LIBERTY UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF DIVINITY
Assignment Title: Equipping Churches Invest Resources in Equipping People for Daily Work
Course: CHMN 699 - Internship
Student: Kristine Sage
Date: January 29, 2022
Professor: Dr. Joel Breidenbaugh
For Eugene Peterson the challenge lies in affirming the worth of the everyday ministry of
all the people of God:
One of the most soul-damaging phrases that has crept into the Christian vocabulary is
“full-time Christian work”. Every time it is used, it drives a wedge of misunderstanding between
the way we pray and the way we work, between the way we worship and the way we make a
living.... Most of what Jesus said and did took place in a secular workplace — in a farmer’s field,
in a fishing boat, at a wedding feast, in a cemetery, at a public well asking a woman he didn’t
know for a drink of water, on a country hillside that he turned into a huge picnic, in a
courtroom, having supper in homes with acquaintances or friends…. Twenty seven times in
John’s Gospel Jesus is identified as a worker: “My father is still working and I also am working”
(John 5:17). Work doesn’t take us away from God; it continues the work of God. God comes
into view on the first page of our scriptures as a worker. Once we identify God in his workplace
working, it isn’t long before we find ourselves in our workplaces working in the name of God.
[31]
Each church needs to identify the particular opportunities and challenges their people
face in their places of work. Do people work as professionals, managers, labourers, technicians,
public servants, teachers, or service workers? The opportunities and challenges vary widely
between these types of work. Do congregants’ jobs have high status, pay, opportunity, power,
security, and mobility, or low? Initiatives–a quarterly online publication of the National Center
for the Laity in the USA (www.classic.catholiclabor.org/NCL)– gives details in each issue of ways
that local churches identify and are responding to the particular workplace situations their
people are in. This could be a resource for churches looking for examples.
Equipping Churches Invest Resources in Equipping People for Daily Work
Effectively equipping church members for daily life and work requires significant
investments of money and staff time. This may mean reallocating resources to support ministry
in daily life and work. At the most advanced equipping churches, this is now a budgeted item.
This is a fair test of how seriously the challenge has been taken. Those churches that do invest
realise daily life and work is where faith is lived out in front of the world and is where the future
of the church is being decided.
Equipping Churches Create Structures to Sustain This Ministry
Equipping people is a complex business. Structures can help to facilitate or hinder
ministry. What is a help for the first generation often becomes a hindrance for the next,
because energy ends up serving and resourcing the structure, but not necessarily serving the
originally intended function. Form should always follow function and not the other way around.
The dream that births any structure needs revisiting regularly to see if it is still being pursued or
if that vision has been lost or distorted.
At the same time, any successful attempt at ministry or mission also needs structures to
maintain and facilitate its sustainability. Perhaps the most elaborate example of this in terms of
churches involved in workplace ministry is the structure that Katherine Leary Alsdorf and her
team (now led by David Kim) have developed at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York.
Their Faith and Work Center includes a team of staff members who each head up different
areas of ministry such as their Arts Ministry, Entrepreneurship Initiative, and Gotham
Fellowship intern programme. The staff also co-ordinates the leadership of eighteen different
Vocational Groups, each of which also includes a number of sub groups. A number of other
churches also have staff who specialise in resourcing and supporting those who are
unemployed or looking for work.
The challenge for churches just beginning on this journey is deciding which structural
elements are important to start with. The Imagine Church Project suggests beginning with the
formation of a core team. This helps provide continuity and maintain adequate funding and
other resources. But it can slowly diminish the vitality and vision of the church’s workplace
programs if it becomes too bureaucratic. The challenge is to create an institutionalized centre
while maintaining the flexibility to engage a younger generation to build their own ministries.
Equipping Churches Empower and Collaborate With People in the Congregation to Lead
the Ministry
The leaders of equipping churches have started to think about the complete mission of
God as well as church growth. They are thinking about how they can help to enhance the
everyday ministry and mission of their people in the world as well as through their own church
programs and ministries. They are thinking about what their people are doing all the time and
not just with their spare time. They also realise their own limitations and are recruiting lay
leaders to head up workplace ministries.
It is easy to blame church leaders for the failure of churches to resource their people
better for ministry in daily life. Leaders are only partly to blame, though. For many church
members, it may be a relief to leave the responsibility for ministry up to the professionals and
avoid accepting responsibility themselves. The equipping church vision is about the whole
church accepting responsibility. In most churches where an equipping movement has begun to
happen, it has been the result of new levels of conversation and partnership between church
leaders and grass-roots church members. Sometimes this has also been assisted by input from
resource people involved in other churches or other faith and work ministries. This is
sometimes in-person and sometimes through their books, videos or online resources. For any of
these initiatives to be sustainable requires vision casting from the top, ongoing energy and
enthusiasm from the grass roots memberships, and outside resourcing.
Many pastors recognize the need to empower every believer in the ministry of daily
life, but they experience multiple roadblocks when attempting to address this need. Dwight
Dubois’ report “Equipping Pastors Conversations explores the myriad difficulties that pastors
face. View or download the full report: Equipping Pastors Conversations (PDF).
If equipping is to become embedded as a priority in the life of a congregation, pastoral
leadership and how it is exercised are crucial, though it is difficult to unpack what such
leadership looks like. David Miller identifies five factors that are related to core aspects of
pastoral ministry in general, which he thinks need to be more specifically applied to the
workplace by church leaders. These include:
A ministry of presence or listening in the work sphere, by visiting people in their places
of work
A ministry of preaching and prayer that intentionally and constructively addresses faith
and work issues
A ministry of teaching designed to address faith and work issues, also using the
experience and expertise of other church members for input
A ministry of personal integration that ensures that congregants are trained to utilise
personal prayer and devotional study in their daily lives
A ministry of gatherings of business people, perhaps in partnership with other
marketplace ministries[34]
Miller comments, ‘my research has found that lay-led and lay-founded groups are
generally more effective at understanding and meeting workplace integration needs’.[37]
William Diehl has said something similar:
The key to bringing the workplace into the worship place is the pastor. If he or she has
to have tight control over everything, it will not happen. There are two reasons why the pastor
should not totally try to control: very few pastors have the breadth of knowledge of workplace
issues to be able to design educational programmes of relevance; and secondly, lay leadership
must be involved in both the planning and presentation of programmes in order to give them
credibility in the eyes of the rest of the congregation.[38]
Robert Banks also argues strongly for the involvement of ‘ordinary’ Christians if we are to
develop a useful theology of everyday life, because:
Ordinary Christians can best identify their everyday concerns.
Ordinary Christians already have some elements of an everyday theology.
Everyday theology is a co-operative effort between ordinary Christians and
professional theologians.
A workable theology of everyday life requires practical testing by ordinary
Christians.
Only a theology forged in the cut and thrust of everyday life will have vitality and
relevance.[39]
Businessman Kent Humphries, when he was President of Fellowship of Companies for
Christ International, emphasised the important role that pastors have to play as equippers and
mentors for ministry in the marketplace.[41] It is clear that many pastors feel out of touch with
the modern marketplace and inadequate for task. Some feel threatened by the enthusiasm and
big dreams of marketplace entrepreneurs. Yet the clear message is that pastors have a very
important role to play—not by pretending to be the experts, or as controllers, but rather as
encouragers and supporters.
Initiating a process of partnership between pastors and working people will take a lot of
time, a lot of conversations and a lot of collaboration. This sort of partnership also has the
power to realise the dream of the whole church mobilised and supported in mission and
ministry all of the time. Debra Meyerson explains the sort of leadership that is involved in her
description of the best culture changers:
They bear no banners; they sound no trumpet. Their ends are sweeping, but their
means are mundane. They are firm in their commitments, yet flexible in the ways they fulfill
them. Their actions may be small but can spread like a virus. They yearn for rapid change but
trust in patience. They often work individually, but pull people together. Instead of stridently
pressing their agenda, they start conversations. Rather than battling powerful foes, they seek
powerful friends. And in the face of setbacks they keep going.[42]
