Turning Towards the World: Introduction
“From the point of view of official Judaism, Christianity arose largely as a lay movement.”
George Huntston Williams[1]
“The distinction between ordained and lay, between those whose sphere of service is primarily the Church and those whose sphere of service is primarily the world, is a real one.”
Stephen Neill[2]
Most Christians live and work in the world. A few, of course, work in the church as pastors, sextons, administrators, youth workers, and worship leaders. Some are immersed in Christian organizations where they have relatively little contact with the world unless their organization is truly missional. Some live and work in a monastery such as the one to which I visit every few months for prayer and reflection. And life is not easier for the monks, nuns, pastors and religious workers. Indeed it is in many ways harder as it has been said, and I quoted earlier, that there is nothing quite so debilitating as the constant handling of holy things.[3] And there are profound dangers in living and working in the church gathered. It is all too easy to become like Job’s friends, talking about God rather than to God in prayer.
Some so-called laypersons are close to living a clerical lifestyle in that they spend almost all of their discretionary time in the church, either in the church building for meetings, or among Christians gathering in homes. These are church members that usually win accolades because of their “dedication to the church.” But for most it is otherwise. This volume addresses the meaning of their life in the world first, in terms of ministry, as priests, prophets and princes in the workplace and the world, second, in terms of their mission, and third in respect to the trouble they have in the world through their engagement with the principalities and powers. But even the church building, if you have one, is somewhere in the world.
Called Into the World
So the people of God are inserted into the world, dispersed Monday to Saturday (usually) in the marketplaces, in leisure facilities, in homes and apartments, government offices, clinics, hospitals, schools and universities, on construction sites and in factories. But, as Stephen Neill in his Introduction to The Layman in Christian History insightfully says,
When the ordinary layman hears someone described as “a good churchman,” he is at once seized with a vague disquiet; the impression given is of someone who is not quite at home in the everyday world, who is a little censorious of its standards and is likely to be a disapproving rather than a welcoming visitor.[4]
But which world is this?
The world (kosmos) is a word used in Scripture to describe several things. (1) The world is the sum total of everything here and now; “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse” (Rom 1:20; see also Matt 25:34; Luke 11:50; Heb 4:3; 9:26; Rev 13:8; Rom 1:28). (2) The world is the scene of earthly joys, cares and sufferings; “What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” (Matt 16:26; see also 1 Cor 7:31; 1 John 3:17). (3) The world is all mankind; “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16; see also 8:12; 9:5; Rom 5:12-13; 1 Cor 4:13). (4) The world and everything that belongs to it, and as the lexicon reads, “appears as that which is at enmity with God, lost in sin, wholly at odds with anything divine, ruined and depraved;”[5] “We know that we are the children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one” (1 John 5:19; see also 8:23, Eph 2:2).
Into which world is the ordinary Christian inserted for life and livelihood? Is it world one, the good created world that bears the signature of God on it? Or world two, the scene of our earthly joys struggles and suffering? Or world three, the sum total of all human beings in the world, whom God loves and desires to rescue from sin and meaninglessness to enjoy a new life forever with Christ? Or world four, the world as a system out of sync with God’s purpose and plan, a world full of principalities and powers, a world “condemned by God (1 Cor 11:32) but also [is] the object of the divine plan of salvation (2 Cor 5:19). The Christian is dead as far as world four is concerned. [Paul says] ‘through Christ the world has been crucified for me, and I have been crucified to the world’ (Gal 6:4).”[6] This world four is an upside down kingdom which God’s right side up kingdom will partially redeem now and in the end will completely renew. The hope for world four is found in the Revelation: “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and his Messiah, and he will reign for ever and ever.” (Rev 11:15; see also Matt 19:28 for Jesus’ vision of “the renewal of all things.”) Which one is the world into which the Christian, especially the unordained, is thrust day in and day out? Here is my answer: All of them—the world of people, the created world for which we are to be stewards, the systems of the world even those alienated and hostile to the kingdom of God, and finally the world in which we have both joy and suffering. They are one and the same world. But how do we insert ourselves as Christians into this world?
Integral Mission in the World
It is common in missiological circles today to replace “wholistic mission” with “integral mission.” The term “integral” actually means “necessary to make a whole complete; essential or fundamental” and has the advantage of not primarily describing the wholistic nature of the mission to which we are called, a truly incarnational engagement with the world as assumed with Jesus’ “greatest commission” of Jesus in John 20:21 (“As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.”). But, instead, integral underscores the fact that in order for the world, the culture and people to become whole, integral mission is needed: “necessary to make a whole complete.” My friend, Charles Ringma has just published his massive valendictory volume entitled, In the Midst of Much-Doing: Cultivating a Missional Spirituality[7] and I am drawing rather heavily on this magnificent resource. In it he outlines, along with some of my own thoughts, the nature of our engagement with the world.
First, Ringma proposes that Christians “are a restless and uneasy insertion into the world, for as pilgrims we are never calmly settled.”[8] He speaks of the people of God being a “disruptive presence.” Second, he proposes that our presence in the world is distinguished by the healing presence of Jesus bringing wholeness, health and human flourishing to people and places. Third, Ringma suggests that when inserted into the world we cooperate with God in bringing God’s values into workplaces, homes and places of leisure. We are thus not merely a redemptive presence but a visioning one, casting an image of what humankind and all of God’s creation can and will become when God fully consummates God’s kingdom. But finally, he says we are called to live and work as an embodied presence, subverting “the human march towards self-exaltation and embodying in some measure the reign of God in the world.[9] How do we do this?
We do this through our lived and worked values. True followers of Jesus live and work differently. It has always been this way and always will be. In an early example of apologetic writing composed around 130 AD, The Epistle of Diognentus 5:4-10, defending the faith, describes the life of early Christians.
Though they live in Greek and barbarian cities, as each man’s lot is cast, and follow the local customs in dress and food and the rest of their living, their own way of life which they display is wonderful and admittedly strange. They live in their native lands, but like foreigners. They take part in everything like citizens, and endure everything like aliens. Every foreign country is their native land, and every native land a foreign country. Like everyone else they marry, they have children, but they do not expose their infants. They set a common table, but not a common bed. They find themselves in flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven. They obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives.[10]
In The Kingdom of God in Working Clothes I propose that one of the three ways that we cooperate with God in bringing in the kingdom of God to this world is through our presence. The kingdom is described by Jesus through images of penetration: seeds sown in soil, salt in meat, light in darkness, yeast exploding the dough, keys in a lock, fire cast down on earth (Matt 13).[11] It is the whereabouts of the people of God in the world where they influence by living out their kingdom values. In this chapter of my kingdom book I use the scientific analogy of osmosis to explain how it works.[12] The church, as we have seen, is a rhythm of gathering and dispersion so that “church-goer” is a term that probably should not be used. “We cannot go to church; we are the church wherever we go.” So said Elton Trueblood, the Quaker philosopher.[13] The apostle Paul said to Timothy, “You know about… my way of life, my purpose, faith, patience, love, endurance, persecutions, sufferings” (2 Tim 3:10). Occasionally for each of us this raises questions from not-yet-believers such as the following: “How do you account for the peacefulness you exhibit in a crisis?” “Why do you seem to work with hope that things will get better?” But there is more.
We do this through our announcement of the good news of the kingdom of God. This is the gospel Jesus preached and embodied (Matt 4:17) both in his first and last message on earth (Acts 1:3), not the good news that he would get our souls saved so we can go to heaven, but the news that the kingdom has begun to come in his first coming—bringing human flourishing (Luke 4:14-21) and salvation from sin and meaninglessness—and everything will be completely infused and renewed in the kingdom, when heaven is fully joined with earth, when in the End Christ comes again. As Aris Mortimer says, “we are not sent to preach the church but to announce the kingdom.”[14] That is, the people of God have a missional vocation to witness to the goodness of Jesus who crosses the infinity of time and space in the Spirit, and knocks on the door of our hearts and, like a perfect gentleman does not barge in but waits to be invited.
We do this through our intentional mission in the world. In 1930, a few years before I was born, a United Church of Canada pastor wrote a stunning volume with the title, The Social Achievements of the Christian Church[15] starting with the first century and ending with the twentieth. E. H. Oliver shows in this volume that Christians rescued abandoned and aborted babies from the garbage heaps of Rome, cared for widows and orphans, started hostels and hotels for travelers, envisioned and started the university, provided medical care and hospitals, and in the twenty-first century similar whole life expressions of the kingdom having partly come. Speaking to the ancient church Williams notes that “the number of widows dependent on the charity of the Church was high. Cornelius of Rome counted besides his 46 presbyters, 7 deacons, 7 sub-deacons, 42 acolytes, 52 exorcists, readers and janitors, not less than 1500 widows![16] In more modern times believers were instrumental in at least the substantial abolition of the British slave trade. Recently I was hospitalized in Seoul, South Korea, in an institution started decades ago by a medical missionary, touted to be one of the best hospitals even now in Korea.
I live in a city, beautiful Vancouver, BC, where nevertheless, somewhere between 2 and 5 per cent of the population are practising followers of Jesus, where churches are shuffling their members around with each new church-plant gaining a portion of the total “market share.” And yet, Christians are in the forefront of compassionate ministry and restorative ministry in the down-town east side, the poorest postal code in the country and many believers have invented advanced systems of fossil fuel dependency alleviation, not to mention medical advancement and health care initiatives in developing countries. Some believers known to me have been in the forefront of micro-economic development following the advice of the medieval Jewish rabbi Maimonides.[17] Who says the church has never done the world any good?[18]
So Oliver at the end of his somewhat dated volume summarizes the church’s role in the world:
First, the church “must exercise its age-long prophetic vocation as conscience to society,” never dulling its sensitiveness to wrong and exploitation. Second, the church must “educate and inspire,” as interpreter, stimulator and guide. Third, the church “must be a pioneer” inaugurating and initiating. Oliver says in history the church has done its best work in pioneering rather than running ambulance services for the wounded and broken. Fourth, the church “must… seek rather to prevent than to cure.” Fifth, the church “will transform the helped into helpers.”[19]
Much of the foregoing is a partial record of the stated, intentional missional engagement with the world by the church in either its corporate or individual member’s life. But what about the so-called layperson in the work world. This is one of the three ways that believers can work with God in bringing in the kingdom of God: witness, whereabouts and finally work.[20] I stress “working with God” because we cannot make effective transformation without God. Augustine said, “God without us, as we without God cannot.”[21]
The Faith at Work Movement in North America
I am writing about a truly global movement in my lifetime that is essentially (and tragically I think) almost totally a layperson movement, outside the gathered life of the church and only marginally of interest to ordained pastors. In one sense, as I have suggested in the introduction to volume one of the Abolition of the Laity, the faith at work movement seemed to emerge from the failure of the laity movement.[22] I mentioned in that volume that this largely corresponds to my own experience as documented by my writing and teaching. I started with every member ministry in both the gathered and dispersed life of the church but with only an ounce of gold from a ton of ore I began to focus on what the ordinary Christian is doing when he is not gathered for mutual edification and worship. I did this without consciously deciding to do so but being affirmed by the responsiveness of the unordained for a vision for their full-time ministry in the workplace. Anecdotally I report that the response has been enormous. So along with a few others, I became a marketplace theologian.[23] But sadly I confess that with a few wonderful exceptions[24] most of it is happening outside the church and by the unordained. And it is a beneficent forest fire. In North America alone there are more than a thousand organizations claiming to integrate faith and work. Significant progress was made in 2006 through the founding of the Theology of Work Project providing through a book by book study of the entire Bible a biblical foundation for the faith and work movement. This movement in North America was documented formally in David Miller’s God at Work: The History and Promise of the Faith at Work Movement (Oxford University Press, 2007). The record of this is actually not easy to document as so much is happening, small and great, organized and unorganized in what is certainly a movement without a single human leader.[25] But here is one try.
Darren Shearer, founder and director of the Theology of Business Institute and author of Marketplace Christian and Marketing Like Jesus notes that the English and North American movement seems to take shape as early as the 1930’s to the 1950’s in a men’s evangelism movement in the business world. I remember my own father, a President of a steel company, going once a month as secretary to a CBMC meeting, spelling out Christian Business Men’s Committee, in which speakers were heard and inspiring fellowship ensued. Not long after CBMC was born the charismatic believers, largely influenced by an Armenian, Damos Shakarian, started the Full Gospel Business Men’s Committee, spreading to 160 countries. In the 1960’s and 70’s women got involved in the charismatic wing and started Women Aglow, spreading to 171 countries. In the 1980’s people, especially leaders in companies wanted more help and The Fellows for Companies for Christ International was formed and The International Chamber of Commerce, again charismatic, both of them dealing with timeless biblical principles of business engagement.[26] But business was not the only focus.
Indeed, and here I am reporting not what Shearer notes but my own engagement with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, IFES (the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students), and Graduates Christian Fellowship globally, with their emphasis on serving God and God’s purposes missionally in the world, whether lawyers, doctors, teachers, homemakers, business people, or trades people. All of this was promoted by a staff person in InterVarsity USA, the late Pete Hammond, who in many ways was the founder of the faith and work movement in North America. Regent College, Vancouver, BC was started in the early 1970’s with a vision for the integration of faith with all of life. It proposed to provide a theological education equivalent to the professional education people receive in graduate education and therefore placed itself on the University of British Columbia campus. I became involved as a local pastor in Regent in the early 1970’s and joined the faculty in 1986, where I am till teaching the integration of faith and work, mainly to people intending to return, or already in, a so-called secular workplace, as well as future pastors and future academics. But let me return to Shearer’s brief history.
Shearer says that in the 1990’s Bob Buford’s Half Time and his ensuing organization tapped into the search for meaning and significance in the so-called secular workplace. His subtitle of his best-selling book was From Success to Significance. It struck a deep cord, namely that many people give the first half of their life to becoming successful but then, at the point of their mid-life transition, they ask, along with the Professor in Ecclesiastes, what is it all for. At which point many people entertain the thought of pastoral ministry or leadership in non-profits. But while there are many people living this way with a different “second half,” why, I ask wait for mid-life to ask for the significance of what you are doing? It is certainly an overstatement but that way of living suggests that God has a wonderful plan “for the second half of your life,” when he certainly has a wonderful plan, or better yet, a wonderful purpose for the first half as well.
Then Shearer turns to the twenty-first century arguing for three trends, the first involving Abraham Kuyper and neo-Calvinists in asserting that Christ is Lord of every square inch of creation, and embodied in the marketplace emphasis in Redeemer Presbyterian in New York.[27] Second, the Business as Mission movement took off in a major way and ran inspiring conferences world-wide and even dabbled in marketplace theology. A Korean Business as Mission (BAM) group that meets annually in Shanghai reports that a BAM company must be (1) a profitable and sustainable business; (2) intentional about the kingdom of God focus influencing people and nations; (3) focused on wholistic transformation with multiple bottom lines: with economic, social, environmental and spiritual outcomes; (4) being concerned for the world’s poorest and least evangelized people.[28] Undoubtedly this is the major visible and global sign of the faith and work movement, even if it is, in my opinion, needing more theological and spiritual depth. Thirdly, charismatics came up with the Seven Mountains emphasis, praying for and inserting believers into major arenas of financial, cultural, political, social and educational realms.
A few theological schools in North America have introduced theology of work into their preparation of pastors and out of this came the Theology of Work project which has provided an exposition of every book of the Bible on work, which is available on their website.[29] And vitally important is the Lausanne movement which has a marketplace track, recognizing the critical importance of “finishing the missional task” in the marketplace, sometimes called the major unreached mission field left in the world. The Lausanne movement has recognized, thanks to the influence of John Stott, that the marketplace is not only a mission “field” but is mission itself, at least in partly, through providing goods and services to our neighbours near and far.
The Faith at Work Movement Globally
As mentioned earlier, in 2015 I was invited to found and serve as President/Chairman of an institute for the integration of faith and work. We named it The Institute for Marketplace Transformation (IMT)[30] and began work, including producing a film, “Doing God’s Business” with 16-20 minute segments with a study guide. It has since been translated into Chinese, Korean, Spanish and Arabic and is used in hundreds of contexts globally. But I was struggling to manage a global organization and we discovered from the former president of Visa International a form of “chaordic organization” (combining order and chaos) in which the head office determines the mission and values but trusts units in various regions to be entrepreneurial and contextual. It released an enormous amount of creativity in our five regions, North America, Taiwan (and Chinese diaspora), Hong Kong, South Korea and South-East Asia. Our mission is to empower Christians in all walks of life to live out their kingdom calling from Monday to Saturday. We have three values which nicely match our acronym IMT: Integrating, Meaning and Thriving.[31] We are theologically oriented wanting to integrate deeply: head, heart and hand. With that in mind we concentrate on “training the trainers” through Fellows groups in various countries which a small (less than 12), one year, intensive, mentored community and with each person doing a project.
What follows is a very personal “reading” on the global situation from several decades of traveling internationally and more recently being engaged on the internet almost every day somewhere in the world. I am surely missing many wonderful causes, organizations and local initiatives. But this will at least skim the surface of the movement.
Europe
In Europe Christianity is on a free-fall decline except as a tourist attraction for their beautiful cathedrals. But there are some laity institutes still in Germany and the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) continues to provide resources for the integration of faith and work. The London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, founded by John Stott, continues to soldier on very effectively in the UK. Richard Higginson in Cambridge University founded the Faith and Work initiative. Very recently SCM press in London published a wonderful and deep book on Work: Theological Foundations and Practical Implications.[32]
Africa
Having spent four months a year for ten years in East Africa I have a special interest in the shape of the movement there. About twenty years ago some of us taught a course on the theology of work in Seattle through Bakke Graduate University. There were about eighteen in the class, but these eighteen fanned out in the world and taught hundred even thousands, mainly pastors in Africa. Dennis Bakke, CEO of AES, the largest energy company in the world and author of Joy at Work, funded a foundation on the International Theology of Work Grant Program.[33] Through this grant program some eighty thousand pastors and lay leaders in churches in various countries in Africa have taken a five-day course in the theology of work. The result has been amazing. And our own Brenda Halk, working with Canadian Baptist Ministries has mentored groups of church leaders in East Africa. Universities in various African countries, convicted about the importance of work and the integration of faith and work, have included courses on the theology of work in their curricula. The Christian way is on the rise in Africa and along with it, and perhaps uniquely the faith at work movement is mostly church-based.
Asia
Asia is a broad term covering many unique Asian cultures and many countries. But they are generally more or less unified in embracing Confucianism, whether consciously, as in the case with South Korea or unconsciously as in the case of China. Confucianism is a practical philosophy by which harmony between people can be achieved. It is because of this and many other factors that Asian people are intensely practical in their approach to faith and work, even though most Asian intellectuals and professors have studied in the West. Mainland Chinese seem very hungry for the integration of faith and work and some unusual things have taken place. I work with the Chinese diaspora, with young students and young working adults in various places in the globe through CHYASTA which the CEO of a fabric manufacturing company founded. This tentmaking person has founded three marketplace churches in various Asian countries, restaurants Monday to Saturday and a church on Sunday, fulfilling the proposal of a fascinating article by Matthew Kaemingk on “Lesslie Newbigin’s Missional Approach to the Modern Workplace.”[34]
Meanwhile in Hong Kong for some decades the Hong Kong Professional and Educational Society (HKPES) has worked on integration with people in the workplace. The Oaks concentrates on assisting leaders small and medium sized enterprises to integrate faith and work. China Graduate School of Theology in Hong Kong is one of three seminaries having a track in marketplace theology and ministry, and teaching theology of work. In South Korea some megachurches, some with their own academies, have embraced courses in theology of work and even a few seminaries have courses to assist pastors to empower the people for their full-time ministry during the week. And in South-East Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines), partly through the influence of Graduates Christian Fellowship which has equipped university graduates to integrate faith and work, there is a growing interest and even, sometimes, passion for marketplace ministry. Biblical Graduate School of Theology in Singapore, is, in a way, patterned after Regent College. In Indonesia a Regent graduate has started WIN, integrating faith and work in Jakarta.
Latinos
It is completely unfair to lump this vast region into one short section including Spain (which has already translated some of this book into Spanish), Mexico, Central America and South America). But there are encouraging signs of renewal in the faith and work movement, partly through the effort of Canadian Baptist Ministries, and partly through the influence of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. Brenda Halk is mentoring several pastors in Central and South America, and some institutes have emerged, one in particular in Brasil headed by Ricardo Barbosa de Sousa and we have the privilege a business faculty person from Brasil in our current Fellows programme in Vancouver.
Australasia
Three very influential authors in Australia have contributed to deepening the movement, Robert Banks, Gordon Preece and Charles Ringma. A frequent guest in Australia especially among aboriginals and those working with them, has been Gray Poehnell from Vancouver, an aboriginal Metis himself. Gray has worked in Canada with Aboriginals to integrate faith and work.
And what about the Far East, Russia, and the Middle East? Suffice it to say that there are signs that this is a truly global movement without a single human head, carried along by the Holy Spirit. Indeed, in his PDF on the decline and renewal of the American church,[35] the late Tim Keller cites the faith at work movement as a sign of hope for the renewal for the American Church.
The Way Forward
Essentially the faith and work movement, as the insertion of the people of God in the world missionally provides meaning to the average and ordinary layperson. And Daniel Pink suggests in his A Whole New Mind, “Meaning is the new money.”[36] He suggests, “Pursuits devoted to meaning and transcendence, are now as mainstream as a double tall latte.”[37] And the thought that a person is doing “the Lord’s Work,” is engaging in the mission of God to bring human flourishing, is growing spiritually while in the workplace, provides meaning to the believer immersed in the world. So in conclusion I wish to offer four challenges to the faith at work movement: First, to go deeper theologically. Secondly to go deeper culturally and missionally. Third to go deeper ethically. Finally to go deeper spiritually. To do this we must engage our head, heart and hand. To that end we turn now to investigate how the unordained people of God, men and women, can serve as priests, prophets and princes in the workplace.[38]
References
This article serves as an introduction to the final three chapters of The Abolition of the Laity: Vocation, Work and Ministry (Paternoster, 1999), reprinted as The Other Six Days (Eerdmans, 1999). This volume 3 is preceded by two other volumes, volume 1: The Abolition of the Laity and volume 2: Vocation, Work and Service, each with four chapters, one newly written and the other three modified from the original.
[1] George Huntston Williams, “The Ancient Church AD 30-313”, in Stephen Charles Neill and Hans-Ruedi Weber, eds., The Layman in Christian History (A Project of the Department on the Laity of the World Council of Churches (London: SCM Press, 1963), 28.
[2] Neill and Weber, The Layman in Christian History, 15
[3] George MacDonald, The Curate’s Awakening, Michael R. Phillips, ed. (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Baker House Publishers, 1985), 176
[4] Neill and Weber, The Layman in Christian History, 18.
[5] “Kosmos” in William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich. A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 447 (446-8).
[6] “Kosmos” in Arndt and Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon, 447.
[7] Charles R. Ringma, In the Midst of Much-Doing: Cultivating a Missional Spirituality (Carlisle, Cumbria, UK: Langham Global Library, 2023), chapter seven, “The Heart and Scope of Integral Mission,” in which Ringma surveys biblical models of integral mission and engages the literature, including Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture, 165-205.
[8] Ringma, In the Midst of Much-Doing, 212.
[9] Ringma, In the Midst of Much Doing, 212-3.
[10] Quoted in Williams, “The Ancient Church” in Neill and Weber, The Layman in Christian History, 49.
[11] R. Paul Stevens, The Kingdom of God in Working Clothes: The Marketplace and the Reign of God (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2022), 62-3.
[12] Stevens, The Kingdom of God, 63. The other two ways of bringing in the kingdom are witness and work, the latter I will be taking up shortly.
[13] Heard at a public lecture McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, around 1958.
[14] Mortimer Arias, Announcing the Reign of God: Evangelization and the Subversive Memory of Jesus (Eugene OT: Wipf & Stock, 2001), 118.
[15] E.H. Oliver, The Social Achievements of the Christian Church (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2004).
[16] Quoted in Friend, “The Ancient Church,” in Neill and Weber, The Layman in Christian History, 48.
[17] The Medieval Jew, Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon, 1135-1204) defined charity’s eight degrees by ranking them:
A person gives, but only when asked by the poor.
A person gives, but is glum when giving.
A person gives cheerfully, but less than he should.
A person gives without being asked, but gives directly to the poor. Now the poor know who gave them help and the giver, too, knows whom he has benefited.
A person throws money into the house of someone who is poor. The poor person does not know to whom he is indebted, but the donor knows whom he has helped.
A person gives his donation in a certain place and then turns his back so that he does not know which of the poor he has helped, but the poor person knows to whom he is indebted.
A person gives anonymously to a fund for the poor. Here the poor does not know to whom he is indebted, and the donor does not know whom he has helped.
But the highest is this:
Money is given to prevent another from becoming poor, such as providing him with a job or by teaching him a trade or by setting him up in business and not be forced to the dreadful alternative of holding out his hand for charity. This is the highest step and the summit of charity’s golden ladder. Quoted in William E. Diehl and Judith Ruhe Diehl, It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over (Minneapolis: Augsburg Books, 2003), 129-30.
[18] A more recent volume is Rodney Stark. For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton University Press, 2004).
[19] Oliver, The Social Achievements of the Christian Church, 176-7.
[20] Stevens, The Kingdom of God in Working Clothes, 60-66.
[21] Quoted in Amy L. Sherman, Kingdom Calling: Vocational Stewardship for the Common Good (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2011), 238.
[22] The discussion document from the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity in the UK notes that the demise of the laity movement is reflected in the succession of terms used: rebirth (1962), liberation (2004) to abolition (2006) and in the flow of major movements entitled, in succession: the apostolate of the laity (an old and largely Roman Catholic term, the ministry of the laity, to the ministry of everyday life (1970’s) to and finally, marketplace ministry. “Lay Movements,” London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, (nd).
[23] I am now publishing three volumes on marketplace theology entitled, Working Blessedly Forever, with Wipf & Stock, forthcoming.
[24] Among them Tim Keller in Redeemer Presbyterian, New York and Tom Nelson in Atlanta, who wrote the stunning forward to my Kingdom of God in Working Clothes.
[25] David Miller, God at Work: The History and Promise of the Faith at Work Movement (Oxford University Press, 2007). Miller documents what makes the faith and work phenomenon a movement on page 20.
[26] Darren Shearer, “The Marketplace Christianity Movement: 1930-Present: https://www.theologyof business.com/the-marketplace-christianity-movement-a-brief-history-1930-present/
[27] See the penetrating essay by Nicholas Wolterstorff on Neo-Calvinism in “Fidelity in Politics,” Christian Scholar’s Review, (Spring 2023, Vol LII:3, 9-20.
[28] Sam Cho, “BAM As A Movement” (Korean BAM Paper 4/12, BAM Think Tank).
[29] https://www.theologyof work.org
[30] Our website is www.imtglobal.org.
[31] See “Three Values to Die For,” in R. Paul Stevens, The Kingdom of God in Working Clothes: The Marketplace and the Reign of God (Eugene OR: Wipf & Stock, 2022), 79-87.
[32] (London: SCM Press, 2018).
[33] https://www.theologyofworkgrant.com
[34] Matthew Kaemingk on “Lesslie Newbigin’s Missional Approach to the Modern Workplace,” Missiology: An International Review, vol XXXIX, no 3, July 2011.
[35] Tim Keller, decline_and_renewal_of_the_american_church (pdf).
[36] “After decades of pursuing riches, wealth seems less alluring. For [baby boomers], and for many others in this new era, meaning is the new money.” Daniel H. Pink, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005/6), 61.
[37] Pink, A Whole New Mind, 60.
[38] This is a reference to the last three chapters of The Abolition of the Laity: Vocation, Work and Ministry in Biblical Perspective (Paternoster: 1999), reprinted as The Other Six Days (Eerdmans, 1999).
