by Matt Perman
Gospel in Life now has a YouTube channel. There are currently about 90 of Tim Keller’s audio sermons posted for free, and moving forward it sounds like they will be releasing more and more.
This is great news and is worth checking out and subscribing.
by Matt Perman
More and more people are asking today the important question, “How does the gospel relate to my work?”
There is a lot that can be said on this, and for the best treatment out there I recommend Tim Keller’s excellent book Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work.
But for immediate application, if you are looking for a few simple ways to begin letting the gospel impact your work right now, here are two things that go to the heart of it:
by Matt Perman
This is a great TEDx talk by Ryan Hartwig, co-author of Teams that Thrive. It’s called “The Myth of Meaningful Work.”
Does this mean that we are wrong-headed in wanting our work to be meaningful?
Not in the slightest. What he means is this: meaning is not something first of all found in the job. Rather, meaning is something you bring to the job. We make our work meaningful. We can (and must) bring meaning to our jobs.
Meaning is in the way the work is done, and therefore any task — whether it is regarded as “meaningful” by society or not — can be done with incredible significance.
In fact, it used to be that most people did experience a deep connection between their work and meaning. So what happened?
Scientific management.
We changed the way we do work as a society in the quest to utterly maximize efficiency. The result was that we turned work, which is in itself meaningful, into alienating labor. We forced people to start doing work in ways that take the meaning out of their tasks by reducing the space for personal initiative and contribution and introducing more control-oriented management practices.
Of course, as he points out, there were many excellent benefits of scientific management. It really did increase efficiency, and that was needed. But the principles were taken too far.
What we need to do is find ways to help people overcome the gap between work and meaning that has been imposed so often not from the tasks themselves, but from the way in which we make people do them.
The talk is a great overview of these things, and closes with four suggestions for helping people bring meaning back into their work.
by Matt Perman
As a companion piece with the article on Jon Acuff, I wrote an article for Christianity Today on why Christians need to be learning from secular business thinkers.
More and more Christians have been learning from secular business thinkers over the last few years. I think this is a really good thing. What I seek to do in the article is lay out a brief case for why this is a good thing — something you don’t hear articulated much.
I also highlight two of the most important trends in the best business thinking that we can especially learn from as Christians.
Some Christians are hesitant to learn from business thinking. I think in most of those situations what is happening is that bad business thinking is being confused for the whole of business thinking.
In other words, there is certainly bad business thinking out there. Some Christians have rightly critiqued that and said “this doesn’t belong in the church.” I agree — it doesn’t. But not all business thinking is like that. There is also good business thinking that is based in principles of character and respect for the individual. This business thinking is something we can — and must — learn from.
Often, those who have critiqued bad business thinking haven’t realized that they’ve only encountered one strain of business thinking. By then implying that all business thinking is like that, they close us off from learning the lessons that we really do need to learn and apply in the church.
We need to move past that and redeem good business thinking. Even more, when we do that we can also stop giving bad business practices a “pass” by saying “that’s just business.” No, it’s not. Business is required to seek the good of the other person just as much as every other area of life. That is the guiding principle of all good business thinking, and that’s why we can indeed learn from it in the church.
So take a look, and if you have any thoughts, let me know what you think.
by Matt Perman
For the next two weeks, you can watch the sessions from yesterday’s online event by The Gospel Project.
My favorite was Trevin Wax’s on The Gospel and Repentance. It’s a very timely message on a much-overlooked foundational reality in the Christian life.
(You need to register to watch the videos, but it is quick and easy.)
by Matt Perman
In 1899, a few months after becoming governor of New York, Theodore Roosevelt gave the speech “In Praise of the Strenuous Life.” It remained one of his most popular, and has excellent things to say that are affirmed by the biblical doctrine of vocation. Here is how it starts:
In speaking to you, men of the greatest city of the West, men of the state which gave to the country Lincoln and Grant, men who preeminently and distinctly embody all that is most American in the American character, I wish to preach not the doctrine of ignoble ease but the doctrine of the strenuous life; the life of toil and effort; of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes not to the man who desires mere easy peace but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.
A life of ignoble ease, a life of that peace which springs merely from lack either of desire or of power to strive after great things, is as little worthy of a nation as of an individual. I ask only that what every self-respecting American demands from himself, and from his sons, shall be demanded of the American nation as a whole.
Read the whole thing (it’s short). And you can find more helpful resources on vocation at MondayChurch.org.
by Matt Perman
Sometimes, Dorothy Sayers sounds like Seth Godin. Here’s what she says in her superb essay “Why Work?,” referring to one of the main implications of the view of work she has just outlined:
A fourth consequence is that we should fight tooth and nail, not for mere employment, but for the quality of the work that we had to do. We should clamor to be engaged on work that was worth doing, and in which we can take pride.
The worker would demand that the stuff he helped to turn out should be good stuff….
There would be protests and strikes — not only about pay and conditions, but about the quality of the work demanded and the honesty, beauty, and usefulness of the goods produced. The greatest insult which a commercial age has offered to the worker has been to rob him of all interest in the end-product of the work and to force him to dedicate his life to making badly things which were not worth making.
Fast forwarding about 70 years, I think Sayers would agree whole-heartedly with the vision for work Godin outlines on his blog and books, especially Linchpin:
In bestsellers such as Purple Cow and Tribes, Seth Godin taught readers how to make remarkable products and spread powerful ideas. But this book is about you-your choices, your future, and your potential to make a huge difference in whatever field you choose.
There used to be two teams in every workplace: management and labor. Now there’s a third team, the linchpins. These people figure out what to do when there’s no rule book. They delight and challenge their customers and peers. They love their work, pour their best selves into it, and turn each day into a kind of art.
Linchpins are the essential building blocks of great organizations. They may not be famous but they’re indispensable. And in today’s world, they get the best jobs and the most freedom.
As Godin writes, “Every day I meet people who have so much to give but have been bullied enough or frightened enough to hold it back. It’s time to stop complying with the system and draw your own map. You have brilliance in you, your contribution is essential, and the art you create is precious. Only you can do it, and you must.”
by Matt Perman
There is still sometimes in the church today the thinking that success is a sign that a person is following God well, and difficulty and adversity are signs that they are likely doing something wrong.
While following God’s commands often leads to success, sometimes (due to injustice in the world) it leads to hardship and the opposite of earthly success. Hence, we cannot evaluate whether God is blessing someone simply by their outward success and circumstances. We have to look at character and obedience.
Here are some incredible quotes from some of the greatest theologians in church history on this matter, from Leland Ryken’s book Redeeming the Time: A Christian Approach to Work and Leisure:
Puritan Thomas Watson: “True godliness is usually attended with persecution.”
Puritan Richard Baxter: “Take heed that you judge not of God’s love, or of your happiness or misery, by your riches or poverty, prosperity or adversity.”
Luther: It is “utterly nonsensical” the “delusion” that if someone “has good fortune, wealth, and health, …God is dwelling there.”
Samuel Willard: “As riches are not evidences of God’s love, so neither is poverty of his anger or hatred.”
Thomas Hooker: “Afflictions are no argument of God’s displeasure…but the ensign of grace and goodness.”
by Matt Perman
From my notes on his book The Callings: The Gospel in the World:
The call to the ministry is extraordinary, not in the sense that it is miraculous or accompanied by visions, but because “by it a man is taken out of many of the routine commitments of daily life.” Specifically, “he ought to be freed from the need to earn his daily living in order to give himself exclusively to the word of God (1 Tim 5:17).”
It also is extraordinary in that it arises out of the ordinary. A person generally will carry on a normal calling, and “it is when he is inwardly constrained to preach the gospel, and his gifts — his ability to handle Scripture, to preach, to give leadership — are recognized by the church, that his inward call becomes outwardly ratified. It is as these inward and outward circumstances combined that a man has a warrant for leaving his regular calling and attempting to obtain a position of pastoral oversight.”
by Matt Perman
I’m going through Keller’s Every Good Endeavor again and taking some notes. Here are four central points from my overall summary of the book (quotes are, interestingly, from the dust jacket — which for most books does a great job of highlighting the core points):
Why are these points so important, and why have I focused in on these? Here’s why.
Point four addresses the dichotomy between “sacred and secular” that robs work of meaning for so many people. It is life giving and liberating to realize that Christ can be served through the so-called secular tasks of reconciling bank statements or taking out the trash just as much as in ministry work.
Points two and three address issues which I find Christians sometimes disputing due to a some incorrect views of the fall, human nature, and God’s expectations of us. Because of the fact that we live in a fallen world, some Christians fall into the notion that we are to work only for a paycheck. Sometimes it is reasoned that life is so hard that the most you can expect out of your job is to provide for your financial needs. To seek meaning in work is just not possible or, at best, a nice bonus only available to a select fortunate few.
But that view treats us as merely economic beings. It is an overly reductionistic view of people. Since we are social, intellectual, and spiritual as well as economic, work needs to tap into those capacities as well. This is part of how God has designed work. The fact that the fall really screwed things up does not deny or remove this reality. It simply means that in each of these realms we will have hardship as well as success — not that we should reduce work to merely the economic dimension.
I would submit that one reason life does feel so hard sometimes, in fact, is because of employers who try to treat people as merely economic beings. If employers did a better job of managing to the whole person, quality of life for everyone would go up.
More could be said here, but the statement affirming the possibility of “a thriving professional life” affirms this reality (as does the rest of the book) that it is indeed possible to thrive in our work beyond just the economic side of things, and that it is good and right to seek this as Christians. So also creativity, passion, and excellence in our work are right, and in fact part of how we find meaning and purpose in our work, when done for the glory of God, because these things especially tap into our social, intellectual, and spiritual dimensions.
Finally, point one is the foundation of any truly Christian view of work. In the world, work is often viewed as something we do ultimately for ourselves. This often results in work that may benefit the company (in the short-term), but doesn’t really give the customer what they actually need (and want).
Of course, self-interest is not wrong in itself. But a Christian view of work is that we work for more than ourselves and even more than our families. We work for the good of everyone (cf. Jeremiah 29:7, which applies to us as Christians because we are in exile, 1 Peter 1:17) — especially the good of the customers our organization services.
This means that it is not enough to simply work in order to make the sale or get the paycheck. We have to work in such a way that people will truly be benefited. If doing our work in a certain way will earn the money, but not truly benefit the other person (perhaps by cutting corners on quality), we are not doing our work in a Christian way. Christians in the workplace should seek profit, but they should also seek more than profit.
If more people worked this way, the entire world would be a better place. And, perhaps, if we worked this way from distinctly Christian motives and were tactful and winsome about our faith, more people would ask us for the reason for the hope that is in us (1 Peter 3:15), and the gospel would spread more fully throughout our vocations (that’s the meaning of a close reading of Matthew 5:16 and Ephesians 5:8-17; for more on this in the Ephesians passage, see Peter T O’Brien’s commentary).