Kruse Kronicle

The Value of a Person Versus the Value of Labor (Part 1)

(Part 2) (Part 3) (Part 4)

On what basis should people be compensated for their work? Economists say the value of labor is a function of supply and demand. Wages should correspond to the economic value of work. Theologians often object. (Note: We are all theologians but here I’m referring to those formally educated in theology.) They say it dehumanizes people. People are not faceless cogs in a machine to be differentially valued based on their economic contribution. Everyone is equal in God’s eyes. Income and wealth should be shared equitably.

What do you think? How do we sort this out? Is one right and the other wrong? My short answer is that human beings are created in the image of God. We have intrinsic value that transcends any instrumental purpose we might serve. The goods we produce do not have intrinsic value. Value is set by the interaction of a community’s subjective desire for a good and the good’s objective availability; so also with an hour of labor. God sets the value of people while the community sets the value of particular types of labor. The value of a person’s labor is not an indicator of a person’s intrinsic value. And that leads to some important theological and economic challenges. Let us unpack this.

Humans are unique. We have a hybrid existence. On one side, we are like creation and unlike God.  We are material beings. We share much in common with other mammals. We have bodies subject to the laws of thermodynamics, just like the rest of the material world.

On the other side, we are like God and unlike creation. We are spiritual beings. We have the ability to love, to see beauty, to reason, to create, and to discern morality and meaning. We are meant for eternal life.

We are a body and spirit fusion. These two realities must be held together. We are not spirits inside of bodies. In the end, we believe in “the bodily resurrection,” not transformation into spirits. In the language of Genesis 1:27, we are the image of God … eikons … in the created order. Not eikons in the sense of lifeless statues, but rather as God’s agents, discerning and acting in ways that are so integrated with God that God’s character and purpose are evidenced through us.

As agents, we have a mission. Genesis 1 and 2 give us the grand stories of creation that highlight that mission but due to our preoccupation with what these stories might say about origins we often seem to miss the point. I’m persuaded that origin is not the driving subject of these stories. The purpose of these stories is to articulate God’s sovereignty and our mission.

I think the best way to understand Genesis 1 and 2 is by analogy. Imagine creating a garden in your backyard. There are two phases. First, we take a plot of ground that is “formless and void” of the vision we have in mind. We remove rocks and weeds. We loosen the soil. We might add some fertilizer. We plant some seeds. Maybe we put a protective border around the garden and put up a fence to keep animals out. Having done so, we are done with the first phase and we “rest” from “creating” the garden. But the garden is not done.

In the second phase, the garden must be continually weeded. The fence must be monitored and repaired as needed. Plants must be protected from hard freezes or hail. There will be occasional watering. Some plants may need regular pruning and others will yield fruit that periodically needs to be harvested.  Only when the garden has come to full flourishing can we say the garden is complete.

Genesis 1 and 2 are phase one of God’s garden project. When God is finished creating, Genesis says God rested. Phase 1 was done. Now it was time to enjoy bringing it to fullness. In keeping with this narrative, Hebrews 4:1-11 says that God has been living in this seventh day of rest since creation. But this second phase work is not work God has chosen to do alone.

At the end of the sixth day of creation, God creates eikons of God’s self, and gives them the mission of exercising dominion over creation. Despite various perversions of “dominion” as a right to do as you please, the idea here is that human beings are God’s agents participating with God in realizing God’s vision. I will not unpack this all here, but in view is humanity as God’s vice-regents over creation and creation as God’s temple in which we serve as priests. Human beings are intended for loving communion with God as they and God go about the work of bringing “the garden” to full potential.

Now I do not understand the early chapters of Genesis to correspond to historical events. They are stories that relate profound truths about God’s vision and mission, and humanity’s role in that vision and mission. In short, God is sovereign over creation and human beings are God’s image-bearing agents in the world, participating with God and each other to realize God’s ends. Genesis 3 and onward reveals humanity’s sin and failure to embrace this mission. The biblical narrative is the story of God’s redemption and reclamation of that vision, even as God continues to “work the garden” and bring us into that work. Revelation records that in the end, “You have made them [redeemed humanity] to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God, and they will reign on the earth." (Rev 5:10) Priests and vice-regents.

Let us return to the question of value. Value is subjective. Nothing has value without someone to do the valuing. This is true in all cases but one. God alone has intrinsic value. No one can set God’s value. "There is one God who is father of all, over all, through all and within all." (Eph. 4:6) All value ultimately extends from God.

What the biblical narrative tells us that God values creation but humanity is valued in a way that is apart from the rest of creation. Human beings are God’s image bearers, springing forth from the love and communion of the Trinity. Human beings have immeasurable value in God’s eyes. Because God values human beings, we have intrinsic value by extension. It is God’s intention that human beings, individually and corporately, should thrive. Consequently, the measure of a shalom-filled community is one where all of the members thrive together. All human beings are precious in God’s eyes. As Christians thinking theologically and economically, a key end has to be a community where all have resources and opportunities to thrive. Sharing in material abundance is a component of that vision. But it is not the only component. … 

(Part 2) (Part 3) (Part 4)

Two-thirds of churched adults say it has been at least three years or more since they heard church teachings on work and career

Barna Group: Three Trends on Faith, Work and Calling

I'm two months slow in posting this article but it is important.

... Barna Group's new research shows that three-quarters of U.S. adults (75%) say they are looking for ways to live a more meaningful life. Whether such meaning is found in family, career, church, side projects or elsewhere, these are all questions of vocation—that is, the way in which people feel "called" to certain types of work and life choices. And in 2014, these questions remain as strong as ever for millions of Americans

Among Christians, there is an additional question: "What does God want me to do with my life?" According to Barna Group's study, only 40% of practicing Christians say they have a clear sense of God's calling on their lives. Christian Millennials are especially sensitive to this divine prompting—nearly half (48%) say they believe God is calling them to different work, yet they haven't yet made such a change.

Sermons are commonly preached on evangelism, discipleship, and spiritual disciplines—but what about vocation? It turns out that most churchgoers are craving more direction and discipleship when it comes to the theology of calling, especially as it relates to work. Barna research shows nearly two-thirds of churched adults say it has been at least three years or more since they heard church teachings on work and career, and yet, the workplace is where most Americans spend a the biggest share of their waking hours. ...

The implied message: Your work is irrelevant and without connection to you discipleship. Meaningful work is the purview of church institutions and only the work associated with "ministry" (evangelism, charity, and justice activities) is of value.

Faith and Business - Michael Jinkins

Huffington Post Business: Faith and Business - Michael Jinkins

The church has a knack for depreciating the vocations of the laity. Well, perhaps not all vocations of the laity. The church routinely blesses vocations like the helping professions and education, especially if they are in the not-for-profit realm. But the church is ambivalent, at best, when it comes to blessing the vocations of those folks whose business is, well, business. I find this troubling, since the overwhelming majority of Christians I know are working in the business world just making a living.

The problem the church has with business has as much to do with an ignorance of economics as a flawed theology of vocation. When pastors and theologians begin talking about economic matters, I often cringe, not only because of their lack of knowledge in the fields of financial and economic matters, but because of the thinness of the theological reflections. Usually such conversations reflect little more than the individual's biases dressed up in theological language to dress down someone else's interests. ...

Michael Jinkins is the president of Louisville Presbyterian Seminary. I can't tell you what an encouragement it is to hear a Presbyterian seminary president come forward and raise this issue. I have made the case in public and in private for just this emphasis for nearly ten years as I have served the denomination at the national level. I have made the case that church renewal begins when people begin to see the connection between what they do in their daily lives and God's mission. I occasionally caught an ear here and there but largely what I experienced was acute indifference. To hear the president of one of our seminaries acknowledge the deprecating (and I will add "demonizing" in some contexts) attitude toward people in business and lack of economic acumen is such an encouragement. Blessings on you, Dr. Jinkins, and may your tribe multiply among our denomination's hierarchy.

Jinkins mentions Presbyterian John Knapp's (now president of Hope College) How the Church Fails Businesspeople (and what can be done about it). I blogged through the book two years ago both here and at Jesus Creed. The index is here.

If you are interested in a couple of books about basic economics from a Christian perspective I would recommend Bulls, Bears and Golden Calves: Applying Christian Ethics in Economics, written by John Stapleford, a professor of mine when I was at Eastern University.

Also, Economics in Christian Perspective: Theory, Policy and Life Choices by Victor Claar and Robin Klay.

Does God Ordain Us to the Hardware Business?

I preached at Pine Ridge Presbyterian Church, in Kansas City, MO, on March 16, 2014. The sermon begins by wondering if it is appropriate to ordain people to the hardware business. The sermon text is Genesis 12:1-4 and the real issue is ministry of work in everyday life. I think this is the first time I have ever preached on this topic. See what you think.

PRPC Mar 16 2014 from Jay Waddell on Vimeo.

Should Christians Really Stop Saying This?

A Facebook friend linked this article this week, The One Thing Christians Should Stop Saying. I get the gist of what he is saying but I also have reservations. He is a businessperson and tells of how a friend asked how his business was going. He answered with his usual response:

"Definitely feeling blessed. Last year was the best year yet for my business. And it looks like this year will be just as busy."

But on further reflection he has concluded that it is wrong for him to say that. Two reasons:

... First, when I say that my material fortune is the result of God's blessing, it reduces The Almighty to some sort of sky-bound, wish-granting fairy who spends his days randomly bestowing cars and cash upon his followers. I can't help but draw parallels to how I handed out M&M's to my own kids when they followed my directions and chose to poop in the toilet rather than in their pants. Sure, God wants us to continually seek His will, and it's for our own good. But positive reinforcement?

God is not a behavioral psychologist.

Second, and more importantly, calling myself blessed because of material good fortune is just plain wrong. For starters, it can be offensive to the hundreds of millions of Christians in the world who live on less than $10 per day. You read that right. Hundreds of millions who receive a single-digit dollar "blessing" per day. ...

He goes on to talk about the beatitudes and talks about how it is the poor and the marginalized who are described as blessed. He concludes noting:

My blessing is this. I know a God who gives hope to the hopeless. I know a God who loves the unlovable. I know a God who comforts the sorrowful. And I know a God who has planted this same power within me. Within all of us.

And for this blessing, may our response always be,

"Use me."

Since I had this conversation, my new response is simply, "I'm grateful." Would love to hear your thoughts.

There is a lot of truth in this. I find myself strongly identifying with his observations ... and yet ...

What about passages like Deut 8:17-19:

“17 Do not say to yourself, "My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth." 18 But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, so that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your ancestors, as he is doing today.” NRSV

I have been in small groups with countless businesspeople and entrepreneurs. What I hear from so many of them is a deep gratefulness for the opportunity to express what they understand as a God-given gift for creativity. They feel gratefulness because they can benefit their customers, their workers, their families, and, yes, themselves. When I hear them talk about being blessed, I don’t hear them saying, “I did all the right stuff, now see how God rewarded me.” Most are intensely aware of their shortcomings, they make endless mistakes, and yet they are still here in their businesses. They sense God’s presence with them in their work but I don’t get the sense that they think that those whose businesses fail do so because of a lack of God’s presence. They know people who have done everything seemingly right and don’t make it. They feel blessed in the sense that in God’s grand scheme of things, they are where they are.

What I worry about is the compartmentalization of our faith and the business world. If the businessperson claims all credit for achieving success in creating a sustainable profitable business, then we chastise her for attributing success to herself alone. But if she talks about being blessed in her work (i.e., God had a hand in her success), then that also is taboo because she is saying God withheld blessing from someone else who didn’t do well. In short, if you are in business, then you are only entitled to have vague feelings of gratefulness but not to see God as present in your daily life.

I’m not saying that the way "blessing" is used is without abuse. Someone in the comments section of the article talked about "blessed to be a blessing" as a corrective and I think that has merit. But I worry that the thinking in this article just drives a deeper wedge between faith and daily life. Maybe I read too much between the lines but it seems to me that the thinking here is evidence of a deep ambivalence so much of the church has about business and the people who make their living there.

Any thoughts?

Why 'Follow Your Passion' Is Bizarre Advice

Huffington Post: Why 'Follow Your Passion' Is Bizarre Advice

This is an excellent article on an important TED Talk!

A couple years ago, I launched a simple experiment. I identified a large group of people, from a variety of different professional fields, who all self-reported to love what they do for a living. I then gave them a straightforward prompt: "tell me your story."

My goal was to better understand how people end up passionate about their work. I succeeded in identifying some common patterns, but perhaps equally interesting is what I didn't find: very few of these happy workers knew in advance what they wanted to do with their life -- their path was more haphazard.

This conclusion is surprising to many in our culture where "follow your passion" has been canonized as unimpeachable advice. ...

... "Follow your passion... what could possibly be wrong with that?" Rowe joked in his talk. "Probably the worst advice I ever got." ...

... In his talk, Rowe points out that many of the happiest people in the country have jobs that no one would ever identify as a pre-existing passion. ...

... The pig farmer is not happy because he was born with a pig farmer gene, or because he grew up feeling a deep pre-existing passion for pork. He's instead happy because he's making a great living, has tons of autonomy, and does work that's useful to the world (he raises his pigs on food scraps from nearby casinos that would otherwise go to waste). You could replace pig farming with any number of pursuits, but so long as they yielded these same traits, he'd love his work. ...

... The alternative explanation -- that it's what you get out of your job, not the specifics of the work, that matters -- begins to seem a lot more reasonable. ...

... Don't follow your passion, let it follow you in your quest to become useful to the world.

The Evangelical Work Ethic

Christianity Today: The Evangelical Work Ethic

Forget Weber. We don’t need social science to know that God cares about our work. ...

... American evangelicals have been rediscovering the precious truth that all honest work serves as a spiritual calling to fruitful and worshipful service (Gen. 2:15; Col. 3:22-24). That means everyone – not just religious professionals – has the opportunity to glorify God with their work. We shape ourselves into the kind of people God wants us to be in everything we do, not just in the few hours we spend engaged in church activities. Most of life is work, because God designed us that way. ...

... That doesn't mean all the issues are clear and simple. Nothing shows the difficulty of understanding the relationship between work and faith more than our continued insistence on framing this issue as a debate over Max Weber's long-discredited theory of the Protestant work ethic. Weber argued that Protestants value work because they think prosperity is proof that you're saved; as anyone who knows anything about church history can tell you, this was and is slanderous nonsense. He also argued that teaching people that God values their work created an economic system that thrives on greed and materialism; as anyone who knows economic history can tell you, this is just as preposterous. Weber's theory has been almost universally dismissed by a century of theologians, historians, and economists.

Nonetheless, Weber's terms and categories continue to dominate popular discussions, because his approach strictly separates "facts" from "values." This allows secularists to think about possible cultural connections between faith and work while preserving a comfortable work/spirit dualism in their own lives. That dualism is exactly what the faith and work movement seeks to challenge. As long as Weber dominates the conversation it's difficult to get people to understand the message. 

However, the idea that Protestantism impacts attitudes about work—which the recent research investigates—is not misplaced. The Protestant Reformation brought unique advances in our understanding of God's purposes for work and vocation. ...

... Our culture's hunger for meaning and dignity in everyday work is a window through which Christians can shine the light of the gospel. No civilization can grow and flourish when its people spend the vast majority of their waking hours in an activity they find meaningless. The deepest root of our economic crisis is that people no longer find a worthy purpose in the daily practice of diligence, honesty, self-control, generosity, and service. This creates a timely moment for people to rediscover how God brings dignity and meaning to daily life. ...

The author is right about Weber. I read several of his works in grad school. His significance was in the kinds of questions he asked, not in his particular theories. "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" is no longer accepted as valid social analysis and it wasn't when I was in grad school thirty years ago. It apparently takes some folks a few decades to get the memo. I particularly think the last paragraph quoted above is a keeper.

The Evolution Of Work

Forbes: The Evolution Of Work

David Fitch on a New "Order" of Clergy

Reclaiming the Mission: Create a New ‘Order’ of Clergy: A Recommendation to Denominations - David Fitch

... I suggest there is a need for a new order of clergy (if I may call it that): a missional leader who can understand the relationship between work and ministry so that it is seamless. He or she dedicates 10-15 hours a week to organizing the Kingdom community in their local context.  He or she knows her gifting and can lead out of that gifting. He or she has a job that he/she can support her/himself and her family with. He/she can develop a job skill that can adapt to changing circumstances. Often, he or she adjust their work hours so that she can work a tad less than the average 40 hour week. He or she can then give time to the leadership of their community without disrupting a daily/weekly rhythm of being present with family and neighborhood as well. The small church community can offer a small stipend to make up the difference. He or she does all this with 3 to 4 other leaders who do the same. Each is recognized for one of the five-fold giftings out of which they minister and lead in relation to the other leaders. They are apostle, prophet, pastor-organizer, teacher-organizer, evangelist working together, 15 hours plus 15 hours, plus 15 hours, plus 15 hours plus 15 hours. They are doing more out of multiple giftings than one single pastor ever could. They are bearing each other’s burdens. They are a “band of brothers and sisters.” This becomes a sustainable missionary kind of ministry that changes the whole dynamics of ministry because they are present in jobs, families and neighborhoods and makes possible long term ministry in context. It is, in essence, a new version of the old monastic orders of mission adapted to the capitalistic societies in the West while providing the means to resist (and provide witness) to its more oppressive sinful patterns.

Denominations need to define a new order of clergy because anyone seeking to operate in ministry this way will easily get defeated. Some of the more obvious ways they will get defeated are: ...

... For all these reasons we need to fund a new imagination for a new emerging clergy class that are in essence self sustaining contextual N. American missionaries. But the denominations for the most part have not navigated this. My guess is, if the denominations formed a new order of clergy, helped developed imagination and supporting structures for it, there would be untold numbers flocking to this group. There are literally thousands of second career people, and thousands of younger seminary graduates  dissatisfied with current options (dying small church senior pastor or mega church staff person) who would gravitate towards this kind of commissioning.  But we have no larger imagination for it. A new order of clergy could help and support these kind of missionaries and stir up such an imagination. Such an order of clergy could seed a whole new mission for a renewal of the Kingdom in N America. ...

The Gospel According to ‘Me’

New York Times: The Gospel According to ‘Me’

The booming self-help industry, not to mention the cash cow of New Age spirituality, has one message: be authentic! Charming as American optimism may be, its 21st-century incarnation as the search for authenticity deserves pause. The power of this new version of the American dream can be felt through the stridency of its imperatives: Live fully! Realize yourself! Be connected! Achieve well-being!

Despite the frequent claim that we are living in a secular age defined by the death of God, many citizens in rich Western democracies have merely switched one notion of God for another — abandoning their singular, omnipotent (Christian or Judaic or whatever) deity reigning over all humankind and replacing it with a weak but all-pervasive idea of spirituality tied to a personal ethic of authenticity and a liturgy of inwardness. The latter does not make the exorbitant moral demands of traditional religions, which impose bad conscience, guilt, sin, sexual inhibition and the rest.

Unlike the conversions that transfigure the born-again’s experience of the world in a lightning strike, this one occurred in stages: a postwar existentialist philosophy of personal liberation and “becoming who you are” fed into a 1960s counterculture that mutated into the most selfish conformism, disguising acquisitiveness under a patina of personal growth, mindfulness and compassion. Traditional forms of morality that required extensive social cooperation in relation to a hard reality defined by scarcity have largely collapsed and been replaced with this New Age therapeutic culture of well-being that does not require obedience or even faith — and certainly not feelings of guilt. Guilt must be shed; alienation, both of body and mind, must be eliminated, most notably through yoga practice after a long day of mind-numbing work.

In the gospel of authenticity, well-being has become the primary goal of human life. Rather than being the by-product of some collective project, some upbuilding of the New Jerusalem, well-being is an end in itself. The stroke of genius in the ideology of authenticity is that it doesn’t really require a belief in anything, and certainly not a belief in anything that might transcend the serene and contented living of one’s authentic life and baseline well-being. In this, one can claim to be beyond dogma. ...

Dying and Booming Industries in the Next Decade

Business Insider: 12 US Industries That Will Collapse In The Next Decade

The long decline of American manufacturing isn't over yet.

Fifteen of the 20 fastest shrinking industries are in the manufacturing sector, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report on job growth from 2010 to 2020.

Government jobs, especially in the postal service, are also getting axed. ...

• Glass and glass product manufacturing
• Metalworking machinery manufacturing
• Miscellaneous manufacturing
• Federal government jobs except for the Postal Service and electric utilities
• Pesticide, fertilizer, and otheragricultural chemical manufacturing
• Metal ore mining
• Pipeline transportation
• Computer and peripheral equipment manufacturing
• Communications equipment manufacturing
• Postal service
• Leather and hide tanning and finishing, and other leather and allied product manufacturing
• Apparel knitting mills

14 US Industries That Will Boom In The Next Decade

There are lots of jobs in America if you know where to look.

The fastest-growing industries — according to a 2012 Bureau of Labor Statistics report — include ones tied to the aging population, like home health care services and offices of health care practitioners.

High tech industries are also doing well, and there's even a steady comeback happening in construction.

Between 2010 and 2020, the BLS projects an overall gain of 20.5 million jobs in America. ...

• Community and vocational rehabilitation services
• Facilities support services
• Other professional, scientific, and technical services
• Commercial and industrial machinery and equipment rental and leasing
• Construction
• Software publishers
• Offices of health practitioners
• Outpatient, laboratory, and other ambulatory care services
• Cement and concrete product manufacturing
• Computer systems design and related services
• Veneer, plywood, and engineered wood product manufacturing
• Management, scientific, and technical consulting services
• Individual and family services
• Home health care services

Business as Calling

Last summer I had the privilege of meeting Dr. Thom Thomson, professor of finance at the University of Texas. Dr. Thomson was in Toronto a week ago preaching at his brother's church, Every Nation, Greater Toronto. The topic was "Business as Calling." This is a wonderful presentation!  You can find the 30 sermon at Faith & the Marketplace Part 2: BUSINESS AS CALLING or by clicking below. For some reason my player indicates it will 78 minutes long but it is actually about 30 minutes. (Disclosure: At 11:40 into the sermon the author of the controversial Facebook post was me. I was intrigued that Dr. Thomson picked up on this post because I have privately used the responses to to the post as an example of the deep cynicism toward business held by so many theological professionals.):

Here is the sermon setup:

A leading personal finance magazine published its list of the 10 best fields of study based on the potential they had of offering a steady, well-paying career. Some of you may already be pursuing these studies or are in these business areas, such as Pharmacy and Pharmacology, Nursing, Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Management Information Systems and Treatment Therapy Professions.  As we read the New Testament in the Bible, we come across other popular professions: Jesus was a carpenter. Paul was a tentmaker. And Peter was a fisherman. All noble business pursuits providing a valuable service to the community and offering a means to make a good living. Our city – Toronto – is built on business. So how does faith enter the equation? Does it have a place? This week Dr. Thomas Thomson, a finance professor at the University of Texas, continues our series by giving us a fresh perspective on how faith can positively affect business and how business can be a worthy calling. Join us, and bring a friend, to Innis Town Hall at 10:30 a.m.

Six Ideas on How to Lead Congregations to Integrate Work and Discipleship

The High Calling: Six Ideas on How to Lead Congregations to Integrate Work and Discipleship

“How can we create a congregation where work and discipleship are truly integrated?” This is a question I am hearing more often, even though much has been written about a theology of work in recent years.

Pastors and church leaders are looking for a programmatic strategy. I don’t think there is one. ...

This is a piece I wrote for the High Calling. They posted it yesterday. What do you think? What ideas do you have?

The Benefits of Servant Leadership

Harvard Business School's "Working Knowledge" has a post, Why Isn’t ‘Servant Leadership’ More Prevalent?, which is a bit strange because the article never addresses the question. However, I did think this was interesting:

Now it appears that a group of organizational psychologists, led by Adam Grant, are attempting to measure the impact of servant leadership on leaders, not just those being led. Grant describes research in his recent book, Give and Take, that suggests that servant leaders are not only more highly regarded than others by their employees and not only feel better about themselves at the end of the day but are more productive as well. His thesis is that servant leaders are the beneficiaries of important contacts, information, and insights that make them more effective and productive in what they do even though they spend a great deal of their time sharing what they learn and helping others through such things as career counseling, suggesting contacts, and recommending new ways of doing things.

Further, servant leaders don't waste much time deciding to whom to give and in what order. They give to everyone in their organizations. Grant concludes that giving can be exhausting but also self-replenishing. So in his seemingly tireless efforts to give, described in the book, Grant makes it a practice to give to everyone until he detects a habitual "taker" that can be eliminated from his "gift list."

The Active Life - 4. "The Woodcarver": A Model for Right Action. Parker Palmer

This week we are looking at chapter 4, “’The Woodcarver’: A Model for Right Action,” in Parker Palmer’s book, The Active Life. Palmer is drawing on another story by the ancient Taoist philosopher, Chuang Tzu.

 

The Woodcarver.

 

Khing, the master carver, made a bell stand

Of prescious wood. When it was finished,

All who saw it were astounded. The said it must be

The work of spirits.

The Prince of Lu said to the master carver:

“What is your secret?”

 

Khling replied: “I am only a workman:

I have no secret. There is only this:

When I began to think about the work you commanded

I guarded my spirit, did not expend it

On trifles, that were no to the point.

I fasted in order to set

My heart at rest.

After three days fasting, I had forgotten gain and success.

After five days

I had forgotten criticism.

After seven days

I had forgotten my body

With all its limbs.

 

“By this time all thought of your Highness

And of the court had faded away.

All that might distract me from the work

Had vanished.

I was collected in the single thought

Of the bell stand.

 

“Then I went to the forest

To see the trees in their own natural state.

When the right tree appeared before my eyes,

The bell stand also appeared in it, clearly, beyond doubt.

All I had to do was to put forth my hand

And begin.

 

“If I had not met this particular tree

There would have been

No bell stand at all.

 

“What happened?

My own collected thought

Encountered the hidden potential in the wood;

From this live encounter came the work

Which you ascribe to the spirits. (55-56)

 Palmer suspects that many people will find this story a bit on the romantic side. Does it really apply to our contemporary work world?

Many people feel hampered by the hierarchies in which we often must work, by institutional structures that curtail the independence that we think we need to do our creative best. But few people work in a setting as demanding as the woodcarver’s. … When I ask Chinese scholars what would have happened if Khing had failed to produce a bell stand acceptable to the prince, they usually answer with a sweeping movement of the forefinger across the front of the throat. (57)

Few of us work under such demanding circumstances and yet the woodcarver seems to us to take on odd approach in completing his task. Palmer writes that after years of reflection on this story he sees four “critical junctures” in the story where an element of work is revealed that we can learn from. “The four elements are motives, skills and gifts, ‘the other,’ and results.” (58) Palmer unpacks these four elements during the rest of the chapter.

Motives

Each action has a motive behind it. Khing is not making the bell stand out of some whimsical desire to create but in response to a command by the prince. He must do this to survive. This may not be the most desirable motivation for action but it is what is. However, once the action is set in motion, Khing has the freedom to choose how he will complete his task. He begins by fasting to cleanse himself of all the destructive pressures and motivations that will hinder him from authentically engaging his task. By forgetting the details of his present context he was able to re-member … join back together the authentic pieces of his identity … and act out of who he truly was. Palmer writes:

 … If we are to transcend the motives and context that so often limit and distort our action, we must enter into our versions of fasting, forgetting, and dying. (64)

As I read this section my mind kept going to this passage in the Bible:

Col 3:22-24

Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything, not only while being watched and in order to please them, but wholeheartedly, fearing the Lord. Whatever your task, put yourselves into it, as done for the Lord and not for your masters, since you know that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward; you serve the Lord Christ.  NRSV

R. Paul Stevens notes that ministry is not defined by what we do but rather by who we serve. It is critical to continually “re-member” our identity as servants of Christ in the face of a world that endlessly seeks to dismember us with other motives.

Skills and Gifts.

Khing resists the adulation thrust upon him for his work and thereby the temptation to unreflectively throw himself into his task. His skill is not superhuman. His workmanship comes from experience, practice, and awareness. People often give such accolades (“the work of the spirits”) to an accomplished craftsman because ascribing high quality of work to supernatural sources frees them of reflecting on how poorly devoted they have been to their own development. Khing is not letting others off the hook.

Palmer goes on to reflect on a distinction between innate abilities we possess and skills we have learned. He writes:

The skills we are most aware of possessing are often those we have acquired only through long hours of study and practice, at considerable financial or personal cost. Precisely because these skills once cost us effort to acquire, and still cost us effort to employ, we are acutely aware of owning them. Ironically, these self-conscious skills are often not our leading strengths; if they were, they would not be so effortful. But they are our strengths upon which we sometimes build our identities and our careers – though we build on an anxious, uncertain foundation. Meanwhile, our native, instinctive gifts either languish unused and unappreciated or get used unconsciously without being named and claimed. (66)

Concerning the woodcarver, Palmer observes:

… the woodcarver possesses several other gifts [other than technical woodcarver skills], all of which are essential to the mastery he demonstrates: the capacity to wait patiently for insight to emerge, the capacity to trust in the outcomes of uncertain process, the capacity to take risks under pressure, the capacity to speak his truth even when it is not what people want to hear. (67)

To discover our innate abilities, Palmer suggests we might want to reflect on our earliest memories as a child and remember how we spent our time. What things brought us pleasure and what things we could not abide? By going back to early memories of ourselves we can recapture what we naturally did before we were socialized to conform to particular norms or to ground our identity in acquired skills. I was counseled to do this a few years ago. I think the exercise was one of the most important acts of self-discovery I have ever done.

The Other

Action always involves an “other,” whether other people or other objects. “Right action requires knowledge of the other’s nature, which means knowledge of its potentials and limits, of what it can and cannot do.” (70)

In this section I think Palmer is wrestling with a polarity. We are not intended to leave the world untouched in a pristine primitive state but neither are we to treat the “other” as only raw material to be shaped for utilitarian purposes. In this sense, I’m reminded of Darrell Cosden (Theology of Work) who reminds us that the natural order is simultaneously the raw material out of which we fashion artifacts and also our home. Embracing either pole without the other is dehumanizing. Our human existence is one of correctly discerning how we work in harmony with other, even as we reshape it.

Results

Palmer does not deny that achieving results are important but he pushes back against the idea that the only meaningful, or even primary, thing is the results.

“… As long as ‘effectiveness’ is the ultimate standard by which we judge our actions, we will act only toward ends we are sure we can achieve. People who undertake projects of real breadth and depth are very unlikely to be “effective,” since effectiveness is measured by short-term results (never mind the fact that such people may be creating cultural legacies by their “failures”). But people with small visions will win the effectiveness awards, since those projects are so insignificant that they can almost always ‘succeed’ (never mind the fact that they contribute nothing of real merit to the commonweal). (75)

Palmer tells of a friend who said, “’I have never asked myself if I was being effective, but only if I was being faithful.’” (76) But Palmer goes on to add:

Again, results are not irrelevant. We rightly care about outcomes; we have to live with them, and being accountable for them is part of right action. But to make results the primary measure of action is a sure path to either inanity or insanity. The only standard that can guide and sustain us in action worth taking is whether the action corresponds to the reality of the situation, including the reality of our own inward nature.

The paradox is that faithful action does get results. …  (78-79)

Finally, Palmer reminds us the when we act we are not only shaping the “other” but we are also shaping ourselves.

 

Questions

Do you feel trapped in your work, compelled to do work that may not be your first choice or work for which your employer is seeking to motivate you in ways that dismember your true identity? What do you think of Palmer’s idea of “re-membering” ourselves?

Have you ever deeply reflected on your childhood to discover what things brought you pleasure or dissatisfaction? What does such reflection tell you about the innate abilities God has given you?

It what ways do you experience a tension between seeing the world as raw material and as home that nourishes us?

How have you seen the tension between results and faithfulness played out in your own life?

Previous/Next

Why Tim Keller Wants You to Stay in That Job You Hate

Christianity Today: Why Tim Keller Wants You to Stay in That Job You Hate

There are few better places in the world where Tim Keller could write a book about career and calling. "New York City is a place where people live in order to work," says the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan and author most recently of Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Work (Dutton). "They basically live more in their work than in their neighborhoods. That . . . means that if you start talking about work, you get right at their hearts."

In a recent sit-down conversation with This Is Our City executive producer Andy Crouch, Keller explained why he wanted to write a more comprehensive book about faith and work, how he learned to answer congregants' questions about their work, and what Redeemer has done to equip laypeople to live into their vocations outside the church.

Andy: What's been missing from faith-and-work books that Every Good Endeavor was designed to address?

Tim: When I read faith-and-work books, they tended to pass by each other. I had the sense that they were drawing on different streams of thought, maybe different biblical or historical themes. I tend to be a complexifier. I like to hold the different biblical themes in tension. I got the sense that most books on faith and work tended to isolate a certain idea. This book is trying to bring the different streams together.

What streams of thoughts have been most missing when we talk about faith and work?

It depends on who you're talking about. It seems to me the evangelical tradition tends to talk a lot about how faith essentially spiritually helps you deal with the troubles and the stresses of work. You need help to face challenges.

Mainline churches tend to put more emphasis on social justice and basically did a critique of capitalism early on, so whenever the mainline churches or ecumenical movement did faith-and-work stuff, it was usually critiquing the market, not "how's your heart?"

The Lutheran stream emphasizes that all work is God's work. Worldview doesn't matter. You make a good pair of shoes, then you're doing God's work, because work is God's way of caring for creation.

The Calvinist stream was more like yes, it's not just you are caring for creation through work, but you are shaping it. and therefore your beliefs have an impact.

When you put those four streams together, I think they're very comprehensive. If you isolate them from each other, they can create idiosyncrasies at best and imbalances at worst. ...

The Truth About Entrepreneurs: Twice As Many Are Over 50 than Under 25

PBS: The Truth About Entrepreneurs: Twice As Many Are Over 50 than Under 25

... Myths abound about the young entrepreneurs who dreamed up crazy ideas while in their dorm room, raised millions of dollars in venture capital, and started billion-dollar businesses. But these are just the outliers. The typical entrepreneur is more like Albert -- a middle-aged professional who learns about a market need and starts a company with his own savings.

Research that my team completed in 2009 determined that the average age of a successful entrepreneur in high-growth industries such as computers, health care, and aerospace is 40. Twice as many successful entrepreneurs are over 50 as under 25; and twice as many, over 60 as under 20. The vast majority -- 75 percent -- have more than six years of industry experience and half have more than 10 years when they create their startup. Nearly 70 percent start their companies to capitalize on business ideas that they have -- which they see as a way to build wealth. ...

Gene Veith on Vocation

Intercollegiate Review: How to Find Your Vocation in College - Gene Veith

... These are all struggles about your vocation. That word has become a synonym for “job,” so that colleges debate the extent to which higher education should be primarily vocational training or whether it should have higher goals, such as cultivating the intellect. But vocation is simply the Latinate word for “calling.” It is one of those theological words—like inspiration, revelation, mission, and vision—that has been taken over by the corporate world and drained of its meaning. The idea is that what you do for a living can be a calling. From God. That He has made you in a certain way and given you certain talents, opportunities, and inclinations. He then calls you to certain tasks, relationships, and experiences.

Your job is only a part of that, and sometimes not the most important part. We have vocations in the family (being a child, getting married, becoming a parent) and in the society (being a citizen, being a friend).  There are also vocations in the church (pastor, layperson), but even if you don’t believe in religion, the vocations are operative. Not only that, according to Martin Luther, the great theologian of vocation, God works through vocation, including the work of people who do not believe in Him. God gives us our daily bread by means of farmers, millers, bakers, and the person who served you your last meal. God creates new life by means of mothers and fathers. He heals by means of doctors, nurses, and pharmacists.  He protects us by means of police officers, judges, and the military callings.  He creates works of beauty and meaning by the talents He has given to artists.

The purpose of every vocation—in the workplace, the family, the church, the society—is to love and serve our neighbors. These are the “good works” that we are given to do. That may sound idealistic. Surely in our participation in the economy we are motivated by our enlightened self-interest. And yet it is surely true that if we are not helping someone by the goods or services we provide, we will not stay in business very long. Even our self-interests are taken up into God’s providential workings. In serving ourselves we also find ourselves serving others, whether or not that is our intention. Thus our work, our families, and our citizenship can be charged with moral and even spiritual significance. ...

... College students are often so fixated on what their future vocations may be that they forget that they have vocations right now.

Slinging burgers may be a dull and boring occupation with the sole purpose of earning tuition money. While it won’t be your vocation forever, it is still a calling, a sphere of service to one’s neighbors–customers, the boss, fellow workers—and a meaningful human enterprise.

College students also have a vocation as members of their family, with obligations to their parents, brothers, and sisters. They also have a vocation as citizens of the various communities they inhabit (their hometown, their college community, their state, their country). They also have vocations in their religious communities, if they have one.

Most notably, they have the vocation of being college students. This calling, like all the others, has its proper work—namely, to study, read, go to class, discuss ideas, and write papers. ...

Good stuff! In the popular vernacular we typically think of "vocation" as an "occupation." "Vocation," or "calling," is mission given to us by God. R. Paul Stevens talks about three vocations. 

Human vocation - Doing all of those things we do that make our world run and contribute to human flourishing that God called us to do at creation.

Christian vocation - Caring on the work of Christ in the world.

Personal vocation - Our particular response to the first two vocations in our particular time and context.

Our occupation is an important application of our vocation but our occupation can change. It is only one among many possible applications. And vocation includes much more than our occupation.

A Theology of Work by One Businesswoman

Ampersand Photography: Thursday Q & A // Theology of Work

It’s Thursday! Time for another Q & A post!

A question someone posed to me a few weeks ago (I’m sorry, I forgot to write down who asked this…):

“I am a fellow photographer desiring to make a business and have been thinking through things such as: What is work according to God? What does it look like? What does rest look like? How have these two been redeemed by Christ? What are they going to look like for my life? … I would love to hear your mission statement: the reason you work and the way you should work.  I would also love to hear any edifying words you have for someone starting a photography business.

This is such a great question, and a necessary thing for any person to think through, whether Christian or not— regardless of whether you are an artist, a businessman, a homemaker, or a student. I’m going to answer this in points, that could, perhaps, be an entire blog series, but I have so many other questions to answer that I’m just going to do this all in one shot. ...

1. Defining Work

What is work according to God? What does it look like? What does rest look like? How have these two been redeemed by Christ? 

Answer: work is an expression of God’s character. It’s original purpose is the “advancement of human flourishing to the glory of God.” We were made to work, because we were made in th image of God, who is a Worker.

I attended The Gospel at Work Conference back in January. The opening session was entitled, “The Theology of Work,” and is to date, one of the best sermon’s I’ve ever heard. You can download the message here (and I highly recommend that you do so… like, NOW). A few basic points from that message: ...

Read the whole thing. You may not agree with her at every point but I love how she is wrestling with a practical theology of work in her in own context and being intentional about integrating her life.

Want to be Missional? Equip Those in the Workplace

The High Calling: Want to be Missional? Equip Those in the Workplace

I was recently invited to teach a session of a seminary class called “Pastoral Functions” at an extension of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. In this class, the pastors-in-training had been discussing such topics as Worship, Disciplemaking, Evangelism, Visitation, Funerals, Weddings, Pastoral Counseling, Children’s Ministry, etc.—topics we’d expect in a class like this.

But I was invited to talk about something significantly different and paradigm-shifting. Pastors need to recalibrate their ministry philosophy so that the members of their congregations are affirmed, encouraged, and equipped to serve God through their various vocations. I challenged the students to help the people of God participate in God’s mission on earth through their vocations. Thankfully, seminaries are beginning to understand that they will need to transition their curriculum beyond the traditional topics if they want to train pastors to lead missional churches. ...

An excellent piece by Bob Robinson. Spot on! Read the whole thing.

Rise of the Freelance Economy

Atlantic Cities has an interesting piece about the rise of the freelance economy. The Geography of America's Freelance Economy.

... Slightly more than 10 million American workers, or seven percent of the workforce, are self-employed, according to estimates compiled by Rob Sentz and his colleagues at Economic Modeling Specialists (EMSI, for short). EMSI's figures are based on data from the United States Census (American Community Survey and Non-employer Statistics). More than four million (43 percent) of those self-employed workers are members of the creative class of scientists and technologists, knowledge workers and professionals, artists, designers, entertainers, and media workers.

... It's high time we temper the the mythology of freelance work with a dose of reality. While the popular image of self-employment is technology or knowledge working free-agents, the reality is that the ranks of the self-employed are populated by a mix of high-skill knowledge work and low-skill, much lower wage service work. Not only do they often earn less money, self-employed Americans lack the basic protections and security that workers and a middle-class society require.

Given the flexibility that has come along with the knowledge and service-based economy and the preference many Americans have for doing their own thing, it will be next to impossible to go back to the old system of long-term employment tenure in "real jobs" of the past. The number of full-employed independent workers is projected to swell to 30 million in the next decade and the total number of freelancers could reach as many as 70 million when as much as half of the workforce could be involved in some sort of freelance work. What's more, 57 percent of freelancers chose to go independent in 2012, as Johnson reports, and only 13 percent say they want to go back to traditional employment.

What's needed is nothing less than a new social compact which reflects the new realities of work. ...

Then Ross Douthart, writing in the New York Times, has this piece: A World Without Work

If such a utopia were possible, one might expect that it would be achieved first among the upper classes, and then gradually spread down the social ladder. First the wealthy would work shorter hours, then the middle class, and finally even high school dropouts would be able to sleep late and take four-day weekends and choose their own adventures — “to hunt in the morning,” as Karl Marx once prophesied, “fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner ...”

Yet the decline of work isn’t actually some wild Marxist scenario. It’s a basic reality of 21st-century American life, one that predates the financial crash and promises to continue apace even as normal economic growth returns. This decline isn’t unemployment in the usual sense, where people look for work and can’t find it. It’s a kind of post-employment, in which people drop out of the work force and find ways to live, more or less permanently, without a steady job. So instead of spreading from the top down, leisure time — wanted or unwanted — is expanding from the bottom up. Long hours are increasingly the province of the rich. ...

Whether or not either of these stories has things framed just right, I do think we are in the midst of a major upheavel in what work and employment look like. I remember reading once that Americans made or grew more than 80% of everything they consumed in 1885. By 1915 is was less than 20%. I suspect this last decade is the leadning edge of changes that may be just as profound, and just as hard to anticipate, as those on the horizon in 1885.

The 20 Greatest Songs About Work

The Pessimist: The 20 Greatest Songs About Work

You might hate your job, but there’s nothing like a good song to make you feel like you’re not alone. (I mean, except when you think about it, and realize that the musicians who performed the song probably no longer have to work in an office, and are most likely drinking Champagne with supermodels in a brand-new Learjet 85, while you’re eating off-brand corn chips you bought from a convenience store that the health department should have closed down a long time ago.)

The point is, labor has been the single most popular subject of pop songs for decades (besides girls, cars, alcohol, parties, religion, and about 10,000 other things). So below, we’ve collected 20 of the best songs about the working life. Think of it as an extremely depressing playlist, like if your local radio station hired a German film director as its morning drive-time DJ. If we missed anything, let us know in the comments! (But be nice, or we’ll tell your boss you’re goldbricking again.)  ...

Take a look at the list. Any songs you would add?

 

Happiness Means Being Just Rushed Enough

Scientific American: Happiness Means Being Just Rushed Enough

... However, despite this broad consensus, and its obvious health and quality-of-life implications, there seems little empirical survey evidence that daily life is truly speeding up. ...

... In that 1965 survey, we found 24 percent of respondents aged 18-64 said they “always” felt rushed, and 48 percent said they had no excess time. When we repeated the questions in the 1990s, these figures had risen to 35 percent “always” rushed and 55 percent with no excess time, where they remained, more or less, until we last asked the questions in a 2004 survey.

This set the stage, then, for our repeating these questions in two separate surveys in 2009-10. Quite contrary to our expectations, both of these surveys now show decreases in Americans feeling “always” rushed particularly among the busiest group of those aged 18 to 64 — a 7-point drop in feeling always rushed to 28 percent — and a drop to 45 percent in those feeling no excess time. ...

... Almost 50 percent of respondents who feel least rushed and who also feel least excess time report being “very happy”, almost twice as high as the rest of the US public. It is an elite group, making up less than 10 percent of the population. They not only seem happier by ignoring the “rat race” and subscribing to a philosophy of “Don’t hurry, be happy,” but by organizing their lifestyles to minimize spells of boredom and lack of focus as well. Thus, there seems dysfunction in having either too much or too little free time. In a society that otherwise seems obsessed with speed and the latest IT gadgets, this would seem to offer a path to a more contented lifestyle.

Ten Ways to Encourage Vocational Stewardship in Your Church

Re-Integrate: Ten Ways to Encourage Vocational Stewardship in Your Church

Over the years I've had conversations with pastors who want to do more to integreate faith and work but struggle to know where to begin. Re-Integrate has a post with some very practical ideas.

Originally published at www.vocationalstewardship.org

1. During corporate worship services, pray for members by vocation. This could take a variety of expressions:

• pray aloud for a different occupational group (e.g., educators or businesspeople) each week
• invite congregants who are facing difficulties on the job to come forward during or after the service for prayer
• pray for individual members by name and vocation

2. Visit church members at their places of work.

3. Recognize vocational achievements and awards of congregants in the church’s newsletter or on its website. ...

Read the whole post. Excellent ideas!

Saturday Links

1. I don't know much about Common Good RVA but I like their vision. Christianity Today published a piece featuring them, Why the Rest of Your Week Matters to God

"In general, the church has done a fine job equipping Christians for the "private" areas of their lives: prayer, morality, family life, and so on. However, in general, the church has done a poor job equipping people for the "public" parts of their lives: namely, their work, their vocation. The reality is, most people spend the majority of their time in this latter, "public" area."

And I like this video clip:

CommonGood RVA from This Is Our City on Vimeo.

2. Can we Survive Technology? Written 57 years ago, Fortune resurrected this article by John von Neumann. The editor's note begins:

Editor's note:   Every Sunday, Fortune publishes a favorite story from our magazine archives. This week, to mark our Future Issue, we turn to a feature from June 1955 by John von Neumann tackling the profound questions wrought by radical technical advancement—in von Neumann's day the atomic bomb and climate change. von Neumann was one of the twentieth century's greatest and most influential geniuses. The polymath and patron saint of Game Theory was instrumental in developing America's nuclear superiority toward the end of World War II as well as in framing the decades-long Cold War with the Soviet Union. In his time, von Neumann was said to possess "the world's greatest mind." Here is his characteristically pessimistic look on what the future holds.

It is amazing how much of what he wrote remains true today!

3. Human beings are notoriously bad at evaluating probability and risk I hope to do some blogging on this in the not too distant future. For now, Business Insider has 'The Birthday Problem' Shows How Terrible We Are At Estimating Probability.

4. The Atlantic reports on a study concluding Wanting Things Makes Us Happier Than Having Them

"CONCLUSION: Although "materialists' perceptions that acquisition brings them happiness appear to have some basis in reality," that happiness is short-lived, Richins concluded. As such, "The state of anticipating and desiring a product may be inherently more pleasurable than product ownership itself.""

5. One of the most difficult topics to understand in economics is comparative advantage, especially why outsourcing jobs to other countries often is advantageous for both countries. Forbes has a creative piece this week, Is Outsourcing American Jobs Wrong?. However, as the BBC reports American manufacturers come back home, a trend that has been true for a few years now.

6. Whole Foods Founder Says Too Many Companies Get Capitalism Wrong

"In order to fight that perception and reclaim capitalism and business as positive words, businesses have to find a purpose beyond just making money. Profit is necessary for business, Mackey said, but it's necessary in the same way that his body has to produce red blood cells. It's needed, but it's not the sole purpose."

7. Fortune has a great piece on Why innovation is so hard.

"Most business leaders don't understand what makes innovation so different from everything else they do at work -- and they haven't adjusted their behavior to accommodate these differences."

8. We've all been watching Lance Armstrong this week. Beware! Study Finds That Having Power Can Make You Stupid

9. More on the continuing evolution of the print industry in The Growing Adoption of Creative Commons Textbooks and Nation's First Bookless Public Library Could Be in Texas.

10. Paper-Thin Computer Debuts at CES

11. Scientist reveal that Star Wars And Star Trek Got Warp Speed Totally Wrong.

"The science fiction vision of stars flashing by as streaks when spaceships travel faster than light isn't what the scene would actually look like, a team of physics students says.

Instead, the view out the windows of a vehicle traveling through hyperspace would be more like a centralized bright glow, calculations show. ..."

That's all for this week. Like the Kruse Kronicle at Facebook.

Happiness, Meaning, and a Theology of Work

The Atlantic: There's More to Life Than Being Happy  This is a fascianting piece on happiness written by Emily Esfahani Smith as she reflects on the difference in between happiness and a meaningful life. I've got some thoughts below but here is one powerful excerpt:

... This is why some researchers are cautioning against the pursuit of mere happiness. In a new study, which will be published this year in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Positive Psychology, psychological scientists asked nearly 400 Americans aged 18 to 78 whether they thought their lives were meaningful and/or happy. Examining their self-reported attitudes toward meaning, happiness, and many other variables -- like stress levels, spending patterns, and having children -- over a month-long period, the researchers found that a meaningful life and happy life overlap in certain ways, but are ultimately very different. Leading a happy life, the psychologists found, is associated with being a "taker" while leading a meaningful life corresponds with being a "giver."

"Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided," the authors write.

How do the happy life and the meaningful life differ? Happiness, they found, is about feeling good. Specifically, the researchers found that people who are happy tend to think that life is easy, they are in good physical health, and they are able to buy the things that they need and want. While not having enough money decreases how happy and meaningful you consider your life to be, it has a much greater impact on happiness. The happy life is also defined by a lack of stress or worry.

Most importantly from a social perspective, the pursuit of happiness is associated with selfish behavior -- being, as mentioned, a "taker" rather than a "giver." The psychologists give an evolutionary explanation for this: happiness is about drive reduction. If you have a need or a desire -- like hunger -- you satisfy it, and that makes you happy. People become happy, in other words, when they get what they want. Humans, then, are not the only ones who can feel happy. Animals have needs and drives, too, and when those drives are satisfied, animals also feel happy, the researchers point out.

"Happy people get a lot of joy from receiving benefits from others while people leading meaningful lives get a lot of joy from giving to others," explained Kathleen Vohs, one of the authors of the study, in a recent presentation at the University of Pennsylvania. In other words, meaning transcends the self while happiness is all about giving the self what it wants. People who have high meaning in their lives are more likely to help others in need. "If anything, pure happiness is linked to not helping others in need," the researchers write.

What sets human beings apart from animals is not the pursuit of happiness, which occurs all across the natural world, but the pursuit of meaning, which is unique to humans, according to Roy Baumeister, the lead researcher of the study and author, with John Tierney, of the recent book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Baumeister, a social psychologists at Florida State University, was named an ISI highly cited scientific researcher in 2003.

The study participants reported deriving meaning from giving a part of themselves away to others and making a sacrifice on behalf of the overall group. In the words of Martin E. P. Seligman, one of the leading psychological scientists alive today, in the meaningful life "you use your highest strengths and talents to belong to and serve something you believe is larger than the self." For instance, having more meaning in one's life was associated with doing activities like buying presents for others, taking care of kids, and arguing. People whose lives have high levels of meaning often actively seek meaning out even when they know it will come at the expense of happiness. Because they have invested themselves in something bigger than themselves, they also worry more and have higher levels of stress and anxiety in their lives than happy people. Having children, for example, is associated with the meaningful life and requires self-sacrifice, but it has been famously associated with low happiness among parents, including the ones in this study. In fact, according to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, research shows that parents are less happy interacting with their children than they are exercising, eating, and watching television.

"Partly what we do as human beings is to take care of others and contribute to others. This makes life meaningful but it does not necessarily make us happy," Baumeister told me in an interview.

Meaning is not only about transcending the self, but also about transcending the present moment -- which is perhaps the most important finding of the study, according to the researchers. While happiness is an emotion felt in the here and now, it ultimately fades away, just as all emotions do; positive affect and feelings of pleasure are fleeting. The amount of time people report feeling good or bad correlates with happiness but not at all with meaning.

Meaning, on the other hand, is enduring. It connects the past to the present to the future. "Thinking beyond the present moment, into the past or future, was a sign of the relatively meaningful but unhappy life," the researchers write. "Happiness is not generally found in contemplating the past or future." That is, people who thought more about the present were happier, but people who spent more time thinking about the future or about past struggles and sufferings felt more meaning in their lives, though they were less happy....

And this is where the church does a great disservice. We form people into clients who look to the church as a route to personal happiness rather than as people who can discern meaning. And this is especially true for a theology of work and daily life. I perceive that the vast majority of Americans either see no meaning in their work as it relates to God's mission in the world or they find great meaning it their work precisely because it is such an important component to achieving the happiness that comes from getting what we want.

For the most part, the church confirms that there is no meaning to daily work. Meaningful work, as it relates to God, is the stuff that happens within the four walls of the church or as an extension of some ecclesiastical initiative. Christian service is framed as an alternative to work-a-day life, an escape from meaningless work into meaningful work. Church leaders correctly perceive that many people see no meaning to their daily existence but the ecclesiastical impulse is to answer the question of meaning over and against daily life, not to find meaning within it.

I see one of two strategies typically at work. One is to simply avoid saying too much about daily work while offering therapeutic spirituality and opportunities for service that (for some) supplement a daily meaningless existence or (for others) enhances the meaning we find apart from God and God’s mission in the world (essentially supporting idolatry.) The other is to offer prophetic pronouncements against greed and selfishness … correctly challenging idolatries that give false meaning to life … while steering people to participate in just causes like eco-justice, gun-control, or poverty advocacy. False ideologies may be challenged but, once again, the answer is to pursue the meaning question over and against daily life, not to find meaning within it.

Until the church is willing to honestly wrestle with the meaning of work and daily life, the church will never have be an effective expression of the Kingdom of God.

Saturday Links

1. Too often Westerners perceive African economy as a monolithic basket case. There are actually many regions of that are very hopeful. Ozwald Boateng explains Why entrepreneurs are back in Africa

2. Want a higher paying occupation? Here Are The Jobs With The Biggest Wage Growth Right Now

3. Lots of recent talk about whether or not e-books will ever actually totally supplant hard copy books. This week Mashable explores Why Are People Still Buying CDs? (And people are still buying them.)

4. Speaking of transitions to digital media, Business Insider shows that Old Media Is Alive And Rocking

5. This fascinating chart shows Inflation Since 1775 And How It Took Off In 1933

6. Want to live to a ripe old age? US News reports on What People Who Live to 100 Have in Common.

7. I almost didn't link this article because I could swear I've linked it before. Why Does Deja Vu Happen?

8. Several months ago I saw a speech expert interviewed has offered voice training to a number of famous figures. One was Margaret Thatcher. They showed her speaking in the 1970s and then in the 1980s, after receiving voice training. A big piece of the change was lessening the modulation in tone and pitch, which tends to vary more widely with female voices. The changes were intended to make her sound more authoritative, which both men and women, unjustified as it may be, more often associate with male vocal traits. But apparently, the thing that really triggers gender detection in our language is the way we use S's. Change Your Perceived Gender by Pronouncing S's Differently

9. This has to be a new low technological achievement: a sensor-filled smartfork that tells you when you're eating to much. Medieval Tines: A Brief History of the Fork

10. And this has to be the Holy Grail of technology cool! Star Trek-Inspired 'CommBadge' Gives You Handsfree Access to iPhone, Android

Like the Kruse Kronicle at Facebook.

The Top Seven Regrets of Pastors - Thom Rainer

Christian Post: The Top Seven Regrets of Pastors - Thom Rainer

I recently interviewed more than twenty pastors who had been in ministry for at least 25 years. All of these men were over 55 years old. A few of them were retired, but most of them were still active in full-time vocational ministry. ...

1. Lack of practical training for local church ministry. "I was not prepared for 80 percent of my day-to-day ministry after I graduated from seminary. ...
2. Overly concerned about critics. ...
3. Failure to exercise faith. ...
4. Not enough time with family. ...
5. Failure to understand basic business and finance issues. ...
6. Failure to share ministry. "Let me shoot straight. I had two complexes. The first was the Superman complex. ... My second complex was the conflict avoider complex. ...
7. Failure to make friends. ...

I'm certain that #8 was failing to spend enough time reading blog posts. ;-) What else should be on the list?

 

Only one of the top 9 occupations expected to create the most jobs this decade (nursing) requires a 4-year college degree

Carpe Diem: Only one of the top 9 occupations expected to create the most jobs this decade (nursing) requires a 4-year college degree

The chart above shows the 30 occupations that are expected to experience the largest job growth between 2010 and 2020, according to employment forecasts from the BLS. Between 2010 and 2020, the BLS estimates that the total number of U.S. jobs will increase by 20.4 million, from 143 million in 2010 to 163.5 million by 2020. The number of jobs created this decade in the top 30 fastest growing occupations – 9.3 million – will represent almost half of all of the new jobs created by 2020.

What’s really interesting is that only five of the top 30 occupations expected to create the most jobs by 2020 require a college degree or more (nursing, post-secondary teachers, elementary school teachers, accountants and physicians), and ten of the fastest growing occupations don’t even require a high school diploma. Moreover, of the top nine occupations expected to create the most jobs this decade, only one (nursing) requires a 4-year college degree. ...

One-Third Of Americans Are Working For Themselves

Business Insider: One-Third Of Americans Are Working For Themselves

When the economy became unreliable, people decided to rely on themselves to propel their careers.

“We see the labor market itself following the trend that we call ‘the individualization of work' — people working for themselves,” says Iain MacDonald, CEO of SkillPages. “People are increasingly either moving jobs more often, doing what they love, or doing what they really like to do, rather than what they have to do.”

Nearly one in three workers in America are freelancers, contractors, or contingent workers, according to the Freelancers Union, and 19 percent of them say that they've doubled their income within the past year.

According to a survey by Elance, the average freelancer expects to earn 43 percent more in 2013 than they did in 2012. Furthermore, 70 percent claim they're happier and 79 percent say they're more productive working as a freelancer than a full-time employee. ...

Here Are The Most And Least Happy Careers

Business Insider: Here Are The Most And Least Happy Careers

For more top 10 employment lists go to myplan.com.

Living as an Authentic Christian in a Non-Christian World

Huffington Post: Living as an Authentic Christian in a Non-Christian World - Richard Stearns

After the election, I published an article in this space that struck a chord with many Christians. I suggested that engaging in a bitter 'culture war' in order to preserve America's formerly dominant Christian culture has been largely a failed strategy. We cannot win in the courts and at the ballot box that which we have lost in the court of public opinion. Instead, I argued, we should embrace the strategy that has successfully attracted people to Jesus for two thousand years - authentic Christianity.

What if we simply stuck to what Jesus commanded us to do: love our neighbors as ourselves, care for the poor and the sick and the brokenhearted, stand up for the oppressed, be generous with our time and our money, and live winsome lives filled with grace and gentleness?

Christians have always lived, and often thrived, in cultures where they are minorities. Christianity began in a Jewish culture and thrived in a pagan Roman one. The apostle Paul, writer of nearly half the New Testament, actually offers advice to the church in Corinth which lived in the midst of a very pagan society. His words should guide us today.

In I Corinthians 5:9, Paul encourages the Christians to clean up their own affairs. The church was in a mess with sexual shenanigans, internal bickering, and a deep division between rich and poor. Paul gives them some advice, but he also says Christians shouldn't worry about whether others follow Christian moral teaching.

"I wrote you in my earlier letter that you shouldn't make yourselves at home among the sexually promiscuous. I didn't mean that you should have nothing at all to do with outsiders of that sort. Or with crooks, whether blue- or white-collar. Or with spiritual phonies, for that matter. You'd have to leave the world entirely to do that! ... I'm not responsible for what the outsiders do, but don't we have some responsibility for those within our community of believers? God decides on the outsiders, but we need to decide when our brothers and sisters are out of line and, if necessary, clean house. (I Cor. 5:9-13, The Message)

Paul's point is this: Be strict with yourselves, expecting fellow Christians to obey the demands of Jesus. But don't hold others to the same rules. ...

Stearns post also brought to mind another passage I recently read. I just finished going back through Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon.

“In fact, much of what passes for Christian social concern today, of the left or the right, is the social concern of a church that seems to have despaired of being the church. Unable through our preaching, baptism, and witness to form a visible community of faith, we content ourselves with ersatz Christian ethical activity – lobbying Congress to support progressive strategies, asking the culture at large to be a little less racist, a little less promiscuous, a little less violent. Falwell’s Moral Majority is little different from any mainline Protestant church that opposes him. Both groups imply that one can practice Christian ethics without being in the Christian community. Both begin with the Constantinian assumption that there is no way for the gospel to present in our world without asking the world to support our convictions through its own social and political institutionalization. The result is the gospel transformed into civil religion.” (Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, Resident Aliens, 1989, 80-81.)

There is much I resonate with in Stearn’s post and with the Resident Aliens quote, but I shade things a little differently.

I don't have a neat label for my position. Maybe what I see is a polarity. I'm uneasy with the overemphasis of social activism within my Mainline Reformed world, partly because of its domestication of "justice" to contemporary leftist framings. But mostly I'm uneasy because of the neglect of the central mission of the church to be a "sense-making" witness of God's Kingdom by connecting the daily routines of life to God's mission in the world, to be a communities reflecting on the contexts and relationships where they have genuine authentic influence and being the body of Christ in those particularities.

And yet I'm uneasy with quotes like those above, and similar cases made by neo-Anabaptists, that seem to suggest we should not be seeking to influence the state at all. If some ways of ordering society are more just than others according to God's Kingdom, is it appropriate to remain silent in the public square as citizens of a democracy where we are invited to interject what wisdom we may have? And curiously, it seems to me that while many of those who want to avoid entanglement with the state have a stronger sense of the congregational community, they also have a weak practical theology for how the people of God, as they live dispersed in the world, are to make sense of work and daily life as the relate to God's mission in the world.

Rather than embracing either the activist Reformed pole or the neo-Anabaptist separatism, I'm inclined to embrace the strength's and cautions of both camps and to press for better integration of daily life with God's mission in the world.

What do you think?

Saturday Links

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. There a few less links this week. Enjoy!

1. The last typewriter rolls off the assembly line.

2. Abraham Lincoln's spirituality has been a constant topic of debate among historians. The new Lincoln movie has resurfaced the debate. Film revives questions about Abraham Lincoln’s faith, but offers few answers.

3. What impact will computer/internet technology have on our daily lives? Glimpse of your life in 2020 thanks to the Internet of Things.

"What if all objects were interconnected and started to sense their surroundings and communicate with each other? The Internet of Things (IoT) will have that sort of ubiquitous machine-to-machine (M2M) connectivity. Since there are estimates that between 50 billion to 500 billion devices will have a mobile connection to the cloud by 2020, here’s a glimpse of our possible future.

Your alarm clock signals the lights to come on in your bedroom; the lights tell the heated tiles in your bathroom to kick on so your feet are not cold when you go to shower. The shower tells your coffee pot to start brewing. Your smartphone checks the weather and tells you to wear your gray suit since RFID tags on your clothes confirm that your favorite black suit is not in your closet but at the dry cleaners. After you pour a cup of java, the mug alerts your medication that you have a drink in-hand and your pill bottle begins to glow and beep as a reminder. Your pill bottle confirms that you took your medicine and wirelessly adds this info to your medical file at the doctor’s office; it will also text the pharmacy for a refill if you are running low.

Your smart TV automatically comes on with your favorite news channel while you eat breakfast and browse your tablet for online news. After you’ve eaten, while you are brushing your teeth, your dishwasher texts your smartphone to fire up your vehicle via the remote start. Because your “smart” car can talk to other cars and the road, it knows what streets to avoid due to early morning traffic jams. Your phone notifies you that your route to work has been changed to save you time. And you no longer need to look for a place to park, since your smartphone reserved one of the RFID parking spaces marked as "open" and available in the cloud. Don’t worry about your smart house because as you exited it, the doors locked, the lights went off, and the temperature was adjusted to save energy and money.

Does it sound too farfetched for 2020? It shouldn’t since a good part of that is in the works now. ..."

4. Speaking of computers, technology lovers will appreciate that the World’s Oldest Computer Gets a Reboot.

5. Should Students Use Wikipedia? Maybe it depends on how they use it and what the objective is.

6. Does the United States essentially have a flat tax? Economist Greg Mankiw thinks maybe do. The U.S. has a flat tax (in effect)

"The Congressional Budget Office has a new study of effective federal marginal tax rates for low and moderate income workers (those below 450 percent of the poverty line).  The study looks at the effects of income taxes, payroll taxes, and SNAP (the program formerly known as Food Stamps).  The bottom line is that the average household now faces an effective marginal tax rate of 30 percent.  In 2014, after various temporary tax provisions have expired and the newly passed health insurance subsidies go into effect, the average effective marginal tax rate will rise to 35 percent.

What struck me is how close these marginal tax rates are to the marginal tax rates at the top of the income distribution.  This means that we could repeal all these taxes and transfer programs, replace them with a flat tax along with a universal lump-sum grant, and achieve approximately the same overall degree of progressivity."

7.  What are the conservative streams and thinkers that are likely to influence the evolving future of conservatism in the United States. David Brooks has some interesting insights into The Conservative Future.

8.  Did you know that You Are Most Likely to Die at 11 a.m.?

9. This would never appeal to me. I like to know exactly what I'm buying. Would drop some coins in this thing?

The BIBLIO-MAT from Craig Small on Vimeo.

10. The High Calling has a review of R. Paul Stevens new book, Work Matters, Lessons from Scripture. I hope to read it next month.

11. Good news on the crime front in Washington, D. C.: D.C. on pace for fewer than 100 homicides in 2012

Bloodletting Economics

Robet Lupton is the author of some excellent books like Compassion, Justice and the Christian Life: Rethinking Ministry to the Poor and Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (And How to Reverse It).  Each month he does a newsletter for FCS Ministries in Atlanta.  This month was particularly interesting piece. I've got a few comments at the end.

Blood-letting

November 2012

by Bob Lupton

Ever wonder why the red and white striped pole is displayed outside many barbershops?  Neither have I.  Not until I stumbled across a morsel of obscure history about this symbol.  I was immediately drawn in.

In the middle ages surgeons and barbers performed most of the operations.  Yes, that’s right – barbers.  Blood-letting was the most commonly prescribed treatment of the day, a cure for almost every ailment.  Surgeons would order it, barbers would do the cutting.  The red-and-white-striped pole outside the barbershop was the signpost that blood-letting was performed here.  The red represents the blood being drawn, the white represents the tourniquet used, and the pole itself represents the stick squeezed in the patient’s hand to dilate the veins.   Interesting, eh?

What I found even more interesting, however, was that for more than 3000 years, from antiquity until the advent of modern scientific medicine, blood-letting was universally accepted as the most effective remedy for almost every disease.  It was recommended for the treatment of countless ailments ranging from cholera to cancer, tetanus to tuberculosis, gout to gangrene.  It was even prescribed to treat acne and hemorrhoids.  Before the circulatory system was understood, a prevailing theory was that blood could stagnate in the extremities.  A build-up of bad blood could cause all manner of maladies.  The cure was purging.

Every one bought in.  For eons.  Even in ancient cultures like the Mesopotamians and Egyptians. The Talmud (ancient Israel’s sacred writings) specified certain days for blood-letting.  Hippocrates (the father of modern medicine) accepted the practice as good medicine some 500 years before the birth of Christ.  So did Socrates and Plato.  Early Christian writings offer advice on which saints’ days were favorable for blood-letting.  Well into the scientific era the practice continued to prevail.  The more blood drawn the better, even to the point of losing consciousness.  Many sessions would only end when the patient began to swoon.   1799 George Washington, suffering from a throat infection, requested that he be bled heavily (nearly four pints) and died shortly thereafter.

One typical course of medical treatment began the morning of 13 July 1824. A French sergeant was stabbed through the chest while engaged in single combat; within minutes, he fainted from loss of blood. Arriving at the local hospital he was immediately bled twenty ounces “to prevent inflammation”. During the night he was bled another 24 ounces. Early the next morning, the chief surgeon bled the patient another 10 ounces (285 ml); during the next 14 hours, he was bled five more times. Medical attendants thus intentionally removed more than half of the patient’s normal blood supply—in addition to the initial blood loss which caused the sergeant to faint. Bleedings continued over the next several days. By 29 July, the wound had become inflamed. The physician applied 32 leeches to the most sensitive part of the wound. Over the next three days, there were more bleedings and a total of 40 more leeches. The sergeant recovered and was discharged on 3 October. His physician wrote that “by the large quantity of blood lost, amounting to 170 ounces [nearly eleven pints], besides that drawn by the application of leeches [perhaps another two pints], the life of the patient was preserved”. 

“The life of the patient was preserved” by draining thirteen pints of his blood?!  Outrageous!  Sounds totally absurd today.  But is it any more absurd than the widely accepted practice of draining off the strength of able-bodied adults by “curing” them with dependency-producing subsidies?  Can we legitimately claim to be “preserving the life” of the needy by weakening their capacity to become self-sufficient?   And how absurd is it to measure the effectiveness of our remedy by the volume of recipients who return for repeated “treatments”?

Is harmful medical treatment better than no treatment at all?  The French sergeant who survived the blood-letting would doubtless answer “yes”.  His surgeon acted upon the best knowledge that was available at the time.  Is harmful charity better than no charity at all?  Recipients would doubtless urge its continuation.  But just as it took centuries of malpractice before the medical profession finally realized that blood-adding, not blood-letting, actually saves lives, so charitable malpractice may have to run its course.

Bloodletting persisted into the 20th century.  Not until Pasteur (1822-1895) figured out that germs, not bad blood, cause diseases did the practice begin to fall out of favor.  It took many more decades before the practice was finally abandoned.  The modern science of microbiology finally brought a 3000 year practice to an end.  I can’t help wondering how long it will take the tradition-steeped compassion industry to recognize the need for a fundamental change of practice.

I've actually incorporated the bloodletting metaphor in some writing I've been doing on economic issues. (Stay tuned.) For millennia, bloodletting was the preferred method for treating illness. Only in the past century or two have we learned enough about the human body to see that this is not effective, even destructive. For millennia, the preferred method for treating poverty was generosity. Poverty was an inadequate distribution of a fixed amount of wealth. Only in the past century or two have we really unlocked the powers of productivity and exchange. Poverty is now more appropriately seen as exclusion from networks of productivity and exchange.

No metaphor is perfect. Generosity had limited effectiveness over the millennia and generosity still has a critical role to play today, particularly in times crisis. But the revolution in productivity and exchange has radically altered how we address challenges we face.

All my life I've heard that the Bible talks about wealth and poverty more than any other topic, yet I find very few theologians who have ever taken even one class in economics. I can probably count on one hand the number who have had formal training in economics. The irony is that it is often those who most contextualized the Bible on a range of issues ranging from science, to gender roles, to slavery, to war, and to government, who I find become the most wooden and "fundamentalist" on economic questions ... unable (unwilling?) to make a leap from the advanced agrarian societies of the Bible era to modern economies, sometimes even pining for retreat from the dark dystopian present back to the bucolic bliss of the past. (And just to be fair, those that are most "fundamentalist" on so many other issues want to baptize our present economic order as the "biblical" model.) We aren’t going back, and idealistic models like distributism and liberationism, or any other model that doesn’t seriously take into account issues of productivity and exchange, offer no guidance for the future.

There are many challenges confronting the church of Jesus Christ but I continue to be convinced that it is the church's inability to come to grips with modern economic order, and by extension the inability to help people find meaning in the our present context and equip them for ministry in our present context, that is at the top of the list of challenges.

The Cutting Edge of Marketplace Ministries

Christianity Today: The Cutting Edge of Marketplace Ministries

How businesses are doing more holistic ministry than ever.

With all the twists and turns that led to his vocation, Chuck Proudfit might never have gotten there without the quest for more efficient toilet paper.

He was fresh out of college working for Procter & Gamble at the time. The company had scooped up the gifted entrepreneur after he graduated from Harvard. Proudfit had already launched a laser-printing business when he was a sophomore, selling it to Harvard upon graduation. Now he was on the fast track in the Cincinnati headquarters of Procter & Gamble. And one of his first jobs was to oversee a project whose objective was to fit fewer sheets on a toilet paper roll.

And then, he says, he had "a meltdown." Surely, he thought, there was more to life.

He pursued that "more" while he advanced in the business world over the next decade. That journey included running a large division of the Gallo wine empire on the West Coast, then returning to Ohio as a high-level manager for LensCrafters. All the while, he was reading voraciously about the major religions, searching for the truth.

He finally discovered it, he says, in Christ. Proudfit says he was eager to "apply my new faith to every area of my life, including my work." But when he looked to his church for guidance, he was stymied.

"The local church doesn't deal much with everyday realities for the working people in the pews," he laments. So, "more out of exasperation than inspiration," Proudfit founded the Cincinnati-based marketplace ministry At Work on Purpose (AWOP).

That AWOP formed independently of the church is common, says Princeton University scholar David W. Miller. Author of God at Work: The History and Promise of the Faith at Work Movement, Miller notes that most marketplace ministries "have formed outside the authority, involvement, or impetus of the church." What is uncommon is AWOP's holistic approach to integrating faith and work among its 5,000-plus members in the Cincinnati metro area. It's moving past a narrow focus on workplace evangelism to include ethics, social responsibility, and citywide engagement—a model that more marketplace ministries are embracing across the nation. ...

Saturday Links

Here are this week's odds and ends that didn't make it on to the blog. Enjoy the leftovers!

1. MIT Technology Review says Geoengineering Could Be Essential to Reducing the Risk of Climate Change. "Using technology to cool the planet may be the only way to deal with the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere, argues scientist David Keith." On a similar topic is this piece by Robert Kurlwich at NPR, Will We 'Fix' The Weather? Yes. Should We Fix The Weather? Hmmm. Kurlwich discusses the possibility that we may one day be able to control the earth's climate and wonders if that is a good thing.

2. Research indicates that Millennial Generation Becoming More Fiscally Conservative.

3. Are E-readers a transitional technology? Analysis: E-readers grapple with a future on the shelf.

4. Inhabitat reports on The World's First Commercial Vertical Farm Opens in Singapore. "The dense metropolis of Singapore is now home to the world’s first commercial vertical farm! Built by Sky Greens Farms, the rising steel structure will help the city grow more food locally, reducing dependence on imported produce. The new farm is able to produce 1 ton of fresh veggies every other day, which are sold in local supermarkets."

5. The New Republic has a very lengthy article The Mormon Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It offers some interesting insights in to Mormonism's road from communalism to economic individualism, a trajectory followed by many Protestant sectarian movements. Jackson Lears writes:

"Mormons embraced economic individualism and hierarchical communalism; they distrusted government interventions in business life but not in moral life; they used their personal morality to underwrite their monetary success. They celebrated endless progress through Promethean striving. They paid little attention to introspection and much to correct behavior. And their fundamental scripture confirmed that America was God’s New Israel and the Mormons His Chosen People. It would be hard to find an outlook more suited to the political culture of the post–Reagan Republican Party."

6. Annie-Marie Slaughter maintains that the "having it all" debate about work-life balance isn't just about women. Work-Life Balance as a Men's Issue, Too.

"A number of students asked foreign policy questions, and then a young woman asked me about the responses I have received to my Atlantic cover story from this past summer, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All." I answered, and several other young women followed up. After ten minutes or so, I saw that the roughly 50 percent guys in the room had gone completely silent. When I commented on the suddenly one-sided nature of the conversation, one young man volunteered that he "had been raised in a strong feminist household" and considered himself to be fully supportive of male-female equality, but he was reluctant to say anything for fear he would be misunderstood. A number of the other guys around the table nodded in agreement."

7. French and Spanish legal documents from colonial Louisiana are being digitized, opening up a new window on colonial history in that part of the world. Colonial La. records shed new light on US history

8. People who know me personally know I tend to use sarcasm and double entendre in spoken communication. One of my biggest blogging challenges is editing most of this out of posts. Emoticons can help but some of the biggest misunderstandings I have had came from people not being able to see my wink or big grin as I write certain things. For that reason, I found this interesting: The Strange Science Of Translating Sarcasm Online

9. Ever wonder why sign language often seems so animated? Why Great Sign Language Interpreters Are So Animated

10. Africa: sociologists cite religion as a key factor in preventing and alleviating AIDS epidemic

"In their new book "Religion and AIDS in Africa" (Oxford University Press), sociologists Jenny Trinitapoli and Alexander Weinreb seek to challenge the widespread view that religious beliefs and communities have unwittingly assisted in the spread of the disease through their resistance to preventative sex education. They also show that not only have religious groups had a largely positive role in AIDS prevention, but also how the epidemic has shaped religious beliefs in unexpected ways."

Finding God in Advertising

(re)integrate: Finding God in Advertising  Bob Robinson

In a profound chapter in A Matrix of Meanings: Finding God in Pop Culture, Craig Detweiler and Barry Taylor look at how advertising has shaped contemporary society. The authors offer “Ten Commandments of Advertising,” all of which point to an overarching question that people in this (and every) culture ask: “What is it to be fully human?”

“This is the question that advertising seeks to answer, a question that was one the pursuit of philosophers and theologians. Advertising is an incredibly powerful form of pop culture that influences us on levels far deeper than getting us to choose certain products. Life choices are part of today’s world of advertising and consumption. ‘The glory of God,’ Irenaeus wrote, ‘is a human being fully alive.’ In contemporary society, to be fully human is to shop. Advertising offers us ways to be alive, ways to be human.” (p. 84)

Certainly, there are ads that are manipulative and appeal to the baser aspects of human depravity in order to sell products. But advertising, at its best, appeals to our desire to know who we are, to celebrate life, to find meaning in being human. ...

I especially liked this statement:

Christianity needs to “re-message” itself as a faith that embraces the joy of God restoring humanity and encourages celebration. The restoration of all things is in our future. We await the return of Jesus Christ with great anticipation. What are we doing in preparation?

The primary vision of the church today, liberal or conservative, is to offer people meaning and transcendence by extracting them out of the daily routines of life, rather than equipping people to see transcendence in those daily routines. We do it in the form of therapeutic pietism or in the form of activism to change the world. And if you are really "spiritual" you will enter "full-time ministry" to do these things.

(Bob wrote a great post here. He recently began (re)integrate, which is devoted to addressing just the kind of issues the post raises. Be sure to check the website.)

 

Where have you seen examples of the church equipping people to see transcendence in the routines of life? How might we do a better job of celebrating life?

The Consequences of Machine Intelligence

Atlantic: The Consequences of Machine Intelligence  Moshe Vardi

If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?

... Bill Joy's question deserves therefore not to be ignored: Does the future need us? By this I mean to ask, if machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do? I have been getting various answers to this question, but I find none satisfying.

A typical answer to my raising this question is to tell me that I am a Luddite. (Luddism is defined as distrust or fear of the inevitable changes brought about by new technology.) This is an ad hominem attack that does not deserve a serious answer.

A more thoughtful answer is that technology has been destroying jobs since the start of the Industrial Revolution, yet new jobs are continually created. The AI Revolution, however, is different than the Industrial Revolution. In the 19th century machines competed with human brawn. Now machines are competing with human brain. Robots combine brain and brawn. We are facing the prospect of being completely out-competed by our own creations. Another typical answer is that if machines will do all of our work, then we will be free to pursue leisure activities. The economist John Maynard Keynes addressed this issue already in 1930, when he wrote, "The increase of technical efficiency has been taking place faster than we can deal with the problem of labour absorption." Keynes imagined 2030 as a time in which most people worked only 15 hours a week, and would occupy themselves mostly with leisure activities.

I do not find this to be a promising future. First, if machines can do almost all of our work, then it is not clear that even 15 weekly hours of work will be required. Second, I do not find the prospect of leisure-filled life appealing. I believe that work is essential to human well-being. Third, our economic system would have to undergo a radical restructuring to enable billions of people to live lives of leisure. Unemployment rate in the US is currently under 9 percent and is considered to be a huge problem. 

Finally, people tell me that my concerns apply only to a future that is so far away that we need not worry about it. I find this answer to be unacceptable. 2045 is merely a generation away from us. We cannot shirk responsibility from concerns for the welfare of the next generation. ...

Vardi's point?

We cannot blindly pursue the goal of machine intelligence without pondering its consequences.

One of the challenges of creative destruction is that we can see what is being destroyed but it is exceedingly difficult to see what is being created. As we have moved through the industrial era into the modern age, this fear that change was about impoverish the masses has been a recurring them. Futurists like Gene Rodenberry saw a day where most goods would be so plentiful or easily created that there would be little need for money or possessions. You wouldn’t need a job as a means to survival.

What do you think? Do Yardi’s concerns worry you? Or is the arrival of AI a godsend?

The Eternal Significance of Everyday Work

Values and Capitalism: The Eternal Significance of Everyday Work

Is God calling you to the workforce or full-time ministry?

Many Christian college students preparing to graduate feel as if their entire life rests on the answer to this question.

During my senior year at James Madison University, I watched plans to become doctors and business leaders dissolve as many of my friends gave up their dreams for "full-time ministry." I respected their decisions and wondered if I could find the same significance in my "ordinary" calling. As they began raising support to join campus ministry staff or church plant teams, I applied for internships in Washington, D.C., and tried to convince myself that my vocation would be equally meaningful.

I found some repose from the leaders in my church. They regularly emphasized the importance of secular work in building God's kingdom. I learned that I would find significance in any job, as long as I:

• Exemplified Christ's love
• Shared my faith with my co-workers
• Donated a portion of my income to ministry

But I found this answer only half-satisfying. It explained how I should interact with co-workers and steward my money, but what about the actual work I was going to be doing?

I came across an article in Relevant Magazine recently, called "Kingdom Living from the Middle of Normal." I was interested to see if author Kelli Trujillo's insights were any deeper than what I had heard in church. Sadly, they weren't.

To find eternal meaning in your "seemingly mundane calling," Trujillo says that, among other things, we should:

• Reduce consumption
• Reuse and recycle
• Sponsor a child
• Donate your things
• Buy fair trade
• Buy local

So I guess the message is ... my office job means absolutely nothing? While stewardship and charity are responsibilities of the Christian life, none of these points have anything to do with the "seemingly mundane" job itself. Trujillo nearly implies secular work can only contribute to the Kingdom of God in areas outside the nine-to-five, since the secular really isn't directly "God-related."

If I had read this article my senior year of college and believed it, I would have immediately deserted my "ordinary" calling to jump on the "full-time ministry" bandwagon. Troubled after reading this article, I wondered if Christians had lost a true understanding of work as it relates to doing God's work.

A few days later, ...

Read the whole thing. Elise Amyx is talking about the problem from an Evangelical perspective but Mainliners do similar things. Justice advocacy and compassionate ministries are what count as "real" ministry. There is no real theology of work and daily life.

How to Eat, Play, Love—And Do Other Christian Acts

Christianity Today: How to Eat, Play, Love—And Do Other Christian Acts

Thirty years ago, Ben Witherington III prayed for the energy to write a commentary on every book of the New Testament. This he has done, in addition to writing several other books, including a two-volume work of New Testament theology and ethics. Now, at age 60, the prolific author and Asbury Theological Seminary professor has turned his attention to activities that make up, he says, "99 percent of people's ordinary lives." The result is his latest release, The Rest of Life: Rest, Play, Eating, Studying, Sex from a Kingdom Perspective (Eerdmans). Rachel Marie Stone, author of the forthcoming Eat with Joy: Redeeming God's Gift of Food (InterVarsity), spoke with Witherington about the need for theological and ethical reflection on the everyday things of life. 

Having written many scholarly volumes, why are you now turning your attention to the "ordinary" things of life?

 

There is very little serious theological reflection on the ordinary Christian life: the things we do every day, like working, playing, eating, or going to church. I wanted to ask, "What do these things look like in the light of the coming kingdom of God? Where did God intend all these things to go?" I wanted to somehow take a global view that would work toward the integration of all these things in the mundane life: keeping in balance work, worship, play, sex, and so forth. The aim was to fill a gap in theological reflection.? ...

... What do you want readers to take away from this book?

What we are, and what we do in life, is tremendously important to God, to the kingdom of God, and to ourselves. When we think about our Christian faith and how we spend our work week, faith should not be something that we do on Sunday, but something that shapes our worldview and how we live.

So whether we eat, play, rest, go to a concert, or conjugate the word "to love," it is all doxological, which is to say it's about giving praise to God and preparing us for the kingdom. The question we should ask about anything and everything is, Can I do this to the glory of God and the edification of others? If the answer is no, a Christian shouldn't do it. That's the ultimate ethical question.

I appreciate Ben Witherington's recent focus. I thought his recent book, Work: A Kingdom Perspective on Labor, was very helpful. I look forward to this new book. I hope his focusing on these topics will serve as legitimization for younger theologians to see this area of study as focus of study. There is still a huge gap between the worlds of theology and daily life, particularly work life.

 

The Severe Jobs and Skills Mismatch in Manufacturing

Bloomberg: Caterpillar’s Worker Hunt Means Welders Top Banking Pay

... Companies such as Caterpillar Inc. (CAT) are looking for workers like Brennan. Even with trades offering competitive pay, skilled factory vacancies may soar fivefold to 3 million by 2015 amid a U.S. industry rebound and baby boomer retirements, according to the Society of Manufacturing Engineers. That shortfall threatens to jeopardize both the U.S. recovery and corporate growth plans.

The manufacturing mismatch is part of a broader skills gap in an economy that has more than 3 million jobs open, even with an unemployment rate that ran at 8 percent or more for 43 straight months until the decline in September to 7.8 percent.

Economics and history are combining to drive the skilled-worker shortage. High-school graduates are opting in increasing numbers for four-year schools that can lead to jobs with higher pay and more prestige, and shying away from manufacturing after it shed jobs for more than a decade....

... Schools that provide training for trades and fields such as nursing aren’t producing students in great-enough numbers. Enrollment in two-year colleges that award degrees totaled 7.68 million in 2010, 18 percent more than in 2005. In the same period, four-year university enrollment climbed 21 percent to 13.3 million, according to the U.S. Education Department. ...

... The average annual salary in the field [welding] is $47,900, more than a bank teller supervisor, according to jobs website CareerBuilder. Welders with their own equipment can make $70 an hour, Roy said. Billing 40 weekly hours at that rate and working 50 weeks a year would produce gross pay of $140,000. ...

... Government figures understate the factory shortage, according to a September 2011 report by Deloitte LLP for the National Association of Manufacturers trade group. The report, based on a survey of 1,123 executives, estimated that there were 600,000 unfilled U.S. jobs in manufacturing.

The Society of Manufacturing Engineers used that data as the basis for its projection of 3 million manufacturing vacancies in three years. ...

... “We’re at the edge of a significant problem turning into a critical problem,” Giffi said. “The only reason it’s staying out of critical is because growth is stalled.”

Industrial companies in search of skilled workers cite a common refrain: reluctance by parents and teachers to steer young people to factory jobs. ...

... The Irving, Texas-based company [Fluor Corp] is visiting high schools and recruiting military veterans to hire about 8,000 skilled workers, he said. ...

And I can't help but wonder how many twentysomethings there are out there with a mountain load of debt for a college education they will not use, who would have been better served with a trade education.

The Pope and the CEO: John Paul's Leadership Lessons to a Young Swiss Guard - Book Review

The business world is not an easy place to practice Christian discipleship. Some challenges are obvious but there are many trapdoors as we journey along the path. How nice it would be to have mentors along the way.

Andreas Widmer had just such a mentor. Widmer served as Swiss guard at the Vatican for two years in the late 1980s. His frequent encounters with Pope John Paul II shaped his life as a businessperson over the coming years.  Last year Widmer published a book about his personal journey called The Pope and The CEO: John Paul II’s Leadership Lessons to a Young Swiss Guard. Claudia Ellermann, a friend of mine from church, was a colleague of Widmer’s in the 1990’s and she put me on to the book. I’m glad she did.

The book is divided into nine chapters, sandwiched between some introductory remarks and a conclusion. Each chapter addresses a particular vocational question that leaders must wrestle with and offers habits we might develop to become better leaders. What is intriguing is the format. Each chapter contains a vignette from Widmer’s life as well as vignette from his encounters with the John Paul II. Widmer offers up some of his own painful failures, as well as some triumphs, and how at times he had to relearn lessons he learned from the Pope. There are questions at the end of each chapter that can be used as personal reflection or as the basis for discussion in group setting.

Widmer is coming from a Roman Catholic perspective and there were a couple of places where I had to translate ideas into Presbyterian <grin>. But the lessons learned are meaningful for any disciple of Jesus Christ. The presentation of the issues in an autobiographical format, often offering very intimate insights, makes it a deeply engaging read. I recommend this book for anyone who finds themselves in a leadership position, particularly in the business world.

Productivity and Grace: Management and Labor at a Denver Manufacturer

Christianity Today: Productivity and Grace: Management and Labor at a Denver Manufacturer

Steve Hill and Jim Howey's leadership style is unusual in an industry known for top-down hierarchies.

There's a simple reason why manual laborers are called "blue-collar": The color blue, it turns out, hides dirt better than the white seen in office buildings. But "blue collar" defines more than work apparel, of course. It defines industry, even a way of life. And its stereotypes are often unflattering.

But a metal products manufacturer in Colorado is working to undermine those stereotypes, right on the shop floor.

Sandwiched between rail lines and a tire depot, the Blender Products factory hides in a quiet neighborhood in Denver. The nondescript warehouse looks from the outside as nondescript as most warehouses do. But the way Steve Hill and Jim Howey lead inside the building is unusual in an industry known for top-down hierarchies of management.

"The metal fabrication business is extremely cutthroat," says Hill. "Workers are given a singular task, and maximum output is demanded. They're simply a factor of production. As a general rule, they have no access to management. There is very little crossover between guys on the floor and guys in the offices."

Hill and Howey aim to subvert the us-versus-them mentality. Many days they walk the shop floor, engaging their workers as peers. Employees on the floor are treated as importantly as the managers, undermining the adversarial culture simmering in many manufacturing businesses.

"The company has tried to abide by a simple philosophy concerning our employees," Steve said. "Pay them well, provide great benefits, and invest in lives. . . . The guys in our shop . . . know that I'm a human too. I have many of the same struggles they do. Showing humanness to people is key to disarming those stereotypes."

Extraordinary moments of God's grace abound. ...

Reading this article took me back to grad school and reading about Wayne Alderson.

Business and the Way of the Cross

First Things - On the Square: Business and the Way of the Cross  James R. Rogers

A comment in a Huffington Post article on the “new monasticism” caught my eye a few months back.

“Nobody wants their kid to get interested in new monasticism, ” joked Ben, a young seminarian from Michigan when he arrived at The Simple Way for a visit, “They want them to become businessmen. ”

This joke is an exaggeration of what many Christian parents want for their children—the dreaded expectation that the child pursue a “practical college major” that leads seamlessly to an ordinary, bourgeois life and career. Nonetheless, the joke would not be a joke without the sneer at business, as if the pursuit of a vocation in business necessarily means the embrace of a lesser form of the Christian life.

While not all of the folks associated with The Simple Way necessarily share young Ben’s opinion, the idea that being a monastic (whether old or new) is godly while being a businessperson is worldly reflects a widely held belief among Christians. And that is really too bad, particularly in this economy.

While I would be loath to argue that the pursuit of business is superior to the pursuit of monasticism, I nonetheless would insist that business vocations do not necessarily entail a lesser form of Christian life. Indeed, Christian discipleship can be quite meaningfully pursued through vocations in business. ...

(re)integrate: God.Life.Work

My cyber-friend Bob Robinson has officially rolled out his new work, (re)integrate:

Reintegrate is a nonprofit organization that equips God’s people to reintegrate the Christian faith with vocation so that they can participate in God’s mission on earth. We help churches, institutions, cohort groups, college students, and professionals by providing consulting, teaching, curriculum, networking, and coaching.

They also have the (re)integrate blog. You can follow on Facebook. Check it out. Pretty exciting stuff.

Dancing to the Beat of Shalom: Christians Revive Kansas City's Arts Scene

Christianity Today: Dancing to the Beat of Shalom: Christians Revive Kansas City's Arts Scene

The Culture House and Störling Dance Theater have given believers a voice in the local arts scene and beyond, meanwhile bringing a bit of racial peace to the Kansas City area.

... Since that time of uncertainty, however, the Ennas and fellow leaders at The Culture House and Störling Dance Theater have given Christians a voice in the local arts scene and beyond, meanwhile bringing a bit of racial peace to the Kansas City area.

Starting something new

Enna, who received a theater degree at UCLA and performed with a dance theater group in Sweden, began organizing a board of directors that would help lay the foundation for The Culture House, a grassroots arts organization with schools of dance, theater, and music. Störling-Enna, who received her professional dance education in Helsinki, Finland, and Paris, continued honing her skills in order to lead what would become Störling Dance Theater, a neo-classical dance company known for its powerful storytelling.

With both projects, the two wanted to merge excellence in the arts with their faith in a way that benefited the Kansas City area, meanwhile raising the bar for Christians in the arts. With the community's increased support for the Kansas City Ballet, the Kansas City Chorale, the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum, and the Lyric Opera on the Missouri side during the 1990s, they arrived at the right time. The seeds for what would become the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, which opened in 2011, were also planted during this time.

"We saw that the whole community was starting to focus on the arts," Enna says. "We came here not to 'take over the city for Jesus,' but to at least sit at the table because of the quality of our work."

The vision of The Culture House, which includes the residency of Störling Dance Theater, is to enable quality artists, believers and nonbelievers alike, to have a platform in the marketplace.

The Culture House launched in 1996 in Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City. It initially resided between a Chuck E. Cheese's and a Hooters. In 2005, the organization bought a larger facility in neighboring Olathe. The extra space proved useful.

"That's when we expanded our school of music and started our school of theater," says Enna, executive director. "We went from 100 students to 450 in one cycle. Then another 650 the next year, and it just grew from there. We now have about 800 students [and are growing."

While The Culture House is a Christian organization, Störling Dance Theater is a dance company run by Christians, not a "Christian dance company." As such, some of its dancers are not Christians. Yet "people still do, even if they're not Christian, ask for prayer," notes Störling-Enna, artistic director. "I'd say 90 percent of the dancers who joined the company and were not Christian have become Christian through the company." ...

... While not explicitly Christian, Störling does operate the Artist Development Program, which provides pre-professional dancers with nine months of intensive instruction, and helps them develop tools for their life and career, spiritual maturity, physical and mental discipline, and an appreciation of the arts.

"That is a specifically Christian discipleship program," Enna says. "You don't have to participate in the spiritual development, but besides dancing day and night, they take design classes, as well as an apologetics course and a discussion group about Christianity and culture. It's to help those young artists have the discussions, think about their faith, and be prepared for the marketplace . . . It's not just so their faith survives in the arts, but that it thrives and they have the support and the integrity with them going into it."

Today, graduates of the program are receiving scholarships to top dance and theater programs around the country, including the Ailey School, part of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York, and theater programs at the University of Harford in Connecticut and Oklahoma City University. Students have also received full scholarships to the Joffrey Ballet's summer program in Chicago. ...

... "If Christianity has been so ineffective during the past 150 years in the arts, it's moving to see that we're part of a bigger picture and that the ship is turning," Enna says. "Christians are now being known for their good work."

Ministers With MBAs

Inside Higher Ed: Ministers With MBAs

... In the past five years, programs that combine master’s degrees in divinity with business credentials have sprung up, Aleshire says. He sees two reasons: leadership studies have become more common as an academic field, and Christian ministry has expanded beyond the church into nonprofit organizations and social entrepreneurship -- start-up businesses that try to serve a larger good.

But many joint business and divinity programs are intended for students who want to work for religious nonprofits, or for Christian students studying for professional degrees -- like business or law -- who want some theological background.

Seattle Pacific University’s School of Theology offers an M.B.A., but recommends it for students who want to “serve in the marketplace as a Christian grounded in the Scriptures and theology” or be a business manager for a church or religious nonprofit. Palmer Theological Seminary and Eastern University offer an M.B.A. for seminary students who want to work with the poor. Duke University has an option for students to pursue a seminary credential and a law degree.

In most cases, “they’re going to be using it in the broader ministries, where the work of the church and the broader culture intersect and the alternative to the divinity degree is an asset,” Aleshire says. ...

I had the option of doing the joint M.B.A. and M.Div. degree offered by Eastern University and Palmer Seminary (then Eastern Baptist Seminary) back in the late 1980s but went with the M.B.A. option that included theological education at Palmer but not the full M.Div. It ruined me life! ;-) My education there is what me put my on the path to exploring the intersection between faith and economics and I haven't been able to shake it sense.

The Most Dangerous Place to Work: Nursing Homes

Atlantic Cities: The Geography of Work-Related Injuries

... The United States' Bureau of Labor Statistics breaks down the number of injuries and illnesses by industry, with some surprising results [PDF]. Nursing and residential care facilities rank in the top ten most dangerous (14.7 injuries per 100 full-time workers for state industries and 10.9 for local industries). In comparison, petroleum refinery incidences barely register (at 0.7 cases per 100 full-time workers), according to another table [PDF]. ...

Nonfatal Occupational Injury Rate, 2010:

(And what's up travel trailer manufacturing?)

Why Business Matters to God

Mark D. Roberts: Why Business Matters to God

This past weekend, Laity Lodge hosted a retreat on the topic: Christians in the Marketplace: What would it Look Like if God Was Running the Show? Our speakers were Tod Bolsinger, Senior Pastor of San Clemente Presbyterian Church in California and Jeff Van Duzer, Dean of the School of Business and Economics at Seattle Pacific University, Washington. From their different perspectives and on the basis of their diverse experiences, both Tod and Jeff challenged us to think creatively as Christians about business. Many of those who attended this retreat are business owners and/or leaders.

Both speakers commented on the fact that most of us who seek to follow Christ have not done much deep thinking about business. We have tended to uncritically endorse either of two popular options. One idolizes capitalism and the market. The other demonizes capitalism and the market. Thus, we are desperately in need of careful, creative thinking about business in light of God’s purposes for the world and for us as creatures created in his image. ...

I had the privilege of attending this conference last week and finally got to meet people like Mark Roberts and Jeff Van Duzer face-to-face. It was one of the best conferences I've atteneded on this topic. Later this year I expect to blog through Van Duzer's  book Why Business Matters to God: (And What Still Needs to Be Fixed).

Mark Roberts on Work

Mark D. Roberts: Work and God . . . Oops! The Times Gets It Very Wrong

"... So, Kreider’s assertion that God invented work as punishment reveals a double problem. His understanding of God and his understand of work are lacking. If he had done a bit of homework, actually reading Genesis 1-3, Kreider would have discovered that God set up an antidote to busyness in the very beginning: the Sabbath. Not only did God create human beings to do meaningful work, but also he created a day each week for rest, rest that entails much more than mere idleness.

If Tim Kreider were alone in his view that our work really doesn’t matter and that it is a punishment from God, I would probably not be griping. But, unfortunately, Kreider’s perspective is common, even among Jews and Christians who should know better. What we need today is not a four-hour work day and lots of time off, but rather an understanding of work that see its potential value as well as an understanding of rest that goes deeper than mere idleness."

Bingo!