I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard people tell me that if they were to be truly obedient to God’s mission, they’d have to pack up and move to some far-away place and serve to spread the gospel there.
But even the great missiologist Lesslie Newbigin would differ with that notion. This is what he said:
“God’s saving power known and experienced in the life of a redeemed community has to issue in all kinds of witness and service to the world… (The) enormous preponderance of the Church’s witness is the witness of the thousands of its members who work in field, home, office, mill, or law court.”
As I’ve been in the sphere of the Faith-and-Work movement, I’m happy to report that a growing number of pastors are instilling into their congregations a robust theology of vocation, tellint them that they are already missional in and through their daily vocations. These pastors are equipping and empowering people to live missionally within the contexts that God has already placed them. As one of my doctoral mentors, Steven Garber, has been saying for decades:
“Vocation is integral, not incidental, to the missio Dei.”
More and more people are now seeing their vocation as their missional calling. Not as incidental, nor as merely instrumental, to evangelism, but as mission itself! It is through our work that believers in Christ reach into the difficult places in their communities and actually love their neighbors by working for their common good.
Christians are being encouraged to recover their creative callings, as Andy Crouch wrote in his must-read book, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (Downers Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 2008).
On Mission Right Where You Are
You see, when Christians fully engage in their callings, they are already being missional. I love how Darrell Cosden puts it in his book, The Heavenly Good of Earthly Work:
“Believers desperately need to grasp why and how mission is what they, the whole people of God, are engaged in already as they work. More specifically, they need to grasp why and how the work itself that we do is missionary activity rather than just an occasion for it…It is largely (though not exclusively) through our work that we reflect God’s image and co-operate with him in bringing people and the whole of creation to humanity’s and nature’s ultimate maturity and future.”
Does Your Pastor Get This?
But there still are pastors who believe that their calling is to get you to do their calling to build the church up (as important as that is) rather than equip you in your ministry in your calling.
This leads people to experience something that causes great distress:
“Many people report feeling that they live increasingly bifurcated lives, where faith and work seldom connect. Many who are Christians complain of a ‘Sunday-Monday gap’ where their Sunday worship hour bears little or no relevance to the issues they face in their Monday workplace hours.” (David Miller, Director of the Faith and Work Initiative at Princeton).
I know that in my seminary training, very little time was taken thinking theologically about the activity that takes up most of the time of church congregants!
A few years ago, pastor Tom Nelson had to confess “pastoral malpractice” to his congregation. He writes,
“For way too long, I did not see work as an essential component of a broader, robust theology of calling. I failed to grasp that a primary stewardship of my pastoral work was to assist and equip others to better connect the professions of their Sunday faith with the practices of their Monday work.”
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