Room for Comment

I’m going to begin blogging again. I now have the time/structure to be at the computer and able to write my thoughts down more easily. I don’t know if I ever had any readers other than a few church friends, but hopefully this blog will achieve its goal, which is to provide a room for commentary. If Steve G., Nate, JT, Roger, Matt McD, etc. are reading this, take this as my plea for us to re-establish a conVerge blogging community. I sure miss it.

Now, at conVerge Lynchburg we are returning, in our mid-week group and also our teaching on the Sermon on the Mount on Sundays, to some pretty deep ideas about what it is people are for, that is, not just what is our job, but what gives meaning to our lives. In our midweek groups we are going through Dallas Willard’s Spirit of the Disciplines, which is a pretty standard classic on the “why” of spirituality/discipline. I have had the blessing/curse of reading this book in groups a few times before (i’m especially thinking of the time we read it in RA groups at LU). The reason for the blessing/curse ambiguity is that for perhaps the first time I am being forced to really consider doing what Willard is calling us to do, echoing Christ. I’d, of course, wanted to want to try to attempt to get around to doing some of these things before, but what has been so revolutionary this time (and we are only on chapter 5) is that we’re reading it as a church. We now have the actual structure and posture to encourage each other to live this way, certainly more naturally/healthily than we did in that RA group.

This past group, we talked pretty abstractly about the idea of work. I think we all pretty much assume that we know what work is, and then make the perennial mistake of conflating that idea with what work OUGHT to be. I don’t wanna make this a 5,000 word post, but I do wanna just put it out there that doing some WORK and thinking about work will be a profitable experience for all. One thing that we’ve gradually been concluding at conVerge is that most “jobs” are not work, properly understood. I am arguing in imprecise and unsystematic terms for a higher view of work, one that even goes beyond the call to Mission. In these terms, I have been highly impacted by such cultural critics as Wendell Berry and Neil Postman. Berry especially, in his book of essays What Are People For?, gets the mental gears turning with respect to what is a the proper understanding of work. I don’t mean to here give my theology of work, but I think this would be an appropriate place to ask some questions and see what I get back in response:

Basic to this discussion is a biblical understanding of “dominion”, cf. Genesis 1.26. Are you comfortable with the equation of this “dominion” with “work”?

Postman comments that our generation is going to be mainly employed as symbol-analysts. Of the top of your head what are the problems with calling symbol-analysis work in any substantive sense? Are we willing to accept a, *gasp*, compartmentalization in our concept of work? (ie. the difference between biblical work and wage earning)

If we admit a growing crisis, a growing illiteracy with biblical categories of work, then how do we expect to:  1) speak relevantly to the secular, and 2) make biblical work practical?

I think it is our job as Christ-followers to in some sense pull a Jerry Maguire and abort the attempt to compromise with regard to work. We will be culpable for rationalizing this away, if indeed the radical call to Work is indeed biblical. I’ve already grabbed the fish, who’s coming with me?