Are All Jobs Equal in Value?
A commenter on Challies’ blog recently raised that question, and Tim gave me a shot at answering. You can read my thoughts on his blog.
My Interview at The Gospel Coalition on the Doctrine of Vocation and Finding Meaning in Your Work
Last fall, Collin Hansen of The Gospel Coalition interviewed me on the Christian doctrine of work. It’s now posted at their site. Here’s the video, with Collin’s intro:
What gets you out of bed on Monday morning to go to work? What motivates you to persevere in a job you don’t enjoy, that doesn’t reward you adequately?
I posed these questions to Matt Perman, blogger and author of the forthcoming What’s Best Next: How the Gospel Changes the Way You Get Things Done. We discussed how jobs afford us opportunities to love our neighbors, and how we each multitasked during repetitive work to learn about God and concentrate on his Word.
Especially if you’re struggling at work, you’ll want to hear Perman explain the doctrine of vocation, which invests everything we do with meaning, because we’re living out a God-giving calling. Whether a pastor or plumber, we work in faith as unto God himself (Colossians 3:23-24). Perman explains how even garbage collectors can apply this doctrine to make their work more interesting, challenging, and fulfilling.
The True Meaning of Justice in the Workplace
Biblically speaking, to be just means to use your strength on behalf of the weak.
Justice most certainly includes an overall “fairness” and truth and integrity and honesty and refusing to show partiality.
But the essence of justice goes beyond that.
The essence of justice is that those with greater authority and influence are to use their stronger position in service of those who are in a weaker situation.
Helping those in a “weaker situation” might mean helping those suffering from poverty or sickness or some other harm, but it doesn’t have to be. It means helping anyone without the influence of formal authority you have. Which means, if you are a manager or leader in an organization (or in politics or anywhere), that it includes those who work for you.
Some people think that the biblical commands to be just in this sense and their corollary, radical generosity, do not apply inside the bounds of an organization. Inside an organization, “business rules” apply, which is interpreted to mean that people must be impersonal (a distorted notion of the concept of being “impartial”) and that doing things for your own advantage primarily is correct and right.
But this is wrong. The biblical commands to be generous and to be just apply in all areas of our lives, without exception. The Golden Rule (Matthew 7:12) and commands to be merciful as God is merciful (generous to all, especially the undeserving, Matthew 5:43-48) do not cease to apply at our jobs and in our work and in our organizations. They are not simply for the personal realm.
Their manifestation may look different in each area of life. But these principles of justice and generosity still apply in every area of life and we must be diligent to apply them in all areas.
So, here’s one example. Let’s take the workplace. Being just and generous in the workplace means that, if you are in authority over people, you use that authority in the service of everyone you interact with — including those in the organization who directly work for you, those around the organization who don’t work for you but you are in a position to influence, and those outside the organization that you interact with. It means you see yourself as the servant of all, and that you see your authority and position and role as existing not as some statement of how great you are or how hard you’ve worked, but rather as existing for the sake of those around you. Your authority exists to do them good.
Now, immediately here we run into “the fallacy of doing good,” which is the tendency of people to act contrary to the purpose and role of their vocations in in their attempts to “do good,” which ends up making things worse. One example might be a chef at a restaurant who gives away dozens of free meals every night out of a spirit of generosity, when it’s not his restaurant and the owner has not given him the authority to do that. In this case, the chef’s generosity of spirit is right, but the way he carries it out is not. (If he owned the restaurant or had been given the leeway to do that sort of thing by the owner, however, go for it!)
So, what does using your authority and role to “do good” at your job look like when done right? A lot could be said, but let me just say one simple, yet core, thing.
It means being for the people who work for you. Which means believing that they can excel and do good work and make a contribution, even when few other people might be able to see it. And it means using your influence to give them opportunities and, yes, advance their career whenever you have the chance.
Note I’m not saying you shouldn’t be smart and discerning. But I am saying that you should have a default belief in people and therefore do whatever you can to give them a chance, to give them greater opportunities, and to give them a break whenever you can and whenever it seems they will be able to meet the opportunity and succeed in it.
And it means, even when you aren’t in a position at the moment to help advance someone or given them an opportunity, that you are encouraging and always seek to be the type of person that builds others up and helps them get better at what they do.
So much here is about your spirit and attitude — the disposition you have and with which you carry yourself. You need to see yourself as existing for the good of others, and charged with the responsibility from God to use any influence, authority, and resources you have in service to others.
But note that I’m not simply saying “be for other people.” That is a critical thing. But it’s not enough, because it’s so easy to say that we are “for” someone but never take action. It’s easy to say words that we don’t back up with our behavior. The true disposition of a servant is to be for people and to be diligent and forward and effective in identifying ways to promote their welfare.
This is a call to give thought to improving in both our dispositions and our concrete actions. See yourself as existing in your role for the good of others, and be proactive in finding real opportunities to use your authority and influence and resources to serve others and build them up.
That’s a how true Christian operates in his job and lives his entire life.
All of Life is an Arena for God’s Glory
Gene Veith, in his article Our Calling and God’s Glory:
Christian’s preoccupied with their families, struggling to make ends meet, living their mundane lives “are all in a state of holiness,” according to Luther, “living holy lives before God.”
Your Job is a Good Work!
My guest post at the Willow Creek Association leadership blog. Here’s the start:
When most of us think of good works, we tend to think of things like giving money to those in need, encouraging a friend who is discouraged, or going on a short-term mission trip.
All of those things are critical and important, and definitely are good works.
However, it’s easy to think that these types of things are the only things that God considers good works. That good works are something relatively rare and infrequent. If you go on a mission trip, you are engaging in good works. But when you go to your job each day you are doing … what, exactly?
How to Glorify God at Work
A great post by John Piper. He gives quick thoughts on 9 areas:
- Dependence
- Integrity
- Skill
- Corporate shaping
- Impact
- Communication
- Love
- Money
- Thanks
One additional word on skill: If you show love by being the first to order the pizza, or drive the van, or do whatever to serve people, but aren’t good at what you do, everything will fall flat. You have to be good at what you do. Good intentions are not enough.
And this usually means, in part, reading about your industry and about the best practices (and unconventional practices!) for your role and about management and about leadership and other such things.
Which likely means reading secular resources as well as Christian. You won’t learn what it means to be a great manager, for example, simply by reading Christian books on management (unfortunately!). Same with leadership. Marketing. And so forth.
And this is acceptable and good. As John Wesley said, “To imagine none can teach you but those who are themselves saved from sin, is a very great and dangerous mistake. Give not place to it for a moment.”
Likewise, the book of Acts points out that Moses (Moses!) was “instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and he was mighty in his words and deeds” (Acts 7:22). And we could go on and talk about Daniel (Daniel 1:4, 17), Paul, Luke, Joseph, the book of Proverbs (most scholars recognize that many of the Proverbs were adapted from the wisdom literature of other civilizations), Jonathan Edwards, and on and on.
The point is: If we want to glorify God in our workplaces, we need to learn from the best thinkers in our fields, whether they are Christians or not. And, this creates a better testimony to the gospel.
Don’t be the guy who volunteers first to go get the pizza, but that everyone groans about because he thinks that’s a substitute for being an expert in his role.
Redeemer’s Conference on the Gospel and Culture
Registration is open for Redeemer’s new faith and work conference, The Gospel & Culture. The conference will be November 4-5.
Here’s the gist:
The Gospel & Culture Conference represents the culmination of more than eight years of the Center for Faith & Work’s ministry targeted at equipping, connecting, and mobilizing Christians to engage the world from a gospel-centered foundation.
Drawing on the experiences of one another as well as more than 10 speakers representing various sectors, conference participants will gain:
- Sharpened discernment of God’s work in the world.
- Renewed understanding of the importance of community in cultural engagement.
- Heightened awareness of the power of the Holy Spirit in changing motivations of the heart.
- Excitement for our daily work as it contributes to building for the great City that is to come.
And here’s the agenda:
The Conference opens Friday evening, November 4th, with participants engaging the culture of NYC through “Glimpses,” events happening throughout the city which point toward evidence of God’s glory and His sovereignty over all things.
On Saturday, November 5th, all attendees convene at St. Bart’s for a full day of interacting with practitioners from across various sectors who will showcase their work in ways that highlight God’s work in the world.
Speakers include Tim Keller, Richard Mouw, and many others.
Edwards: Many Who Mean Well Actually, Through Lack of Knowledge, Do Great Harm
A good exhortation from Edwards on the importance of learning about the practical dimension of life and our vocations:
Many who mean well, and are full of a good spirit, yet for want of prudence, conduct themselves so as to wound religion. Many have a zeal for God, which doth more hurt than good, because it is not according to knowledge, Rom 10: 2. The reason why many good men behave no better in many instances, is not so much that they want grace, as they want knowledge. (From “Christian Knowledge: The Importance and Advantage of a Thorough Knowledge of Divine Truth,” p. 162 in volume 2 of the Banner edition of his works.)
In other words: Good intentions are admirable. But we should not think that they are enough. If we have good intentions but do not understand how to do things right, we will end up doing harm — and this, in turn, not only hurts people, but casts a bad reflection on the gospel.
It’s easy to leave this in the realm of the abstract and think it applies mostly to people other than ourselves. So, to make this a bit more concrete, here’s what this means.
If you are in a position of leadership, you need to learn how to lead. You should not think that your natural inclinations are sufficient to make you a good leader. Some people do have better instincts than others, but in both cases we need to actually apply ourselves to learning from others — including through reading books — about what it means to lead well.
If you are a manager and responsible for the more detailed planning and coordinating of things, you need to know how to manage. For some people, this comes more naturally. But for others, they have a lot to learn. But, once again, in both cases it is important to learn from the best people outside of yourself. This can mean, as with leadership, reading some books and articles, being intentional to learn from other managers in your organization, and going to some of the one-day seminars that you probably get fliers for in the mail every so often. (They’re not perfect, but some of them can be pretty helpful.)
If you are a pastor, learn about preaching. If you are a missionary, don’t just wing it, but make sure you have a strategy. And, be diligent to learn about the culture you are in so you can properly contextualize.
If you are in marketing, subscribe to Seth Godin’s blog and read some of his books. If you are in finance or run an organization, make sure not to let financial considerations be the main thing in how your business is run, don’t let the short-term be the primary consideration, and realize that cost-cutting often backfires (also this). (And, be ruthlessly ethical.)
If you are in IT, don’t be ultra conservative and controlling in how you allow your people to use their computers.
If you are in construction, don’t cut corners or allow your business model to be based upon giving people as little as possible for their money (which is, according to Proverbs 18:9, actually a form of vandalism).
If you work at a fast food restaurant, give people quick service. If you are a truck driver, be extra safe by trying to be always asking “what if” questions about things the other drivers around you could do that would cause problems (that’s actually one of the core skills of the best truck drivers, according to Marcus Buckingham’s First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently
And this list could go on and on. The point is: see the vocations God has given you in your life as important and see people as important. And therefore be diligent in fulfilling your vocations and upgrading your skills so that you are actually doing good, and not thinking it is sufficient to merely intend to do good.
Tim Keller on Discerning Your Calling
The other day I linked to Michael Horton’s article on discerning your calling. Tim Keller also has a very helpful article on that as well (online as a pdf).
You’ll notice these articles are in agreement with the same basic three questions to consider, but they complement one another in a helpful way.
Here’s the summary from the end of Keller’s article:
Your vocation is a part of God’s work in the world, and God gives you resources for serving the human community. These factors can help you identify your calling.
Affinity—“Look out.”
Affinity is the normal, existential/priestly way to discern call. What people needs do I vibrate to?Ability—“Look in.”
Ability is the normal, rational/prophetic way to discern call. What am I good at doing?Opportunity—“Look up.”
Opportunity is the normal, organizational/kingly way to discern call. What do the leaders/my friends believe is the most strategic kingdom need?Your life is not a series of random events. Your family background, education, and life experiences—even the most painful ones—all equip you to do some work that no one else can do. “We are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do“ (Eph. 2:10).
(HT: Resurgence)
The Right Kind of Individualism
Sometimes it is suggested that attention to our gifts and unique interests is just “American individualism,” rather than a feature of biblical Christianity.
This is wrong-headed. There is a wrong kind of individualism, to be sure. But there is also a right, biblical kind of individualism that, while affirming the uniqueness and importance of each individual, also affirms this in relation to the value of community.
In fact, I would argue that “American individualism” actually arises from biblical values. Sometimes these values are perverted into a narcissistic, wrong kind of individualism. But they don’t have to be.
The biblical notion of individualism is best captured in the doctrine of vocation, which was a major emphasis of the Reformation. Here’s how Gene Veith summarizes it in God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life
The doctrine of vocation looms behind many of the Protestant influences on culture, though these are often misunderstood. If Protestantism resulted in an increase in individualism, this was not because the theology turned the individual into the supreme authority.
Rather, the doctrine of vocation encourages attention to each individual’s uniqueness, talents, and personality. These are valued as gifts of God, who creates and equips each person in a different way for the calling He has in mind for that person’s life.
The doctrine of vocation undermines conformity, recognizes the unique value of each person, and celebrates human differences; but it sets these individuals into a community with other individuals, avoiding the privatizing, self-centered narcissism of secular individualism.
Starbucks, Vocation, and The Meaning of the Mundane
The other day I came across an excerpt from the new book by Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul
Only weeks earlier, I’d sat in my Seattle office holding back-to-back meetings about how to quickly fix myriad problems that were beginning to surface inside the company. One team had to figure out how we could, in short order, retrain 135,000 baristas to pour the perfect shot of espresso.
Pouring espresso is an art, one that requires the barista to care about the quality of the beverage. If the barista only goes through the motions, if he or she does not care and produces an inferior espresso that is too weak or too bitter, then Starbucks has lost the essence of what we set out to do 40 years ago: inspire the human spirit.
I realize this is a lofty mission for a cup of coffee, but this is what merchants do. We take the ordinary—a shoe, a knife—and give it new life, believing that what we create has the potential to touch others’ lives because it touched ours.
Here’s the point: the ordinary is not ordinary. Rather, it is in the ordinary that we are able to build people up and, yes, inspire the human spirit.
When you clean house for your family, or pour a cup of coffee, or take your car to the wash, you aren’t just doing small, mundane things. You are building building people up. You are making things better, and making a statement that people matter. Or, that’s how you ought to see it.
And the doctrine of vocation takes us further than this. For it means that, when we serve others in the everyday, it is actually God himself who is serving people through us. God is hidden in the everyday. This is true if we are believers; and God is also working through unbelievers, even if they don’t know it (Gene Veith makes this point very well in God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life
when he discusses why we pray in the Lord’s Prayer “give us this day our daily bread” when we actually get it from the grocery store, who got it from the bread company, who got the ingredients from various other spots, and so forth).
In fact, the doctrine of vocation even takes us one more step. When we, as followers of Christ, serve others for his sake, we aren’t just serving them. We are actually serving the Lord himself. “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ” (Colossians 3:23-24; see also Ephesians 6:7-8).
What is Vocation?
Stephen Nichols booklet What Is Vocation? (Basics of the Faith) is a helpful and quick read on the subject. It helps to remind us that, whatever our work is (ministry work, marketplace work, or working in the home), it is a calling from God and therefore is immensely meaningful when done for the glory of God.
Another helpful read on the doctrine of vocation is Gene Veith’s excellent book God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life.
And, if you haven’t made the connection already, it’s worth noting: everything that I write on productivity is really a fleshing out of the doctrine of vocation on the practical side.
Food From Afar
This is a paragraph from a recent article in Wired. I like Wired and find it helpful for keeping up with technology as it affects society. In this case, though, I’m not helped. I’ll quote the paragraph and then tell you what’s wrong with it.
Attention, Iowa shoppers: If you eat standard supermarket produce, figure an average transport distance of 1,500 miles (and that’s just for stuff grown in the US). Such is the price you pay in cash and carbon emissions — not to mention the tax dollars spent on repairing highways chewed up by behemoth trucks. In general, a longer, more global supply chain is also vulnerable to strikes, gas hikes, political turmoil, and contamination. All so you can eat what you want when you want it.
Do you see what has happened here? Something that is quite remarkable — something that is really good, and a blessing of God — is presented as negative, destructive, and even selfish (“all so you can eat what you want and when you want it”).
In actuality, we should look at these realities and say “what an amazing blessing. This is God’s providence at work to feed His world — and with food that is far better and varied than the nutraloaf he could have gone with if his aim for us was mere nutrition rather than enjoyment and culture.”
The fact that “supermarket produce” is brought from an average distance of 1,500 miles, and that trucks transport it over an incredibly efficient interstate transportation system, and that as a result we get to eat food that we like, and at times that are convenient to us — this is a good thing. It is a blessing. It is not something to be demeaned, as though humans are a plague on the planet. It is a reflection showing us the remarkable goodness of God.
And it is what we pray for when we pray “give us this day our daily bread” (Matthew 6:11), as Gene Veith points out very effectively in God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life:
When we pray the Lord’s prayer, observed Luther, we ask God to give us this day our daily bread. And he does give us our daily bread. He does it by means of the farmer who planted and harvested the grain, the baker who made the flour into bread, the person who prepared our meail.
We might today add the truck drivers who hauled the produce, the factory workers in the food processing plant, the warehouse men, the wholesale distributors, the stock boys, the lady at the checkout counter. Also playing their part are the bankers, futures investors, advertisers, lawyers, agricultural scientists, mechanical engineers, and every other player in the nation’s economic system. All of these were instrumental in enabling you to eat your morning bagel.
Before you ate, you probably gave thanks to God for your food, as is fitting. He is caring for your physical needs, as with every other kind of need you have, preserving your life through his gifts. “He provides food for those who fear him” (Psalm 11:5); also to those who do not fear Him, “to all flesh” (136:35). And He does so by using other human beings. It is still God who is responsible for giving us our daily bread. Though He could give it to us directly, by a miraculous provision, as He once did fore the children of Israel when He fed them daily with manna, God has chosen to work through human beings, who, in their different capacities and according to their different talents, serve one another. This is the doctrine of vocation.
The way that food is brought “from afar” to people all over the country should not be looked down upon because of the carbon emissions and interstate wear-and-tear it creates. Instead, it should be marveled at as God at work to provide for His creation through the doctrine of vocation.
Calvin on Vocation
A good word from Josh Etter’s blog, quoting John Calvin:
It is an error to think that those who flee worldly affairs and engage in contemplation are leading an angelic life… We know that men were created to busy themselves with labor and that no sacrifice is more pleasing to God than when each one attends to his calling and studies well to live for the common good.
About Matt Perman
Follower of Christ. Husband of one, father of three. Director of strategy at Desiring God. This blog exists to help equip Christians in good works, because that's what productivity is really about.
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