The story is told about an evangelical college that claimed to affirm
the sacredness of all work. But did it really believe this teaching?
Every spring the school held a special chapel service to lay hands on,
and pray for, students who were going off on mission trips. But then a
professor asked if the school could hold a similar service for students
planning to start internships at big accounting firms.
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The school's answer? An emphatic no.
My former colleague Jim Tonkowich tells this story in his online article, "Christians on the Job: Doing Well a Thing Well Worth Doing." "Fine words aside," Tonkowich writes, "the college believes that some vocations are much more sacred than others."
Sadly, many professors "enthusiastically [communicate] that fallacy to its unsuspecting students."
Christians outside the academy sometimes fall for the same fallacy as well. Too many business people "have cut short their careers just before breaking into senior management in order to 'serve God full time,'" Tonkowich notes. Despite their talk about all work being sacred, their own decisions deny their words.
How do we get back a biblical view of work? We can start with an essay by Dorothy Sayers entitled "Why Work." As Sayers writes, Christians "must get it firmly into their heads that when a man or woman is called to a particular job of secular work, that is as true a vocation as though he or she were called to a specific religious work."
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Mark Earley (Prison Fellowship Ministries), Crosswalk.com
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