By Greg Forster; part two of a series. How do we help people suffer without helping them suffer? That is, how can we help people persevere through suffering, and even “rejoice in our sufferings,” without becoming complacent about their suffering or even – God forbid! – contributing to social conditions that increase suffering? This is a paradox the faith and…
By Jennifer Woodruff Tait A few years ago, some of us who are now connected with this blog, and who were at that time connected with another project, were having a planning meeting for the project. The first time we had a coffee/water/restroom break, I noticed something odd. At the risk of beating a dead horse, I’ll remind you I’m…
By Jeff Haanen In my last post, I mulled over all the times I’ve buzzed around the topic of faith and work with pastors, only to bump into the screen door of misunderstanding time and time again. Sometimes I felt like a fly; other times like a mime trying to get my message across with frantic hand gestures. Either way,…
When I was a teenager, I became enamored, as only an anti-establishment teenager in the 1970s could become enamored, of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass. The cynical lyrics deconstructed faith and capitalism in a way profoundly appealing to a countercultural16-year-old.
But now I’m 45, and much more committed to human flourishing as well as deconstructing. Still, as I wrote in this post, I worry that my work with the faith and work movement is blinding me to things I should not be blinded to. I want the movement to reassure me that it isn’t, underneath, aiming for the world that Bernstein describes in this song. (The whole set of lyrics can be seen here on YouTube.) I’ll be watching my fellow bloggers eagerly for answers to that question. I don’t think the faith and work movement will make headway in the mainline until it can find a way to set pastors from my generation at ease on this question.
Chorus: God made it be good
Preacher: Created it good
Chorus: Created the gnats
Preacher: Gnats to nourish the sprats
Chorus: Sprats to nourish the rats
Preacher: And all for us big fat cats. Yow!
By Jeff Haanen One of my continual shortcomings as the executive director of Denver Institute for Faith & Work is that I’ve rarely framed our mission so we’re clearly understood – especially by pastors. More than once, my initial enthusiasm for all things “faith and work” is seen by good, godly pastoral leaders as a niche-y ministry that will likely soon,…
By Jennifer Woodruff Tait A month or so ago, I got an email from my doctoral advisor (who has some idea which way my life path has gone) saying that I ought to review a book called The Blessings of Business by Darren Grem. In conjunction, he said, with Timothy Gloege’s Guaranteed Pure, a scholarly history of Moody Bible Institute.…
My husband Ralph had a daydream when he was 15, to one day own an orchard and help kids in India. But early into our farming years, our labor force radically changed from white, U.S. citizens to Latino immigrants. We realized that our employees must become our first focus of mission, if we were ever to help kids in India. The work provided a common focus that compelled us all to show up every day and do our best. But our new employees not only needed skills. They needed affordable housing, dependable childcare and year-round jobs if their kids were going to stay in school and flourish. Most of all they needed to feel safe. We have found that practicing the core values of love, compassion, respect, community and purpose helps us care about each other. We take better care of our place, which in turn takes care of us, with a surplus of love to export.
___
Cheryl Broetje and her husband Ralph, founded, own and operate Broetje Orchards – a vertically integrated apple growing, packing, shipping, sales company located in the southeastern part of Washington State. Its five million trees produce fruit that is exported around the world. Its mission is to be “…a quality fruit company bearing fruit, fruit that will last.” Cheryl also founded The Center for Sharing, a non-profit, faith-based servant leadership development organization whose mission is “… calling forth the gifts of all persons through Christ-centered community.” Cheryl serves as its executive director. Her passion is in bringing people and resources together to build kingdom structures.
Faith@Work Summit 2014 by fwsummit.org is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Based on a work at fwsummit.org.
More than ever before, humanity is in a crisis over work. People change jobs and careers 6 times or more in their lives. Robotics will threaten even professional level vocations over the next decade. Darwinian competition trumps teamwork and human dignity. Our work – our commitment to bring God’s truth, love, and human dignity to the work lives of all people – has never been so important! How can we better equip ourselves for our work, for our calling? How do we help others work in a world that is increasingly unaware of and even hostile to the hope of the gospel? How does the Biblical story and a deep understanding of the gospel give us the resources to persevere, the winsomeness to witness, the character to be just, and the calling to make a difference?
___
Katherine Leary Alsdorf (BA, Wittenberg; MBA, Darden School, UVa) founded Redeemer Presbyterian Church’s Center for Faith & Work in New York City and served as Executive Director from 2002 – 2012. She established the intensive Gotham Fellows program, an Entrepreneurship Initiative to start new gospel-centered ventures, Arts Ministries, and numerous vocation groups. She now helps churches in other cities to establish faith and work ministries. She spent 25 years in the high tech industry in California and New York. She is co-author with Tim Keller of Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work.
Faith@Work Summit 2014 by fwsummit.org is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Based on a work at fwsummit.org.
My work matters to God—but can the Bible help me in practical ways? Over the past seven years, 138 scholars, pastors and workplace Christians from 16 countries have researched every book of the Bible, recognizing over 1000 passages related or directly applicable to work (free online at theologyofwork.org). The Bible develops workplace applications at length, including calling, truth and deception, finance, wealth and provision, witness to Christ, relationships at work, leadership, what churches can do to equip their members to follow Christ at work, and how to make sense of suffering and hardship at work. Some applications are surprisingly specific—like the importance of face-to-face communication in times of stress, or Jesus’ process for resolving conflicts among co-workers. Others span the world of work, like the value God places on excellence in so-called secular jobs, and pre-eminent role of relationships in doing good work. Its ever-present message is that work is a gift from God for meeting one another’s needs and making the world more like God intends it to be.
Will Messenger (BS, Case Western Reserve; MBA, Harvard; MDiv, Boston University; DMin, Gordon-Conwell) is Executive Editor of the Theology of Work Project, Inc., an international organization dedicated to researching, writing, and circulating materials about how the Christian faith can contribute to non-church workplaces. He was the Director of the Mockler Center for Faith and Ethics in the Workplace at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary from 1999 to 2008.
___
Faith@Work Summit 2014 by fwsummit.org is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Based on a work at fwsummit.org.work at fwsummit.org.
By Adam Joyce This year, the Oikonomia Network’s annual faculty retreat featured provocative and stimulating talks from three leaders of the faith and work movement. Access their talks and slides here: David Miller, “God Bless Us, Every One: The Past, Present and Future of the Faith and Work Movement” (audio) Amy Sherman, “In and For Community: Helpful Models in Theological…
The Green Room 