This evening I ran a session on 'Transforming the Workplace', as part of the Continuing Ministerial Development programme in the Diocese of Chelmsford, with a very engaged and responsive group of curates.
Last week I listened to the second in this year's series of Keene Lectures at Chelmsford Cathedral where Revd. Will Morris outlined his understanding of the issues which led to the credit crunch and argued for a positive engagement by the Church with the world of work together with a postive theology of work to underpin that engagement. My 'Transforming the Workplace' session, which I had previously delivered for St Mellitus College students and which adapts materials from the Christians in the Workplace resource pack, seeks to outline such a theology of work.
I used as a framework N.T. Wright's idea of salvation history as a five act play suggesting that in 'Act 1: Creation' work is seen as a collaborative partnership developing the possibilities inherent in God's creation. 'Act 2: The Fall' is then our choice to undertake the task of developing the created order independently of God and, in aiming to exploit creation for human ends, to work against the best interests and inherent possibilities of creation. As a result, work is experienced as toil and hardship. The end of the play ('Act 5') sees our experience of work being restored to its original form (Isaiah 65.21-23).
At the heart of my suggested theology of work is a quote from Richard Baukham regarding our present experience of “painful contradiction between the promise and present reality.” Bauckham writes: “The contradiction arises from a hope for the world, for the whole of this worldly reality, which it exposes in all its god-forsakenness. The Christian’s suffering is thus a loving solidarity with the whole of the suffering creation … and a hopeful solidarity in expectation of the transformation of all creation … Love and hope for the world involve the Christian in a movement towards world-transformation which has two moments: critical opposition and creative expectation … In the first moment, hope liberates the Christian from all accommodation to the status quo and sets him critically against it … In the second moment, it gives rise to attempts to change the world in the direction of its promised transformation, imaginatively grasping and realising the objective possibilities in the present which conform most closely to the coming Kingdom.”
As an example of work-related liberation from the status quo I used Mark Greene's summary of Biblical teaching on work. Greene says that work is “intended as a source of satisfaction and pleasure”; “an intrinsic part of our walk with God”; limited by our need for rest and by our ultimate value being found elsewhere; “done for God” as worship and therefore needing to be done well; “any activity that contributes to the provision of human needs – cooking, washing, food shopping, car maintenance – as well as those activities that generate money directly”; and a means of provision (for families and for those who don’t have), mutual service, and personal development. I argued that seeking to live these approaches to work with integrity involves a liberation from the status quo of ways in which work is viewed and approached within our culture.
For Bauckham that is only one part of a fuller response to living between the promise and the present reality. I illustrated the second aspect of being critically set against the status quo by using the example of Distributism, which aims to be "a third-way economic philosophy that sits between socialism and capitalism. According to distributism, the ownership of the means of production should be spread as widely as possible among the general populace, rather than being centralized under the control of the state or a few large businesses or wealthy private individuals.
Distributism was developed by Hilaire Belloc from Roman Catholic social encyclicals and has since been a thread knitting together the journalistic pronouncements of G. K. Chesterton with the alternative arts and crafts communities formed by Eric Gill and Father Vincent McNabb, the ‘small is beautiful’ economics of E. F. Schumacher, and the work structuring methodology devised by Schumacher’s son, Christian. Gill, for example, wrote that the “factory system is unchristian primarily because it deprives workmen of responsibility for their work.”
Finally, there is creative expectation; "attempts to change the world in the direction of its promised transformation, imaginatively grasping and realising the objective possibilities in the present which conform most closely to the coming Kingdom.” This I illustrated with the example of Christian Schumacher who, in his work as a company consultant, restructures work so that each workgroup member can personally plan, do and evaluate at least one transformation in the work process. Schumacher “asks that … each person should be willing to give up the ‘raw material’ of his or her own ideas in order that it can be subsumed or absorbed into the pool of other ideas being contributed by other team members, so that a new and better ‘product’ of the team’s combined endeavours can be created”. This experience “of unity in a warm, effective and strongly bound cohesive team operating within divinely compatible structures” has moved participants “to deepen their own inner lives” and has drawn them closer to God.
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The Jam - Smithers-Jones.
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