Sunday, August 24, 2025

Labor Day, Every Day: Work as Worship

I leave the day after Labor Day for a three-week trip to Tanzania, Zambia, and Ethiopia.  I will have the opportunity to meet with three amazing DML teams, speak with denominational leaders, pastors, women, young adults, educators, and government officials. It's my last big trip of the year, with several shorter trips in October and November.  Seems so strange to write that, as this year is flying by!

I'm often not in the US for Labor Day.  I tend to celebrate Labor Day on May 1st, which is when most of the world celebrates it.  Most of our partners hold "Work as Worship" events on Labor Day, where churches gather together to have members share testimonies of how they are integrating their faith and work, and share what God is doing in their workplace.  I'm always amazed that on these national holidays in other countries, whole-day events are held and people actually come!  In the US, that would not be the case, but Labor Day can be acknowledged in some way on the Sunday before (even though the church may be half empty as everyone has gone away for the weekend).

In light of Labor Day, I'd like to share a sample of a workplace commissioning that could be used on a Labor Day Sunday and encourage all of us to encourage our pastors to do something related to our workplaces.  One of the churches living out workplace discipleship in Zambia had their worship team wear their work clothes/uniforms on Sunday.  Others bring in something that they use in work (a tool, a laptop, a motorcycle helmet), lay them on the altar, and they are prayed over.

This commissioning liturgy is from the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity:

Missional Business Commissioning 

Our great cause together, including yours as a business owner or professional, is to be a faithful Christ-follower in our workplaces, communities and around the world.  

THEREFORE, WE WOULD ASK YOU TO PLEASE AFFIRM THE FOLLOWING COMMITMENTS:  

As a follower of Jesus Christ, will you embrace your work as a place of possibility and potential in the purposes of God?  Will you believe that God is already at work in these places and will you give yourself unreservedly to his purposes in you and through you, wherever you are? 

IF YES, PLEASE RESPOND:  With the help of God, I will. 

Will you trust God with the big things and the small things that you do day by day, and seek to make all that you do in your place of business and work a part of your worship of Him – learning to rely on Him, His power, His love, and His grace, whatever you do?  

IF YES, PLEASE RESPOND:  With the help of God, I will. 

As a son or daughter of our heavenly Father, will you believe that your value, your worth, your significance, and your life in your place of business and work, flow first from this identity, so that you can embrace the joy and freedom of being a child of God, wherever you are?  

IF YES, PLEASE RESPOND:  With the help of God, I will. 

As a part of the body of Christ, will you commit to encouraging and helping one another flourish in Christ and be fruitful in your businesses and place of work – learning to be the people of God, whether gathered (together on a Sunday or at any time during the week) or scattered (for the rest of the week), helping one another to make all the difference in the world?  

IF YES, PLEASE RESPOND:  With the help of God, I will. 

Today, we want to affirm your call to follow Christ in all of life, and we declare that the strength and power of the Holy Spirit will flow through you as you live out this calling in your business and at your place of work.  We commission you now this life and work, and pledge to you our prayers, encouragement and support.  

Amen!

I pray that all of us may be able to say yes to these statements and be equipped, encouraged, and commissioned to live them out in every workplace!

Sunday, August 17, 2025

Guest Article: David Smith on "Your Work Matters. And it Doesn't. Be Glad."

I don't share blogs from other writers very often, but this was too good to pass up. David Smith is the Director of the Kuyers Institute for Christian Teaching and Learning, the Coordinator of the de Vries Institute for Global Faculty Development, a Professor of Education at Calvin University, and the Editor of the International Journal of Christianity and Education.  As a fellow Grand Rapidian, we attended the same church for years.

This article first appeared in the Christ-Animating Learning Blog, and I was given permission to reprint this article by the Christian Scholar's Review.

I share this because many of us wonder about how our work fits into the big picture.  Does it really matter?  Some days it feels all important.  Other days, not so much.  David does a very good job of capturing the challenge in this.  What caught me from his article was this quote,

"You must be fully transformed so that you are Everything, Something, and Nothing. Everything in yourself, Something in human society of which you are a part, and Nothing in the presence of God."

Please read below to see the context and enjoy!  (And feel go to the link shared above and give him a review of this article!)

I sit in an empty computer lab, surrounded by the sleek machinery of digital existence, propped in the curvature of an adjustable office chair. I have been here all day, all week, working hard, even harder than usual, spurred on by participation in a writing cooperative. There are others in neighboring rooms, secreting words onto screens, words about wildlife conservation, words about neurotoxins, words about Milton and Lonergan and Owen, words about the nature of attention and the ways we imagine the Apocalypse. In my quiet corner, hunched between my tea mug and the Velky Česko-Anglický Slovník, I am concentrating fiercely on the demanding labor of translating seventeenth century Czech. “Oh God, God, God! God, if you are God, have mercy on me in my misery!”

(That last part was not actually me; that was the last sentence I translated. I am, in fact, not very miserable at all at this particular moment. Huddled in a nest of dictionaries, following arcane verbal rabbit trails, I am having enormous fun of a kind that I would likely be hard pressed to explain to most passing motorists. Perhaps even to most of my colleagues.)

I stand up, stretch, grab a tangerine, and walk over to the windows. The building is next to a highway, and a parade of vehicles streams relentlessly past. As the taut elastic of my attention pings free from its tether, I stand juggling conflicting stories about the traffic and me.

If only they knew, goes one. Here are all these people, hurrying to the store, the dental appointment, the job site, the school, driving past a building with windows behind which important work is happening, profound work, ideas that could change things. Even my own current immersion in the writings of Comenius, the seventeenth century Moravian bishop, theologian, philosopher, and educator, is rooted in a sense that it matters, or will matter if I can persuade a few people that there are still things in his writing that we need to consider. If only they could see what I see, perhaps they might want to pull over for a while.

Why should they care, goes another. They are engaged in the stuff of the real world, earning a living, assisting colleagues, collecting children, getting people to where they need to go. The things they are scurrying toward have immediate consequences for their incomes, their health, and their families. And here I sit wondering whether it would be better to render strašlivý as terrible, frightful, ghastly, or awful.

(Awful, I think, at least for the time being. Awful like the sneaking thought that this is selfish indulgence and a waste of exhausting labor. Awful like the periodic suspicion not just that it might matter to no one, but that perhaps it shouldn’t rightly matter to anyone. Hmm, perhaps I could find my way toward a little misery.)

My project, a story for another day, is large and demanding. Depending on when you ask, you might find me thinking that it could be my finest contribution yet or that I have finally and utterly overestimated the degree to which my peculiar intellectual passions have any significance at all and should quit while there is still time to pivot to something actually useful.

A truck barely held together by rust passes. Then a van from a pet grooming service, a bus with a company logo, a swarm of cars, a mechanical excavator balancing a large sofa on its bucket. I work patiently at linguistic minutiae, and the world keeps passing by at something approximating the speed limit.

I wonder how my feuding stories fit together. Am I supposed to be finding a way to sustain an unwavering conviction that academic work matters? Should I be accepting that it’s just my job and plenty of other folk, along with me, are doing things today that will leave no furrow? Should I be looking for a golden mean, an equanimity that steers between overconfidence and despair?

In one of Comenius’s works, Panorthosia (Universal Reform), he suggests an alternative to the balance image, something that comes closer in spirit to saying “all of the above.” In a chapter devoted to our responsibility to reform ourselves, he urges that “you must be fully transformed so that you are Everything, Something, and Nothing. Everything in yourself, Something in human society of which you are a part, and Nothing in the presence of God.”(1)

In yourself, he explains, you have a full share in the status of being “a true image of God and Christ,”(2) and that is to be expressed in every part of your life; therefore, you have a stake in every facet of human existence. The goal of “representing the very likeness of God in the actions of your daily life”(3) calls for holiness, mercy, generosity, and kindness to be expressed in all human tasks: managing your health, making a living, seeking understanding, controlling your desires, and doing your work. Having a specialization does not exempt you from any part of this, because your life is lived before God as a whole human being. Living that life in the image of Christ requires transformation of its every facet.

Yet each of us also has a position in society, and so it is good to be “something,” to “fulfil your own vocation without presuming to go beyond it.”(4) As the body has many parts, so you do not need to envy the work of others or inflate the value of your piece. You should do the work appropriate to your own calling “without looking round for another one.”(5) It’s enough to be a twig on the tree, a stone in the temple, and weighing which twig or stone matters most is missing the point.

But acknowledging your limited contribution to the larger scheme of things is not enough without also “acknowledging your nothingness, laying yourself empty before God in such deep humility that you take no credit for any good thing that you see before you.”(6) Rather than worrying about status, you should “ascribe everything to God, remaining ready to endure even dire confusion and strife as the penalty for your ignorant use of God’s gifts, and begging forgiveness of your sins.”(7) None of your righteous acts are pure or sovereign. God opposes the proud and exalts the humble.

As with so many of Comenius’s thoughts, the inseparability of the three parts of the argument is key (for theological reasons he was very fond of “three-and-yet-one” thought structures, sensing in them echoes of God’s nature in creation). Focus only on the splendors of multifaceted human existence, and we get triumphalism and delusions of grandeur. Tell only the nothingness story, and we risk degradation. Focus only on your part in the play, and wider purposes fade. The three are all true at once, not in turn. While Comenius did sometimes invoke the golden mean, his instinct was often to shift from dichotomies to triads and turn everything up to eleven. You are and should strive to be, at one and the same time, everything, something, and nothing.

I find this a richer frame for the minutiae of scholarly work than the “everything matters a little bit” impulse that sometimes seems to be implied by balance metaphors. The specific work that I do is part of a glorious whole, an ingredient in an endlessly complex and shifting kaleidoscope of human possibility lived in God’s presence. It is a tiny contribution among many, many others, including those of all those folk on the highway, to the weal of the world, neither insignificant nor the answer, just one piece of the puzzle. And it does not matter at all, because the world belongs to God and I am small, foolish, and mostly mistaken, yet lifted up anyway because of mercy rather than achievement. Acknowledging all three and dwelling on their simultaneity is freeing.

Footnotes:

  1. John Amos Comenius, Panorthosia 20.12. All quoted text here is from the translation in John Amos Comenius, Panorthosia or Universal Reform, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993.
  2. Panorthosia 20.13.
  3. Panorthosia 20.15.
  4. Panorthosia 20.17.
  5. Panorthosia 20.17.
  6. Panorthosia 20.18.
  7. Panorthosia 20.18

Monday, August 4, 2025

A Flywheel: "We love you, but please don't visit."

Last week, I had lunch with Dave Genzink, a friend, partner of DML, and former colleague from my time with Partners Worldwide.  As he heard me share about some of the transitions we are seeing with DML this year (good ones!), he shared with me that it reminded him of a flywheel.

A flywheel is a mechanical device that stores rotational energy using inertia.  It acts as an energy reservoir, maintaining speed and providing a buffer for fluctuations in power or demand.  Think about a potter's wheel - when you push the pedal, the speed doesn't fluctuate because the flywheel stores the energy and uses it when needed.  

If you have read the book, Good to Great, by Jim Collins, you are familiar with his talk about flywheels.  The difficulty is in getting this very heavy wheel to turn the first time.  It takes a lot of work. And once you achieve one turn, you don't stop.  You keep going until you get two, then four, sixteen, sixty, six hundred, one thousand turns.  Then ten thousand, then one million turns.  He says, "Big things happen because you do little things consistently and very well, and they compound over time."  He emphasizes the importance of consistency.

Jim Collins says, "Despite the differences between business and social-sector economics, a fundamental truth remains. Those who lead institutions from good to great must harness the flywheel effect. Whereas in business the key driver in the flywheel is the link between financial success and capital resources, I’d like to suggest that a key link in the social sectors is brand reputation built upon tangible results and emotional share of heart, with potential supporters believing in not only your mission but also your capacity to deliver on that mission."

Dave explained that the flywheel in ministry needs commitment, through long-term engagement and passion.  It requires alignment in what we do and say, as well as learning about what works and what doesn't.  It needs continuous improvement through the sharing of best practices.  And it needs momentum, by building on success and local ownership.

The story I shared with him that triggered the memory of a flywheel was that I was told by the DML Francophone leaders who are starting the work of DML in several French-speaking countries, "We love you, but please don't visit.The presence of a white American can disrupt momentum by potentially undermining opportunities for ownership and contribution.  A flywheel that is moving well can slow down when those pushing begin looking for energy elsewhere.  These leaders continued by saying, "In a few years, when it's going well, then it would be good for you to visit and see what is happening."

I took this as a very positive sign, a sign of the flywheel turning now because of momentum and many more hands pushing it.  In fact, so far this year, we have seen THOUSANDS of new DML trainers trained across many countries.  

In French-speaking Africa, we are seeing amazing growth.  With over 300 million French speakers in 18+ countries, DML teams are moving!  This population frequently laments that many materials relating to faith and transformation are in English only.  Our partners have been working hard to ensure all materials are translated into French and are getting them out there!  We now have fully established teams in Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea, and Togo, and we have teams starting and in training in Chad, Congo Brazzaville, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Senegal; and we have teams heading out very soon to Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, and Madagascar.

We aren't yet to the point of ten thousand or one million turns, but we are on our way!