In ‘Christendom’ you can afford to train people just in prayer, Bible study, evangelism — private world skills — because they are not facing radically non-Christian values in their public life — where they work, in their neighborhood, etc.

In a ‘missional’ church, the laity needs theological education to ‘think Christianly’ about everything and work with Christian distinctiveness. They need to know: a) what cultural practices are common grace and to be embraced, b) what practices are antithetical to the gospel and must be rejected, c) what practices can be adapted/revised.

In a ‘missional’ situation, lay people renewing and transforming the culture through distinctively Christian vocations must be lifted up as real ‘kingdom work’ and ministry along with the traditional ministry of the Word.

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.

Here is one fascinating quote:

[According to the common view creativity] is what happens when people are liberated from the constraints pf conventionality.
…
The truth … is that creativity is a by-product of mastery of the sort that is cultivated through long practice. It seems to be built up through submission (think a musician practicing scales, or Einstein learning tensor algebra). Identifying creativity with freedom harmonizes quite well with the culture of the new capitalism, in which the imperative of flexibility precludes dwelling in any task long enough to develop real competence. Such competence is the condition … for genuine creativity…

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.

I found this fascinating and it brings out something that I’d never heard anywhere else. (Oh, I’m sure someone has covered it, probably in one of the books on my shelf, but I wasn’t paying attention…)

In the frequent discussions of the relationship between the gospel and social justice, I’ve seen few, if any, consider the possibility that social justice might, in some cases, be an important first step for people to hear the good news. We discuss whether social justice might be a significant consequence of the gospel or whether it provides some demonstration of God’s liberation, but we don’t consider that it might need to come first in some situations, that people might need to be helped at a more basic level before they can hear what we have to say.

But if we truly believe that life is not divided into the material/secular and the spiritual, is it so unreasonable that alienation in economics, work or daily life can make it hard for us to grasp the deeper ‘promise of liberation’?

And if we take serious what we see in the story of the Moses, then how should this affect our actions? Perhaps it should make us re-consider our attitude to third-world debt or fair trading or oppressive work environments…

Given my last post here, this quote particularly stuck out for me:

[The key problem in discipleship & evangelism] is not that we can’t figure out a way to answer the tough questions. It’s that we can’t demonstrate to a watching world a way to live the gospel in a compelling manner in the ordinary, good news for the ordinary.

When thinking ‘Christian Worldview’ it is easy to jump straight to the big questions. And this is important: develop a Christian view of politics — I will be grateful; show me how faith and art relate — I will enthusiastically read your book; construct a Christian philosophy of mathematics — my mathematician’s heart will rise up to kiss you. But, hang on, my average day sees only brief flashes of those big questions. What I also want is to know how my faith relates to office work or commuting or washing up or …

Steven Garber put it like this recently:

The [questions] I have spent the most time with over the years have always had something to do with relationships, with the yearning for love, for marriage, and of course with the meaning of sexuality. I have long believed that unless a person has confidence that the Christian vision has honest answers for these questions, these hopes, then it is awfully hard to believe that it is worth working out the meaning of my faith for politics, for economics, for the arts, for globalization (and an honest faith somehow, someday must address them at some point).

He’s probably hit the core, but I think we can expand the point further: we need honest answers to the questions lying around all the details of our lives, as much as the “big questions”. Perhaps more so…

With this in mind, I was interested to read this post by Richard Mouw. After reporting on the vitality of Christian colleges in the US, he ends with the following comments:

What I do worry about in all of this is whether the evangelical churches are prepared to receive and nurture the students graduating from these colleges and universities. On many of these campuses, Lilly-funded programs on the importance of seeing one’s daily work as “vocation” have inspired students to see so-called “secular” occupations as Kingdom service. They are looking for the kind of preaching and sacramental life, as well as continuing education, to which they have become accustomed on their undergraduate campuses. If the evangelical churches fail to meet their expectations, they will go elsewhere. It will not likely be in the direction of liberal Protestantism—more likely they will move toward Anglicanism, Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Or maybe they will contribute to new forms of evangelical church life.

This brings up wider issues: Only a small proportion have even this sort of grounding. How do we serve those who do not so that they enter working life with some sense of “daily work as vocation”? And, equally important, how do we continue this by supporting and educating as part of church life?

The voice of God has been very clear, though, throughout my career that I am doing what He created me to do.
…
Being creative is the way I practice being a believer. It’s an act of obedience. I want to do it well to a particular end. Life is now a stewardship project, which is life-affirming. I’m unbelievably grateful that God has given me this gift. I love that I get to be creative. Being creative is a fundamental part of being human.

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…

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.)