Economics and Vocational Clarity

And, to me, we’ve pulled something apart that God very much has together in this sense, be clear here, and that is that the way in which we care for people actually is a witness and a testimony for what it is that we affirm when we present the gospel.

So, I think of Luke 4 as the example; Jesus goes into the synagogue and he says I’m going to release the captives and he’s delivery why God has anointed him. He’s delivering the message of his calling and what he’s bringing in this new era of salvation. And then, the very next scene in Luke 4, we’re in Capernaum, and Jesus is ministering right and left doing the very things that he’s talking about.

So, that his word and his deed match and go together, and the deeds reinforce the words “God loves you and cares for you and has a wonderful plan for your life”. Sometimes the way we summarize that, probably not the best summary of the gospel, but often times we say it that way, but what do we actually show in the way we engage people that shows that God cares and that God’s people care about who God cares about?

We even have emperors from secular sources – or, shouldn’t say emperors, epistles from secular sources talking about Christians caring for the plague victims all the way through to anti-slavery movements and our current movements. Even the famous fundamental versus liberal split in the church in America from the nineteen teens or twenties to the 1970s. God’s people have never stopped caring. They’ve never stopped doing the good works of Jesus.

We stepped out of public life at times, we didn’t engage in some of the major organs of that communication, but even the most fundamental or conservative theologically of Christians have opened the rescue missions, opened the homes for moms in trouble, cared deeply, and I think it’s important to bring that to light.

But his real message was, we need to respect evangelicals more than we tend to. Because, as I travel the world and go into some of the worst places and work with some of the worst human conditions, what I inevitably find there are evangelicals working, who not only work there and not only have gone in, but in many cases are the last to leave.

Even when things get bad they hang around and work through it. What he was communicating was this terrific respect for this kind of care and concern, and it was registering with him that the kind of way in which evangelicals are often stereotyped and that Christians are stereotyped really may not be a full reflection of many of the kinds of people he’s met, which I thought is interesting.

Six months later, he was a full follower of Jesus Christ and was baptized. His Zoroastrian fiancé baked a cake that said “Happy Christianing” and she’s now a full-devoted follower of Jesus Christ and he’s practicing medicine in California. It was the experience of Christian compassion that drove him to become a Christian.

For one way or another, we have tended to not think about the last two categories we’re going to talk about in the same kinds of ways in relation to discipleship that we have the first three. Just to review; spiritual formation, personal wholeness, healthy relationships.

The fourth category and the fifth, I’ll give them both, and then we’ll go over them one at a time, is vocational clarity and then economics and work. The further we go in the list, the further we may be moving into new territory, but let’s talk about vocational clarity a second. Why is this here to begin with, and then secondly, what are you trying to do in this section?

And so we want to give people a sense of their calling as something a little bit larger and broader than just how they earned a living. Although, how they earn a living matters deeply to God as well. They can sometimes be the same thing, but not always, so if I meet someone who says, “I’m called to be a pastor,” I will obviously encourage that calling, but they might also be earning a living as an electrician, to which someone may feel called, but I’ll say, “Fantastic, you have dimensions to your calling”, but I want that pastor to feel fully a pastor, whether or not she or he is supported by the income of the church.

So vocation is this broader sense of purpose and calling and the economics and work is the arena where we work it out every day, and that was – by the way, we got a lot of pushback on the fifth dimension. Everybody wanted to put economics and work inside of calling or they wanted not to even include it at all, because they thought of it as secular or just instrumental. So we felt it was important that the gifts that God distributes, the callings he distribute, are bigger than just a current job, and then we wanted to make sure that we gave dignity to every bit of the work that people are doing.

What we’re trying to do is say hold it, the one-way ticket to foreign fields and the pastorate, those are important callings, but we want to dignify and elevate all the people of God and really honor the multiple domains of society God may have them serving in.

In fact, the whole idea of wholeness of life and the way God calls us to live in community with each other, within the creation that he’s given us assumes the stewardship that we see in Genesis 1 and 2, and its core.

We get just enough to awaken us to this amazing creativity that we’re called to, and so even before we get to the granular economics and work in our outcomes, we want people to really – and we had a doctoral candidate, 25 years as a rural pastor, actually watch a measurable change in the blue collar and rural workers when he began to teach about vocation and use our assessment. He had people who were doing fairly hard, repetitive, wage-based work awaken to the Holy Spirit involved with their work, the good they were bringing into the world, and the opportunities to share the gospel.

And you don’t have to have a seven-point plan, but one of the things we believe is there’s something a couple can do together that they cannot do separately. We want couples praying and seeking God about the gift that they and their family are to the world, and so my wife and I have a mission statement together. We each have a separate one and we have a mission statement together.

By the way, too much of the theology of work stuff is for middle and upper management or leadership and too little has been concentrated on the everyday work that most people do.

So, work and economics, everyone every day, who’s able to get up and do something, is participating in the economy and is doing some kind of work, and so we wanted to honor that as the stage, as it were, where all those other dimensions find their expression.

We have outcomes that you never see on a standard discipleship form, that creation care and a growing economy can go together; that you contribute to whatever group you’re working for. This is what brings glory to God and we rooted all of this in the gospels and the epistles.

We ask if you’re managing your personal resources well. We actually believe that because oikonomia or oikos refers to household management and so the idea is, are you taking care of your personal resources well? Are you actually aware of how your job fits into the economy?

So these are going to be – these are going to take a little bit longer over the coming years, should Jesus tarry, a little bit longer to get into the consciousness of pastors and disciplers, because they have broader social implications and too often work in economics are seen is merely an end to a tithe or a missions pledge, and we’re trying to give inherent, as well as instrumental value to work.

This is where God has us. God has us there for a reason to not only do things inherently that contribute to society, but also brings us into a web of relationships that have us uniquely placed to represent him where he has us, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and boom, now you’re in a mission.

Are we celebrating people who bring good to the community as a discipleship function with the understand that all of this is in order that people may glorify our Father in heaven and praise our good works and be drawn to Christ, so I’m not making a water-baptized convert the same thing as, you know, doing accounting well.

They are different, I understand that, but are you doing your accounting in such a way that people notice the asset that you are? Are you getting along with the people where you work in such a way that makes them thirsty to know why you’re happy about the work you’re doing when everybody else is complaining, and really, that’s just one example.

But it’s really dignifying. We’re back to where we started at the very beginning. We really want to dignify and I think Romans 12:1 and 2 is the critical theological nexus here when Paul says to offer our bodies as a living sacrifice and the result of that offering is proving the will of God in what we do and what’s interesting is he ended the sacred secular dichotomy in two verses.

Where you fit is kind of – it’s interesting. We had an identity thing early on talking about spiritual formation and personal wholeness and now we come back to it and we’re really dealing with almost identity again, but in a completely different way and a completely different sphere.

He said everybody comes to the airport stressed. Everybody comes with all kinds of anxiety. If I can reduce their anxiety, bring joy to them, and then you find out he’s an elder in his local church. He said and I’m doing this for the glory of God, for the good of people I mention. It turns out that he actually would have people stop and over the course of 25 years, led many to Christ because he brought joy to directing traffic.

The individual assessment is anonymous and personal to the person, but the pastor gets the data for the whole group and then with their leadership teams, they can actually start targeting those areas that are strong. Obviously there are areas of leadership that you want people to grow in. It opens a conversation and, by the way, this fits into any church mission statement, so we’re not – if you have no discipleship program, we have some churches that are using this to begin one.

In other cases, it can fit into any church mission statement or structure, but the idea is you can target weaknesses and strength. If you change one or two of the weaknesses, you’re probably going to touch four or five other outcomes as well, and improved prayer life and improved work life and improved marriage. Each of these can really affect other aspects. So the idea is that you take it again in 6 months or 12 months.

We’re hoping that seminaries will adopt it for entrance and maybe do it annually to be as part of their outcomes for their seminarians, so they can actually – one pastor wrote back and said Charlie, there’s only one problem. I have no excuses and you expect me to do my job now. Because most of us, frankly, are sort of guessing about discipleship. This is not the final word. This is a penultimate word like every word of a human being, but it’s a starting point for this whole life thinking.

But we’re able to do it in the aggregate, so starting in about three months, you’ll start seeing on the website publishing of those results of kind of where our participants are, as a whole group, and eventually, we’ll be able to break out subgroups as well by both denomination, by gender, by other things, because you take an initial survey when you take this.