Closing the Sunday to Monday Gap

During his college years, Steve was involved in a campus ministry that emphasized being sold out to Christ which was demonstrated by entering “full-time” ministry and becoming a pastor, missionary, or parachurch worker. Yet, Steve loved soccer and had a growing interest in international business. After college he joined a large corporation that gave him a global assignment. Yet, over the years, something continued to haunt his heart. Over a cup of coffee, Steve expressed it to me this way. “For so many years, I felt that not being a pastor or missionary meant I was on God’s B-team. That the best I could do was to support God’s A-team.” Hearing Steve’s heartfelt words, I was able to assure him that he was no B-team player, that all apprentices of Jesus, whatever their calling, were on God’s A-team.

Steve’s story is tragically common among so many men that I interact with across the nation. Sadly, pastors have played a large role in explicitly and implicitly reinforcing this unbiblical narrative. One of those pastors was me.

A PASTOR’S CONFESSION

Confession is good for the soul, but hard for pastors. After much prayer and soul searching, I told my congregation that I had blown it. Against the stunned backdrop of silence, I shared my heartfelt regret for my egregious failure. What was my failure? My confession was not for sexual indiscretion, financial malfeasance, or abuse of power, but it was for pastoral malpractice. Because of an impoverished theology and resultant flawed pastoral paradigm, I had been spending the majority of my time equipping my congregation for the slimmest minority of their lives. Transparently, I had been much more concerned with how well I did on Sunday than how my congregation did on Monday. My work “for God” seemed much more important than my congregation’s work. In my faulty thinking, Sunday worship and Monday work were worlds apart. As a pastor I had failed to focus on my primary stewardship of whole life discipleship, a large part of which was equipping my congregation for their daily paid and unpaid work. I had a large Sunday to Monday gap in my thinking, preaching, teaching, and my pastoral practices.

Speaking in Seattle to a group of Christian business leaders, I shared with them why their work really mattered. I also confessed my own failure as a pastor. How I had failed to equip my congregation for where they were called by God to spend a majority of their efforts and time. When I had finished my talk, a business leader came up and shared his burdened heart. He said, “Tom, I know the scriptures teach what you are saying, but my pastor does not teach about the importance of my work calling. I love my pastor, but he does not seem to care about what I do on Monday or be interested in how my Christian faith is to inform and shape where I spend the majority of my time each week.”

As I listened to this committed Christian business leader long for his pastor to take his Monday world seriously, my heart sank in discouragement. So many Christians feel like they are on God’s B-team, second-class citizens in their local church community. Sitting in the pew, there to support God’s A-team players by writing a check

to keep the church going. Many congregants feel ignored or simply taken for granted by their spiritual leaders. Perhaps this is your heart aching experience too.

WHY THE SUNDAY TO MONDAY GAP?

When we speak of the perilous Sunday to Monday gap we are delving into an unbiblical but common way of Christian thinking and practice. The Bible teaches that we live and work before an audience of one. Instead of living an integral, seamless life of faith, we often compartmentalize our life into separate pieces: faith, family, friends, work, money, hobbies, and leisure. When we compartmentalize our life, we divide what God has designed to be seamlessly integrated. An integral triune God created us as integral creatures to live in his tender abiding presence, indwelling a seamless fabric of faithfulness.

A peril of the compartmentalized Sunday to Monday gap is that we often assign greater or lesser eternal value to some aspects of our life. For example, we tend to divide things up into what is secular and what is sacred, yet the Bible teaches that our Monday workplaces are to be viewed as sacred because Jesus is Lord over every square inch of the universe. We also see Sunday to Monday gap thinking when we speak of greater or lesser callings with language like “full-time-ministry.” If you are a follower of Jesus, you are in full time ministry. You may not be called to serve the church as a pastor or cross culture missionary. However, as a business person, entrepreneur, coach, teacher, professional, mechanic, or retiree, you are called by the creator of the universe to a life of ministry as an ambassador of Jesus everywhere you are and in all that you do. You are on God’s A-team.

YOUR WORK REALLY MATTERS

If we are going to close the Sunday to Monday gap we need to get a firmer grasp on how much our Monday work matters. The first two chapters of Genesis inform us that the creator God works and that as humans we are uniquely created in God’s image as workers. Each one of us was created with work in mind. This is seen in the cultural mandate of Genesis 1:28 where we read, “And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

When Adam was placed in the garden, he was given a work job description. In Genesis 2:15 we read, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden to work it and keep it.” Tragically, Genesis chapter 3 describes humanity’s fall into sin and the resulting catastrophic consequences to our relationships with one another, to the earth, and to our work. Work, now as we know it, is toilsome, a mixture of the good, the bad, and the ugly, but what has not changed is God’s design and desire that our work honor Him and serve our neighbor. Work, whether it is monetarily compensated or not, is one of the primary ways we worship God. While we don’t worship our

work, work is one of the most important aspects of how we honor and worship God in our everyday lives.

It is not insignificant that Jesus, the incarnated son of God, spent the vast majority of his time on earth, not as a traveling evangelist, but working with his hands as a carpenter and small business owner. The majority of Jesus’ brilliant parables and teaching are embedded in the workplace of his first century world. While Jesus’ ultimate aim was the cross and the empty tomb, the compelling truth of his vocational calling as a carpenter speaks to us of the dignity and value of human work and how much our Monday work matters. The Apostle Paul, whose Monday job was often a tentmaker, summarized the importance of the Christian’s work. Writing to the first century church at Colossae, Paul gets to the bottom line of our Monday world: “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.”

Dorothy Sayers helps us narrow the Sunday to Monday gap as well. She put it this way: “The only Christian work is good work well done.” Your work matters and doing your work well matters, too. Your work is one of the most important stewardships of your life, a stewardship for which you will one day give an account to God. One day Jesus will give you your ultimate job review. What will that job review reveal

about you and your work? Many of the skills and competencies arising from your work will be utilized one day in the work you will do in the sinless realm of the eternal new heavens and the new earth. Your Monday work matters more than you may realize.

Read the full article of Closing the Sunday to Monday Gap by Tom Nelson in Kinsmen Journal Volume 1.