Reprinted from the Center for Faith and Work at LeTourneau University. By Bill Peel My eyes were glued to the Weather Channel during the landfalls and aftermath of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma like many of you. And we were all so impressed with both the first responders who put their lives on the line as well as the volunteers who went…
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…
Alistair Mackenzie is a Teaching Fellow at Laidlaw College – Christchurch, New Zealand and has also worked part-time with the Theology of Work Project. He is the author of Where’s God on Monday?, SoulPurpose: Making a Difference in Life and Work and Just Decisions: Christians Ethics Go to Work, and the founding director of Faith at Work (NZ). As part…
We thank the Center for Faith and Work at LeTourneau for allowing us to reprint this review of John Van Sloten’s new book. The review is addressed to an audience of workplace Christians; we invite you to think about how you could use the book to address issues of work and daily life with workplace Christians in your own church…
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…
Story and metaphor are a powerful means for education on a variety of subjects, including faith & work. StoryCorps has published a book titled Callings: The Purpose and Passion of Work whose purpose is to tell the story of individuals at work. Callings is written by Dave Isay. Isay is the founder of StoryCorps and the recipient of numerous broadcasting…
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…
The Green Room 