HERE.
Category: Gospel and Culture
My New Article: Community and the Cubicle
By 2000, forty million American white-collar employees were using the cubicle. What began as a customizable work environment eventually turned into an urban dungeon. Cutting us off from contact with the real world, the cubicle is scorned for suffocating productivity and community. Attempts to correct these individualistic work environments, such as co-working or collaborative workspace, have met with little to moderate success. Does work have to be so isolating?
Tobacco and Community
In a thoughtful essay on tobacco production from Sex, Economy, Freedom, & Community, Wendell Berry lists the benefits of tobacco work. (The morality of tobacco work is another issue altogether.) Among them is the practice of “swapping work.” Tobacco, Berry points out, is a very “sociable crop,” one that calls upon the entire community for help in the setting, cutting, stripping, and harvesting of tobacco. He comments:
At these times, neighbors helped each other in order to bring together the many hands that lightened work. Thus, these times of hardest work were also times of big meals and much talk, storytelling and laughter.
I suppose that tobacco farmers could have insisted on doing the work alone, but it wouldn’t have been near as fun or efficient as swapping work. But there’s more merit to work swapping than efficiency. Berry’s reflections reverberate with community. Words like: neighbor, each other, together, many hands, big meals, storytelling, and laughter seem foreign to the professional workplace, even to contemporary expressions of church. Yet, many of these words and concepts occur frequently in New Testament descriptions of the Early Church.
Early Church Community
For example, Acts consistently describes a church that experienced a steady state of Christian community, not just meeting one another on weekends. They devoted themselves to sharing meals, sharing needs, sharing possessions, and sharing a mission (Acts 2:42-47). This radical community was in response to the gospel of Christ, a community-cultivating message that enriched the surrounding social fabric of Jerusalem (Acts 4:32-37). The gospel promoted community in private and in public, through the ministry of reconciliation. They sought God-centered reconciliation (Acts 2,7,17), ethnic reconciliation between Jews and Gentiles (Acts 10,15), and social reconciliation of the poor, sick, and lame (Acts 3:1-10; 5:12-16). The gospel of reconciliation brought very different people together publicly and privately, renewing Jerusalem socially and spiritually.
Gospel, Community, & Work
What would it look like to extend the community-cultivating power of the gospel into our cities, into our workplaces, into our churches? How would the workplace change? In the city, when our workload increases, community often declines. We buckle into the cubicle for days, only to emerge a worn-out mess. Berry recounts an increase in community when hard work sets in—more laughter, more meals, and more hands. On the contrary, urban work deadlines often bring about despair, fewer meals, less sleep, and less time at home with the family. Far from enriching community, office work can isolate individuals from coworkers and families. Ironically, Tom Rath has demonstrated that community can increase productivity. In his book, Vital Friends, Rath points out that people with best friends at work are proven to be seven times more engaged in their job!
It would appear that the city has much to learn from the country. Although some vocations are not as sociable as others, the gospel compels us to work for community and reconciliation. To honor, serve, and love those that are different from us, even the employees that get on our nerves. What if you became an agent of reconciliation and community in your workplace? Company morale and output would likely increase, and so would the glory of God in your life. Perhaps some repentance from go-it-alone work is in order. The rural wisdom of “work swapping” could take us a long way in cultivating better work, better relationships, and better communities. Wouldn’t it be great if Christians led the way?
Originally published at The High Calling
Thoughts on Resolutions
David POwlision helps us think about the nature of making resolutions here.
Something we did as a family was look back, instead of forward. We went around sharing one thing we are immensely grateful for from 2008. It sparked some good conversation and was a heart-warming time.
Should we "Redeem" Culture?
How can we better engage (and disengage) culture in 2009? Much has been written about the extreme Christian postures towards culture–fundamentalist judgmentalism (Christ Against Culture) and emergent syncretism (Christ of Culture)—but is redeeming the culture the biblical middle? D. A. Carson doesn’t seem to think so.
Carson on Culture
D. A. Carson recently cautioned against using “redemption” language when engaging culture. He wrote: “Redemption terminology in the NT is so bound up with Christ’s work for and in the church that to extend it to whatever good we do in the broader world risks a shift in focus.” I love Carson’s commitment to the Bible, and he is correct that redemption terminology is often bound up with Christ’s work for and in the church. However, redemption is also bound up with creation and culture in the New Testament. Apparently, Tim Keller has been affected by Carson’s caution. His comment during a Q&A session at the Dwell Conference revealed sympathy for Carson’s position. Is redeeming culture wrong-headed? Let’s consider this question from Colossians:
Colossians on Culture
- “and through him (Jesus) to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.” Col 1:20
The emphasis of this verse is upon the reconciling work of Christ, a subset of redemption, accompished through Jesus death on the cross. It accomplishes peace, shalom, restoration. The scope of the redemptive, reconciling, shalom promoting effects of the cross are universal. When it comes to people, they are reconciled by faith or by force. When it comes to all other things they are reconciled in fact. That fact is breaking into the present through the Church. All things then, including creation and culture, are affected by the already-not-fully redemptive work of Jesus on the cross. The church is the embodiment of the redemptive gospel to and in the world, which is made plain by the rest of Paul’s letter to the Colossians. The implications of this culture redeeming posture are spelled out in Paul’s ethical exhortations regarding society and vocation. He tells the church to produce counter-cultural, redeemed forms of:
-
- marriage and family, a social institution:
- work and slavery, cultural norms and ills
- social, economic, and ethnic prejudice and barriers
- how we spend our time, a rather sweeping category that applies to everything!
- “Conduct yourselves wisely toward outsiders, making the best use of (literally “redeeming”) the time.” Colossians 4:; cf. Eph 5:14
Redemptively Engaging Culture
This sweeping command to redeem the time, explicitly through conversations, but implicitly through everything we do warrants redemptive engagement with culture. Perhaps there is something wrong with Carson’s definition of “culture” or maybe we need to clarify what we mean by “redeeming”? Provisionally, I am thinking of gospel-motivated critique and change of cultural forms and content. Nevertheless, the gospel compels us to redemptively engage both peoples and cultures. How? To redeem places—where you gather as a church, where you live in a neighborhood or condo or apartment complex. To redeem cultural products—films you watch, music you listen to, art and advertisement you take in, games you play. To redeem bad political practices—voting for certain propositions, supporting certain policies. To redeem domains like education—to raise the quality of education offered, to promote theological perspectives alongside secular perspectives, to advocate better salaries for teachers.
These are a few ways (here’s more on that) we can redemptively engage culture, which are warranted by Christ on the cross, by Paul from prison, by the Bible as a whole, a document that is, itself, redemptive literature that has affected the writing of novels, short stories, journalism, history, and so on. Should we redeem culture? I think so, but we must be careful not to call the creation of Christian sub-culture redemption of culture; that, of course, is often just bad culture creation and Andy Crouch recently has helped us out with that. I say, redeem, but redeem wisely!