Business as God Meant It to Be

For Katie Nienow, it was leaving "the ministry" that ultimately led her to her true vocation. Following a passion for economic justice, she left her position as a youth minister for a career in microfinance. The work she does now is its own kind of ministry—one she may never have discovered if she had stayed where she was. God's purposes have a way of frustrating our own ideas.

But where did the idea that finance is any less of a calling than youth ministry come from? Obviously, Katie's story lines up with something we're pretty passionate about here: daily work as a sacred opportunity, to serve others and to glorify God. If you're reading this, the chances are that you may feel the same way.

Business as God Meant It To Be from This Is Our City on Vimeo.

How do we communicate to our children, our neighbors—and for some of us, our students—that God's calling might take them in any number of directions? I'll leave that an open-ended question, and defer to C.S. Lewis, who, true to form, was thinking and writing about this a long time before most of us were.

In Mere Christianity, Lewis has this to say about the relationship between the clergy, lay members of the church, and our role in God's redemption of the world:

The clergy are those particular people within the whole Church who have been specially trained and set aside to look after what concerns us as creatures who are going to live forever: and we are asking them to do a quite different job for which they have not been trained. The job is really on us, on the laymen. The application of Christian principles, say, to trade unionism and education, must come from Christian trade unionists and Christian schoolmasters; just as Christian literature comes from Christian novelists and dramatists--not from the bench of bishops getting together and trying to write plays and novels in their spare time.

In typical dry British fashion, Lewis points out how necessary it is for us to use the different talents and passions God has given us in the way we were made to use them. Any good manager, or engineer, would tell you the same thing. Any good novelist or playwright probably would, too—and they might add that a whole lot of people trying to do just one thing in exactly the same way is not only inefficient, but also kind of boring. And it doesn't take a whole lot of time on this planet to figure out that God is many things—but certainly never boring.

A big thanks to Nathan Clarke, who directed this video for Christianity Today's This Is Our City project.