Soma Faith and Work Summit 2015 | Vocation in the Biblical Story and How We Can Impact the World Today
Dr. Michael Goheen
I love that Emmaus City Church is part of the Soma family of churches. Posts from the our time at Soma School and a Soma One Day are included on this website. I also love that Dr. Michael Goheen, one of the leading biblical scholars who also part of our denomination, is a member at a Soma church in Phoenix – shout out to the beloved Missio Dei – and helps lead the Missional Training Center (MTC) in their city.
This unique and needed summit with a focus on faith and discipleship in our God-given work environments was coordinated by key leaders in Soma, Missio Dei, and the MTC, and for that I am extremely thankful.
Soma Faith and Work Summit 2015 | Main Session 1:
Vocation in the Biblical Story with Dr. Michael Goheen
Dr. Michael Goheen
Missional Training Center
Missio Dei Communities
Phoenix, AZ
The Biblical story is God's story of redemption for His family and His creation. His mission is making things right and new, including our work.
Both Lesslie Newbigin and Abraham Kuyper believed that the mission of the laity is the most important part of the mission of the Church. Why? Because the primary witness of the sovereignty of Christ is found in the public vocations of laity Christians in their daily lives where they spend most of their time.
(1) The laity play a crucial role for the Church in the public by declaring and displaying the love and reign of Christ and His Kingdom throughout every sphere of society.
(2) Therefore, pastors, priests, and congregations must take on the training of the laity for witness to the Lordship of Christ in the spheres where their people spend most of their time.
Unfortunately, most godly, well-meaning believers are unconsciously influenced by various gods and worldviews (ex. consumer culture, feelings-based approach to life, therapeutic moralistic deism) that keep them enslaved to a low view of our Creator, His creation, and what He intended for us in our daily work.
Is humanism the Lord of public life? Is religion only the Lord of private life? How we answer these questions begins to reveal what we think we've been saved for in relation to our work. Thankfully, the gospel cannot be put into boundaries despite our dualism in often privatizing the Christian faith. King Christ has still worked through individualized Western culture in spite of itself.
But in order to continue to redeem a right understanding of work, we need to have a robust understanding God as Creator, Father, King, and Judge and how this relates to what He's given us in His creation.
God's creation mandate for humanity included us bearing His image, ruling over His creation, cultivating the potential of what He'd provided, and developing it as His glory filled the earth through us. God gives us both a blessing (Nicholas Wolterstorff) and a command (Albert Wolters) to be and to do.
Creation
Stage 1: empty, dark, shapeless
Stage 2: God forms, brings order, and fills His creation with life
Stage 3: Humans join with God in forming and filling His creation with life
Herman Bavinck said that God stamps His glory on the earth through forming and filling. We release human beings to realize who they were made to be by celebrating God's gifts as the good news reforms our identity and then spills over and fills every area of our lives. The Old Testament notion of wisdom is to understand the way God forms the world, and then conform our lives to the way He's wonderfully ordered the world.
In contrast, foolishness is to do the opposite. In Paul's letter to the Roman church, he addresses wisdom and foolishness in Romans 1-2 (which reflects the fall of Genesis 3 in the deconstruction of Genesis 1-2) by revealing how our choice sins have misshapen culture. He reveals that both the Gentiles and the Jews have created broken communities and societies that don't thank God for how He has formed and ordered creation by living in in His ways, and instead worship idols, including themselves, that empty and destroy rather than fill the world with life.
"Followers of Jesus are to show the world what being truly human looks like."
– N.T Wright
In a broken and chaotic world, to live out our calling as human beings will require sacrifice and suffering as we groan with creation and the Spirit for redemption. Following Jesus always requires this level of intentional commitment to His mission. He bucks the trends of society in relation to work, relationships, community, etc. We need to recapture the gift of Biblical suffering in relation to following Jesus. With Him, faithfulness is not an option because He has shown complete faithfulness to us even in our failings. And in order to be faithful to what God intended humanity to be in an unfaithful world, He suffered. If we are to be like Him, we will suffer, too. But with Christ, suffering is a good thing as through the trials, we are conformed to be more like Him.
We follow Jesus, the fulfillment of the Law (i.e. order for forming and filling His people with His words and actions). The Law was given to show us the way to live together with God and each in community. The Law shows how community was to be formed and shaped for God's glory. And what is the sum of the Law? To love God and to love others. The love of God is so high, so deep, so wide, so long that we can only discover it together in community and for community.
In relation to God's view of community, the Prophetic promises included that:
(1) The people will be gathered from exile.
(2) The people will be restored together back into a place (i.e the land of promise).
(3) All the nations and their specific beautiful ways of imaging God will be incorporated into God's covenant family who are called to fill the earth with His glory.
This is why:
(1) Jesus speaks of the renewed world and how it's ruled (Matthew 19:28-29);
(2) Peter speaks of God restoring all things (Acts 3:21); and
(3) Paul speaks of the reconciliation of all things (Colossians 1:19-20)
on earth as it is in heaven.
So how will we obey the Law and the Prophets, and their fulfillment in Jesus, and enact the love of God with our work in this world in the here and now as a signpost of what's to come? How will you invite Jesus into the redemptive process of re-evaluating your approach to work?
"One of the greatest sins of the 20th century is our lack of imagination.
We too often think about and do things as human beings because it's the only way we've ever done them." – Karl Barth
(1) Consider, do you thank God for your work regularly no matter how small or insignificant you think it is because doing work is part of how He made you to reflect Him? Do you see your ability to work as integral to bearing God's image, or do you see work only as a job and a means to owning things and providing goods for yourself or those closest to you until you can retire? Are these views in line with God as Creator and His blessed creation mandate for humanity? Or are they in view of what most people in our culture would say who don't believe in the Lordship of Jesus? We need to remember that the first sins were not thanking God for what He had given us to be and to do, and then worshiping created things instead. Does original sin describe our approach to work? How much do we exemplify thanklessness and materialism day-to-day?
(2) Consider, how can we have a creation mandate-oriented imagination about business? Can we create a pre-care economy rather than a post-care economy? What would it be like to incorporate into our business' foundations consideration for the environment (i.e. God's creation) and the poor and jobless (i.e. God's image bearers? What does a triple bottom line (i.e. environmental, social, financial) look like for a business that reflects the Kingdom coming and causes flourishing in the city?
(3) Consider, how can we have a creation mandate-oriented imagination about how we live in community among businesses? For example, when speaking with a prince in Africa, he commented on how horrible high-rise apartments are in creating society. They create disconnected living spaces where people are go into spaces facing away from each other, are disconnected from the land, and are separated and placed above the flow of society. How do we design communities in which the environmental layout places people and businesses within the city and communities, among each other, and with a sense of responsibility to each other?
Opposition and suffering creates more opportunity. We have been given intimacy and purpose with God and with each other to go, to cultivate, to develop. Because God is, we are. Instead of "I think, therefore I am," God tells us beautifully, "We are, therefore you exist with us for the good of the world." How will we show that we know this love that brings renewal, restoration, and reconciliation?
Recommended Resources:
Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview by Albert M. Wolters
"Why Business Matters to God" Center for Faith and Work Video by Jeff Vandoozer
Beyond Poverty and Affluence: Toward an Economy of Care with a Twelve-Step Program for Economic Recovery by Bob Goudzwaard and Harry de Lange
Key Quotes:
When God calls creation into being, he announces that it's very good, but he doesn't announce that it's finished! Creation doesn't come into existence ready-made with schools, art museums, and farms; those are all begging to be unpacked. But unfurling that potential is going to take work – and that work is the labor of culture, of cultivation, of unpacking. Indeed, creation is itself a call and invitation; the riches and potential of God's good creation are entrusted to his image bearers.That is our calling and commission. – James K.A. Smith
Now, however, God crowns creation with humanity, who awakens its life, arouses its powers, and with human hands brings to light the glory that once lay locked in its depths but had not yet shown on it's countenance. – Abraham Kuyper
Genesis does not present the creation as a finished product, wrapped up with a big red bow and handed over to the creations to keep it exactly as originally created. It is not a one-time production. Indeed for the creation to stay just as God originally created it would constitute a failure of the divine design. From God’s perspective, the world needs work; development and change are what God intends for it, and God enlists human beings (and other creations) to that end. From another angle, God did not exhaust the divine creativity in the first week of the world; God continues to create and uses creatures in a vocation that involves the becoming of creation. – Terence Fretheim
The scope of God's redemptive work is bigger and wider than the rescue of individual souls. Christ's redemption is cosmic – it affects not only the redemption of our souls but the redemption of every aspect of this entire groaning creation (Romans 8:22). Through the cross, God reconciles all things to himself, whether things on earth or things in heaven (Colossians 1:20). ... On the connection between the cultural mandate and the great commission: The church is that people commissioned to tell the good news of God's salvation precisely in order to announce that God's grace has made it possible for us to take up our vocation as creatures bearing his image. We are the people announcing the New Covenant that finally makes it possible for us to fulfill our calling in the original covenant of creation itself. – James K.A. Smith
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. But is it astonishing? How can anyone remain interested in a religion, which seems to have no concern with nine-tenths of life? 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 on him is to make good tables. – Dorothy L. Sayers
Calling resists privatization by insisting on the totality of faith. Calling resists politicization by demanding a tension with every human allegiance and association. Calling resists polarization by requiring an attitude toward, and action in, society that is inevitably transforming because it is constantly engaged. Grand Christian movements will rise and fall. Grand campaigns will be mounted and grand coalitions assembled. But all together such coordinated efforts will never match the influence of untold numbers of followers of Christ living out their callings faithfully across the vastness and complexity of modern society. – Os Guinness
Christ is not only Lord of our souls, but Lord of our bodies, Lord of our families, Lord of our commerce and recreation and education. He is the Lord of science and arts, dance and diphthongs, eating and drinking. There's no corner of creation that is immune from his Lordship, no secular sphere of life that is neutral with respect to the Creator's sovereignty. – James K.A. Smith
Everyone will be forgotten, nothing we do will make any difference, and all good endeavours, even the best, will come to naught. Unless there is God. If the God of the Bible exists, and there is a True Reality beneath and behind this one, and this life is not the only life, then every good endeavour, even the simplest ones, pursued in response to God's calling, can matter forever. – Tim Keller
Every faithful act of service, every honest labor to make the world a better place, which seemed to have been forever lost and forgotten in the rubble of history, will be seen on that day [at the final resurrection] to have contributed to the perfect fellowship of God's kingdom. ... All who committed their work in faithfulness to God will be by Him raised up to share in the new age, and will find that their labor was not lost, but that it has found its place in the completed Kingdom of God. – Leslie Newbign
– Sully
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