BLOG 10/28/13. A CHURCH DESIGNED FOR THE MONDAY MORNING WORLD

BLOG. 10/28/13. A CHURCH DESIGNED FOR THE MONDAY MORNING WORLD

 

The role of the ministry of the laity in their daily work-a-day lives is loaded with fascinating potential. It has, however, too often been displaced (hi-jacked?) by church professionals, who focus God’s people, rather, on their faithful participation in all of those in-house church activities. That is a horrendous subversion of the mission of God.

 

I regularly sit with our Christian community, in our worship services, in the midst of folk who are film-makers, research scientists, single moms, truck drivers, contractors, IT specialists, actors and actresses, baristas at Starbuck’s, bankers—you name it. As I look at them out of my own eyes as a once-upon-a-time teaching pastor, and now as an author, I have to wonder how all that is taking place in that worship service equips and forms each of them/us for our role as the children of Light in the week that is to follow?

 

The ministry of the laity is a theme that periodically emerges, creates excitement among the laity, and then is eclipsed as theology is divorced from the workplace. After World War II, the newly emerging World Council of Churches did some seminal and very helpful studies on the laity, but then that was eclipsed by more arcane theological issues. In those years Dorothy Sayers became a voice for such a needed focus on the laity, but church professionals had another agenda.

 

Along in the mid-sixties and seventies there emerged a healthy faith at work movement with Keith Miller, Bruce Larson, Howard Butt and others—even producing for a time a really good periodical by that designation. But when the funding ran out, so did the journal. Voices such as Howard Blake, Robert Slocum, and others would blow the trumpet for such a cause, but the seminaries, which, ostensibly, were training the churches teachers and leaders remained mostly deaf to this strategic mission.

 

I still cringe when I hear clergy speak of: “Before I went into the full-time ministry …” My question would be: which baptized (or confirmed) Christian person is not in ‘full time’ ministry’? Which child of God is not a part of the missionary calling of the church? When is the mission field not in the heart of the neighbor next to us, or in the place of our incarnation?

 

Then in the 1970s, after one of the huge Urbana Missionary Conferences, the InterVarsity staff became aware that of the 18,000+ students attending, only a few would wind up in overseas missions to the unreached world abroad … while the rest would return to one of the greatest mission fields in existence, which is the North American workplace. With that vision, they implemented InterVarsity Marketplace, and for a few years under Pete Hammond’s leadership produced a journal, and did some remarkable conferences … until the funding ran out.

 

So you can image my own excitement when PRISM Magazine, the journal of Evangelicals for Social Action, did a recent issue highlighting this very ministry, with a lead article: “The Daily Grind? Putting Our Faith to Work on the Job.” Yea! And in that issue is another hugely encouraging article about Redeemer Church of New York’s Center for Faith and Work. They quote that marvelous quote from Dorothy Sayers: “In nothing has the church so lost her hold on reality as in her failure to understand and respect the secular vocation. She has allowed work and religion to become separate departments . . .”

Cheers for PRISM, and for Redeemer Church and Timothy Keller for lifting up the banner. Stand by: this theme has been my passion for forty years and more. It needs to be heralded. To be continued . . .

About rthenderson

Sixty years a pastor-teacher within the Presbyterian Church. Author of several books, the latest of which are a trilogy on missional ecclesiology: ENCHANTED COMMUNITY: JOURNEY INTO THE MYSTERY OF THE CHURCH, then, REFOUNDING THE CHURCH FROM THE UNDERSIDE, then THE CHURCH AND THE RELENTLESS DARKNESS. Previous to this trilogy was A DOOR OF HOPE: SPIRITUAL CONFLICT IN PASTORAL MINISTRY, and SUBVERSIVE JESUS, RADICAL FAITH. I am a native of West Palm Beach, Florida, a graduate of Davidson College, then of Columbia and Westminster Theological Seminaries.
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