Theology of Work - Lesson 1

I. Introduction

Welcome to the Certification module and Theology of Work. My name is Gerry Breshears. I teach theology here at Western, I have been doing that for a long time, and I’m also a teaching elder at my church, Grace Community Church out in Gresham.

And through that, I have a lot of contact with a lot of different people, from megachurch pastors to ordinary people; from missionaries to counselors, to psychologists, to psychiatrists, medical doctors, CPAs, and tax accountants. I mean, gosh, everything in the world, down to people who just take care of electronics for a living.

II. Common Misconceptions About Work

And what I want to do is think with you a little bit about what is this whole idea of theology of work. We, at our church, have on our masthead—on our bulletin: “Every member, a minister.” But the reality is, we don’t think like that. Now, the reality is, when it gets right down to it, that we think of the guys who are employed at the church, the full-time people, as ministers, and the rest of us are not.

And we tend to think of God’s work as something that happens inside the building or for the specific purposes of Jesus. We tend to think of pastors and missionaries as more “God’s called people” than say, somebody who’s working in a business place, or checking out groceries at Safeway or something like that.

And what I’d like to suggest in this course that we’re going to do together, that we need to get that fixed. When we’ve got our basic theology of work backward, then we tend to divide things into sacred and secular. We tend to divide things into supernatural and natural. We tend to divide things into God’s world and the rest of the world. And I just don’t think that’s right. I don’t think it’s biblical.

One of the things that happened in the history of work is that there was the vocation to be a priest in the Roman Catholic Church. And one of the things that happened in the Reformation—especially Martin Luther, said, “That’s not true. Every Christian has a vocation, and it’s not just the ordained guy.”

Now, part of that was the whole idea of universal priesthood, and we’ll look at priesthood in one of our modules. Part of it is the idea of what is God’s work, and we’ll look at that. 

III. Definition of Work

So, what I propose to do here is just kind of unpack this a little bit, and—a couple of things I’d like to do:

One is just a basic definition of work that I’m going to use. It has quite a history. I ran across it first in some material by Tim Keller, Pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church back in New York City—now a very well-known author. But a very, very good theologian, thinker, pastor. And he, in an essay by Dorothy Sayers, that you’ll find on the CD, unpacked this and put together this theology of work. Which, of course, I have to mess with because I can’t take anything and leave it alone, because I work, you know. The basic idea of a biblical doctrine of work is: “The gracious expression of the creative energy of the Lord in the service of others to create shalom.” Wow. Okay, one more time. Basic biblical doctrine of work is: “The gracious expression of the creative energy of the Lord in the service of others to create shalom.”

IV. Unpacking the Definition

Now, we’re going to unpack several pieces of that as we look at it. But that’s the basic idea that I’m looking for. Work in any mode is an expression of the Lord’s energy that comes to us as image of God—empowered by the Holy Spirit, gifted by the Holy Spirit, called into ministry. It’s in service of others because we fundamentally are “other-oriented” people, because we’re like God. And we’re trying to create shalom: a context of human flourishing, all relationships, and order. We’ll look at that under the context of justice.

V. Theological Foundations

So, a number of pieces we’re going to do as we unpack this. Now, here’s what I’m going to do as we work through this:

I’m going to start with baseline: we’re going to look at the concept of God. We’re going to start in Genesis chapter 1, in his creation of human beings as image of God. And I want to look at God a little bit because that picture of who God is and what He is in relation to us is foundational.

Then I want to come look at human beings particularly as image of God and unpack that a little bit. And then a basic idea flowing out of that is: what is our humanness, and different dimensions of our humanness, and how that relates to our working in covenant partnership with God.

VI. Gifts & Talents

I want to look at the idea of gifts—gifts and talents—because we are gifted by God to do things. And we need to understand a little bit more about this whole topic of spiritual gifts to understand things well. 

VII. Priesthood

We’ll look at the idea of priesthood in a context of basic idea of a church.

VIII. Justice & Righteousness

And I want to look at the concept of justice. What does it mean? Tsedaqah (צְדָקָה) and mishpat (מִשְׁפָּט): righteousness and justice—we’ll unpack that a bit. And then finally, I’m going to come back and tie this all together in a theology of work, and taking this definition of work and pulling all the pieces together and seeing what that looks like theologically.

So, that’s where we’re headed. You can look at these modules in any order, I suppose. If you follow them through in the order I just said, that would probably be the most logical progression, but you get to do it your way. Tie in, look at it, give me feedback. I’d sure appreciate that because we—although you’re not in a classroom, there’s a certain level in which there’s a community that we’re working together here, and I’d love to get feedback from you and share that with others as we work together to understand what is a theology of work.