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?
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.”
By Greg Forster; part three of a series. MLK’s famous image of a street sweeper, widely familiar in the faith and work movement, is at the center of an profound talk he gave six months before he was murdered, on discerning “your life’s blueprint.” As we have seen, King’s image is grounded in Christian personalism. Because you are a human…
By Alistair Mackenzie (see our interview with Alistair here) Previous posts in this series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 Theses are by their nature pretty academic documents and it wasn’t long before some friends of mine who were mostly business people started to say to me, “Hey Alistair are you ever going to bring some of these high-flown ideas down to…
“The American ideal of racial progress is measured by how fast I become white.” James Baldwin As a white person I’ve never been very cognizant of my complexion—I’ve always just blended in; in my white family, my white neighborhoods, my white college, my white workplaces, and my white churches. It’s never been a matter of reflection because it’s all seemed…
I am always on the look out for faith and work content in unexpected places. I got my wish when I watched Hidden Figures, a powerful movie describing the lives and work of three African American females: Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Johnson. They worked as “computers” (humans doing mathematical calculations…and yes, this is where we get the word for the…
Lee Vinsel is Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech and one of the conveners of The Maintainers, a global, interdisciplinary research network made up of those who are interested in “the concepts of maintenance, infrastructure, repair, and the myriad forms of labor and expertise that sustain our human-built world.” TGR: What led you to begin the…
A year and a half ago, we essentially started The Green Room from scratch. We were independent, beholden to no one, and had three goals: point leaders to resources they should know about, feature leaders in the movement, and ask hard questions that would help the movement go forward. We had no idea if anyone would be interested. As it…
Many in our movement have heard some version of Martin Luther King’s famous “street sweeper” illustration, which calls on workers to pursue excellence in their work and find dignity and meaning in that pursuit. One of the occasions on which he used it was in a speech at Barratt Junior High School in Philadelphia in 1967, entitled “What Is Your Life’s Blueprint?” He was murdered six months later.
In this blog series, I’m going to look at how this address shows us that the street sweeper faith-and-work illustration is embedded in the larger framework of King’s theological and social thought, and what we as a movement can learn from this wider perspective on it.
In the past, when I’ve analyzed this talk, I’ve relied on this transcript from the Seattle Times. But a video of the talk has become available on YouTube since I last wrote about it, and it turns out the transcript is only a selection of material – a sort of highlight reel – from a significantly longer address:
The first thing I think we need to grasp about MLK’s street sweeper is how the story is grounded in Christian personalism. This school of thought had a revolutionary effect on King when he encountered it in his studies. It attempts to navigate between the extremes of individualism and collectivism by building social order on the nature of the human person and its concrete needs rather than on any abstract system of moral principles.
Anthony Bradley sums up Christian personalism as the belief that because “men and women are made in the image and likeness of God, they matter!” and thus “as we think about society we are to keep people at the center because they are created free and creative.”
Speaking to junior high students about why this is a critical time in their lives, King begins with the image of a building being constructed. The building won’t come out well if those who build it are simply improvising. Before anyone builds a building, an architect draws up a blueprint.
The idea here is that a human life requires design and management. Today we often speak of this in terms of stewardship. We are responsible to live in a certain way, with intentionality and sacrifice.
This idea that a human life is not arbitrary but ought to be pursued with design is essential to the dignity of the human person, which is King’s next point. King emphasizes to the students that they not allow anyone to take away their sense that they are somebody – their “somebodiness.” There is nobody who is nobody.
Consider how the story Will Messenger shares in the first five minutes of this classic faith-and-work talk shows us how being involved in work and economic exchange with other people contains an inherent pointer to their human dignity:
Of course, King’s purpose is not to encourage narcissism. Today, our movement has to spend a lot of its time resisting narcissism – an inflated sense of somebodiness – because it serves a lot of highly advantaged people who have been told too much about how they are somebody and not enough about how they are responsible to others.
For King, it was all the other way around. His audience had been told all their lives that they existed to serve others. They were treated as mere instruments for others’ ends. King had to work hard to restore their sense of somebodiness. Some of the sections dropped from the Seattle Times transcript involve King going into detail on specific systems of ethnic oppression that construct false racial identities, with narcissistic over-inflated somebodiness part of the definition of what it means to be “white,” and a sense of nobodiness part of the definition of what it means to be “Negro.”
So one really important thing we can learn from this address is that expanding our movement to do a better job of serving those who are lower on the socioeconomic ladder is going to involve adjusting how we deal with issues of identity. I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard people in our movement talk about “our workaholic society” (or “culture”) in terms that are clearly defined only by the experience of those at the top of the social ladder, who idolize work because they’ve incorporated it into a narcissistic identity.
The point is not that we should puff up those at the bottom and tear down those at the top. Notice how King doesn’t address his audience’s sense of nobodiness by trying to flatter them into some sort of compensatory narcissism. On the contrary, he calls upon them to find dignity and personhood in their life’s blueprint – in striving to serve something greater than themselves.
By Darrell Cosden There once was a little man called Niggle, who had a long journey to make. He did not want to go, indeed the whole idea was distasteful to him; but he could not get out of it. He knew he would have to start some time, but he did not hurry with his preparations. Niggle was…
The Green Room 