Pastoring for Monday: Help Your Congregation Integrate Faith and Work by Matt Rusten. IVP. 194 pages. 2026
*** ½

Matt Rusten is the President of the Made to Flourish, an organization that exists to close the gap between Sunday worship and Monday work. This book is written for pastors to help their congregations integrate faith and work, which has long been a passion of mine. Nine years ago, I presented a seminar at our church denomination’s General Assembly titled “Helping Our People to Connect Their Faith to Their Work and Callings”.

This helpful book is broken into three parts and an Epilogue:

Part 1: Why Prioritize Work at Church?

Part 2: What Does Discipling Workers Entail?

Part 3: How to Shepherd Workers

Epilogue Prioritizing Vocational Discipleship and Mission: A Case Study

In this book, the author offers reliable models and paradigms on how to close the Sunday-to-Monday gap in a local congregation. He tells us that sometimes the Sunday-to-Monday gap means workers feel their Sunday gathering at church does nothing to affirm or commission them in their daily ministry. He tells us that he wrote the book to help pastors reimagine and inhabit a new way for local churches to form Christians who follow, represent, and commune with Christ amid their daily work. He writes that there are meaningful paradigms and practices that pastors can adopt to help the entire people of God embrace the task of mission in whatever area of work they serve.

Among the topics covered in the book are several different workplace scenarios, the major dominant narratives of work of our age, the biblical story for work, how work forms us, workplace pressures, unique discipleship challenges and possibilities inherent in several vocations, how to preach with workers in mind, vocation groups, career transitions, starting a new role, mentoring, unemployed and looking for work, retirement, gratitude, and the fourfold movement – from unenchantment, to enchantment, to disenchantment, to reenchantment – approximated in the life of Qoheleth in the book of Ecclesiastes.

This is an informative and practical book by someone who has years of experience in helping pastors close the Sunday-to-Monday gap. Highly recommended.

Below are 10 helpful quotes from the book:

• Work and its discipleship implications should be an important focus of all churches.
• A distinctive Christian approach to faithfulness at work shows up as love demonstrated by selfless service to others.
• Wherever we find ourselves at work, we should make it our ambition to spend our lives in service to others.
• Pastors play a pivotal role in helping people imagine new ways to participate with the Spirit, adopting practices in the context of their work that conform to the way of Jesus, bringing praise and glory to God.
• Preaching with an eye toward workers is not only vital but also one of the most effective ways that preachers can practically shepherd their congregations.
• Work is one of the most common themes to come up in the letters of the New Testament.
• Work – like few other things, and because it requires so much of our time, effort, hopes, and relationships – can become central in our lives. All the other facets of our lives become anchored in it.
• For retirement, in God’s design, is simply a changing season to embrace new opportunities for meaningful contribution to others.
• God is forming us into the likeness of his Son, Jesus, by his Holy Spirit, in and through our daily work.
• Pastors play a pivotal role in helping people imagine new ways to participate with the Spirit, adopting practices in the context of their work that conform to the way of Jesus, bringing praise and glory to God.