By Greg Forster: part eight of a series. The title of this post pulled me up short when I wrote it. I was just following the format for all the titles in this series: Just Imagine, God a Farmer! Just Imagine: God a Doctor! But this one’s different. “Just Imagine: God a Father!” It’s amazing. Just imagine it! God .…
By Greg Forster: part seven of a series. The image of God as king is very familiar in other contexts – especially as the importance of “the kingdom of God” in the teachings of Jesus is being rediscovered. But what we may not always realize is that a king is a worker! As with the image of God as a…
By Greg Forster: part six of a series. In my last post I noted that, without realizing it, the biblical images I had chosen for imagining God as a worker could be organized in a progressive scale based on what the various kinds of workers had stewardship over: God as a doctor: Human body (material bodies of intelligent creatures) God as…
By Greg Forster: part five of a series. This wasn’t intentional, but in this series on imagining God as a worker one of the things that’s emerged for me is how the different kinds of workers used in the Bible to depict God are differentiated by the levels of life in the creatures they work on. We’ve seen so far:…
By Greg Forster: part four of a series. Adam was not only a gardener; he was a farmer. He was called to bring the world under cultivation not only to make it beautiful but to make it fruitful. In this, Adam was like God. In many parables, Jesus represents God as the owner or manager of a farm or other agricultural…
By Greg Forster: part three of a series. If the profession of shepherd is “largely lost on us today” that of the doctor is not. To the contrary, the difficulty for us is to understand how remote and exotic – and shameful – it was in the biblical world. While the shepherd’s work is foreign to us, we are actually too…
By Greg Forster: part two of a series. In a talk on Sending Disciples to a Pluralistic World, Vincent Bacote said: “Many Christians live in an imagination desert, unable to connect faith to vocation.” That’s a deep insight – that it takes imagination to make the connection between faith and work. And Bacote draws the work/imagination connection tighter when he…
By Greg Forster: part one of a series. Do we really think of God as a worker? We may say he is one, citing John 5:17 or other passages. But does our concept of God match our theology? How we imagine God is one of the most profound formative influences on our faith and life. That’s why scripture gives us…
By John Terrill, reprinted from Made to Flourish. What would Jesus do? WWJD, a common refrain in Christian subculture of the mid-1990s, exploded into the popular vernacular and Christian kitsch by the end of the decade. Estimates of the number of WWJD bracelets sold in the United States during the last decade of the 20th century range from 15 to 52 million.…
Jubilee Professional is a half-day conference designed to help Christians of all vocations learn how to apply biblical truth to everyday, professional life. This event is produced by the Pittsburgh Leadership Foundation. The theme for this year’s conference – the 9th annual – was Sabbath rest. The conference was hosted by emcees Jim Stout, vice president at Pittsburgh Leadership Foundation,…
The Green Room 