It was a beautiful spring day in my home town. I had just finished a long walk with my special friend, Sue, who was soon to be my wife. We were discussing our plans for the future. Sue was in medical school. I was enrolled in business. Ever since Sue saw the movie Born Free, she had dreamed of being a missionary doctor in Africa. Her imagination was captured by the story of a lady physician in Kenya. My plans were different. I was looking forward to a career in business. Africa was the farthest thing from my mind. In a moment of sheer folly, I said to her, “It’s Africa or me!”
For me, Africa was not a good idea. I commended her for her desire to be a physician and to help people. I thought if we were going to be married, Sue needed to make a choice about where she would spend her life. Since I had no plans for Africa and since we were going to be married, it meant she had to let go of that dream. However, I was not factoring in the possibility that perhaps this was not just her idea. Perhaps God had something in mind for us and it included Africa.
To be honest, I felt badly about asking her to make that choice. So within a year of us being married, we arranged to go to Africa and spend eight weeks at a hospital in Zaire where Sue could do an elective in tropical medicine. I was helping a missionary group with some administration. Before we went, I have to admit, I hoped that this short term visit would help Sue get Africa out of her system. She would see how difficult things were there. Instead, God completely changed me during our time there. I was struck by the warmth and friendliness of the people. I saw the great need and how even a little effort on our part could make a big difference in a lot of people’s lives. So we came back to Canada knowing that one day God was going to take us back to Africa.
Ten years and three children later we returned. Through various circumstances and divine appointments, God had set up our return. We had a Zambian family, Derek & Gladys Mutungu, live with us in Vancouver while Derek studied theology at Regent College. After his program finished and they returned to Zambia, he invited us to come and live with them for a time. Sue had graduated from medical School and I had finished my Masters in Business Administration. We had three small children, ages 4, 5 and 7. We accepted the invitation and spent 6 months training with Youth With a Mission before we went to Zambia.
During my time at YWAM, I asked God what He thought I should do as a missionary. The normal missions activity such as evangelism and discipleship did not interest me. Working in administration also was not something I wanted to do. So I sought God for direction. The Lord’s word to me came through the story of Moses. (Exodus 4:1-5) When Moses asked God how the people would know God had sent him, God asked him what he had in his hand. It was his shepherd staff that stood for the work God had called him to undertake. So God had him throw it down on the ground. The staff transformed into a snake in a demonstration of the power of God. It returned to being a staff when Moses picked it up.
God asked me what I had in my hand to offer him. For me my staff was my secular work in small business. Yet, I have often found the traditional Christian understanding of work as shallow and depreciating of the value of work. This has led me to cry out to God, “I don’t get it!” If you want me to offer you my secular work, why does the Church not value that work?
I don’t get it! Why did God create us to work?
Why did God create us to work if work is not valuable to Him? Why is there a disconnect between the Christian faith and what Christians do everyday at work. Why does the Church seem blind to this problem? What is going on and how can I discover an understanding of God’s world that gives meaning and purpose to what I do everyday at work.
These questions have directed a journey of faith that has taken me from Canada to Africa and back. While I was in Africa, I taught Zambian entrepreneurs small business skills. I also desired to give them a foundation in Biblical principles in business. So I wrote to Christian friends in Canada who were in business and asked them for Biblical teaching resources that had assisted them in integrating their faith at work. I was shocked at the response. Most Christians I knew in business had no idea how to integrate faith and work. They perceived that the Church did not care about what they did from 9 to 5 every weekday just as long as they supported the ministry with their tithing. They felt like they were being “fed to the wolves” every day and the Church just did not care!
Word of the Lord - Slow down!
After returning from Africa I resolved to something about this lack of resources so I launched an Internet Web Site called Scruples (www.scruples.net). This resource has grown and now I have a registry of over 1,200 organizations that help Christians at work. Still, the question persisted, why is there such disconnect between Sunday faith and Monday work? I don’t get it!
God speaks in mysterious ways. He heard my cry for an answer and began the process of leading me in a discovery of a new way to work. I tried my hand at running for office in a civic election. In the busyness of my campaign I found myself circling words on a place mat at a restaurant. There was a poem and the refrain I had circled said – “don’t dance so fast”! Was this a message from God? I forgot about it until I was pulled over for speeding twice in a six month period. I asked God, “What are you trying to tell me? His answer was “Slow down!”
Now, I am a very busy fellow. I like to work and I sometimes work too much! So perhaps God was calling me to slow down and stop working so hard! I resolved to bring balance to my work life.
However, the question of how my faith and work related to one another still vexed me. For example, I was at a Christian bookshop and noticed a message printed on their shopping bags. It began with a question in big bold letters. “What on earth am I here for?” Then it answered the question with a series of scriptures. The words “worship”, “fellowship”, “discipleship”, “ministry” and “evangelism” were the summary words for each of these passages. They asked the question of God’s purpose for mankind on earth and they answered it in terms of spiritual work. There was no mention of there being other work that God created us to do.
I heard a message about “Calling” from a preacher. He spoke of Saul’s call to kingship, and how it happened in the context of the young man looking for his family’s donkey’s (1 Samuel 9). The implied message was that there are two types of work, one that is God’s purpose for us and usually relates to Christian ministry and the other that is “looking for the donkeys” type of work that most Christians find themselves at everyday. I remember chatting with a friend who was counseling people on chemical dependency. His comment after the message was “I guess what I am doing is just looking for donkeys!” This message was not empowering to my friend in his work activity although in any common sense measure what he was doing was very valuable work. I have heard similar sentiments expressed by Christian business people who perceive the church only values them for their tithes and Christian medical personnel who are usually painted in a negative light when the church asks God for healing miracles for its members. Thus there seemed to be a major contradiction between the preacher’s worldview and the real world of most Christians at work. Did the preacher’s worldview represent God’s worldview with respect to work? If so, I don’t get it, God! Why?
You’ll never get it if you don’t slow down, my friend.
This past year I was reading Michael Frost’s book Eyes Wide Open, Seeing God in the Ordinary. In it he describes a scene from the movie Smoke. God used this story to answer my need to “get it!”
One of my favourite movies is the Wayne Wang film Smoke, starring Harvey Keitel and William Hurt. The latter plays a famous writer called Paul Benjamin whose pregnant wife has been recently killed when caught in a gun battle in the street. He is still in deep grief and has writer’s block to prove it. Keitel’s character, Augie Wren, runs the nearby tobacco store that the writer visits regularly for his cigars. One evening as he is closing up, Paul arrives rushed and breathless, hoping to catch him before he goes home. He’s run out of cigars. As he’s paying for the merchandise, Paul notices a camera on the counter and enquires about it. Augie tells him that it’s his hobby, taking pictures every day.
‘So you’re not just a man who pushes coins across a counter.’ Paul smiles.
‘That’s what people see,’ Augie replies, ‘but that’s not necessarily what I am.’ The next thing you know, they’re both in Augie’s enjoying a smoke and a beer and the tobacconist is piling a heap of photograph albums on the table for Paul to view. Each photograph is dated with a label stuck underneath it on the page. The dates began from 1978. Paul flips through several pages and laughs in bewilderment, shaking his head.
‘They’re all the same!’
‘That’s right,’ replies Augie. ‘More than 4000 pictures of the same place. Corner of Third Street and Seventh Avenue at 8 o’clock in the morning. 4000 straight days in all kinds of weather. that’s why I can never take a vacation. I’ve got to be in my spot every morning at the same time.’
‘I’ve never seen anything like this,’ Paul says, astonished by the enormity of it.
‘It’s my project,’ Augie smiles, taking a drag on his panatella. ‘What you call my life’s work.’
‘Amazing, I’m not sure I get it, though. What was it that gave you the idea to do this, er ‘project’?’ Paul smirks.
‘I don’t know. It just came to me. It’s my corner, after all. I mean it’s just one little part of the world, but things take place there too just like everywhere else. It’s a record of my little spot.’
Paul is visibly stunned. ‘It’s kind of overwhelming,’ he mumbles, as he closes one album and Augie passes him another, filled with the same pictures of the very same street corner. Paul turns page after page, shaking his head at the strangeness of it all. As each page turns, the writer, scanning each shot quickly, is stunned by this grand obsession. Speedily, he races through the album, but Augie halts him gently.
‘You’ll never get it if you don’t slow down, my friend.’
‘Whatta you mean?’ Paul asks as he flips another page.
‘I mean, you’re going too fast. You’re hardly even looking’ at the pictures.’
Paul laughs, ‘But, they’re all the same.’
Then Augie, the unlikely sage, offers him a profound piece of wisdom…
‘They’re all the same, but each one is different from every other one. You’ve got your bright mornings, your dark mornings. You’ve got your summer light and your autumn light.’ As Augie speaks, one photograph after another, flashes across the screen. ‘You’ve got your weekdays and your weekends. You’ve got your people in T-shirts and shorts. Sometimes the same people, sometimes different ones. Sometimes the different ones become the same and the same ones disappear. The earth revolves around the sun and every day the light from the sun hits the earth at a different angle.’
Paul stops turning pages. He looks at Augie and sucks on his cigarette. ‘Slow down, huh?’
‘that’s right, working’ man, You know how it is. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Time keeps its pretty pace.’
Paul sighs deeply, then takes a breath and looks intently at one of the pictures. Then another and another. Slowly, deeply, with concentration. Every shot has the Brooklyn Cigar Company in the background, but the foregrounds are like an ever changing parade of cars, trucks, businessmen, children, teenagers, umbrellas, limousines. Then his eyes fall on a familiar face. His pregnant wife.
‘Jesus, Look! It’s Ellen!”
‘Yeah, that’s right,’ says Augie leaning across to see her. ‘She’s in quite a few from that year. Must have been on her way to work.’
‘It’s Ellen!’ gasps Paul, choking back tears. ‘Look at her. Look at my sweet darling.’
Paul dissolves into tears, his grief flowing like a torrent. He slumps over the albums on the laminex topped table and sobs inconsolably, Augie draping his arm around his new found friend. (1)
Frost’s point in sharing this story is to challenge his readers to slow down and discover God in the ordinary things of life. When I read the story, it was God’s megaphone –
I knew God was speaking powerfully to me through this story. My heart’s cry was, ‘Lord, I don’t get it!’ God’s word to me over several years was “slow down!” Now in this one story He brought together the answer for me, “Mike, Slow down, if you want to “get it!”
So I went into a season of prayer. “Lord, help me to slow down so I can get it” was my cry. Part of the slowing down was to accompany my family on a vacation in London, England. One evening, I was sitting in St. Paul’s Cathedral, listening to vespers. As the music filled the church, the answer came to me in a flash of illumination. “The gospel!” that was what I needed to get!
The Gospel – A truth widely held, A truth greatly reduced
The gospel? How does the gospel relate to my quest for meaning and purpose at work? In coming to an answer to this question I came across this quote from Walter Brueggemann,
“The gospel is … a truth widely held, but a truth greatly reduced. It is a truth that has been flattened, trivialized and rendered inane. Partly, the gospel is simply an old habit among us, neither valued nor questioned.”(2)
The resolution to my quest for understanding was a right understanding of the gospel and how it relates to the whole of creation and man’s place in creation. The worldview that did not make sense to me, the worldview I heard at church, was a worldview that was shaped by a gospel, “greatly reduced.” Andrew Perriman, a contributor to the Open Source Theology web resource, comments on this problem.
“Let's start with a summary of the traditional evangelical gospel. It's going to look something like this: we are all sinners; God sent his Son from heaven to die for us; if we repent of our sins, believe in Jesus, invite him into our hearts, we will be saved and will receive the Holy Spirit as an assurance that we will have eternal life with God when we die; if not - though we rather play down this aspect - we will go to hell.
What is wrong with this? There are a number of things that we might mention. The language can sound trite and complacent - certainly to the ear of the jaded evangelical but surely also to most people who are conscious of the fact that they live in a post-Christian culture. The argument takes no account of how problematic or irrelevant notions of sin, God, and heaven may be for people who do not already share basic Christian presuppositions - ironically, it only really sounds like ‘good news’ to believers. It fails to acknowledge the difficulty and mysteriousness of spiritual experience; it describes salvation in highly individualized and even self-centred terms.
Failings such as these have generally been recognized by the emerging church movement and much has been done to alleviate their effects. What I want to suggest…is that there is a more fundamental problem with the traditional evangelical gospel, which may well prove to be at the root of these distortions. It is that a synopsis such as this fails to take into account the landscape of history. It is played out instead against the backdrop of a simple existential requirement - the plight of the sinner who needs to be reconciled to God in order to be certain of eternal life. It is the ‘good news’ reduced to the terms of a universalized, standardized contract, almost entirely disengaged from its original narrative and historical context. If New Testament stories feature at all in the announcement of this gospel, they serve merely as illustrations for general spiritual truths. In effect we take as our frame of reference the over-refined end-product of a long process of interpretive rationalization rather than the raw material of the original historical narrative.” (3)
The Gospel as THE Frame of Reference for Faith at Work
This is what I needed to get. I needed a deeper understanding of the gospel. I needed a right understanding that would transform my way of seeing the world and empower a new way to work in the marketplace. The gospel I heard at church on Sunday morning was an “over-refined end-product of a long process of interpretative rationalization”. It disconnected faith from work and marginalized what Christians do most of the time and that is work. The gospel, rightly understood, is a much larger frame of reference for faith that includes work.
In this Blog I will try to answer the question – What does it mean to live the gospel at work? What does the gospel look like in the real world? How does the gospel make a difference and provide practical solutions to real world problems faced by Christians in their everyday lives?
Notes:
1. Michael Frost, Eyes Wide Open, Seeing God in the Ordinary (Sutherland, Australia: Albatross Books, 1998).43-46.
2. Walter Brueggemann, Finally comes the Poet (Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1989), 1-2, quoted in Michael Frost, 17.
3. Andrew Perriman. “What was Jesus’ gospel? | open source theology.” http://www.opensourcetheology.net/node/view/164 (Accessed on: 18 July 2004). "What was Jesus' gospel?
