Excerpt from Workship: how our faith impacts our working

Here is another excerpt from my book: "Workship", which will be launch in March.

One of the saddest stories I have heard about faith and work was from a businessman who was a fund manager running his own company. He was a Christian who had achieved a great success in a difficult industry, running a company that was mostly made up of non-Christians. He told me that his faith was an integral part of his success at work: he prayed regularly about major decisions, he saw his success as a sign of God’s blessing, and he used his wealth to bless much individual ministry as well as Christian organisations.

I asked him about how he managed to sustain his faith in some of the tough ethical dilemmas he must face in his business, and particularly when many work colleagues weren’t Christian. With pride he said the following: “My colleagues will tell you that I am no Christian pushover. I have a saying that when I walk into the boardroom I check my faith at the door.”

To “check your faith at the door” means that you walk into that room where the biggest decisions are made as less of the person you could be or should be; it means that you have left behind the most important thing you possess: your connection to the Sovereign God of the universe and the empowering of His Spirit. It means that you still think it is possible to live dualistically: separating your faith from your everyday life. It means that your whole company is missing out on the wisdom that faith brings. It means that your work colleagues are missing out on a critical witness of the power of faith to transform every part of our lives, including how we make work decisions.

So we have a choice.

Do we pretend that our work doesn’t matter to God? Do we check our faith at the door? Do we feel guilty working in our secular jobs rather than going to Bible college and doing ‘Gospel work’?

Or, do we seek to worship God through our work? Do we seek to serve God and others in the way we work, the choices we make, what we say and do at work, how we treat other people?

In effect, the choice is actually between worshipping work or worshipping God through our work. Ironically, when we cut God off from our work, or eating, or relationships… we end up not making those things subject to his control, and we allow those things to replace God at the centre of our decision-making, as the source of our identity and pride and sense of security. We worship the created thing rather than the creator.

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God in Public

Just received NT Wright's: "God in Public" and found this equally affirming and challenging... 

"This is the strange public truth of the Christian gospel. God is in the business of remaking the whole world, turning it the right way up at last. The call of the Christian gospel makes the sense it's supposed to make, not when it is heard as a call to ignore the world and pursue a private salvation, but when it is heard as a call to follow Jesus and become a part of his plan to sort the world out now, as much as we can, in advance of the final day. 

Being a Christian means that your own life becomes part of that anticipation, allowing God to do in your heart and mind, your imagination and energy, what he's going to do one day for the whole world — that is, remake it from top to bottom and flood it with his glory."
 

All work matters to God

From Sarah Bessey who describes herself as: Author of "Jesus Feminist" & "Out of Sorts." Writer/blogger. Preacher. Unqualified theologian. Recovering know-it-all. Wife to Brian. Mum to 4 tinies.

This part of life is just as real and honourable as any trip to preach in faraway places! Traded my heels and microphone for a toilet brush and comfy sweats because I am home to clean our two bathrooms and then make supper and get tinies bathed and …

This part of life is just as real and honourable as any trip to preach in faraway places! Traded my heels and microphone for a toilet brush and comfy sweats because I am home to clean our two bathrooms and then make supper and get tinies bathed and ready for another school week. All work - no matter how uncelebrated and un-Instagrammed! - matters to God.

#myworkship An-Magritt, Safety training instructor

#myworkship Thank you An-Magritt, who has sent in a selfie of herself at work. To EVERYONE: please take a selfie and describe the way you worship God through your work, and send it through the "send email" button on this page. I am collecting them to illustrate my book: 'Workship'.


An-Magritt writes: 
"I work as a safety training instructor and have the opportunity to meet and interact with lots of different people.
For me, demonstrating God at work is seeking to meet each person as an individual, try to make them feel comfortable and welcome and facilitate as good a learning environment as I possibly can."
 

Coaching nights (Free!)

I am hosting these coaching nights. If you have an idea, a business, an art project, a strategy, a ministry or a problem, and you want to work on it as part of a community; come along and have the benefit of experienced facilitators. Let me know if you have any questions :)

RSVP on facebook or info@seed.com.au

#myworkship Angus, Senior Functional Analyst

#myworkship Thank you Angus, the first person to send in a selfie of them at work. Please take a selfie and describe the way you worship God through your work, and send it here.


Angus writes: 
I'm a Senior Functional Analyst, responsible for project managing the delivery of financial reporting and analysis applications. I view reports as a channel of revelation, and therefore — as with God's own self-revelation — having the ultimate purpose of enabling us to walk in covenant relationship with each other, united in spirit and purpose. So, I see the image of God's work imprinted on my own, and this motivates me in worship and purpose. I also worship God in my workplace by drawing fellow believers together for unity of prayer and mission.
 

Jonathan Heppner

I realised that this page is about writing, as well as faith and work, so here is an incredibly articulate piece of writing about writing and faith from one of my favourite bloggers (I wish I could write like this!):

Jonathan Heppner
#excusemymuse very few disciplines expose the complexity of fear like writing. prose. poetry. verse. rhythm. rhyme. flow. all chosen to be the costume that insight wears and that profundity seems to require. i have been a life long reader, and have dabbled with the craft of writing. i notice that the more i pay attention, the more attuned i am to the smell of fear, of insecurity and the longing for approval that hides beneath the surface of so many pages. layered under the writers’ choices, you can feel it. long words instead of short ones, as though the short were not just as powerful; the long as a pretentious choice of clothes to hide what is subconsciously seen as unseemly, a hidden attempt to keep people at a distance. words chosen as hidden protectors, something we can hide behind, to pretend we are giving and at the same to thwart queries in a frightful sneer of ‘you wouldn’t understand’. we do it to assuage the very real haunt of doubt. these bastions allow us to hide…from what we can’t control: the potential of criticism, judgment, and rejection. the tragedy is that we cannot truly write from this place of fear. we have to write from the place of love. love? yes. because love is where truth is born. and to give truth language, we have to fight for her. we contend for her by writing that which is simple. that which is honest. and that which calls us to experience beauty. truth should only be given in love…and this love demands courage. we hold out our hand and say, ‘these words…they come from my soul. can you hear them? i want you to understand, have i wrapped them in the language of your heart?’ it is the willing gift of soul that makes the written word powerful, because it is brave.#saskatchewanwanderings
(ps. Apologies to my proofing friends... just imagine ee cummings)