A CHRISTIAN STATEMENT ON WORK

What does a Christian spirituality of work look like?
We have a sense of calling, a God-given ability to do a job linked with a God-given enjoyment in doing it. We have a sense of responsibility to do something in our own time that has value. We have a sense of freedom from burden of the workaholic, for we are not asked to do more than we can. We have a sense of creativity that enables us to place the autograph of our souls on the work of our hands. We have a sense of dignity, for we value people over efficiency. We have a sense of community, for we know that our life together is more important than the end product. We have a sense of solidarity with the poor to empower them to do what they cannot do by themselves. And we have a sense of meaning and purpose, for we know that we are working in cooperation with God to bring the world one step closer to completion. –Richard Foster

Our relationship with creation, the earth, is a significant part of such a work. This is the first work given man. In our care and keep of it we image God, who rules over all he has made. In this work of bringing the earth and all it’s life forms into a flourishing health, we demonstrate our own ‘being made in the image of God’. Healthy soil, healthy plants, healthy animals, healthy people, healthy relationships. And there is importance in this for as men we know as men, our knowledge comes from metaphor, from seeing mirrors of deeper things. Physical realities mirror spiritual truth. Our understanding of reality is shaped by our concrete experiences and relationships here on earth. It is important also in that our work now is a rehearsal for our reigning with Christ in the future.

N.T. Wright puts it this way in his book ‘Simply Christian’, ‘the Creator loved the world he had made, and wanted to look after it in the best possible way. To that end, he placed within his world a looking-after creature, a creature who would demonstrate to the creation who he, the Creator, really was, and who would set to work developing the creation and making it flourish and fulfill its purpose. This looking-after creature (or rather, this family of creatures: the human race) would model and embody that interrelatedness, that mutual and fruitful knowing, trusting, and loving, which was the Creator’s intention. Relationship was part of the way in which we were meant to be fully human, not for our own sake, but as a part of a much larger scheme of things’.