One afternoon this Spring, I met the Rich Young Ruler. He was a well dressed young professional, who sat next to me and simply struck up a conversation. Eventually the conversation turned to my vocation, drawing out his thoughts on religion: “All religions are the same,” he said, “they all teach the same basic message: Do not murder, do not steal…” He rhymed off most of the Ten Commandments. I listened to his story as he recounted to me the ways he had observed various world religions having failed at keeping the commandments they claimed to believe would save them. Following these commandments did not seem, to him, to be the way to salvation.Taking my cues from Luke 18, I agreed with him that what so many beliefs (including perversions of our own) seem to have in common is that they start with rules and laws, or some other human achievement. There is always something that one must do in order to gain eternal life, spiritual awareness, or whatever end result is sought. This is what the Rich Young Ruler had naturally come to expect, and why he asked Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” What my friend observed was the same reason the Rich Young Ruler left in disappointment: the bar is always set too high for humans to reach, and we always fall short.
What is unique about the Christian faith, I shared, is that God came to Earth as one of us, the very best of us, and so the starting point is not that we have to do the impossible, but that in living the life we could not, and conquering death for us, God has already done it. Of course our faith has rules and laws, including the Ten Commandments, but as a worshipful response to God’s loving gift of eternal life, rather than as a prerequisite. He told me he had never heard the gospel story all at once before, and when it came time to go, my new friend was reflectively saying, “that makes a lot of sense” before we traded email addresses to keep in touch. What friend of yours echoes a familiar story from scripture? Do you know a prodigal like the one in Luke 15? Someone worshipping a nebulous “Unknown God” like those Paul met in Acts 17? A curious reader like the one Philip met in Acts 8? As we continue to grow as disciples of Christ, and naturally share our faith with family, friends, and even with new friends as I did this Spring, our witness will often follow the shape of such stories in scripture. |
Luke 18:18-27 (The Rich Young Ruler) – A certain ruler asked him, ‘Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; Honour your father and mother.” ‘ He replied, ‘I have kept all these since my youth.’ When Jesus heard this, he said to him, ‘There is still one thing lacking. Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’ But when he heard this, he became sad; for he was very rich. Jesus looked at him and said, ‘How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.’ Those who heard it said, ‘Then who can be saved?’ He replied, ‘What is impossible for mortals is possible for God.’ (NRSV) |
Relational Evangelism
Reaching Your Friends Through Facebook
Social networking sites are a big deal these days. Love them or hate them, they are a part of the new reality of how people, especially young people, choose to interact with each other online.
This past year in my work as a cyber-evangelist I have invested some time in looking at ways to interact with people through social networking. It can be a great way to reach out to people and help them become followers of Jesus. Although the principles outlined here can apply to different online ministry situations, my examples come from working through Facebook
Whose Profile Is This Anyway?
When you set up your personal profile online for a social networking site there are many decisions to make. How much information will you disclose and to whom? Do you want to display a funny or a serious picture of yourself? (A close-up shot is best, I think, for easy recognition.) Who will you invite and who will you accept to be your friends online?
While these are important decisions, the first and most important decision that you will have to make about your witness online is actually something that you won’t type in when you set up your profile info. Who really owns this profile? Who calls the shots? Who sets the priorities? Is it you or is it the Lord whom you serve? If Jesus is in the driver’s seat, then that will make a big difference about how you use your time, what kinds of things you will and will not attach to your profile and who you will seek to interact with.
Just as in real life, it is always good to be prepared to give a reason for the hope that is in you (See I Peter 3:15 for a great guideline as to how to interact online.) You can post the story of how your life was changed by your faith in Christ in the “notes” section of your Facebook profile. The power of your online faith-story can be multiplied. You can grab the url address from your faith-story, repost it in the mini-feed section, refer to it in other documents and use it as a part of your online signature.
Making Every Move Count
A key principle is to ask yourself what purpose every activity or potential activity in the social networking environment can serve. There are huge numbers of funny and fascinating applications out there that can help bring you closer to people. Not all of them are equally good for helping you to get in touch with spiritual “seekers.”
Some of them can turn into timewasters. Some of them can send people confusing messages about who and what you really represent. Beware of undercutting your message once you’ve let it be known through your profile that you are a follower of Jesus. Lots of application activities can simply be a tool to bridge the gap and create “meaningful touch moments”. The key is to be discerning and intentional about their use.
Send virtual flowers, play silly online games, tag your friends in your photos, post funny videos . . . but do it for a purpose and do it with integrity. If you are an interesting and caring friend in real life, you can find ways online to show your friends that you are interested in them and that you really care . . . if that is your goal.
Real Faces, Real People
The more meaningful experiences you have online in this environment to talk about your faith are likely to be with people you have already met. That’s not to say that you can’t have meaningful interactions with a total stranger whom you have only met on the Internet. By searching via the avenues suggested by Facebook, you can sometimes find long lost friends or keep up with someone you seldom see. Ask God to guide you and give you ideas of who to establish or re-establish contact with.
If you only have Christian friends on your profile and you all talk about church or “Christian stuff”, it’s not likely that your profile will have much influence or prove very attractive for your non-Christian friends. Choose to highlight those things that those who aren’t Christians yet can relate to. Be sensitive to their needs. You might think that the latest video that you found on GodTube is hilarious, but will your non-Christian friends you are trying to influence “get it”? Or will they feel excluded?
Care To Share?
Sites such as http://www.iamnext.com, the outreach focused website where I work, attempt to provide online material that helps to bridge the gap between the interests and needs of many non-Christians and the gospel. Consider posting an article on your profile from a website designed to reach out to those who aren’t yet believers. Be choosey. Passive posting where people come to visit you and observe your interests is one thing. It’s probably not a good idea to overwhelm your non-Christian friends by actively inviting them to lots of events or actively sharing material with them. An annoying friend is not a friend for long.
The Facebook application “Life Questions” (http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=6611135350&b=&ref=pd) designed by our sister site invites your visitors to dialogue with you over a particular evangelistic article or a explanation of the gospel. I hope we will soon see a version of this application for iamnext.com.
Going Out On Chaplaincy Duty
I have found that another good way to “bridge the gap” is by joining groups where I share a common interest or experience with others. I have found that it is easier to initiate conversations that go past the surface when you find people who recognize a need in their lives. Sometimes people in this position are willing to share their own story and receive a part of your life’s experience in return.
I have found ways to bring Christ into the picture by operating from a starting point of a particular problem or experience I have had. Thus, I have had the chance to engage in a kind of “online chaplaincy” by looking for opportunities to help. Some of the interaction takes place on discussion boards and public wall postings, but most of it goes back and forth through private email messages to an individual looking for help.
A key to making online ministry from a social networking site work is being disciplined about maintenance. I re-prioritize and “weed” my page constantly for objects that are repetitive or don’t serve a purpose. Clutter is the enemy. I want to keep those points that are the most important for pointing people to Jesus at the top of my profile and let the rest of the “amusing stuff” and “interesting stuff about me” sink to the bottom.
Follow Me As I Follow Christ
Social networking is a very relational way of sharing Christ with others, both those you know personally and those you don’t. This article is only meant to be a first introduction to an idea that might be new to some. I’m learning all the time about how to be more effective in online witness. The essence of this type of witnessing is very incarnational. By asking people to take a look online at who we are, we ask people to look at Jesus who inhabits our daily lives.
If you want to know more about what I’ve discovered about ministry through social networking, ask me. If you are on Facebook and you want to look at what I have done on my profile to reach out to those outside the Church, feel free to (temporarily) join the Ottawa Facebook network and observe my profile.
Catherine Savard is a commissioned staff worker with Campus for Christ, working with the Campus Internet Ministry in content development. Catherine blogs at www.midnightoil.squarespace.com – Midnight Oil: Movies and More.
Spiritual Conversations in Unlikely Places
As a priest, I have had several conversations about The Da Vinci Code. None have been as memorable as the one I enjoyed, not as a priest, but as a rock climber and a friend. On a winter evening in 2004, between runs up the wall at the climbing gym, one of the guys asked if I’d read the popular bestseller. I admitted I had not, and after asking for his impressions, promised that I would read it and get back to him. That simple question, and an honest reponse, initiated a spiritual conversation as thrilling as the climbing itself.
So it is with most spiritual conversations. We enter them unprepared, in the midst of other, seemingly irreligious activities. My most fruitful spiritual conversations have taken place in living rooms, coffee shops, ambulances and climbing gyms. They are the conversations I relish most as a priest, and yet they arise regularly in my personal, everyday relationships, the ones that all Christians share. It is through these spiritual conversations with everyday Christians in everyday situations that people reguarly come to faith in Christ.
If you are like most Christians, I imagine such spiritual questions have been asked of you by friends or family, and you have been equally unprepared. Why do you go to church? What is it like? What do you believe about this, or that? These conversations can provoke fear and anxiety for the average Christian. I belive this likely comes from an impression that we need to be Billy Graham, that a spiritual conversation only succeeds if it leads someone from spiritual nothingness to full-fledged discipleship. This is seldom true. Good spiritual conversations are seldom one-time encounters, but usually just another chapter in a long spiritual journey shared by two or more friends, in the venerable tradition of the Emmaus Road.
In my case, I was unprepared to answer my friend’s questions, being unfamiliar with the book he had read and the challenges to Christianity that it posed. A knee-jerk reaction would have ended the conversation, but with my offer to read the book and respond, we entered into a spiritual conversation that lasted months and led us to much deeper questions.
The Gospels record the spiritual conversations Jesus had with people in the midst of everyday life, such as the woman at the well. His followers, like Philip, carried on the tradition, and we as his disciples today are called, in fact commanded, to keep sharing the story.
Building a Musical Bridge
My wife Marci and I were sitting at a table in a crowded restaurant in our city of Edmonton. It was a Sunday evening, and we were attending a regular Sunday night ‘open mike’ – an opportunity for local musicians to get up in front of a microphone, sing their three songs, and then sit down again and listen to the efforts of their fellow musicians. We had been attending this particular open mike for a couple of years, and had gotten to know quite a few of the musicians, including the host, a bubbly and gregarious aging hippy who, I had discovered, was also a recovering alcoholic. She had come to sit at our table while one of the musicians was playing, and we were chatting about another musician who was causing her some grief at the open stage. “What do you think I should do?” she asked. And then she surprised me; “I guess what I’m really asking”, she continued, “is, ‘What would Jesus do?’”
Reflecting on this conversation later on, I couldn’t help remembering how flabbergasted this woman had been when she had first discovered that I was a pastor. A friend and I were helping her set up the PA system one night, and my friend made some comment about me being a man of the cloth. “Cloth?” the host exclaimed; “What cloth is that – a tablecloth?” And then, as it gradually dawned on her that my friend was serious, I saw a look of absolute horror flash across her face. Her attempts to backpedal were so funny, I wished I’d had a camcorder with me.
I’ve been playing folk music all my life, but in the last three years, for the first time, I’ve stepped out of my Christian bubble into the live music community here in Edmonton. I started playing at a Monday night open stage run by Chris Wynters (of the Edmonton band ‘Captain Tractor’); from there I discovered other events, in pubs and coffee shops, and I began to make a whole new community of friends. I was not doing this out of any overt evangelizing agenda; I simply wanted to find a way to relax in the city, and music seemed like a good way to do it. But it has been interesting, as I’ve gotten to know people in the music community, to see how many opportunities I’ve had to be a witness, or simply a caring Christian presence.
A local songwriter hosts a monthly songwriter circle at his house; I’ve participated in it fairly regularly for a couple of years, and we’ve become good friends. He says he is an agnostic, but I often kid him that he seems to write a lot of songs about the God he’s not sure is there! Sometimes he asks me for my thoughts on lyrics he’s writing – usually when the lyrics have references to God in them. These conversations lead in some really interesting directions. Last year this friend agreed to participate in a fundraising concert for Habitat for Humanity which was held at our church. This was very good for our concert – it brought in a few people who wouldn’t have been there otherwise. But I think it was also good for my songwriting friend; he has a pretty low opinion of organized religion in general and clergy in particular, and I think his participation in the concert gave him an alternative view.
Another new friend and I have started playing gigs together; he is a very fine lead guitarist and has also helped me record some of my songs at his home studio. I asked him to help out this past December with a special musical number we were doing at our Nine Lessons and Carols service at St. Margaret’s Church; he and his girlfriend came to the service, and afterwards she commented on how much she enjoyed it and how she was hoping to be able to drop by on an ordinary Sunday sometime, when we weren’t doing a ‘special’ service. Last time my wife spoke to her, she had bought a daily devotional book and was finding real inspiration in reading it every day.
What’s the secret? I don’t think it’s especially complicated. I think you need to find something that you are really interested in doing, and then find some non-Christian people to do it with. And the objective, at the beginning, can’t be overtly evangelistic; people seem to sense instinctively when you are only there to convert them, and they don’t tend to respond well to that approach! I didn’t begin to attend open mikes to evangelize; I went because I wanted to play music. But, once I was there, I decided to be myself: not just a musician, but also a follower of Jesus. And because I’d earned the right to be heard – both in terms of being a credible musician, and also in being genuinely interested in other people’s lives and willing to listen to their stories – well, then the opportunities for witness gradually began to come my way.
One thing I have resisted is the temptation to sing ‘evangelistic’ songs. I’ve been at the open mics when others have done that, and I can almost feel the audience’s resistance rising. To me, the songs I sing are simply a bridge I build into the lives of the people who are listening. Afterwards, when we’ve become friends over a few months’ worth of coffees and hours of listening to music together, I can use that bridge to speak a word of witness at the right time.
I don’t think I’ve got it quite right yet; I can’t report any spectacular conversions, and I suspect that at times I’m still a bit too backward about speaking about my faith. But for the first time in my life, I feel like I’m really engaging in regular relational evangelism. And I’m excited to see what the Holy Spirit is going to do with it.
How to Invite a Friend to Church
You’re thinking of inviting a friend to church? My first piece of advice: Don’t.
At least, don’t do it on an average Sunday. Unless, of course, your friend has said, “You know what? I would just love to see how an Anglican church operates on a typical Sunday when you’re not making special allowances for visitors. That would really be my idea of a good time.” That would be different.
In general, however, that is not the attitude of the Canadian non-church-going public. To the majority, the idea of going to church is not high on their checklist of goals to fulfill before they die. So there needs to be some reason why, if you were bold enough to invite them, they might be bold enough to say yes. What kind of reason might that be? Let me suggest two:
1. There is something special going on at church which they might be interested in:
• Carol Services are great for this. Everybody loves a carol service. The tunes are familiar—if only because we’ve been hearing them at Shopper’s since the day after Halloween.
• The Blessing of the Animals, liturgical challenge though it may be, is intriguing to someone who doesn’t normally come to church.
• In St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas, Dean Kevin Martin does an annual service to thank workers in the food industry in the city. They come in their droves. They have never been thanked publicly like that—let alone by the church.
• A sermon series can be of interest to people. At the local street festival a year ago, my own church invited passers-by to write on a flip chart the questions they would most like to ask God, promising that the sermons in the following months would address those questions.
2. If our hope is that our friends will find something attractive about the expression of Christian faith they find at church—might there be other settings where they could experience that more easily than in the unfamiliar setting of a church service?
What about “half-way house” events, where the spiritually curious can encounter Christians and their spirituality outside the context of as Sunday service? Jenny Andison, in her helpful booklet, Doors into Faith: Inviting Friends the Join the Big Game (Wycliffe Booklet on Evangelism #4), has great suggestions. Here is a sampling of some possibilities churches have tried:
• What about forming a group of friends—Christians and others—who meet to watch movies with spiritual themes and discuss them?
• How about a nice dinner to which you invite a Christian speaker known in the community—an athlete, perhaps, or a local MP—to talk about their work and their faith?
• Many Canadians would like to make a difference to this country’s problems. I heard recently of a man who had first encountered followers of Jesus when he offered to help with the food bank at their church, and then gradually found his own way to faith.
Having said we need suitable events, of course, we want to be sure that if we take the risk of inviting someone, they will be well-received. To be honest, I’m simply not going to risk their feeling alienated and my being embarrassed unless the greeting system is warm, competent and genuine. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always happen, and the horror stories are legion. (I have written more about the art of welcoming in the Wycliffe Booklet #6, From Visitor to Disciple: Eight Ways Your Church Can Help.)
Let’s assume then that (a) there is a suitable event that our neighbour might actually be interested in and that (b) as far as we can tell, it will be a positive experience. What then?
Here are three practical things I find helpful myself:
• I like to have an official invitation card or flyer about the event to give. Apart from anything else, it saves me explaining every single detail, and provides a reminder after the conversation is over.
• I want to be fairly sure there really is a natural connection between my friend and the event. My neighbour’s 10-year old bought a goldfish bowl from us during the local garage sale in the summer. In September his mother told me he had now bought a goldfish to live in the bowl. So I said, “I wonder if he’d like it to bring it to church for St. Francis’ Day when we bless people’s pets?” “Wow, that sounds neat!” she replied. Without the goldfish connection, the invitation would have sounded a little forced. With the goldfish, it was the most natural thing in the world.
• I always try to give people an out—“Of course, I know that’s a busy time of year” is a fairly safe one—which makes it easy for them say no. I might even say, “Personally, I hate pushy religious people, so I’m a bit nervous to suggest this . . .” Usually that reassures people, because you’ve shown consideration for their feelings—and clearly you’re not pushy!
Will it still be scary? Probably. Hey, I’m a Professor of Evangelism, and I certainly find my heart beats a bit faster when I’m inviting someone to a church event. But fear is not the worst thing that could happen. Some of the most rewarding things we ever do were scary once. I find I am encouraged by that book title which says, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. It’s not bad advice.
(This article first appeared in The Anglican, newspaper of the Anglican Diocese of Toronto, in February 2008.)
The Difficult Journey to Faith: How the Church can Provide Stepping Stones
Moving toward Christian faith is seldom easy. There are intellectual, ethical and relational issues to be worked through, to name but three. Churches which seek to practice evangelism will try to offer help at every step for those who wish it. There are many such “stepping stones” churches can offer: classical music is one of them.
Coming to Christian faith is often a long and complex process involving many steps.
Take Dave, for instance. Though his parents never went to church, his grandmother had a reputation for being “religious” and told him stories of Jesus. At university, he had been intrigued to discover in a history of science course how many of the great scientists were also thoughtful and articulate Christians-Kepler, Newton, Boyle, and Maxwell, for example. When he got a job with an innovative high tech firm, he found that one of his colleagues was a person of quiet but firm Christian faith. They talked sometimes about the historic connection between science and faith, and Sam invited Dave to a lecture by a leading physicist on “Why I am a Christian.” Dave found it thought-provoking.
Dave and Sam hung out together sometimes on the weekends. Dave was impressed by Sam’s integrity and enjoyed his sense of humour. So after six months or so, when Sam invited him to a Sunday afternoon discussion group about the Bible for young singles who were figuring out their spirituality, Dave was interested to go. Then he checked out Sam’s church, to which some of the group also went, on a Sunday when they were doing a jazz mass, and, to his surprise, he liked it. A year later, he decided to be baptized.
Dave, as you may have guessed, is a composite of many people, but I have heard enough stories of this kind to know it is a pattern: a long-term friendship with someone who is genuine in their faith, plus a special event or two, plus plenty of time for reflection and asking questions, some experimentation with church, and then a thoughtful commitment.
This edition of good idea! looks at one place where churches often fail to help people who are taking that kind of step towards Christian faith: the special event. We often assume that if we make our churches friendly enough, and the liturgy contemporary enough, new people will flock in. Well, that may be true for some.
But there are many for whom a regular Sunday service is unlikely to be an accessible door through which they can move towards faith. For Dave, the lecture by the physicist was on a Thursday evening on a local university campus. The Bible study was on a Sunday afternoon, over a glass of wine in a young couple’s apartment. And his first Sunday service was a little out of the ordinary. Each event was a stepping stone on the way, and each was more user-friendly than a “regular” Sunday for a non-churchgoer like Dave.
There are many forms this kind of bridging event can take.
- I know one family who every summer invite their neighbours to watch a thought-provoking current movie on a wide-screen TV in their back yard. Significant conversation about big issues of life and death always follows over hot chocolate.
- Many churches in the past thirty years have invited hockey legend Paul Henderson to be an after-dinner speaker, to talk about his hockey, his life and his faith.
- I recently heard of two clergy in England who have begun running regular discussions about spiritual issues in their local pub: the program is called “Pints of View.”
- And Jenny Andison, in a recent Wycliffe Booklet on Evangelism, Doors into Faith: Inviting Friends to Join the Big Game, gives more examples to stimulate our creativity.
Future editions of good idea! may feature some of these events. This edition, however, examines two churches, one in Eastern Canada and one in the West, who have made classical music just such a stepping stone towards faith. As it happens, both have run their programs in the church and on a Sunday. But in neither case is it in the form of a regular Sunday service. St. John’s Shaughnessy, Vancouver, has experimented with performances of Bach Cantatas, which were originally composed to be performed in the context of a church service, with a sermon on the relevant texts. And Stone Church in Fredericton NB has offered evening concerts of sacred music entitled The Great Composers Tell a Great Story, highlighting the Christian narrative that underlies much classical music.
If evangelism is helping people take steps towards faith in Jesus, and if those steps can take several years, we need to be sensitised to how we can help. A lively and welcoming church is often a piece of the puzzle. A friendship with a Christian is usually a key part of the process. But between the friendship and the normal life of the church there is often a great gulf fixed. Probably the journey to faith will never be an easy one, but the church can at least remove some of the unnecessary difficulties. One way to do that is by creating the sort of stepping stones which special events provide along the way.
Evangelism as Dance
This is available for sale in Audio CD format.
Purchase a copy for $15 Plus GST and $1 Shipping: Email sales@institute.wycliffecollege.ca to order
McLaren tells the story of his friend April, as she moved gradually towards Christian faith through an email conversation with him. Essential insights for evangelizing postmodern people.
Adam was a Gardener
What do you think of garbage collectors? Or architects? Or farmers? Not whether they are nice or nasty (though that might be important): but what do you think of them theologically?
The reason I ask is this: I find that in seminaries we do not always place a high value on the career theology students followed before they began to train for ordination. In fact, we sometimes talk as if it is fairly irrelevant, even inferior, to what they are doing now, and what they are going to do.
I see three problems with this attitude.
1. People coming to Wycliffe have often had the most impressive careers, in teaching, engineering, the arts, home-making, the law-you name it. Whatever we have been doing during that time, God has been at work, shaping us, developing our gifts, chipping away at our character, preparing us for the next phase.
Thus there is a very direct line connecting our previous work and our future work. If you were a manager, doesn’t a priest need to know how to manage people? If you were an educator, isn’t education central to congregational leadership? If you started your own business, might God not have prepared you to plant a new church? And so on.
2. More significant is the fact that this attitude to “secular” careers will likely rub off on the way we lead parish ministry. Who will you think of as the most spiritually mature Christians in your congregation? For many clergy, it is those who spend most time in the four walls of the church, serving on committees, singing in the choir, maintaining the building. Isn’t that the best way to measure their commitment to Christ and his church?
Exhibit A: Don Page was a senior civil servant in Ottawa. During his twenty years or so in that job, he started the Public Service Christian Fellowship, which eventually sponsored around a hundred Bible study groups scattered throughout government buildings in Ottawa. Through those groups over the years, he told me, about a hundred people became Christians.
How much did Don Page do in his church? Very little. The elders (it was a Fellowship Baptist church) said, “Don, that is clearly your ministry. We will support you and pray for you, but we will not ask you to take on any internal jobs at the church.”
Exhibit B: When Don left, to become Vice-President of Trinity Western University, he asked his VP to take over the PSCF. The man replied, “Sorry, I can’t do that: I’ve got too many responsibilities in my church.”
One of the chief reasons the church exists, surely, is to equip its members so that they can go out in witness to the world. If you like, Christ is centrifugal, inviting us to follow him into the “secular” world where he is already at work. Often, however, we work against this by making church centripetal, drawing our most energetic members away from “the world” they are supposed to inhabit into the running of the church’s infrastructure. Those who don’t serve on committees or running pancake suppers or planning the annual bazaar are regarded as second class Christians. Is there not something wrong with this picture?
3. But we do not witness simply by starting Bible study groups and seeking to bring others to Christ, important though those are. We witness simply by living as God’s people in God’s world in God’s way. The Christian architect shows by her work that God is concerned for the beauty and usefulness of where people live. The Christian scientist demonstrates his love of God by his delight in the intricacies of God’s amazing world. The Christian accountant shows by her efficiency and love of people something of the character of God. The Christian garbage collector mirrors the love of Christ, who dealt (and continues to deal) with the garbage in our lives. And the “call” of God to such jobs should be just as clear and compelling as the “call” to an ordained job in the church. Both are part of the work of God.
Thus the good pastor will affirm her people in their “secular” jobs and teach about the value of those jobs in the work of God. I know one pastor who visited as many as possible of his church members in their place of work, so that he could appreciate the opportunities and the challenges of the context in which they spent so much of their lives. As a result, his preaching became far more connected, and he stopped acting as if church activities were the most important thing his members were involved in.
As Luther said, “Every shoemaker can be a priest of God.” And, after all, Adam was a gardener.
Originally published in Morning Star