Workplace as formation

Posted by Paul | Filed under work

I wrote this back in October, but forgot to post it. It follows on from the post about Miroslav Volf’s book Work in the Spirit and connects into James K.A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom (the intro is downloadable from the Baker website) The two spark interestingly off each other. Let’s start with Volf’s observation:

Economic alienation … often directly or indirectly causes alienation from God. We read in Exodus, for instance, that the oppressed and exploited Israelite slaves “did not listen to Moses on account of their … cruel bondage” (Exod 6:9). Economic alienation hindered their believing God and grasping the promise of liberation.

Smith’s point is that we are not just formed intellectually, via worldviews and ideas, but we are formed by practices. Using generalised liturgy as his focus, he suggests

…we are the sorts of animals whose orientation to the world is shaped from the body up more than from the head down. Liturgies aim our love to different ends precisely by training our hearts through our bodies. They prime us to approach the world in a certain way, to value certain things, to aim for certain goals, to pursue certain dreams, to work together on certain projects. In short, every liturgy constitutes a pedagogy that teaches us, in all sorts of precognitive ways, to be a certain kind of person.

But if we bring these two observations together, I think we are led to conclude that our work, employment, daily activities become part of our formation. They are not simply value-free actions, but they change our underlying perspective of the world. In the case of the Exodus story, the oppressive work formed the Israelites in such a way that they could not hear the message of liberation. Which brings up all sorts of questions: how does our workplace form us? Can we operate in a way that makes it positive rather than negative? Etc.

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Permalink | February 13th, 2010

One Response to “Workplace as formation”

  1. jonny Says:
    jonny February 25th, 2010 at 7:32 pm

    thanks paul. thinking about this here’s a related quote:

    “Say what you will, but a method, a system, has its virtues. You know, sometimes I say to myself, if every single day, at exactly the same stroke of the clock, one were to perform the same single act, like a ritual, unchanging, systematic, every day at the same time, the world would be changed. Yes, something would change.

    - Alexander from Tarkovsky’s “The Sacrifice”

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