This week my wife finishes her twenty-second year as a public school teacher.  I'm so proud of her for so many reasons. I've always viewed her teaching not just as a job, but as a calling, and even a sacred gift to our community's civic life. 

Similarly, our three children attended public schools, and then large public universities.  Across those years, and in those settings, they tried to figure out what it means to follow Jesus — as Johnny Cash put it in his song "A Boy Named Sue," "in the mud and the blood and the beer."

In his controversial new book The Benedict Option (2017), Rod Dreher argues that the cultural war is over and that Christians have lost.  He says that Christians should secede from mainstream culture. We should turn off our smartphones and watch only movies and television that are consistent with Christian values. Christians should take their kids out of the public schools.

I respect Dreher's decision to home school his own kids, but not his generalized advice to all the church.  Every family, child, and parent is different.  We all have different opportunities, constraints, backgrounds, experiences, interests, abilities, finances, geography, and so on. We shouldn't presume to advise every believer based upon our own beliefs and choices.

New York City.

In Matthew's gospel for this week, Jesus tells his followers to spread his good news "to all nations (Luke 24:48; cf. Matthew 28:19). Mark's parallel passage is even more emphatic — we're sent into "all creation" (Mark 16:15). And in Luke's sequel to his gospel, Jesus sends us to "the ends of the earth." (Acts 1:8).

In the reading from the first pages of Genesis, God calls us to tend the garden and till the earth, to be trustworthy stewards of the gifts of creation that are given to all people.

For the most part, the church has commissioned a separate class of people — missionaries and clergy, to fulfill the so-called Great Commission of Jesus.  But there are some churches out there today that are experimenting with new ways to think about our sacred callings in the so-called secular world, or, as a friend of mine likes to put it, our secular callings in the sacred world.

At Central Presbyterian Church on Park Avenue in New York City, pastor Jason Harris commissions some of his congregants to their sacred vocations of secular work — finance people, lawyers, artists, and health care providers.  He wants to bridge the gap between sacred and secular callings.  In this view, virtually all callings can be sacred vocations.

Similarly, pastor Ryan Beattie of Bellevue Presbyterian Church in Washington has done four such commissioning services.  In the backyards of Microsoft and Amazon, he blesses his parishioners and has them stand to explain what they do and why they do it.  It's an effort to connect worship on Sunday with work on Monday.

Sierra Leone.

Pastor Jon Tyson of Trinity Grace Church in New York describes how Steve Garber of the Washington Institute for Faith, Vocation & Culture challenged him:  “There are people who labor all week long, and you bring missionaries up front and you pray for them, and you commission and send them out. Wouldn’t it be an amazing thing if you could take the people and send them into the city that you love so much, so that they felt like missionaries to their industries?”

Since that challenge from Garber, Tyson has started a new practice. Before he preaches, he has a parishioner from a specific vocational sector come forward, then he has people in the congregation who work in that same field to stand up.  They are then blessed to fulfill their commission.  After one such service, a teacher remarked to Tyson, “That was the most powerful moment in my entire life in church. Thank you.”

I have a friend in my church who's a corporate attorney.  After reading the book Lean In; Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg, she joked that she wanted to write a Christian and counter-cultural response called Lean Out.  It wasn't that she so much disagreed with Sandberg's message, but rather, that at her age and stage, and in a world that defines work and success in narrow ways, she was interested in other aspects of life like care for the poor and her pro bono work.

But just recently my friend took a new job at a new firm, where she's the leader of the firm's pro bono and women's initiatives programs.  So, once again she's "leaning in," by choice, and being a presence of God's kingdom in her work-a-day world.

And let's not forget all those who work inside the home instead of outside, more often than not without pay, more often than not women rather than men, some by choice and others by necessity.  They, too, have a sacred calling.

Brazil.

Our three kids have taken three different paths — law, Big Pharma, and finance at a mega church.  I like to joke that they have effectively prevented me from making jokes about three work places that often bear the brunt of sarcasm and criticisms.

Every call to love the world is uniquely personal and deeply sacred. 

And so we remember the prayer of Jesus to God his Father: "They are not of the world any more than I am of the world.  My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one.  They are not of the world, even as I am not of it.  As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world."

NOTE: See "Helping People Connect Faith and Work" by Skye Jethani and Luke Bobo.