revised)

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INTRODUCTION

Some years ago my wife Gill and I took a weekend away in Bognor. We were into weekends away but this one was different. No romantic meals, no trips out! What were we doing there? We were listening to twelve hours of audio material on the kingdom of God and we didn’t want to leave until we had devoured that material and allowed it to change our lives. Little did we know what the word of God would do and how it would dramatically change the course of our lives.

I had been preaching, even back then, about the place of work in the Christian world, but with one or two exceptions the church by and large, and church leadership in particular, seemed more or less uninterested.

What a change in the last decade or so! Chapters 1 and 18 reflect this more fully but Bible schools and theological training colleges now include the workplace in the curriculum. Major conferences such as Spring Harvest, Days of Destiny, Transform, New Wine, Stoneleigh and others have increasingly embraced the message. Rob Parsons and the team at Care for the Family facilitated sixty regional evening events to provide a platform for the workplace message.

But back to Bognor! What was it that so dramatically changed our lives? Gill and I had always assumed we had the magical so-called ‘full-time’ call to ministry. Various supernatural encounters had encouraged us towards what we thought was our calling. We were travelling itinerantly preaching and working with prophetic teams. We saw a full-time ministry as working primarily for and into the church. But that weekend and what followed was where our eyes opened. A new horizon opened up: the possibility that our ministry could be equally shared in the world of work and the world of the church. Even that, in time, would change again as our theology gradually got challenged, shaped and moulded. We would see in time that our ministry, our calling, was a seamless whole. God did not divide it into either compartment.

I have been an apprentice on the shop floor, worked as a church-paid staff member, been a clerk in an office, a manager in large and small family-owned businesses, and have owned or part-owned three businesses including Insight Marketing, a company which specialises in consultancy and training worldwide in marketing, sales, negotiation and leadership development. I understand the pressures of work on the shop floor. I understand the tremendous privileges of being employed and the many frustrations that it can bring. I know what it is to run a company with all the blessings and tensions that it involves. From that varied experience I do believe that, in a way probably unique in world history, working men and women today have a chance to see the kingdom of God expressed in our generation on a scale not experienced before, in our places of work.

Along with others I have been invited again and again to talk about ‘The Kingdom of God and Work’ in the UK, in Kenya, in Sweden, in Zimbabwe, in the USA and in India.

It is as if the prophetic word voiced in its infancy nearly two decades ago is starting to take hold. The mustard seed of revelation is growing into a tree that will fill the whole earth. In this area of life it may just be that the kingdom of God is coming of age.

If this book could challenge, encourage and release you, I would be delighted, whether you are in church-paid ministry, a businessman, a shop-floor worker or someone in vocational calling. May God bless you as you open up your hearts and minds.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Mark Greene used to work in advertising and is prepared to admit it. He has written and spoken widely on work and everyday discipleship. His latest book is Fruitfulness on the Frontline. Other titles include Thank God it’s Monday, Supporting Christians at Work, The Best Idea in the World and Imagine How We Can Reach the UK. A graduate and former Vice Principal of the London School of Theology, Mark has been Executive Director of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity since 1999. He is married to Katriina and they have three children – Matt, Tomi and Anna-Marie.

Dr Christian Overman is the Director of Worldview Matters, an educational service organisation headquartered in Seattle, WA, USA, biblicalworldview.com, which focuses on biblical worldview training and the integration of faith and work. He is an adjunct faculty member at Seattle Pacific University, an international public speaker, and the author of Assumptions That Affect Our Lives, and God’s Pleasure At Work. Married to Kathy since 1972, the Overmans have four adult children and ten grandchildren.

1

WORK IN PROGRESS

BY MARK GREENE

WORK IN PROGRESS?

Much has changed in the working world in the UK in the last ten years – and much of it has not been for the better.

Some things have changed in the church’s response to work and encouragingly most of that has been positive.

Most encouraging of all, at least for me, is that we are now seeing the emergence of a strategy that may enable local churches to consistently and effectively envision, equip and support Christians for fruitful ministry in the contemporary workplace. And that is something we haven’t had since the days of Wesley. Still, before we explore the paths ahead, it’s important to know where we are now.

WORK IN REGRESS …

Overall, work has got tougher. Unemployment has risen, graduate unemployment significantly. More people are working part-time who would rather be working full-time and employee contracts have tended to get shorter and shorter – over one million people are now on zero hours contracts – and that inevitably leads to greater anxiety and stress for individuals and their families. At the same time the job market has become hour-glass in shape – jobs at the top, jobs at the bottom but fewer in the middle. And it is much harder to make the transition upwards. Outsourcing has meant that many jobs that used to be the first rungs on a career ladder are now cul-de-sacs and there has been a continuing decline in the skilled and semi-skilled jobs that young men traditionally filled. The percentage of women in senior roles has increased and women are better paid than they were but not yet at the same rates as men.

This bleak employment picture is matched by an increasingly bleak ethical picture – in many of our major institutions at least. Over the last ten years, there have been a series of tremendously damaging ethical scandals – the parliamentary expenses furore, the loss of appropriate editorial control at the BBC, criminal practice at the News of the World, woeful patient care in a small number of NHS units, the hubris of a tiny but all too influential number of people in the banking and financial services sector.

More worrying than any individual case is the growing sense that these are symptoms of a morally degenerative culture, of an overall approach to work that has lost sight of work’s primary function as a means to serve others and contribute to the flourishing of the workers themselves. Yes, profit is as vital to business as oxygen is to the body, but there is more to life than breathing. Yes, we need to make a living, but preferably not in a way that sucks the life out of us all. The data suggests that the Dementors are winning.

Furthermore, the combination of greater job insecurity with a more aggressive performance culture has given new vigour to that old ideological foe ‘salvation by works’ which serves to reinforce the belief that our success leads to our significance. By contrast, the gospel of grace encourages human beings to bask in the liberating confidence that they are already significant because they are not only created in the image of God but loved to the point of Christ’s selfgiving sacrifice on the cross. As such, we don’t need to find our identity or our significance in work but increasingly people in our culture do.

The working world needs the gospel.

John Stott, the great champion of biblically informed engagement in the world, took this further: you don’t blame the meat for going rotten, you blame the salt for not doing its job. Christians have a responsibility, a mandate, a duty to participate in the mission of God in the working world. If it’s going rotten, ‘It’s our fault,’ he said. ‘It’s we Christians who should be in there refining, reforming, rescuing it for Jesus.’

Workers have a job to do for Jesus. It’s a high calling. But a hard one. And impossible without Christ. Jesus is Lord, so no context is beyond the reach of his redemptive love. The Spirit blows where he wills, so no office, factory, warehouse, school is beyond his reach. Stott knew that it was primarily the job of ‘lay’ Christians to change their bit of God’s world. His confidence, however, was not in people but in the supreme transformative power of the gospel working through God’s people in the world.

CHURCH IN PROGRESS …

As far as the church is concerned it was the ethical collapse in the financial sector that probably has most to teach us, precisely because there were so many devoted, Bible-believing, generous, church-going Christians working in the law firms and the banks of the City of London – thousands in fact, and a good few in very senior positions, with hundreds of them attending lunchtime worship services in the City. Given that there were so many Christians there, why were we not able to make a greater impact? One bank president’s very humble response was, ‘It is very difficult to see it when you are in it.’

And there in a nutshell is the challenge for the local church.

How do we help one another ‘see it’?

How do we help one another – whether we are cleaners or CEOs, students or pro-vice-chancellors, shop assistants or marketing executives – how do we help one another see our work, our workplaces, our co-workers with biblical discernment so that we can indeed live, offer and facilitate a better way forward?

Over the last ten years the church’s response to this question has continued to be patchy – there’s been a slowly growing awareness that something needs to be done but quite what has not been clear. Yes, work is on the agenda and you can see the signs of that: the big conference providers have all offered seminars on work, the first series of books on work was launched, a small number of new resources have emerged – Alpha in the Workplace, God at Work – and Dr Richard Higginson has continued to bring his theological depth to the work arena.

On the other hand, the work-focused para-church organisations in the UK have for the most part struggled – faithfully, but struggled. Almost all of them are smaller than they were a decade ago and two of the very few specialist speakers on work now spend half their time in the United States. Here at the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity we have been able to add two posts and to grow a cadre of volunteer associate speakers and writers but, chaplains apart, the number of people working full-time to support the million or so Christians in paid work is very small indeed.

It is an extraordinary situation given that working Christians not only engage daily with millions and millions of people who don’t know Jesus, but have the daily opportunity to bring the resources of the gospel to bear on what they do, how they do it and why they do it. The great mission thinker Lesslie Newbigin was convinced that the primary action of the church was the action of its members through their daily work.

We are still a long way from acting on the implications of that statement. Indeed, the church’s mission strategy, here in the UK and globally, can be summarised as:

To recruit the people of God to use some of their leisure time to join the missionary initiatives of church-paid workers.

Why haven’t local churches managed to integrate workplace mission into their missional thinking and teaching? The reasons have very little to do with work.

THE HEART OF THE ISSUE

The first barrier to fruitful workplace ministry is theological. The gospel, and indeed the Bible as a whole, is being read through lenses distorted by the sacred–secular divide – the belief that some things are really important to God: church, prayer meetings, social action – but that others aren’t: work, rest, the arts, sport …

Yes, Jesus is Lord of all, but somehow we don’t really think that includes work. Yes, a disciple is a disciple wherever they are, but the activities that really matter are either based in the local church or in overseas missional contexts, not in banks and businesses, shops and schools. We don’t really live as if Colossians 1:15–20 is true: ‘all things have been created through him and for him’ and he died on the cross ‘to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven’.

If this limited view of the work of Christ is the theological barrier, then what our work at LICC has shown is that the methodological barrier is the lack of intentional disciplemaking. It is not simply that the church overall doesn’t make disciples for the workplace. No, the church overall doesn’t have an intentional strategy or commonly taught expertise to make disciples for pretty much any context. Jesus spent a huge proportion of his time teaching the twelve personally – working on their character, helping them reflect on mission trips, reframing their thinking, teaching them to minister, heal, exorcise, teach … It was highly relational. These kinds of relationships are largely absent from most, though not all, streams of the church. And where disciple-making is more common it tends to focus on domestic, personal and leisuretime concerns.

In sum, God’s people are not being discipled for daily mission in their daily context. And that is the heart of the crisis both for mission in general and the workplace in particular. And there is no sustainable way forward for workplace mission unless that bigger problem is addressed.

Encouragingly, however, the reality that the problem is broader than just work makes the solution easier.

What is required in the contemporary church is a shared language for daily whole-life mission, a way that any local community or group of people can talk about their own mission field, without one particular sphere being privileged over another. After all, in an average church of 100 people, only around 40 might be in paid employment, so it becomes difficult for someone preaching or teaching to focus on paid work for any meaningful length of time. Still, everyone in that church probably has a regular context in which they might be able to reach out to those who don’t know Jesus – a frontline, if you like. Almost everyone has a frontline that is out there in the world.

And on people’s frontlines, many of the challenges are actually similar – the call to model godly character, to make good work, to minister grace and love, to be a messenger of the gospel, a mouthpiece for truth and justice, and a moulder of culture – six ‘M’s. All apply to greater and lesser degrees, whether your frontline is a workplace, a gym, a school gate or a hydrotherapy class.

Yes, the contemporary workplace throws up particular challenges, but what the whole church needs is envisioning and equipping for daily mission on the frontline. And that makes the church leader’s task easier. Yes,