ChristianWeek

VANCOUVER, BC—The vast majority of pastors are failing most of their church members by not helping them see themselves as missionaries to the marketplace, say those who minister among Vancouver’s business and professional community.

“On Sundays, businesspeople have been sitting so long [in church] without hearing a lot of connections to their Monday world, they don’t even ask for it anymore,” says Tim Ernst of The Navigators.

The result is often a vast gulf between the local church and the workplace to the detriment of the Kingdom of God in both places.

What businesspeople need is the encouragement and empowerment of their church to serve the Lord as Monday-to-Friday missionaries, says Ernst. “They need to be sort of validated as significant agents of God’s kingdom right where they work.”

Richard Blackaby, president of Blackaby Ministries International in Cochrane, Alberta, says part of the problem is most pastors have little personal experience of the workplace.

“In fact, I know a lot of pastors who are intimidated by the world,” says Blackaby, who is himself a former pastor and seminary president. “They’re comfortable with the Bible and teaching generalities and principles, but [they don’t know how] to make it applicable and specific....[The workplace is] just so foreign to them.”

Paul Williams, who teaches marketplace theology and leadership at Regent College, says whenever he asks his students if they have “given as much attention to thinking Christianly about your work as you gave to studying it from a secular point of view,...99 times out of 100, the answer is ‘No.’”

And since pastors will typically preach on the things they know about, the marketplace often gets overlooked. In their book Your Work Matters to God, Doug Sherman and William Hendricks concluded that upwards of “97 per cent of Christians have never heard a sermon relating biblical principles to their work life.”

Shaila Visser, who ministers to women working in downtown Vancouver as well as overseeing Alpha in the Workplace International, can attest to that. “My church just this past Sunday had a businessman come...and he gave the first sermon I’ve ever heard in all my churchgoing years...on the value of work,” she says. “I was so thrilled, because I know that that doesn’t happen in very many churches.”

This failure of churches to integrate their people’s faith into their work life means most Christians end up with what Sherman and Hendricks call a “strategic soapbox mode” of work—their job has no value apart from giving them opportunities to evangelize.

“And that doesn’t make for good workers,” says Williams, “because they see their work content as irrelevant to serving God, and they see the people around them as a means to an end. So they’re not actually loving them for themselves.

“It’s utterly counterproductive to my mind and contrary to how the gospel actually commands us to live.”

But not only is the workplace being deprived of a positive Christian witness, many churches are also being deprived of the gifts that Christian business leaders can bring.

Blackaby knows of pastors lacking in leadership skills who have ostracized the business executives in their congregations who have those skills—because they are afraid of them.

“The tragedy,” he says, “is the Church is often so under-led and poorly administered, and yet we have guys sitting in the pews that are great at that. They’re very creative, very talented people. [But all they hear is] ‘Would you like to hand out the bulletin?’”

In contrast, Blackaby believes God could well be preparing these same businesspeople to revive the Church. “If revival comes, it’s going to start where there are roadways to other groups so that it spreads,” he says. “Now the business community, they’re beginning to have Bible studies. They’ve got networks. They want to see things happen.”