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…
Tags: Culture Making (Crouch), work
One Response to “Sacred and secular vocations”
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jonnyjpg Says:
November 19th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
thats great. thanks Paul
A random walk over culture, art, christianity, etc. with occasional photographs...