Work
Image by Flickr user JD Hancock. Used under Creative Commons License. Cropped from original.
I was having a conversation with a colleague at the LEAD conference earlier this year in which he bemoaned that secular organizations had taken over all the stuff churches used to do—running hospitals, feeding the hungry, caring for orphans, housing the homeless—and were doing it better. My response to him was, “Good! Then the Church has done its job by teaching people to take care of each other. Now we just need to find the next big problem in our society and get to work on that!”
Our conversation ended there, but I kept thinking about what he said.
“They’ve taken what we always used to do. Only they do it better. So now what?”
“Who are we? What are we for?”
“What makes us special?”
If I think back to what churches did when I was a kid and imagine what they were like generations before me, it seems like your church provided you with some unique opportunities. It was a place to build a community of people with similar goals and values. It held you accountable to living a good life. It was the place where you gave back to your neighborhood through missions and service. It provided a narrative for a purpose greater than your own existence.
My recent stint working outside the church was shockingly time-consuming. I totally understood why it’s hard to get laypeople to show up during their off-time. For one thing, they may not have much. For another, when they do they’re probably exhausted. And if I look at corporate culture now, our jobs do the things the church always did. Even when I worked at a smallish non-profit several years ago, it provided those same experiences that used to be unique to the church. We had social activities, volunteer projects, a mission statement. We were supposed to believe in why we were there. Think about the language of that for a minute: mission statement. Even the words companies use sound sort of theological. Marion Grau has a lot to say about the way that money itself has become a god to us and we’ve proselytized the world for capitalism. I think that’s the big-picture issue we’re seeing played out in the lives of people for whom work is the new church. Workplaces have taken on what churches used to do, but they do it better.
A church can’t compete with someone’s job. If we are asking people to choose to spend their precious time and energy at church rather than at their job, we will lose that battle every time. Because we don’t pay the rent. And we’re a voluntary organization, which means there’s less enforcement and a less efficient structure to accomplish goals. Even if they are deeply devout, how can we realistically expect they will choose church involvement over their job, or even have that choice?
So it’s time to re-evaluate what we do as churches. We can’t and shouldn’t look like a business, even if we were doing the good parts first. We have to discern where God is leading our churches now, how they witness to an overworked world that is literally dying trying to get by. I want to propose two possible directions:
1) Get involved with worker justice.
Over the past few decades, organized labor has become a deeply politicized issue. Simultaneously, we’ve seen courts and legislatures choose the rights of businesses over the rights of people. And now we’re in a place where people work full-time (or even more) hours, yet cannot survive without federal assistance. Workers, both blue and white collar, are exploited more and more under the false notion that exorbitant profit is the goal of work. It is idol worship. Sacrificing human well-being for profit is wrong. The Old Testament prophets condemned Israel for such things. Jesus offers alternative economies where workers are provided for equally even if they only worked the field the end of the day. Methodists have an historic commitment to the rights of workers. Fighting for the fair treatment of those who work is part of who we are. We just forgot about it.
If we are willing to donate money to food pantries, run free clinics, provide monetary assistance to the poor, or any other act of mercy, then we should also be willing to fight the systems that keep people in places of scarcity. Talk to your congregations about the fairness of working 60 hours a week and still needing food stamps, about having hours cut, about implicit expectations that you stay at the office until 9pm or check email on your vacation. Do those things honor God and the gifts God has given us to use in the world? Or do they treat workers like parts of a machine making a product rather than uniquely created, beloved children of God?
2) Practice sabbath.
If anything I’ve said is true, then people are overworked. A culture that overworks people in this way does not promote sabbath because it cares about production and not well-being. So, as churches who are trying to speak some truth into the world, we need to be talking a lot more about sabbath, rest, and taking care of ourselves. We already know that God wants us to rest, wants us to be whole, wants us to carve out time to be with hir. Do we practice this, or do we add to the noise and busyness?
Make Sunday mornings about rest. Take time for silence, for fellowship, and for celebration of a week completed and another yet to come. Combine or eliminate some of those meetings during the week. Or at least start them with something centering and restorative. Have a meal together. Help people learn to take a break, to develop boundaries, to use their gifts.
If we’re worried about not having a special place in the world anymore, then it’s because we’ve stopped looking to the needs of our communities. Our people need some relief from the crushing grind of American work. They need to hear that they matter beyond their output. We have that message already through the Gospel. We’ve just got say it with our actions.
Laura Patterson is in her third year at Eden Theological Seminary and a certified candidate in the Missouri Annual Conference. After four years in campus and young adult ministry, she's transitioning to congregational ministry in the St. Louis area.