Sacred and secular vocations

Posted by Paul | Filed under work

Continuing my one-blog mission to disrupt the sacred/secular divide, here are some quotes on the subject from Andy Crouch’s Culture Making. We tend to think of this question in a relatively theoretical way — is there value in all types of work? Crouch aims for the practical and asks,

Is it possible to participate in culture, to create culture, outside of the church and experience every bit as much divine multiplication as those who work inside the church?

Not only ‘is secular work valuable?’, but ‘can we expect God to work with us in our ‘secular’ jobs?’

He uses an interesting example of his working for IVCF on-campus. He found times when students ‘renounced their ambitions’ in order to work for Christian organisations, only to find themselves struggling and seeing little fruit in what they were doing. Some of these eventually went to work in ‘secular’ employment and, in contrast, found ‘freedom and joy’.

Interestingly, a friend who has worked in missions said something similar to me — being on the ‘mission field’ does not mean you are doing what God intends for you.

Andy Crouch proposes a very helpful re-alignment

The religious or secular nature of out cultural creativity is simply asking the wrong question. The right question is whether, when we undertake the work we believe to be our vocation, we experience the joy and humility that come only when God multiplies our work so that it bears thirty, sixty and a hundredfold beyond what we could expect from our feeble inputs. Vocation — calling — becomes another word for a continual process of discernment, examining the fruits of our work to see whether they are producing that kind of fruit, and doing all we can to scatter the next round of seed in the most fruitful places.

By the fruits you’ll know, not the classification…

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Read more | Comments (1) | November 16th, 2008

Keller on Culture

Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised

I (re-)discovered the website of Redeemer’s Center for Faith & Work this week. They have a lot of interesting mp3s on the site on faith and culture, work, etc.

The talk I found particularly useful is Tim Keller’s Changing Culture: The Role of the Entrepreneur. It’s taken from a forum for ‘Christian Entrepreneurs’, but the definition of entrepreneurs seems to be defined very broadly so don’t let that put you off. A good part of the talk is a more general discussion of the call for Christians to be involved in cultural renewal. I found it pulled together a lot of thoughts I’ve been having recently on culture, work, etc. (some of which have made it on to the blog), as well as stimulating some more. (To be honest, as someone who isn’t particularly business-minded, even the title got me thinking in new ways…)

By the way, if you’ve read Andy Crouch’s Culture Making, this talk makes a good companion piece.

Oh, and he references Sufjan Stevens, so, really, what more can you ask for?

Another one worth a listen is Call to Action : Stewarding our Gifts, which is a short talk on practicalities. I particularly liked the musings on profit — Christians should have the space to re-think the purpose of profit in business — and on ‘form and content’ — if we add the content of christianity to an existing form, shouldn’t we expect the form to be altered in the process? This last point starts an interesting conversation with the question of whether borrowing forms will risk us losing the message.

(HT: I probably got to all this from the Reformissionary list of Tim Keller resources.)

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Read more | Comments (0) | November 7th, 2008