Work and Worship

Reconnecting Our Labor and Liturgy

Matthew Kaemingk, Cory B. Willson

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781540961983
• eBook ISBN: 9781493423873
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

The modern chasm between "secular" work and "sacred" worship has had a devastating impact on Western Christianity.

Drawing on years of research, ministry, and leadership experience, Kaemingk and Willson explain why Sunday morning worship and Monday morning work desperately need to inform and impact one another. Together they engage in a rich biblical, theological, and historical exploration of the deep and life-giving connections between labor and liturgy. In so doing, Kaemingk and Willson offer new ways in which Christian communities can live seamless lives of work and worship.

1

Worship That Forms Workers

We do not go into liturgy in order to escape the world, we go there to learn how to do it the correct way.

—David Fagerberg, Consecrating the World

Worship as a Heartbeat

A healthy heart constantly pumps and pulsates. It beats with a predictable and consistent rhythm. It will draw blood in. It will send blood out. This systolic and diastolic movement, this gathering and scattering, is how the entire body receives life-giving oxygen. At specific moments the heart valves must tighten and release. This opening and closing movement draws blood in and propels it out. Without this rhythm, the blood stagnates. It becomes static and stale. Without the heart’s dynamic force—pull and push, gather and scatter—the blood, the heart, and the entire body begin to decay and ultimately die.

The liturgical theologian J.-J. von Allmen asserts that worship is the heartbeat of the church. Like a heartbeat, Christian worship has a life-giving rhythm. Like a heartbeat, it has a systolic and diastolic function. Worship welcomes and gathers people in. Worship sends and scatters people out. In and out. Pull and push. Von Allmen argues that the regularity of worship’s systolic-diastolic rhythm matters a great deal. One day in and six days out. Like the valves of a healthy heart, the doors of worship must regularly open and close to draw people in and send people out.

Like a healthy heart, worship has no interest in holding people statically inside the sanctuary. Worship is concerned with the rhythmic movement of the people. This movement of souls is essential to the health of both the worship and the worshiper. Like a heartbeat, if worship stalls, worshipers struggle to access the life-giving oxygen of the Holy Spirit. Everything begins to decay—the worship, the worshipers, and the community itself. Like a heartbeat, worship must be constantly gathering and scattering people in and out.

Healthy worship, von Allmen writes, is “a pump which sends into circulation and draws in again, it claims and it sanctifies.”1 Worship scatters God’s people into “the world to mingle with it like leaven in the dough, to give it savor like salt, to irradiate like light.” Similarly, worship gathers people in “from the world like a fisherman gathering up his nets or a farmer harvesting his grain.”2 On their way into the sanctuary, they carry their whole lives—their fish and their grain—into the presence of the Lord. On their way back out to the city, worshipers carry the grace of Christ, the law of God, and the power of the Holy Spirit into the world. Gathered and scattered. Welcomed and sent. This is the heartbeat of healthy Christian worship.3

In its diastolic function, worship gathers workers in from a wide variety of careers and callings. From all over the city they come. Worship gathers workers so that they might offer their working lives to God and so that God might offer his work to them. In its systolic function, worship does the opposite. It sends them out with a great work that must be extended into the city. Worship scatters workers, transformed by the work and Word of the Lord, throughout the city to be salt and light wherever they have been called. Worship blesses and commissions workers so that they may go (with systolic force) out into their various careers and callings. Worship scatters workers so that they can extend Sunday worship into Monday work.

Worship does not cease come Monday. Disciples continue to worship God in a new way through their daily work. As Clayton Schmit asserts, “The sending forth of gathered worshipers is the pivotal moment when worship turns from adoration to action. . . . In the sending, worship redirects its focus from the liturgy of assembly to become the living liturgy of discipleship.”4

Charles Price and Louis Weil echo these sentiments but add an additional insight. They argue that Christ is the only leader of the church’s whole life of worship. The worship that Christ leads has two movements: intensive and extensive. In Christ’s intensive worship, the church is gathered to receive assurance, pardon, and renewal. In Christ’s extensive worship, the church is scattered into the world to love and serve the Lord. These two distinct forms of worship, intensive and extensive, are one in Christ.5

Figure 1.1. Gather and Disperse by Matthew Whitney

Matthew Whitney is a visual artist whose work focuses on the spaces that urban citizens navigate on a daily basis. This piece depicts the gathering and scattering of a church as it goes about its life and labor within the city of Seattle, like a heart that gathers and scatters blood throughout the body. See the artist’s website, www.matthewwhitney.com, and his discussion of the poetics of walking at www.matthewwhitney.com/writing-in-the-urban-grid.

Pastors and worship leaders have a responsibility to encourage both intensive and extensive worship, in the sanctuary and in the world. Worship must facilitate this systolic and diastolic movement of work and worship. Worship must generously draw work and workers into the presence of the Lord, and it should also send them out the door with some systolic force. Workers who remain stagnant, whether in the sanctuary or in the workplace, begin to decay. Movement in the Spirit is life—it is oxygen.

Worship Gathers

Let me tell you what he has done for me.

—Psalm 66:16

Nicholas Wolterstorff extends von Allmen’s heartbeat metaphor even further. He argues that corporate worship not only gathers our souls but gathers our stories as well. When the doors of the sanctuary open, worshipers enter carrying their stories with them from all over the city. These are stories from their week—stories that they need to share with God. Wolterstorff argues that faithfully designed worship will welcome three specific types of stories: stories of thanksgiving and praise, stories of sin and rebellion, and stories of heartbreak and lament.6

While worshipers need to communicate their weekly stories to God, they don’t always know how to articulate them. Some feel awkward, others unsure. Good worship, Wolterstorff maintains, provides worshipers with three helpful mediums to articulate their various stories to God. Wolterstorff calls them trumpets, ashes, and tears. Through trumpets, a worshiper is empowered to communicate their praise and thanksgiving—their happy stories of the beauty, goodness, and abundance they’ve experienced throughout the week. Through ashes, worshipers can confess and honestly carry their weekly stories of rebellion and sin to God. Through tears, worshipers are graciously given some time and space to openly share their weekly stories of sadness, confusion, and even anger with God.

For our purposes of worship and work, these images of trumpets, ashes, and tears are profoundly helpful. They enable everyday workers to honestly carry their workplace thanksgivings, confessions, and laments to God. Here worship can cultivate a candid conversation between God and workers, faith and work, the sanctuary and the workplace. Worship that is vocationally conversant will make space for all three.

This book will make two additions to Wolterstorff’s list: petitions and fruits. Workers need to regularly carry their workplace petitions and requests before God. As members of the priesthood of all believers, workers need to practice the ministry of priestly intercession. They need to intercede before God on behalf of their workplace. As priests, they must petition God with urgency to move on behalf of their coworkers, clients, customers, and entire industries. All workers have a priestly responsibility to carry their workplace petitions to God, to intercede for divine action and transformation in their industries. Gathered worship is a place where workers can begin to practice their own sacred calling to the priesthood of all believers.

The final element that workers need to carry with them into worship is fruit. Healthy worship regularly calls workers to carry the fruits of their labor to God’s table. In the sanctuary, workers can practice offering their first fruits, the best work of their hands in a holy and pleasing act of worship. Healthy and formative worship will find ways to welcome the diverse fruits of workers as a holy offering of praise.7 As we will see, carrying workplace fruits into worship is far more involved than simply dropping cash into an offering plate or directing an electronic transfer of funds. There are many reasons the Bible clearly instructs workers not to come before the Lord empty-handed (Deut. 16:16).

What does this look like in practice? How might Sunday worship gather a worker’s trumpets, ashes, tears, petitions, and fruits? These critical questions will be explored in the book’s final section in dialogue with Scripture, history, and rural and global practice. There we will give practical examples and models, but for now we’re simply laying the conceptual groundwork for developing worship that is vocationally conversant.

Worship that is vocationally conversant is able to gather workers and their work openly and honestly before God. It gives workers the space and time, and the language and practices, to offer their whole lives and their whole work to God as a living sacrifice of praise, holy and pleasing to God (Rom. 12:1).

Some workers will come into worship with bright and shining faces, excited to offer their vocational trumpets of praise and their first fruits of thanksgiving. Some workers will come to worship with faces that are weary and broken; they will come with nothing but ashes, petitions, and tears. Worship that is vocationally conversant will welcome these diverse workplace stories into the presence of Christ and the transformative power of the Holy Spirit.

After Jesus’s crucifixion, two disciples are walking to Emmaus. Along the road they discuss the past week (Luke 24:13–35); their stories from the week are both painful and beautiful. Jesus interrupts them on the road to Emmaus. He inserts himself into the conversation and wants to hear their stories. Of course, Jesus already knows—quite intimately—all the things that have occurred in the city. And yet still he asks, “What things?” In the divine encounter, Jesus wants to hear about our week.

Worship Dialogues

But gathered worship is not a one-way conversation. God is not mute. God does not sit back and passively absorb our weekly trumpets, ashes, tears, petitions, and fruits. God is not inert. In worship, God has a story to tell, a Word to proclaim, fruits to offer, and a work to accomplish. Worship is not a monologue; it’s a dialogue. Workers who enter the sanctuary are entering into a conversation—a dialogical exchange that may very well challenge, disrupt, and transform the stories they tell themselves about their work.

In the sanctuary, workers offer their stories to God. God does the same. Workers tell God about their work. God does the same. This great dialogue, this dynamic and gracious exchange between workers and God, reaches its zenith at the Lord’s Table. Here workers offer their whole lives to God, and God does the same. Both sides have a story to tell. Both sides offer their work, their bodies, and their lives. Both sides receive the work of the other. In the worship dialogue, nothing is held back.

Returning to the Emmaus encounter, Constance Cherry’s reflections are instructive. We, the disciples, share our stories with Christ, and Christ shares his disruptive presence and story with us. In corporate worship, “we are approached by his presence, instructed in his presence, fed by his presence, and we depart with his presence . . . a journey with Jesus together.”8

In worship that is vocationally conversant, both God and workers take turns speaking and listening, offering and receiving, acting and waiting. By engaging in this dialogue, workers slowly and clumsily begin to practice putting their faith in God and their work in the world into conversation.

When describing worship as a “dialogue,” we need to make one thing perfectly clear. This dialogue between God and worker in the sanctuary is not, in any way, equal. A worker’s story from the past week comes under God’s story for the whole world—not the other way around. A worker’s fruits offered to God are a mere pittance compared to the fruits God offers to the worker. A worker’s body offered to God in worship is nothing compared to God’s body offered to the worker at the Lord’s Table.

Moreover, without God’s primary work on their behalf, workers would have no standing whatsoever to enter into his holy presence and offer their work as worship. God made the workers, gave them gifts, gave them fruits to offer, called them into worship. Yes, worship is a gracious exchange between God and workers. Yes, it is mutual dialogue and a vocational conversation. Both sides have something to say, and both have something to offer. However, the origin, essence, and end of this vocational conversation is not the worker; it is God.

Worship (Trans)forms

O Jesus, Master Carpenter of Nazareth, who on the cross through wood and nails didst work man’s whole salvation; wield well thy tools in this workshop, that we who come to thee rough-hewn may, by Thy hand, be fashioned to a truer beauty and a greater usefulness. . . . Lord in your Mercy—hear our prayer.

—Congregational prayer in Cameron Butland, Work in Worship

While the primary purpose of worship is the glory of God, it has a secondary purpose, a by-product, so to speak: the (trans)formation and sanctification of the church. Worship that is vocationally c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part 1: Foundations
• Part 2: Resources
• Part 3: Practices
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index
• Back Cover