In an article called “My Three Seasons of Faith and Work”, pastor Matthew Woodley opens up about how he came to a holistic understanding of faith and work after some quite obvious wrong turns. He divides his ministry into three “seasons”:
The “naive engagement” of his first pastorate, where he immersed himself in small-town culture:
For eight years I made inadvertent “faith and work” visits. I rode with Willis on his many-geared fuel truck at 4:00 a.m. and joined him for the early August season of gathering and stacking hay bales. I spent time with Irma and Kenny Deusler at their small dairy farm, listening with city-boy wonder as they described their grueling seven-day morning and evening rhythm of milking 65 cows and working full-time jobs. I sat with Dave Ferguson in his steaming homemade Finnish sauna and listened to his stories about teaching gym class at Barnum High School. Howard Ballou, an 82-year-old retired farmer and widower, lectured me on the glories of cream from the Guernsey cattle he once owned. In near ecstasy, he exclaimed, “Ah, dat cream! It was da best, da richest, da heaviest cream in da world!”
…That’s the lesson I started to learn in Barnum. Work matters a lot to people. They want to talk about it. So I sat in their homes or on their worksites and listened. I started to let people tell me about “what they do all day and how they feel about what they do.” I actually enjoyed hearing about truck gears and Guernsey cream and case histories for foster boys. I didn’t help the people of Barnum develop a robust biblical vision of faith and work, but having a pastor show up and ask about their work, infused their daily toil with dignity.
The intentional disengagement of his second pastorate:
Early on in this second pastorate, I made a conscious and clear decision: I don’t have time for those inefficient, small town visits. After all, I told myself, my church people need me to grow a church. I can’t be spending my week idly chattering about what they do all week. I have a church to run….
Looking back on my intentional disengagement from faith and work conversation, I now see that my decision was about more than the need to run a church. My soul was disordered by pride and insecurity. I started to view Barnum as my pastoral preseason. Cambridge was the playoffs, and I had to win. I had to win by building a larger, successful church. I had to win by proving that I was worthwhile. Like Rocky Balboa, I had to win at church growth so I could prove I wasn’t a bum. My work success had become my idol, an idol that devoured my time and energy. No wonder I didn’t have any room to focus on anyone else’s work success: my work mattered too much.
and finally, how one of his own sermons awakened him to the need for a more well-rounded vision, introducing him to a season of creative engagement:
Strangely enough, the shift started by listening to my own sermon from 1 Chronicles 26 based on the life of King Uzziah. I noticed that the entire chapter lauded King Uzziah’s “secular” rather than “spiritual” accomplishments. So in my sermon titled “Your Whole Life Matters,” I argued that the Bible demolishes any kind of sacred/secular split and instead proclaims the lordship of Christ over our whole life, including our work.
I have to admit, it was a darn good sermon, but there was one huge problem: I wasn’t following my own advice. And even worse, my vision of pastoral ministry backed me into the sacred/secular split I was telling people to avoid. But now a sermon from an obscure Old Testament text was working on my soul, subverting my disengagement and healing my carefully crafted split.
His creative engagement has led him to a further focus on three questions of importance to a well-rounded faith and work ministry: How do we honor the callings among us? How do we offer a robust theology of faith and work? How do we heal our wounded workers?
Matthew’s whole story both encourages and challenges those in pastoral ministry to step into engagement with these issues. I encourage you to check it out!
Image: Joel Olives, “Blossom.”
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