FAITH AND WORK: Connecting Sunday to Monday (2024)

Faith and Work News ~ Links to Interesting Articles

• Goodwill’s CEO on Christian Leadership and the Fight for Opportunity. On this episode of the Gospelbound podcast, Steve Preston joins Collin Hansen to share about his journey and how his faith in God carries him through various decisions and leadership challenges as he fights to provide opportunities for others.
• Worshipping God As We Work. Watch this message from Kara Martin delivered at the 2023 Annual Center for Faith & Work Los Angeles Conference.
• Called to Lead. My book Called to Lead: Living and Leading for Jesus in the Workplace is available in both a paperback and Kindle edition. Read a free sample (Introduction through Chapter 2).

Click on ‘Continue reading’ for:

• More links to interesting articles
• The Top 10 Faith and Work Quotes of the Week
• Faith and Work Book Review ~ Faithful Work: In the Daily Grind with God and for Others by Ross Chapman and Ryan Tafilowski
• Quotes from the book Working in the Presence of God: Spiritual Practices for Everyday Work by Denise Daniels and Shannon Vandewarker.

• Taking Our Faith to Work. Russ Gehrlein reappeared on the syndicated radio programThe Plumb Line, hosted by Jay Rudolph, on Tuesday, March 12. As in partsone,two, andthree of this interview, Russ and Jay discussed several of the faith and work concepts found in Russ’ excellent book,Immanuel Labor: God’s Presence In Our Profession. Here is a partial transcript of their conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity. You can also listen to the full conversation.
• Debunking Four Retirement Myths. Kristin Brown writes “How should Christians think about retirement, whether at 35, 65, or beyond? Here are four myths about retirement that may be impacting your own view.”
• Sunday Faith & Monday Work. Matt Rusten writes “The Made to Flourish pastors’ network—which includes the leaders of more than 950 evangelical congregations—is cultivating a community of pastors who specifically affirm human dignity and the value of work, arguing that because free enterprise improves human life, it is therefore a moral, not merely material, good.”
• How to Take a Sabbatical. Jeff Haanen shares this excerpt from his helpful book An Uncommon Guide to Retirement: Finding God’s Purpose for the Next Season of Life.
• How I Manage My Time as a Pastor. On this episode of The Focused Pastor, Alistair Begg shares a candid glimpse into the life of a pastor’s demanding schedule and the delicate balance between pastoral duties and personal time.
• Practice These Six Habits on Your First Professional Project. Logan Smith writes “While the context and parameters of each project vary, there are several habits that you can develop to help you manage expectations of the client/employer and navigate a project successfully and thus glorify God in doing so (1 Peter 2:13-19).”
• A Biblical Perspective on Physical and Mental Labor. Russ Gehrlein writes “Whether one’s vocation is mostly using muscle or mind; their intrinsic value is the same. Each one’s work matters to God, assuming it adds to shalom in the world and is not prohibited in scripture.”
• Working with Dan Doriani: Joel Salatin. On this episode of the Working with Dan Doriani podcast, Dan visits with Joel Salatin, author of The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God’s Creation. Dan digs into all the aspects that make Joel’s unique perspective such a clarion call for believers. It is no longer merely about sustenance but about our creational responsibility to the created world. It is a prescient challenge in a turbulent time.

Top 10 Faith and Work Quotes of the Week

• God has placed you right where you need to be, and he has empowered you with all the skills you need to do your work for His purposes and glory. Russ Gehrlein
• A job pays the bills; a calling fits our gifts and interests. Dan Doriani
• The mark of great leaders is not the number of their followers, but how they attract and intentionally develop the next generation of leaders. Harry Reeder
• There is no ideal place to serve God except the place in which He has set you down. Alistair Begg
• All legitimate work, whether with hands or head, paid or unpaid, carries honor and dignity. Larry Peabody
• The true measure of leaders is not the number of people who serve them but the number of people they serve. John Maxwell
• Instead of striving to be served, Christian leaders strive to serve. Harry Reeder
• While God blessed work to be a glorious use of our gifts and his resources to prosper the world, it is also cursed because of mankind’s fall. Work exists now in a world sustained by God but disordered by sin. Tim Keller
• Any work that is good and godly, any work worth doing, can be done to the glory of God and for the help of humankind. Ben Witherington

FAITH AND WORK BOOK REVIEW:

Faithful Work: In the Daily Grind with God and for Others by Ross Chapman and Ryan Tafilowski. IVP. 112 pages. 2024
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Faithful Work is the third excellent book on faith and work to have recently come out of the Denver Institute for Faith and Work group, following books by Joanna Meyer and Jeff Haanen. The book was written by Ross Chapman, current CEO of the Denver Institute for Faith and Work and Ryan Tafilowski, pastor and assistant professor. With this short book, the authors hope to stir the reader’s mind and heart toward a renewed vision of daily work. They hope to “increase the understanding of what it means for our faith to intersect with our work, and that through this understanding, our cities will be filled with disciples of Jesus—good citizens who will live out the implications of the gospel, not just in church on Sundays but every day in all of life.”
The book touches on a number of important subjects, including what the Bible says about work, the so called sacred/secular divide, redeeming work, a two-part or “truncated gospel”, the instrumental and intrinsic understandings of work, a crisis of place, our primary and secondary callings, politics, and a renewed vision of rest.
The book concludes with an “Epilogue: AFramework forChange” by Jeff Haanen and Ross Chapman about the five guiding principles that are used to guide the work at the Denver Institute for Faith and Work.

Faithful Work is a good introduction to the Christian understanding of work, and how to integrate our faith with our work, and thus a worthy addition to your library.
Below are some of my favorite quotes from the book:

• Scripture has a very high view of work.
• Work was given as a good gift and an invitation to be cocreators with God.
• To redeem work or to work redemptively means, simply, turning bad and broken work into good and godly work wherever it is encountered. That is the task of the worker who follows Jesus.
• The daily work of Christians is the church’s greatest opportunity to complement God’s work. Yet for centuries, that opportunity has been largely ignored and often squandered. It must not continue.
• Doing our secular jobs in a spiritual way is a deeply Christian way of being in the world.
• Work is our chance to participate in God’s great plan to reconcile the world to himself in Christ. Work is our chance to participate in the redemption of all things. Work is where we shape our one small corner of the world.
• Work, whether paid or unpaid, is an opportunity for being involved spiritually in the world today.
• Faith and work should not be separate; instead, the heart of our faith is meant to be lived out during the day-to-day work of home and business.
• Work is the greatest vehicle many of us have for loving our neighbors as ourselves. It’s at work that we find our most frequent opportunities to serve the public good by using our talents and skills to serve others.
• When our faith is integrated with our work, it transforms us to become passionate about finding the true, good, and beautiful in the work God has called us to do.
• If our understanding of the gospel is too narrow, we will arrive at an instrumental understanding of our work, meaning that work is good only because of the value it can create for something else. But if we allow Scripture to expand our understanding, we can include an intrinsic view of our work, meaning work itself is valuable.
• Work is the greatest opportunity many of us have for fulfilling the calling of Christ and his command to love our neighbors as ourselves.
• It is at work where we often see our greatest opportunities to use our talents and skills to love and serve others.
• Paid and unpaid work allows us to participate in God’s redemption and restoration of all things, and that is where God has placed us to shape our small corners of the world.
• Our day-to-day tasks, no matter how small, when done as a response to God’s calling, matter from an eternal perspective. This is the promise of our Christian faith.

Faith and Work Book Club – Won’t you read along with us?

We are reading Working in the Presence of God: Spiritual Practices for Everyday Work by Denise Daniels and Shannon Vandewarker. This book was recommended by the Nashville Institute for Faith + Work.

The Amazon description of the book reads in part:
“How do we invite God into our everyday lives? Working in the Presence of God discusses the incorporation of spiritual disciplines into the ordinary rhythms of everyday experience. God is already present and active, so by becoming aware of workday rhythms and focusing on where various spiritual practices might be implemented in our jobs, we can be transformed into Christ’s likeness through our work.”

This week we look at the Preface: A Theological Framework for Work. Here are a few helpful quotes from this section:

• God provided work to do and then commanded Adam and Eve to fill the earth and to subdue it, meaning that they were to make something of the world.
• As Adam and Eve were called to subdue the earth, we are also humans created in God’s image, called to work as co-creators with the Lord of creation. We are to make something with the materials we are given.
• We are called to be co-creators. In that co-creation, we follow the call of God to cultivate and subdue by showing up, taking responsibility for our work, and doing it to the best of our abilities.
• Joy can be found in our work, because we have the privilege of being in relationship with the Creator of the universe who gives us the responsibility to co-create alongside the Trinity, making something of our little corners of the world.
• In the midst of the brokenness of our work, there is hope—hope that Christ enters into our work and shows up not only as the redeemer of all humanity but as the redeemer of all of creation, including our work.
• In Christ’s promise of restoration, each day is an opportunity for us to witness his presence, bringing redemption to our work, our workplaces, and to those with whom we work.
• The good news about work is that God gave us good work to do: work we will continue to cultivate—in a fulfilled and redeemed form—into eternity!