I’ve been in church ministry for well over two decades now, and one of the patterns I see in the church world is a deep frustration about and fear of the culture. Evangelicals see the world around us and wring our hands, seeing the demise of traditional values, the triumph of greed and commercialism, and workplaces filled with and defined by arrogance, assertiveness, egoism, pretentiousness, pride, and self-importance.
We think that the only way to make a difference (if only I had the “calling”) would be to become a missionary, a preacher, an evangelist. The world’s values are not God’s values, and our vocation must be something more spiritual than daily work.
Dorothy Sayers has something to say about this.
“In nothing has the church so lost her hold on reality as in her failure to understand and respect vocation.
She has allowed work and religion to become separate departments, and is astonished to find that, as a result, the secular world of work 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.”
– Dorothy Sayers, Creed or Chaos, pg 77-78.
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