Theology of work

Perhaps the most important questions in developing a theology of work ar:-

Is this work God wants done? How does this work serve God’s purposes? How does this work fit into God’s purposes?

One useful article is this one: The Myth of Secular Work which is about work as ministry and raises some pertinent questions; one of those being ‘what needs does [my work] meet?’ Of course you may like also to consider that ‘needs’ is a slippery term and could by some people’s definitions include sex workers, and I’m not sure that Christians would want to be seeing that area of business as godly ministry.

Not quite as extreme is the issue also of being involved in work that God wants doing but where the details of how it is done don’t harmonise with a godly agenda: working in the food trades would be a case in point: God wants people fed; but globally and even nationally the distribution of the abundance we have leaves much to be desired hence the need for the Fair Trade movement, for example.

It’s worth quoting Graham Dow, from Dark Satanic Mills?. It comments on a time when he taught at St John’s College Nottingham in the 1970’s.

I set some of our students an essay inviting them to write a theological consideration of their occupation before they came to St. John’s to study for the ordained ministry. I gave them an outline of the sort of things I had in mind. They were to tackle questions such as: What was the purpose of God for man (sic and ff.) as it was reflected in that occupation? What sin lay at the heart of the relationships and structures which made up the social aspect of that employment? What direction of movement in development of this occupation is consistent with the final Kingdom of God? I received essays about a wide range of jobs from teaching to journalism, from accountancy to hairdressing. … in almost every case they wrote almost entirely about being a Christian witness in their work situation, doing their job the Christian way, and had nothing to say about the purpose of God for man in their occupation as an occupation. This exercise brought home to me that in the minds of those of us who come from the evangelical tradition there is a deep cleavage between the purpose of the God and world of secular reality. For us, the purposes of God are about people becoming Christians and Christians living as a holy people, the church. We do not think of God as having vital purposes for man at stake in the warp and woof of society as a whole.

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