Vocation—a short series of posts, especially for college students: part I

“What we have here is a failure to integrate”

I’ve become convinced that Christians in America need help preparing for working lives that are marked by faith integration rather than compartmentalization.

Even if we do think there is a work-faith connection – and an older “marketplace ministries” model has insisted that there is – we have tended to locate that connection in evangelizing co-workers, fighting moral temptation at the office, or practicing the Golden Rule in our work relationships.

These are good things to attend to, of course. But this older model has failed to address the actual nature of people’s work and the value of most of what that work provides for others.

This failure has at least two significant dimensions:

First, the old marketplace ministry model has failed to bring any wisdom from Scripture or Christian tradition to bear on huge swathes of our lives as embodied beings—that is, as people who live not just in the spiritual “body of Christ” but also in material bodies and social bodies. It essentially cuts us adrift from God in much of our real daily experience.

Second, following from this failure to address much of our material and social lives in a Christian way, this approach also fails to see that what we might call our vertical, God-directed lives and our horizontal, material and social lives are actually two parts of a single whole. We have become compartmentalized, dis-integrated people – quite literally, people without integrity. Each of us is split into two selves: a “vertical” self in church on Sunday and a “horizontal” self at work and at home the rest of the week. And this seriously impoverishes our lives in each of these spheres.

In short, on the matter of work and vocation, our modern Christian formation has failed us. Even the parts of that formation that have addressed work have perpetuated a deeply unsatisfying dualism.

(The old model looks something like this:)

· Focus: evangelism, ethics, discipleship

· Ignored: the work and its products

· Missing: the material and social dimensions

· Result: a dis-integrated self

The church’s approach (often) to “being Christian at work” – insufficient integration

The old advice

And so the church ends up with a very short list of things to tell us about our work. It may say . . .

· You should work to support yourself and your family. Or,

· You should be a shining example of Christian moral probity. Or,

· You should be extra nice to your co-workers, because they might ask you what was different in your life and you could lead them to Christ. Or,

· If you work hard and climb the ladder, you should send some money back over to the “sacred” side—where the important stuff happens.

All very well, but none of this acknowledges any sacred or spiritual meaning in the actual activities we are being paid to carry out, or the goods or services our organizations create.

Harvest of the old model

· Leaves the working world as “secular”

· Without meaning, the workers perish

· Gallup poll on the American workplace: we can see it happening

· Michael Lindsay, Faith in the Halls of Power: Even many of those Christians who succeed, fail

In short, I believe American Christians have bought the lie that there’s something called “the secular world,” void of God’s presence.

And the results are damaging both in the world’s workplaces and in our own lives. Absent any higher meaning in our work, little keeps us from becoming what so many of our secularist workmates are—either workaholics idolizing our own accomplishments, or time-servers working for the weekend and retirement.

The Gallup organization, in their recent Survey of the American Workplace, discovered that 70% of Americans are disengaged at work. And 30% are so actively disgruntled that they are working against their organizations.

Nor are things much better for those Christians who do engage their work, and who thus succeed and rise up the ranks.

Amy Sherman, in her book Kingdom Calling: Vocational Stewardship for the Common Good, relates what former Gordon College president Michael Lindsey found as he interviewed evangelical Christians who had reached the top of their fields – in business, academics, entertainment, and so forth, for his book Faith in the Halls of Power. Lindsey found that most of the Christian marketplace leaders he interviewed were infected with the same obsessive ladder-climbing, conspicuous consumption, insensitivity to justice issues, and work-life balance problems as their secular counterparts.

In Sherman’s words, “the vast majority of evangelicals perched atop their career ladders in various social sectors displayed a profoundly anemic vision for what they could accomplish for the kingdom of God.”

Two questions to ponder

Here are two questions to think about as we consider this subject of vocation.

1. First, How can we prepare to find, even early in our careers, a truly Christian vision of our work in the tech sector, the finance sector, the hospitality sector, the media sector, and on and on – such that when we gain stature and power in their fields (and almost all of us will do so, to some degree) we can bring that vision to bear to humanize our organizations and fields?

2. Second, What would it look like to believe and experience a “spirituality of vocation?" That is, How can we prepare to experience our future workplace vocations—and indeed also your current vocations as students—as arenas of discipleship in service of a higher calling?

Definitions

Well, to start with, we need a working definition, from Christian tradition, of key terms, including “vocation.”

What is work?

First, what is work? Here’s one definition I have found helpful:

“Work” may be understood to include all human activities that create value and promote the flourishing of others. This certainly includes unpaid work, such as work done in the raising of a family or in civic participation, volunteering, etc. But it excludes, for example, activities of consumption or leisure that create no value for others.

We’ll see in a moment how we relate this definition of work to our central term “vocation.” Basically, we’re going to say that all legal, helpful work qualifies as “vocation.”