Odd Man Out

I mentioned last week that, about 20 years ago, I was involved in a ministry here in St. Louis called Salt & Light Fellowship. It was led by Jerram Barrs, director of the Francis Schaeffer Institute at Covenant Seminary (Francis Schaeffer had a strong St. Louis connection and had actually pastured a church here.).

The fellowship met weekly at local churches, and it included both a group discussion and lecture time. The idea was reclaiming the culture, and our studies and discussions focused on both the Christian impact on culture historically as well as reclaiming the culture. We spent several weeks talking about work, and Dr. Barrs surprised than a few of us when he said that all work is seen as holy by God (likely with a few exceptions – some work is nothing short of evil).

His point was the church had divided life into the sacred and secular – and “sacred” work was more important to God that “secular work.” That simply wasn’t true, he said.

The two years I spent in the fellowship transformed my ideas about work. While the world would always disagree, I came to understand that the janitor was just as valuable in God’s eyes as was the CEO, and the reason was that both were made in God’s image. Both deserved respect. Both were ultimately about doing God’s work.

And so was I.

This isn’t how most workplaces function. This isn’t how many Christians function in the workplace. Dividing the world in secular and sacred allows us to leave the sacred at the workplace door. We can be different at church because, well, you have to do what you have to do to succeed in the workplace.

This doesn’t mean you pester your colleagues with sermons and leave tracts in the bathroom. What it means more than anything else is to see your work, and perform your work, as if it were an offering to God. How would God react if you dropped your work, and how you performed it, in the offering plate on Sunday?

That understanding changed my life – and my work life. It didn’t mean I became a workplace angel. I still screwed up, made mistakes, got angry when I shouldn’t and otherwise behaved like the usual sinner (I should phrase that in the present tense). But the understanding had an impact, and it slowly changed my behavior and my thinking. It’s still changing my behavior and thinking.

There’s a cost for this, of course. Jesus talked about it. It’s not surprise when, at best, we’re considered the odd man out. The conscientious objector. The “spiritual one.”

But it make a difference. A significant difference. And that’s the point.

“Let us practice the fine art of making every work a priestly ministration,” says A.W. Tozer in The Pursuit of God. “Let us believe that God is in all our simple deeds and learn to find Him there.”

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading Tozer’s The Pursuit of God. Today’s discussion concludes chapter 10, “The Sacrament of Living,” and concludes the book. To see other posts, please visit Jason’s site, Connecting to Impact.

A special thanks to Jason and Sarah for their faithfulness in posting the links and leading the discussion for the last 20 weeks. 

A Riot in Sunday School

I once nearly caused a riot in Sunday School.

Well, my wife would say that’s an exaggeration. And it is. No one threw anything, No one got hurt or arrested. But people were upset.

For a few years, I had been part of a group called Salt & Light Fellowship, hosted by the Francis Schaeffer Institute at Covenant Seminary in St. Louis. It was (and still is) led by a man named Jerram Barrs, a native Brit who studied under and was disciple by Francis Schaeffer at L’Abri in Switzerland.

The core focus of the fellowship was simple: God owns all parts of life, all parts of reality. He’s not confined to the church. He owns the culture, government, the economic system, everything.

We all nod and say that’s true. It’s easy to say. How it plays out in our day-today reality is another thing altogether.

One of our church pastors asked me to teach a summary of the Salt & Light for an adult Sunday School class. It wasn’t easy – consolidating two or three years of study and understanding into a fall Sunday School class. But I agreed.

Things went fine for a while. And then we came to the subject of work.

All work is holy and important to God, I said, repeating what I thought would be easily accepted. The work that each of us do is important and matters to God, I said.

And then I said this: Because it all matters, because all work is important, in God’s eyes no one kind of work is superior to another. No one kind is “holier” than another. What I did in my public relations job – and how I did it – mattered just as much to God as what a missionary or pastor did.

That was what caused the riot. No, it wasn’t a riot. I am exaggerating, at least a bit. I wasn’t lynched. But it did offend several people in the class. One man, a young doctor, never returned to class. And the evaluations at the end of the session showed that a lot of people thought I might be harboring heretical thoughts. Well, that’s an exaggeration, too.

A.W. Tozer explains it this way in The Pursuit of God: “This is the old sacred-secular antithesis. Most Christians are caught in its trap. They cannot get a satisfactory adjustment of the two worlds (sacred and secular). They try to walk the tightrope between two kingdoms and they find no peace in either. Their strength is reduced, their outlook confused and their joy taken from them.”

We compartmentalize. We see our “church life” as something radically different than our “day-to-day life.” I’ve seen Christians in the workplace behave as badly as non-Christians, and be major figures in church life. I’ve heard the “you have to do what it takes to succeed in business” argument and it’s just as wrong as the first time I heard it.

If God is indeed sovereign, then he’s sovereign over everything. Including what we do outside the church. Including the kind of work we do. It’s not only the missionaries and pastors who have “spiritual” jobs. The fact is, we all do.

Saying that out loud might cause a riot, though.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing Tozer’s The Pursuit of God. Chapter 10, “The Sacrament of Living,” is the subject for today and next Wednesday. To see more posts, please visit Sarah’s site, LivingBetween the Lines.