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Come to the Gospel at Work Conference in Atlanta, January 23 – 24

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I’ll be speaking at the Gospel at Work conference in Atlanta, January 23 – 24.

The conference starts that Friday night at 7:30 and goes to Saturday at 12:30. Other speakers include Greg Gilbert, Sebastian Traeger (both co-authors of the excellent book The Gospel at Work), Bob Doll, and many more.

I love the vision of this conference and am really looking forward to it. There is a growing movement of Christians who are eager to understand how their faith relates to their work. This conference is one of the best places to go to be inspired and equipped with the amazing biblical teaching on faith and work.

Here’s a brief description of the conference:

Most people spend at least 80,000 hours of their lives working. Wouldn’t you like to know how to worship God with that time?

The Gospel at Work conference will help you think biblically about your work. Speakers will provide practical wisdom on how to approach the challenges you face in the workplace and offer insight into God’s concern for your work.

You’ll also meet godly men and women from a variety of industries for a series of very practical discussions on topics like career planning as Christians, leading in the workplace and business as a mission field.

If you wrestle with questions about your work, or if you care about someone who does, this conference is for you.

You can learn more about it, and register, at the website.

(And if you aren’t able to make it to Atlanta, they are doing another Gospel at Work conference in Washington, DC, the following weekend.)

It would be great to see you there!

The Vision of the Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics

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Yesterday I blogged on the vision of The Gospel Coalition because I had just received a newsletter from them that communicated it so well.

Turns out I also recently received a newsletter from The Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics (IFWE) which similarly lays out their vision extremely well. IFWE is also an excellent organization that is worth knowing about and following.

Here’s how Hugh Whelchel, executive director of IFWE, starts the newsletter:

“What does IFWE do?” is almost always the first question I am asked about our work at the Institute for Faith, Work & Economics.

Whether you read our articles every day or every week, you know that we provide perspective and practical insight on the integration of faith and work through our blog.

But did you know that IFWE also has campus programs, curriculum, and more books coming this year? To highlight some of the other resources we have developed for you, we have put together this Impact Report to share our story and the stories of those men and women who have been changed by our work.

He then links to their Impact Report, which is super helpful and worth taking a look at.

One thing worth highlighting from the report is the way they lay out their aim and distinctives in the early pages. It is very simple, and here it is:

Mission

IFWE’s mission is to inspire and educate Christians to live out a biblical theology that integrates faith, work, and economics.

Vision

IFWE’s vision is a free society characterized by greater creativity and increased human flourishing.

Core Values

  • Freedom inspires creativity and enterprise. Freedom empowers us to thrive in our work and serve others. Freedom affirms our dignity and the dignity of others.
  • Fulfillment comes when we use our God-given talents to pursue excellence in our work. Fulfillment is the mark of a life spent glorifying God, enriching others, and finding satisfaction in using our gifts as God intended.
  • Flourishing is fullness of life, wholeness, and abundance. Flourishing is the natural outflow of freedom and fulfillment. When we flourish, we contribute to the fruitfulness of our communities, the thriving of our cities, and the peace and justice of our nations.

What We Do

IFWE conducts high level theological and economic research and translates it into practical resources to help Christians integrate their faith in the workplace and empower them to become better stewards of all their God-given talents and resources.

IFWE’s message is both theologically profound and extremely practical. A robust biblical view of work and economics is intensely relevant to Christians today.

Specifically, the resources IFWE produces to equip Christians include their blog, research papers on their website, videos, e-books, events, and student programs.

A few words on IFWE’s vision. First, teaching on how to integrate our faith and work as Christians is incredibly needed right now. I am so thankful that they are doing this, and doing it so well. We spend far more time at work than at church and, usually, in any other single activity. So it is crucial that we understand how this huge segment of life relates to our faith.

Second, it is absolutely essential to think of our work in connection to economics as well. This is because our work is always carried out in a larger ecosystem — the economic environment of our nation. Good economic policies contribute to the flourishing of work; bad economic policies hinder work and its ability to improve society. IFWE makes this connection and gets it, recognizing that freedom is at the heart of all good economic policy.

Third, I’m so glad that they are not afraid to use words like “fulfillment” and “flourishing.” Perhaps because of our fear of the prosperity gospel, theologically-minded evangelicals can sometimes shrink from affirming the importance of fulfillment and flourishing. We can almost be hesitant to talk about making things go well.

IFWE is careful to understand “fulfillment” and “flourishing” in holistic terms. Hence, central to their understanding of true fulfillment and flourishing is a relationship with God. True fulfillment, in other words, has God as its center. Further, when God so calls, this can co-exist with suffering and difficulty when that is the path of obedience to him.

Yet, our ultimate aim for others is not to let suffering be, but to enable people to be fulfilled and to flourish in a truly holistic sense — socially and economically as well as spiritually. This comes through a biblical understanding of work and economics, with our aim in all things being the good of others and glory of God.

Fourth, IFWE bases all that it does on sound research and evidence. They aren’t just espousing their own ideas. They are thoroughly grounded in the Scriptures and what the evidence shows to be a proper (and biblical) understanding of economics. This is what gives ideas their power — showing that they arise from sound evidence, rather than wishful thinking.

It is worth checking out their website to learn more about IFWE, and following their blog every day.

Jesus Made Good Tables!

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God does everything he does with excellence, and Jesus surely never engaged in shoddy work in his time of working as a carpenter before his public ministry. Therefore, we should not settle for shoddy work in our occupations, either.

Yet, because much Christian teaching on work is still thin and compartmentalized, this often happens. We need to correct this by affirming that we are not to compartmentalize our work and our faith, as though God’s call on us applies only in the area of church and our personal lives. Further, if we were able to recapture the compelling biblical vision of work in the church, it would do wonders for the effectiveness of our testimony to the gospel before the world.

I love how Dorothy Sayers makes these points in Why Work:

How can any one remain interested in a religion which seems to have no concern with nine-tenths of life?

The church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays.

What the church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.

Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly — but what use is all that if in the very center of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry? [Great point! Shoddy and careless workmanship is an insult to God because it misrepresents his nature and pervasive concern for all areas of life.]

No crooked table-legs or ill-fitting drawers ever, I dare swear, came out of the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could any one believe that they were made by the same hand that made heaven and earth. No piety in the worker will compensate for work that is not true to itself; for any work that is untrue to its own technique is a living lie.

Yet in her own buildings, in her own ecclesiastical art and music, in her hymns and prayers, in her sermons and in her little books of devotion, the church will tolerate, or permit a pious intention to excuse, work so ugly, so pretentious, so tawdry and twaddling, so insincere and insipid, so bad as to shock and horrify any decent craftsman.

And why? Simply because she has lost all sense of the fact that the living and eternal truth is expressed in work only so far as the work is true in itself, to itself, to the standards of its own technique. She has forgotten that the secular vocation is sacred.

God is Not Served by Technical Incompetence

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Dorothy Sayers, in Why  Work:

The worst religious films I ever saw were produced by a company which chose its staff exclusively for their piety.

Bad photography, bad acting, and bad dialogue produced a result so grotesquely irreverent that the pictures could not have been shown in churches without bringing Christianity into contempt.

God is not served by technical incompetence.

Unbiblical Notions of Work

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Especially in a challenging economy, some people take the perspective that you should work whatever job you can, because the most important thing is to make money and earn a living from your work.

This perspective can sometimes sounds virtuous at first. And, of course, earning a living is indeed an important and essential component of work. If you can’t earn a living at your work, that turns it into an a-vocation, not a career.

However, there is actually something very un-Christian in that view of work. The problem is that it has turned making money into the chief and leading principle for our work. But that is not to be the case. Making money in your work is only one component among at least two others to which we are to give chief consideration in choosing a job.

That perspective of work outlined above subordinates the equal importance of finding work for which you are a good fit to the cause of financial gain. That is not right. It dehumanizes people and robs them of their ability to find real fulfillment in their work and, ultimately, make their greatest contribution.

The great Christian thinker Dorothy Sayers captures this perfectly in her short essay “Why Work”:

At present we have no clear grasp of the principle that every man should do the work for which he is fitted by nature. The employer is obsessed by the notion that he must find cheap labour, and the worker by the notion that the best-paid job is the job for him.

Only feebly, inadequately, and spasmodically do we ever attempt to tackle the problem from the other end, and inquire: What type of worker is suited to this type of work?

People engaged in education see clearly that this is the right end to start from; but they are frustrated by economic pressure, and by the failure of parents on the one hand and employers on the other to grasp the fundamental importance of this approach.

Steve Jobs often said “you need to love what you do.” I’ve seen some Christians stalk down about that, saying things like “well, I have to live in the real world — I can’t afford the luxury of seeking a job that I love.”

But without even knowing it, Steve Jobs was actually reflecting a very Christian view of work. And, as Jobs knew, this is actually the perspective that tends toward the greatest economic success in the long-run as well, for it is impossible to excel over the long-term at work that you don’t enjoy.

Finding work that you love is not a luxury. It is an implication following from the Christian view of work — namely, that work is not only about economic realities, but as Sayers also says, something that should be looked upon “as a way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself to the glory of God.” That reality needs to be upheld right along with the economic purpose of work. Anything else is a truncated view of work, and to say “but I need to live in the real world” is the easy way out and actually lazy.

To those who say “but what if sweeping floors is the only job you can get; shouldn’t you take it?” The answer is, first, the biggest problem with this question is that it seems to assume that there is no one out there who actually likes sweeping floors. But beyond that, most of the time people asking this question are settling too easily. If you are literally going to starve if you don’t sweep floors, then sweep floors. But don’t stop there. While sweeping floors, hold on to your aspirations to find the work that is a good fit for you, and keep looking for it.

Too often, people fall into the fallacy of using economic realities to bludgeon people into giving up their aspirations and dreams. Why do we have to settle so easily for the “either/or”? As in “either you are a dreamer who wants to find the work that fits yourself well, or you can live in the ‘real world’ and do work you hate but earn a living.”

I reject that dichotomy, as all Christians should. It is unloving, un-Christian, contrary to the nature of human beings in the image of God, contrary to the reality that work is intended by God to be more than economic, contrary to God’s very own purposes for our work and, ironically, in the long-run it is also contrary to the legitimate economic aspect of work.

Does the Gospel Change the Way We Work?

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My interview on What’s Best Next with Stephen McGarvey, editorial director of Salem Web Network, has been posted over at Crosswalk.com.

Stephen asked great questions and the interview was a lot of fun! We talk about how this book is different from other productivity books on the market, why we need to start with God in our definition of productivity, the place of generosity in our productivity, and much more.

How to Work as a Christian in the Secular Arena

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This is a message I gave at a Fortune 100 company recently on how to be a Christian in a secular workplace. I talk about avoiding the twin errors of spiritual weirdness (such as thinking you need to insert the gospel into every conversation, or call attention to God through strange trinkets like the “Faithbook” t-shirt I came across at a truck stop once) on the one hand and, on the other hand, thinking that our faith bears no relation to our work at all.

Then I talk about the chief way that God intends our faith to inform our work: namely, love. Love is to be the guiding principle for Christians in their work, and I show what that looks like and how even many leading secular thinkers are echoing this truth in very significant ways. At the end I talk about the results of going about our work in this way.

Update: Here’s a timeline of the message that Joshua Van Der Merwe wrote up (thank you, Joshua!):

  • (3:53) Error #1 regarding faith and work: Our faith doesn’t relate to our work at all
  • (4:26) Error #2 regarding faith and work: Spiritual weirdness, i.e., Work is only a platform for evangelism
  • (5:32) Being boring on the Biblical doctrine of work
  • (9:03) A Christian work ethic goes way beyond, “Work hard and be honest.” 
  • (9:57) The solution: Work matters in itself, and is a place where the gospel can spread. Your secular work matters in itself, and it can be a place where the gospel is proclaimed. 
  • (11:01) Love as the guiding principle and motive in the workplace
  • (22:01) Seeing our work as service to others brings great meaning to our work, and serving others is the way to be most effective in our work. 
  • (26:30) Principle 1: Do your work as service to God, as an avenue of worship
  • (28:04) Principle 2: Make the good of others the aim of what you do. 
  • (28:45) Principle 3: Be on the look out for good you can do. Isaiah 32:8. Make plans for the welfare of others. 
  • (31:29) Principle 4: Make your work easy for others to use. Care about usability.
  • (33:06) Principle 5: Know how to do your work really well. 
  • (34:06) The effect of all this: God can use your work to change the world — this is redemptive. God is at work in our work. 
  • (38:15) Q&A time. 

Dorothy Sayers: Why Work?

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I did not realize until the other day that Dorothy Sayers’s classic, foundational, and fantastic essay on work is online.

This is one of the most helpful articles on work that I’ve read. Keller and many others refer to it often as well.

And, we still need to fulfill the challenge she lays down in it. She says at one point “the Christian church desperately needs a theology of work.” We’ve been doing better in the last ten years (some fantastic efforts are listed below), but don’t let the existence of some great new books on this fool you. We still have a long way to go in actually working this these truths into our hearts and lives.

Here’s one of the best quotes from Sayers’ essay:

It is not right for the Church to acquiesce in the notion that a man’s life is divided into the time he spends on his work and the time he spends in serving God. He must be able to serve God in his work, and the work itself must be accepted and respected as the medium of divine creation.”

Here are some of the best books that have begun to give us a much better, articulate, and biblically grounded doctrine of work in recent days:

And here are some websites that I highly recommend:

Question: What other books and websites would you suggest?