Reprinted from Made to Flourish. Check out their resource library here. What does it take to revive a dying city? That’s the question Fairhaven Church faced in 2008, when Forbes magazine named Dayton, Ohio, as one of the fastest dying cities in America. After the article was published, we interviewed the mayors of Dayton and neighboring cities, and we discovered the greatest…
Author: The Green Room
Salting a Corporation: A Video from the 2014 Boston Faith at Work Summit
The purpose of the Faith@Work Summit is to gather active participants and leaders in the faith at work movement from every industry sector to learn from each other and work together to extend Christ’s transforming presence in workplaces around the world. The 2018 Faith at Work Summit, held in Chicago at the Hyatt Regency O’Hare on October 11th-13th, is now open for registration! The early bird pricing for registration is now available at $179 per ticket, so be sure to purchase soon.
Gloria Nelund spent nearly 30 years on Wall Street as one of the most successful executives in the international investment management industry. After retiring from Deutsche Bank, she co-founded TriLinc Global; an investment firm dedicated to creating impact investment products that will attract significant private capital to help solve some of the world’s most pressing issues. In 2013, TriLinc launched a $1.25 billion impact fund for U.S. retail investors to provide growing businesses in select developing economies. Gloria is also Chairman and Independent Trustee for RS Investments mutual fund complex, and a frequent guest lecturer at several top business schools. She writes about her talk here at the 2014 Boston Summit:
I spent almost 30 years on Wall Street, with a very successful career in the investment management industry. While I live by a personal commitment to honor God in all I do, I always felt guilty about having a career in business – especially one which I enjoyed and that brought me significant personal rewards. In 2005, I retired to finally be able to “serve God,” and after an almost three year “wilderness” journey of desperately seeking my purpose, God demonstrated that my job had been my very own mission field. I highlight my personal journey, disclosing my three “secrets to success” (working hard, solving problems and helping people) in navigating a career in some of the largest organizations in the world, offering some insight for being the only woman in the male-dominated investment industry, and revealing the one book that influenced all of my actions and perspectives.
My Faith and Work Journey (Part 6)
By Alistair Mackenzie (see our interview with Alistair here) Previous posts in this series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 There were a number of specifically faith-related responses that surfaced frequently in my survey work, including: All Christians equal, but some more equal. Regularly I heard comments that amounted to something about all Christians being equal, but those involved in “full-time…
Karam Forum 2018: Poets and Prophets for God’s People and World
Charlie Self delivered the closing address at Karam Forum 2018, “Poets and Prophets for God’s People and World.” He cast a vision for theological and educational institutions to raise up Christians who can inspire and instruct in a polarized and embattled world. In seeking the shalom of the church and the nations, our institutions of higher learning will find their own shalom – a path out of their present troubles.
If you enjoy this talk, mark your calendars to join Miroslav Volf, David Miller and more at Karam Forum 2019!
Self opened his address with the story of a church that sought unity in the midst of Election 2016 by having local leaders from both political parties serve the Eucharist to one another and the congregation. Christian leaders contribute to local economic development, scholarly knowledge and much more by serving as poets and prophets of the kingdom.
Our world is facing two crises of paramount importance, Self observed. There is a crisis of anthropology, as the world forgets that human beings are made in God’s image. And there is a crisis of epistemology, as the world struggles for coherence and certainty amid the wreckage of worldly philosophies in both modern and postmodern movements.
The answer lies in whole-life discipleship – which, Self pointed out, is actually a redundant phrase. “Whole-life discipleship” is simply discipleship, because our God made and cares for all aspects of life. Living as disciples of Christ empowers us to “live the future now,” bringing a foretaste of the future consummation in to the present. “Connecting Sunday’s ecstasies to Monday’s ethics is of paramount importance,” he remarked.
Our theological schools strive to provide an “eschatological education” for this life, which is what sets them apart from departments of religious studies. Overcoming the mental and practical bifurcation that prevailed during the Enlightenment, privatizing religion, we integrate knowledge and take on tough issues from the standpoint of God’s present reign – and an awareness of our own limitaitons.
This integrative intellectual mission entails a role of “worldview leadership to the larger world.” We are able to think about the challenges of our time free from captivity to political and ideological polarization. Without common moral commitments or shared narratives, the world around us becomes less and less able to think outside its comfortable but ultimately enslaving mental boxes. Christian higher education can lead the way to fresh insights in such an environment.
With an abundance of examples and illustrations, Self showed how we can raise up poets and prophets to serve God’s people and God’s world. As poets, we discover the ways of life and worldview in the Bible, distill its insights with the help of history and the Holy Spirit in community, and disseminate them contextually and creatively. As prophets, we faithfully call people back to the principles and praxis of the covenant, stand fearlessly against idolatry, immorality and injustice, and provide visions of the future – ultimate, but also penultimate and culturally contextualized – in which God reigns.
Institutions are part of God’s plan, and Christian higher education has a tradition of innovation that can be called forth in our own efforts to steward the knowledge tradition handed down to us: “From the desert fathers to the Irish monks, from the early universities to our modern Bible colleges, God’s people have always preserved more than mere practical knowledge. We have a deposit of scriptural truth, and a deposit, providentially, of the truth of other sciences, and we’ve preserved it when the economies are up, when they’re down – because it matters, in the character and content of what we bring to the world.”
Reprinted from the Oikonomia Network
Church-Nonprofit Partnership Proves a Godsend for Struggling Outreach Ministry
A priest and his congregation reached out to the community to help save their popular after-school literacy program. Reprinted from Faith & Leadership. Almost every church person I know has been overextended at one time or another, taking on far more than they can handle. We used to call it “having too much on your plate.” But just as individuals…
Vocational Faithfulness as Public Discipleship: A Video from the 2016 Faith at Work Dallas Summit
The purpose of the Faith@Work Summit is to gather active participants and leaders in the faith at work movement from every industry sector to learn from each other and work together to extend Christ’s transforming presence in workplaces around the world. The next Summit will be in Chicago on Oct. 11-13, 2018. Go to fwsummit.org to sign up for updates and to learn more about the Summit. Register for the Summit here!
Vocational faithfulness is not only about individual character but also about applying a biblical-theological lens to the work of the institution in which one labors. (“Institution” here refers to the social sector in which the organization where one works is situated.) We are called to image-bearing in our vocational sectors, which involves practices of both personal discipleship (e.g., prayer, functional dependency on the Spirit) and public discipleship (in love, advancing justice and shalom for the common good).
The public expression of vocational image-bearing is at least threefold:
- Cultivating within the vocational sector all its creational intent and possibilities; aligning it with what it “was meant to be” in God’s original design
- Restoring the sector to righteousness (“set-right-ness”) where it has been corrupted
- Imagining the work of this sector in “the age to come” and offering a foretaste of those future Kingdom realities now
REFLECT & RESPOND
1. Most vocational expressions of public discipleship have focused on white-collar professionals. In what ways can/do blue-collar workers bear Christ’s image for the common good?
2. One way of “going deeper” in vocational faithfulness is the progression from individual to institutional thinking. What other shifts or progressions mark a “2.0” understanding of “faithful presence” in various vocational sectors?
Dr. Amy L. Sherman, a Senior Fellow at the Sagamore Institute, was named by Christianity Today in 2012 as one of the 50 evangelical women most influencing the American church and culture. She’s the author of six books and over 80 articles in periodicals including First Things, The Public Interest, The Christian Century, Christianity Today, and Books & Culture. Her most recent book is Kingdom Calling. You can read a reflection on her talk at TGR here.
Brian Fikkert: The Church and Economics
Getting richer is not making us happier. At the 2018 ON faculty retreat, Brian Fikkert of the Chalmers Center for Economic Development spoke to why that is, why it represents a radical challenge to the narratives that dominate the discipline of economics, and how the church can help people recover a holistic anthropology as a basis for economic thinking and…
Godly Globalization (A Video from the 2014 Boston Faith at Work Summit)
The purpose of the Faith@Work Summit is to gather active participants and leaders in the faith at work movement from every industry sector to learn from each other and work together to extend Christ’s transforming presence in workplaces around the world. The next Summit will be in Chicago on Oct. 11-13, 2018. Go to fwsummit.org to sign up for updates and to learn more about the Summit. Register for the Summit here!
Globalization, though not a new phenomenon in history, is causing major shifts and massive impact on social structures and identity, economy, technology and migration. How can Christians through Christ’s cosmic redemptive plan, bring about genuine redemption of His creation through the whole gospel to the whole world? Tim Liu asks us to think about these questions:
- How do the products and services from my work bring about Kingdom values (or potentially not)?
- How does my work fit into the larger system of a globalized economy?
- How can I practically influence my company’s direction toward Kingdom values?
- How can I work together with other believers in doing what God has called me to do?
(More resources here, too.)
Doing Everyday Church When Your Community is Spread Out
By Tim Chester, reprinted from his blog under a Creative Commons 3.0 license. Missional community life and everyday church requires a certain level of proximity. I’ve had a lot of questions on this issue, especially when I’ve been in the United States. Let’s take a church I spent some time with in New Jersey as an example. They have people…
New EWP Talk: Andy Crouch on Isaiah’s “Posterity Gospel”
Reprinted from the Oikonomia Network.
We’re very excited to release our latest EWP Talk: Andy Crouch’s brief but powerful address at Karam Forum 2018. Drawing on the imagery of Isaiah 5, Crouch spoke about the challenge of separating real flourishing from transitory prosperity in the midst of economic growth and technological innovation. In a world where we can have instant gratification in so many ways, what is of lasting importance?
“If you want to have a biblical conversation about flourishing, you are going to end up – sooner or later – at the story of the vineyard,” said Crouch. The image of Israel as the Lord’s vineyard, most fully developed in Isaiah 5 but recurring in many other places as well, contains a wealth of potential insight that speaks to the present state of our own civilizations and cultures.
Like us, the Israelites were prosperous. But the story of Isaiah 5 is not a happy one. The vineyard produces “wild grapes,” which explode with seeming abundance, but aren’t properly tended and don’t last. Crouch compares worldly prosperity built on fragile foundations to sidewalk chalk art in the tradition of trompe l’oeil (“deceive the eye”). It isn’t what it appears to be; take one step to the side and the illusion disappears.
And it’s doomed to be washed away in the next rain. The Lord wants flourishing from his world, Crouch points out, so if we don’t pursue real flourishing we can be sure our efforts will ultimately fall apart.
The point is not that economic success is bad; the point is that we need to change our definition of what counts as economic success. We tend to seek out activities and accomplishments that are “low friction” – that involve less investment and provide a shortcut to enjoyable experiences. But low-friction activities are by their nature unstable; precisely because the barriers are low, today’s quick fix is quickly replaced by tomorrow’s quicker fix. Crouch points to the music industry, which is contracting rapidly because access to recorded music has become effectively free.
What are we producing that is worth preserving? Crouch suggests that while the Bible does not have a “prosperity gospel,” it does have a “posterity gospel” – it calls us to prioritize what kind of world, what kind of culture and what kind of civilization we leave for our grandchildren. We should invest in things that are worth passing on.
The flourishing life is a pruned life. The Lord prunes his vineyard and it flourishes sustainably.
And the irony is that once we accept the pruned life, the massive power and wealth of modern markets become tools we can use to accomplish the Lord’s purposes. An internet-based music community allows musicians to collaborate digitally and produce art that is superior to what the major labels produce. Crouch even points to fast-food restaurants like In-N-Out and Chik-Fil-A, which have been built on serious and worthy visions of what a fast-food restaurant ought to be like. It is people – from the CEO to the fry cook – who live the pruned life who produce and sustain such visions of flourishing.
“This is where the church needs to be,” concludes Crouch, “going to every part of the world of mere affluence and turning it into a vineyard.”
The Green Room 