A Question for the Faith & Work Movement

Among the reforms Martin Luther desired for the church, he sought to break down the walls between the holy vocations and everyone else. He argued that all people could serve God and love their neighbors, no matter their job, and that those who worked in the church as priests or monks, for example, were not more holy or perfect than others. The contemporary faith and work movement exists today in the wake of Luther’s claim that no vocation is more holy than another, but it wrestles with what exactly that means and how to live that out.

As the movement develops a more critical edge and is willing to question business as usual, I would suggest we need to return to the question of whether there are certain professions Christians shouldn’t do. While I don’t wish to reconstruct a wall between secular and sacred vocations, my contention is that the command to love our neighbor requires us to look deeply at our how work affects our neighbors.

In asking whether there are certain professions Christians should not do, I am not trying to come up with a black and white list, or come up with new rules we must live by in order to be justified. But I want to ask questions that help us think more deeply about what it means to love our neighbor in the complexities of daily life. Because our social imagination is so powerfully shaped by the systems and institutions in which we live, we must critically examine what is happening in the places where we work, what might be getting in the way of loving our neighbor, or problematically redefining what loving our neighbor means. My intention is to press us to ask questions of our work that go beyond how we can be “good Christians” at work and to ask what is going on in our work itself, and how it affects others.

If you’re interested in this question or conversation, here is an article I wrote recently. I’d be interested in your thoughts, questions, or other approaches to the topic.