Faith and Work News ~ Links to Interesting Articles

• Carrying Your Work Into Worship. In this session from the 2023 Faith + Work Los Angeles Conference, Matthew Kaemingk, co-author of the excellent book Work and Worship: Reconnecting Our Labor and Liturgy, explores a wide variety of work experiences that we can offer to God in worship.
• How to Transform Destructive Coworker Behaviors. Shutting down negative behaviors is important. Depending on the severity, certain negative actions make teamwork all but impossible. David L. Winters looks at three destructive behaviors and biblical solutions.
• Powerful Bible Verses for Monday. Jonah McKeown writes “Following is a collection of Bible verses specifically chosen to uplift and empower you on your Monday. Let these powerful words guide you as you navigate your workday, reminding you of God’s unwavering love.”

Click on ‘Continue reading’ for:
• More links to interesting articles
• The Top 10 Faith and Work Quotes of the Week
• Faith and Work Book Review ~ The Emotionally Healthy Leader: How Transforming Your Inner Life Will Deeply Transform Your Church, Team, and the World by Peter Scazzero
• Quotes from the book Agents of Flourishing: Pursuing Shalom in Every Corner of Society by Amy Sherman.

• How Does the Theology of Work Help You in Your Job Search? Russ Gehrlein writes “Understanding what God’s Word says about work and knowing how to practice the presence of the triune God at work will change their perspective about where they will spend the majority of their waking hours every single day for the next 40 years.”
• Called to Lead. My book Called to Lead: Living and Leading for Jesus in the Workplace is available in both a paperback and Kindle edition. Read a free sample (Introduction through Chapter 2).
• A Conversation About God’s Purposes for Our Work. Our friend Russ Gehrlein was recently a guest on the syndicated radio program The Plumb Line, hosted by Jay Rudolph. They discussed several of the faith and work concepts found in Russ’s book, Immanuel Labor: God’s Presence In Our Profession. Below is a partial transcript of their conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity. You can also listen to the full conversation.
• Diligent Workers Make the Best Neighbors. Tom Nelson writes “Jobs matter because they affirm human dignity and provide the economic capacity necessary for human flourishing.”
• How the Gospel Transforms Our Productivity. Ana Ávila writes “Being productive doesn’t mean doing many things in a short period of time. It does not mean working every minute of the day. Rather, it is seeking to honor God with what you have, making an effort when it’s time to make an effort and resting when it’s time to rest.”
• Our Work Done to God’s Glory Matters to Him, for all Eternity. Randy Alcorn was recently a guest on Jordan Raynor’s Mere Christians Enjoy this excerpt from their conversation.

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Top 10 Faith and Work Quotes of the Week

• Taking a Sabbath day is good for us in every way – physically, mentally, spiritually, and socially. Take it. Enjoy it. Russ Gehrlein
• The Church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables. Dorothy Sayers
• God is not served by technical incompetence; and incompetence and untruth always result when the secular vocation is treated as a thing alien to religion. Dorothy Sayers
• Christian people, and particularly perhaps the Christian clergy, must get it firmly into their heads that when a man or woman is called to a particular job of secular work, that is as true a vocation as though he or she were called to specifically religious work. Dorothy Sayers
• If work is to find its right place in the world, it is the duty of the Church to see to it that the work serves God, and that the worker serves the work. Dorothy Sayers
• Work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God. Dorothy Sayers
• In nothing has the Church so lost Her hold on reality as in Her failure to understand and respect the secular vocation. She has allowed work and religion to become separate departments, and is astonished to find that, as a result, the secular work of the world is turned to purely selfish and destructive ends, and that the greater part of the world’s intelligent workers have become irreligious, or at least, uninterested in religion. Dorothy Sayers
• Whenever we bring order out of chaos, whenever we draw out creative potential, whenever we elaborate and unfold creation beyond where it was when we found it, we are following God’s pattern of creative cultural development. Timothy Keller
• I asked that it should be looked upon, not as a necessary drudgery to be undergone for the purpose of making money, but as a way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself to the glory of God. That it should, in fact, be thought of as a creative activity undertaken for the love of the work itself; and that man, made in God’s image, should make things, as God makes them, for the sake of doing well a thing that is well worth doing. Dorothy Sayers

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FAITH AND WORK BOOK REVIEW:
The Emotionally Healthy Leader: How Transforming Your Inner Life Will Deeply Transform Your Church, Team, and the World by Peter Scazzero. Zondervan. 326 pages. 2015
*** ½

I was introduced to some of the material in this book through a few of the soft skill modules we covered in our NXTGEN Pastors Cohort. The book is divided into two parts – the leader’s inner life and outer life. The book was born out of the struggles and growth the author experienced following what he refers to as his “fourth conversion” in 2007. He writes that for nearly two decades, he had ignored the emotional component in his spiritual growth and relationship with God.
The author was senior pastor for twenty-six years, and when the book was published, he had been a teaching pastor and pastor-at-large for two years. In this book, the author offers a road map of sorts for an emotionally healthy journey, complete with specific ideas and practices to help you discern God’s next steps for you as a leader.
The author describes the emotionally unhealthy leader as someone who operates in a continuous state of emotional and spiritual deficit, lacking emotional maturity and a “being with God” sufficient to sustain their “doing for God.” Emotionally unhealthy leaders tend to be unaware of what is going on inside them. They are also chronically overextended and do not practice Sabbath, a weekly, twenty-four-hour period in which they cease all work and rest, delight in God’s gifts, and enjoy life with him.
The author tells us that to lead from a deep and transformed inner life, you must:

• Face your shadow
• Lead out of your marriage/singleness
• Slow down for loving union
• Practice Sabbath delight

Among the topics that the author covers in the book are family of origin, shadow, genogram, marriage, and singleness, slowing down, Rule of Life, Sabbath, shame, limits, emotionally healthy culture and teams, power and boundaries, endings, and transitions.

The author includes numerous helpful stories from his ministry that help illustrate the points he makes in the book. There are several assessments included in the book so that you can see where you are currently with the topic being discussed. The book includes information on how to implement emotionally healthy spirituality in your church or ministry, and as well as a few helpful appendices.
This would be a good book to read and discuss with a group of leaders.

Below are some of my favorite quotes from the book:

• It is not possible to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature.
• We lead more out of who we are than out of what we do, strategic or otherwise. If we fail to recognize that who we are on the inside informs every aspect of our leadership, we will do damage to ourselves and to those we lead.
• Mature spiritual leadership is forged in the crucible of difficult conversations, the pressure of conflicted relationships, the pain of setbacks, and dark nights of the soul.
• The first and most difficult task we face as leaders is to lead ourselves.
• Your shadow is the accumulation of untamed emotions, less-than-pure motives, and thoughts that, while largely unconscious, strongly influence and shape your behaviors. It is the damaged but mostly hidden version of who you are. The shadow is not simply another word for sin. If that makes you think the shadow is hard to pin down, you’re right.
• Emotional intelligence in the workplace trumps almost every other factor — IQ, personality, education, experience, and gifts — when it comes to effective performance for leaders.
• There really are only two options when it comes to the shadow. We can ignore it until we hit a wall, with pain so great we have no choice but to face up to it. Or we can be proactive, courageously looking at the factors that contributed to its formation.
• If you want to lead out of your marriage, then you must make marriage — not leadership — your first ambition, your first passion, and your loudest gospel message.
• Bearing fruit requires slowing down enough to give Jesus direct access to every aspect of our lives and our leadership.
• All work — paid and unpaid — is good, but it needs to be boundaried by the practice of Sabbath.
• The problem with too many leaders is that we allow our work to trespass on every other area of life, disrupting the balanced rhythm of work and rest God created for our good.
• Keeping the Sabbath is a core spiritual discipline — an essential delivery mechanism for God’s grace and goodness in our lives. It provides a God-ordained way to slow us down for meaningful connection with God, ourselves, and those we care about.
• Success is first and foremost doing what God has asked us to do, doing it his way, and in his timing.
• Creating an emotionally healthy culture and building a healthy team are among the primary tasks for every leader.
• The best test of a leader’s character is how they deal with power.
• As leaders, we are stewards of delegated power gifted to us for a short time by God.

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Faith and Work Book Club – Won’t you read along with us?
We are reading Agents of Flourishing: Pursuing Shalom in Every Corner of Society by Amy Sherman. Sherman is also the author of Kingdom Calling: Vocational Stewardship for the Common Good, a book I first read in my “Calling, Vocation and Work” class at Covenant Seminary.
Every corner, every square inch of society can flourish as God intends, and Christians of any vocation can become agents of that flourishing. In this book, Sherman offers a multifaceted, biblically grounded framework for enacting God’s call to seek the shalom of our communities in six arenas of civilizational life (The Good, The True, The Beautiful, The Just, The Prosperous, and The Sustainable).
This week we look at Chapter 16: Cultivating the Sustainable Address Food Deserts. Here are a few helpful quotes from the chapter:

• Brown began sharing his vision with other African American pastors in the city affected by food apartheid. He encouraged churches to reimagine their assets, turning their land into gardens, their kitchens into healthy cooking demonstration centers, and their parking lots into farmers’ markets.
• By 2016 Brown had recruited ten churches to the BCFSN. The network helps congregations to establish community gardens on their land, operate pop-up farm stands, and recruit volunteers.
• By 2020 the BCFSN had expanded to involve about fifty congregations, mostly but not exclusively in the mid-Atlantic region.
• The BCFSN project has created new opportunities for congregants at participating churches to deploy their talents.
• The BCFSN also honors the DNA of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church, where social justice and self-sufficiency are core values.