Christian Professionals have real problems resolving the faith work tension in their professional practice. They ask, Is faith welcome at work? Is work valuable to God? What do I do when faith conflicts with work? Where is the balance between faith and work? Can faith make a difference at work? How?

Answers to these questions were considered at The Christian Medical and Dental Society (CMDS) of Canada conference in Kelowna, BCCanada this past April.

The keynote speaker was R. Paul Stevens. Paul is a Marketplace Ministry Mentor and former Dean of Marketplace Theology at Regent College. In his opening message, Taking your Soul to Work: Honoring God in Professional Practice, he taught Christian professionals how to live the faith work tension well. Here are some excerpts from his talk.

“In many ways, Hippocrates, the Father of Modern Medicine, delivered to us the problem that we have of taking our souls to work. He was the first person to see medicine as a science as opposed to a purely spiritual activity. In ancient Greece, healing practices were based on the cult of Asclepius which used dream interpretation, sacred waters and drama to effect cures. In contrast, Hippocrates recorded what he could see, hear and feel. Basing his reasoning on observed fact and learned to assist body the in its vital struggle against disease.”

“The Hippocratic Oath is a do no harm document. It committed physicians to a set of a professional ethics in the context of community. It was a very good first step and perhaps a matter of Common grace. However, a Christian ethic goes farther and deeper. Physicians in the early church drew on the love of people, active caring, charity and compassionate empathy as the source of their calling and profession.”

“While the Hippocratic school left divine healing to the Asclepius healers, the church has always maintained that all healing is from God. However, unlike the Asclepius healers, the Divine behind the healing process was not ambiguous. The will of God for the people of God is an empowering vision of greatness under God. The sovereignty of God orders the circumstances of life for good, not for evil.” (Genesis 50:20)

Methodist Bible Expositor E. Stanley Jones once said, “Jesus is healing through your hands and through your eyes. He can heal through medicines and surgery. He can heal through mental suggestions. He can heal through a change of climate. He can heal through deliverance from underlying fears, guilt and resentment, He can heal through direct operation of the Spirit on the body through prayer and, ultimately, he heals through the resurrection of the body.”

“Since all healing is from God, Christian health professionals need to see people the way Jesus sees them as bearing the image of God. Motivated by love and service, they are doing the “Lord’s work” as they go about their daily activity to care for the sick.”

 (Read Paul Stevens book: The Other Six Days: Vocation, Work, and Ministry in Biblical Perspective for more on doing the ‘Lord’s Work’ in everyday life.)

To do this well, Christians at work must live the mixed life. Archbishop Hume once said, “no man [sic] can afford to live in the marketplace who does not also live in the desert.”

Walter Hilton, a 14th century bishop, in answer to a Christian merchant seeking orders, said in his tract, "Treatise Written to a Devout Man in Temporal Estate",

“You ought to mingle the works of an active life with spiritual endeavours of a contemplative life, and then you will do well. For you should at certain times be busy with Martha in the ordering and care of your household, children, employees, tenants, or neighbours. If they do well, you ought to comfort and help them in this; if they do badly, then teach them to amend themselves and correct them. And you should regard and wisely know how your property and worldly goods are being administered, conserved, or intelligently invested by your employees, in order that you might, with the increase, the more bountifully fulfil the deeds of mercy to your fellow Christians. At other times you should, with Mary, leave off the busyness of the world and sit down meekly at the feet of our Lord, there to be in prayer, holy thought and contemplation of him, as he gives you grace. And so you should go from one activity to the other in maintaining your stewardship, fulfilling both aspects of the Christian life. In so doing, you will be keeping well the order of charitable love.”

According to Paul Stevens, Jesus did not live a balanced life, he lived a disciplined life.  “For Christians the need of the world is not the call of God. The call comes from God and we will need to withdraw frequently and regularly from compulsive need-meeting in order to hear the voice of God.”

The mixed life for Christians at work begins by preparing FOR work through spiritual disciplines such as

-         Lectio Divina , slowly reading and praying through scripture out loud.

-         Lectio Continua, reading through the entire Bible continuously,

-         Fasting, Repentance, Journal Keeping, Waiting Prayer ,

-         Sabbath. “We do not “keep” Sabbath; Sabbath keeps us – keeps us focused on God as the ultimate reality, keeps us rightly ordered in terms of priorities, and keeps us mindful that we are not accepted by the most important person in the universe because of our performance.”

Eugene H. Peterson has said, “if you cannot afford to take one day a week for rest, you are taking yourself too seriously.”  “Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain. It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep. ( Psalms 127:1-2)

It continues IN work through

-         Workplace Prayer. E.g. Lord, I can’t do this, unless you enable me, Lord, I am just going to continue to do this unless you enable me to do it differently… (E.g. Nehemiah’s Arrow Prayer,

-         Practicing the Presence of God. (See the book by Brother Lawrence (Full Text Here, Listen to it read aloud here.). (A modern version Closer Than a Brother shares the story of a hospital Kitchen Supervisor learning to experience God in everyday work.)

-         Celebration with Sacred Objects in your space or on your person that remind you of God & his person and purposes.

-         Ministry of hospitality – “Hospitality is creating a space in our hearts where others, the stranger and the outsider can be free.” Henri Nouwen.

-         Other Personal spiritual practices (Courtesy of Workplace Spirituality Website by Nancy Smith)

Finally, allowing our spirituality to be formed by the actual work that we do.

Work reveals our interior life,

"Without external work, we could not know ourselves fully, for only in daily work do we have a perfect opportunity to observe ourselves; it is then indeed that we discover the good and evil in ourselves and see our merits and faults. Without active work it is usually very hard to know oneself, for there is a lot of hidden evil in us, covered over with apparent calm… What external work does for our interior life, is shown in the fact that this work, by the sweat of our brow lays bear the image of our souls and unveils its real expression. " (Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, "All You Who Labor: Work and the Sanctification of Daily Life", New Hampshire, Sophia Institute Press, 1995, p. 113 )

Wyszynski again, “The problem arises of how to arrange our work in such a way that it serves our interior life and in deed it becomes one of the means of our sanctification”

Paul Stevens concluded his talk with a exposition of the fruit of the Spirit at work. For more on this subject Paul is publishing a new book in July entitled Doing God's Business: Meaning And Motivation for the Marketplace. Also, I have some resources in my article  Spiritual Formation at Work.

Jacques Ellul in his book, Presence of the Kingdom, states:

“He has sent us into the world, and just as we are involved in the tension between sin and grace, so also we are involved in the tension between these two very contradictory demands. It is a very painful, and a very uncomfortable, situation, but it is the only position which can be fruitful for the action of the Christian in the world, and for his [sic] life in the world....We must accept - in a spirit of repentance – the fact that our life in the world is necessarily ‘scandalous’….To be honest, we must not accept this tension of the Christian, or of the Christian life, as an abstract truth. It must be lived, it must be realized, in the most concrete and living way possible.”

In conclusion, resolving the faith work tension can only be done by taking soul to work, FOR the sake of work, IN the work done and THROUGH that work. This allows our spirituality to be shaped so that we reflect the character of Christ into the world we serve,

“So that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast the word of life, so that in the day of Christ I may be proud that I did not run in vain or labor in vain.” (Philippians 2:15-16)

Some blogs that mention Paul Stevens

Herb Ely just did a post on In Defense of the Hired Hand.

Michael Kruse at Kruse Kronicle: on Theology and Economics: Index So Far

David Ran writes about Faith Work tension in his blog article On the Shoulders of Giants: Tension

Here is a blog that looks at the world through the eyes of a Christian Physician.

The Doctor Is In

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