How Churches can support Christians in their work

(Note — this post is adapted from a talk I wrote for the New Wine Leadership Conference considering how the Church can help Christians engage with their faith at work. Due to this, some aspects are written ‘towards’ churches and church leaders, though I believe and hope Christians seeking to find ways to better engage God in their work will also find it helpful)

Work. Under its more standard definition we spend, on average, over 50% of our waking adult lives doing it. If we then consider all the unpaid responsibilities we hold, such as chores, this figure becomes far higher. Yet, in my experience, most Christians don’t have a clear understanding of how their work fits with their lives as Christians.

There are some who feel they’ve had a clear calling from God to a particular job and are fortunate enough to be doing it. However, for many Christians work feels like a necessary task we need to do to survive while hopefully allowing us some time and energy to do real Christian tasks like serving our church and loving and talking with people so that they might come to know God.

I tend to see three main results of this. The first is Christians, for the most part, not considering God during work. The second is Christians developing a sense of meaninglessness and apathy towards work and life as they feel they’re not doing the really important things — this can eventually lead to feelings of depression and anxiety related to life meaning. The third is Christians idolising their work as the way to get meaning and a sense of self-importance apart from God.

Not only does this lack of vision hurt Christians, it also means that the rest of the world is missing out on seeing God’s love and wisdom fully expressed through them.

This post will include some of my reflections on this and will be in three parts:

• In the first I will tell you a little about myself and my passion for helping Christians live out their faith outside of church settings
• In the second I will consider our theology and how that impacts our understanding of whether God cares about our work and what responsibilities we may have as Christians
• Finally, I will share some practical thoughts on ways churches can better support Christians in their working lives

Part 1 — My journey and experiences

Growing up I was raised to believe the Christian worldview. The core story I held was that humans were once good and pleasing to God, we then became bad and deserving of punishment, God then provided a way of forgiveness and salvation through Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. My main responsibilities then were to live a quiet and good moral life and to share my faith and view of God when I could so that other people might come to believe in Him. This meant that I found it hard to see the importance from a faith perspective of any tasks which didn’t seem related to explicitly showing or speaking about God’s love.

This began to change when I joined PwC in 2014 and learned that they had a Christian Network. After signing up I was met by a Director who welcomed me and explained that the Network’s mission was to ‘Demonstrate the relevance of God to PwC’. Over the last 6 and a half years with the firm I have had the privilege of exploring this statement with whole host of loving, wise and passionate Christians, many of whom were far further ahead in their faith and career journeys. Since April 2020 I’ve also been honoured enough to be a co-Chair of the UK Christian Network which, with over 600 members, is one of the largest workplace Christian Networks in the UK. My time and involvement in the Network has provided me with the opportunity to consider a wide range of question regarding how Christians should relate to their work and their role in the workplace. It has also allowed me to consider how best to engage, encourage and equip other Christians in that journey.

Alongside this role at PwC my journey and understanding on these topics have also been deeply shaped by my involvement in two other initiatives helping young people find broader meaning in their faith and work lives. The first is TearFund’s ‘Impact:Life’ initiative which encourages young professionals to engage with the state and concerns of the Global Christians family and to partner with them through prayer and giving. The second is Shift, a charity by status but an incredible and loving family by nature. Shift’s mission is to see Christians in their 20s and 30s be captivated by God and to impact culture as a result.

And yet, despite all of this, last year I found myself having a crisis of meaning in relation to work. Deep down I still had this nagging sense that I couldn’t really serve God well through my corporate job, that in order to do that I’d have to work for the Church or a Christian charity. However, as the main earner in a new marriage this wasn’t feasible, which caused me to feel trapped and eventually led to a prolonged state of depression.

Thankfully, through conversations with friends, 5 months of counselling and many books and podcasts later I found what felt like some missing pieces of the puzzle which gave me a renewed vision of the Christian life. Due to this I’m now re-energised to share that vision with other Christians facing similar questions and struggles.

Part 2 — Our theology and how it impacts our understanding of how to relate to God in our work

I mentioned earlier the narrative of the Christian worldview which I have held for most of my life. Primarily that humans were good, then became bad and couldn’t become good again, so God provided a way for forgiveness allowing eternal life with Him in the future as well as relationship with Him now.

My problem with this narrative is that it doesn’t really tell us what humans are ‘for’. What’s our purpose? The most I could make from this is that our purpose is to rest in our salvation and help others find that salvation. Now, I’m not saying this isn’t incredibly important, I just believe it’s not the whole story. It sounds to me like saying we were once sick but found a way to be healthy, so now we need to tell other sick people how to get healthy — all well and good — but surely the point of being healthy is not just to help others become healthy, but also to be able to live the rest of our lives properly?

I once heard it said that we can’t know what is best for a thing unless we know its purpose. For example, we can get some value by using an iPhone as a doorstop, but there’s so much more value we could get if we knew its designers intended purpose (though I know a few android users who would disagree).

I’m now going to briefly outline a version of the Christian narrative which I believe gives a more holistic story and worldview and will help us to ‘have life in all its fullness’ (John 10:10).

The key idea I’m going to draw out here is that of humans being God’s image bearers and representatives on the earth. That we have a vocation from God to continue His loving and creative activity in a way which allows all of humanity to co-exist in a single, culturally diverse family, unified under God. This is also not just vocation, but the very way that we represent God in the earth. We are to some extent God’s image bearers as individuals, but we more fully represent God in the fulness of our human diversity.

Within this story every aspect of our lives is part of our human vocation from God. Whilst Jesus’ death did grant us forgiveness and relationship with God, it did so in order that we could once again become fully human and fulfil the vocation given by God in Genesis. We are not just ‘saved’ in an abstract sense for eternal life — we are freed to begin living and loving as true humans in the here and now. In this context work is the way we can use what God has given us to serve and love the human family and to create structures and systems which encourages their unity and flourishing.

I’d like to note here that my thinking on this has been heavily influenced by the thinking of Tom Wright in books like ‘The Day the Revolution Began’ and ‘Surprised by Hope’ and more recently by a wonderful series called ‘The Family of God’ on the ‘Bible Project’ podcast created by Tim Mackie and Jon Collins. If you’re interested to explore the themes I’m talking about further then I would highly recommend you go and look at these resources.

These themes are shown right from the beginning of the Bible in Genesis 1:27–28 which says,

‘So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”’

From this passage we can get our two themes:

1. That humans are to be God’s image bearers in the world by being the loving Family of God, unified in our diversity. This passage states that humans only fully represent God as a diversity, both male and female, but more specifically when that diversity works together as a unified family.

2. That humans are to reflect God by being creative and generative — continuing his ‘work’ of bringing order from chaos in a way that is ‘good’ for human flourishing. This is the theme I most commonly hear when people explain the importance of work from the Bible i.e. that we should subdue or harness the elements and resources given to us to continue God’s creative process and to generate valuable and useful outputs.

Now, while this second aspect of being God’s image bearers is true, I believe that we need the first to provide shape and boundaries to what it means in practice. Understanding that God’s main desire is for humans to be a diverse unified loving family contextualises what our work and creativity is for. It helps answer the questions like ‘Why are we bringing order from chaos, what are we subduing and harnessing our time, talents and resources for?’ and ‘Just because we can create something, does it mean we should?’ The nuclear bomb might be an easy example. This was clearly an amazing scientific and engineering breakthrough which, in some sense displays the creativity of God. However, I think most of us probably believe it would have been better were it not created, but on what basis? Ultimately because it does not serve the purpose of creating a single, flourishing and unified human family.

We live in an age which worships progress and advancement, seemingly with little consideration for how that might affect the global human family. A more current and nuanced example might be Artificial Intelligence. This technology already exists and is only going to proliferate further over the coming decades. Whilst it is likely that many goods will come from it like more accurate diagnosis of illnesses, it also has the capacity to eliminate millions of jobs, largely for poorer people, and to put more profit in the pockets of the rich who own the technologies.

In this instance when we think through the lens of ‘Will this creative and generative activity be beneficial for creating a flourishing unified human family?’ we can start to consider what limits we might want to place on AI’s advancement and what controls might need to be placed around it.

We need our churches to support us as we face these questions in our working lives. Of course, our questions and influence won’t always be on such a grand scale, but on a daily basis we will come across ethical and moral issues which we’re not sure how to handle and we need guidance on.

Part 3 — What can churches do to help Christians live out their full human vocation?

This leads us nicely onto the final question of what can churches do to help?

1. Teach the bigger story and emphasise the importance of our working lives often

As I’ve tried to show, the problem is not simply that there are Christians out there who want this support and guidance from their churches, but that there are also many Christians who don’t because they don’t believe their work matters to God. So, this is primarily a problem of theology and then secondarily one of finding ways to guide, motivate and support.

Therefore, the first and one of the most important things churches can do is ensure they are teaching Christians the full story of God so that they have a clear sense of their broader human vocation. Once that understanding is in place we will have a vision and set of guiderails on how to help Christians dream and innovate for God at work.

More than just this, we need our churches to see this topic as highly important and demonstrate that they do. How we can serve God in our work needs to be central to the church’s agenda rather than a sermon a few times a year. It needs to be so central that Christians stop seeing church as something separate to their work and start seeing it as a core source of support and strength in working well. If there’s one thing I know well it’s that even with all this understanding, in the heat of a long, tiring project, working long hours on often tedious activities — it is all too easy to forget the big picture, lose motivation, and slip back into the disengaged autopilot state we’re used to.

I’m extraordinarily lucky to have other passionate Christians in my firm and structures in place such as weekly work focused bible studies and prayer calls to continually bring my eyes back up, remind me to pray, challenge me, help me dream. Many people don’t have that — and as a church we need to learn how to be that for them. This could even be literally setting up midweek lunchtime work focused bible studies which people can attend online and share their thoughts and experience in.

Finally, to show that work is important our churches need to encourage Christians and give them affirmation for their efforts in these parts of their lives. When we serve the church we tend to get praise and recognition. However, when a Christian seeks to serve God through their work it will rarely get noticed or praised. This is incredibly tiring and demotivating over time and reinforces the belief that it doesn’t really matter or make a difference.

2. Create spaces, frameworks and materials to help Christians think about how they can bring about God’s diverse unified family through their work

Every Christians context and therefore needs will be different. So the first thing to do is to get people from lots of different contexts and ask them what types of support they need. In lieu of this I’ll offer some initial thoughts and suggestions.

Churches could create spaces for dreaming and innovating to happen. This could be, for example, by encouraging Christians in similar industries to pray and talk. They could perhaps offer to bring them together into small groups of 3 or 4 people who can meet up whenever suits them to share what’s happening at work and encourage each other in that journey.

For example, for the last 4 years I’ve been part of a group with 4 other Christians (originally all from PwC but some of whom now work for different companies) who meets up on a semi-regular basis. We tend to go through a book on how to become better Christian leaders and workers and pray for, encourage and hold each other accountable in that journey.

Churches can also help create frameworks, materials and questions to guide Christians on this journey. For example, we could consider what it means to love our fellow humans and create Godly structures by considering four key sets of relationships:

• Customers — the people our company is set up to directly serve and add value to
• Colleagues — the people we work with in order to serve our customers
• Supply Chain — the people and companies who provide us with the resources and services we need in order to fulfil our purpose
• Wider stakeholders — everyone else we influence who doesn’t fall into the first three categories

In relation to these four groups we can then ask questions such as:

• How can I behave in my personal interactions with the people in these groups to love and benefit each of them? E.g. loving and caring for them by taking a real interest in their lives, sacrificing for them and being generous towards them; offering space to talk about God with them
• How can I influence policy change which will encourage behaviours and practices showing love and value for each of these groups? E.g. paying our suppliers and employees fairly and working to ensure there is no discrimination and exploitation; developing appraisal processes which place significance on character traits like care and generosity; creating a culture of loyalty where employees are seen as valuable human beings with whole lives rather than as an expense
• How can I be innovative with respect to the products and services I use my resources to help produce to make them better for our customers and the wider world? This will depend on your situation — you could become an entrepreneur and create a new product or service which benefits society; or, if you have more of an administrative role, you could think of ways to improve the quality of the work you perform so that the company is ultimately better able to serve its customers.

Now, we need to think creatively to apply this more broadly. In most of this article I’ve been giving examples and using language from the corporate world because that is where most of my experiences come from. However, the human vocation applies to all types of work, including even our daily chores. For example, for a fulltime parent your child could be considered your customer (though there would be problems with taking that definition too literally), your colleagues would be fellow parents and your partner, your supply chain would be all the people and organisations you use when looking after and raising your child and your wider stakeholders could be your neighbourhood.

We can also apply a framework like this to our personal lives too — for example, my supply chain includes all the people and organisations I use to meet my needs e.g. does the coffee shop I go to each day pay its baristas and coffee farmers properly, and do I show care and interest in their lives?

Parting words

Now it’s time for you to go away and dream what all this means in the context of your church and your congregation. Some parts of this talk will be more relevant than others for each of you. But I hope that, in some way at least, it may spur you on in your journey of serving and equipping God’s church.