students and vocation
Posted by Paul | Filed under work
Recently I’ve been think a lot about how we can help the students in church as they head out into careers. I’m particularly interested in how we can help them integrate the working side of their life with Sunday mornings. (You never know, I may get around to blogging about this more in the future.) One thing at the front of my mind is that they may only ever hear a handful of talks/sermons/etc. on work life. Considering this takes up a significant proportion of life it seems to be a major omission.
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?
Doing what you are created for…
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
There’s a great interview with Photographer Phillip Spears over at the ‘Christians in the Arts’ blog. A couple of quotes meshed very well with some of the things I’ve been posting recently:
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.
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
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.)
Tags: culture, Culture Making (Crouch), mp3s, work
Graham Tomlin on church and work
Posted by Paul | Filed under work
Graham Tomlin of St Paul’s Theological Centre has a great post on his blog, sort of based on Thoughts on the Financial Crisis, but extending onto thoughts on the task of the church in the wider culture and the way the church connects with the work of its members:
Stanley Hauerwas argues that “the most important social task of Christians is to be nothing less than a community capable of forming people with virtues sufficient to witness to God’s truth in the world” In other words, the church’s primary task is not to tell the world how to run itself, nor to prescribe particular policies or strategies, but to be a community capable of developing people of virtue and goodness, who are more likely to make good, considerate, wise choices, than bad, harmful or selfish ones.…
Holy Trinity Brompton, my church in London has what in my experience are rather unusual regular prayer meetings. The unique thing is that the solicitors, the teachers and the healthcare workers do not gather to pray for the work of the church, but the church meets to pray for the work of the solicitors, the teachers and the healthcare workers. Here the church … simply meets to encourage them, pray for them that they may have the perspective of the kingdom of God on their work, to pray for wisdom, courage and grace in the work they are called to… It is a vision of a church trying to be what Hauerwas suggests – a church seeking not to prescribe policy, but to form them in practical Christ-like goodness and wisdom, so that they become the bedrock of a functioning society, and trustworthy signposts to the Kingdom of God.
celebrating cultivation
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
In the same vein as the last post, here is a quote from Andy Crouch (see Cultivating Where We’re Planted)
In their book Church on Sunday, Work on Monday Laura Nash and Scotty McLennan tell the story of the woman who litigated the clean up of the terribly polluted Boston Harbor for the Environmental Protection Association—one of the major environmental breakthroughs of the twenty-first century. She was a member of an evangelical church, and the only time she was ever recognized from the front of this church was the year that she taught second grade Sunday school. Obviously we should celebrate our Sunday school teachers, but when one of our members acting out of vocation leads in such a tremendous restoration of God’s creation, why wouldn’t we celebrate that, too? And if our churches celebrated that more there would be a less of a sense of saying “yes” to the one, “no” to the other.Celebrating what people are doing out beyond church walls feels like a risk for pastors, but I think that fear is unfounded.
A random walk over culture, art, christianity, etc. with occasional photographs...