Much has been written about work and vocation from a theological perspective the past few decades, and there have been plenty of conferences about work, but as this article in Christianity Today points out, it’s not janitors and fast food workers – or even machinists –  who frequent Christian conferences about work.  And they’re not reading books on vocation either.

For decades my dad would get up in the morning, make a cheese sandwich – the regular boring cheese, not the classy stuff – get in his car, and drive off to work in some form of semi-skilled low paying manufacturing job in a factory on an industrial estate somewhere.

Every day the same type of job.

Every day the same cheese sandwich.

Two wives in that time.

Six sons.

Same job.

Same sandwich.

Dad lived half of those work years as a professing Christian, and half as not.  Yet during neither phase did I ever recall him talking about his job as some sort of “vocation”; as a way to “glorify God”, or as “his passion”.

It was a job.  Plain and simple.

Plain and simple and boring and repetitive.

Dad’s job was a means to the end of putting food on the table, clothes on our backs and, with a bit of luck, some money left over for fun or a cheap family holiday down south on the coast to escape the searing Perth summer heat.

There was no noble vision, no quest, no sense of call.  Whether or not Wednesdays as “hump day” was a thing back then I am not sure.

What I am sure of was that by Wednesdays Dad would have been looking forward to Saturday morning when he could go into his shed and do some picture-framing, something he was passionate about.

His three areas of lack: business acumen, self-belief, and general education, meant his occasional plans to set up a framing business where his career and passion could collide  never really took off.

Yet on Saturday mornings Dad was the master of his craft.

I can see him now: A cup of instant coffee on the side bench with some chocolate; mitring an angle with precision; running a tack through his thin hair before nailing it in; reruns of The Goon Show playing loudly on ABC radio; sun streaming through the window shimmering the dancing wood dust.

In that shed he was the master. He belonged here.  This was his true vocation though it earned him little money. The pride in almost seamless joints.  The look of satisfaction in a friend’s face at how Dad had gotten the moulding choice just right for that piece they’d bought overseas and which held such memories.

This weekend at our church I’m talking about work and the pendulum swing of our culture in which work risks becoming either our noble identity, or a necessary irritant.

And for people like my Dad there was no sense that he drew any identity whatsoever from his paid employment.  It was just a job.  Whether it irritated him or not I can’t tell either, so locked in was he to the process.

Much has been written about work and vocation from a theological perspective the past few decades, and there have been plenty of conferences about work, but as this article in Christianity Today points out, it’s not janitors and fast food workers – or even machinists –  who frequent Christian conferences about work.  And they’re not reading books on vocation either.

Once again evangelical Christianity has been great at targeting the middle class when it comes to dealing with the big issues of life.  It’s no wonder our tribe is so middle class, or at least tends towards it.

After all we have the luxury of using the gospel to put checks and balances on just how much of our identity is tied up in our jobs.  And the more we focus on the idolatry aspect of work, the more we call our fellow Christians not to idolise their jobs, the more distant we become in experience; and more irrelevant in message, to the working class among us.

Many low skilled, low paid workers, – many Christian workers – will never have the luxury of feeling angsty about putting too much meaning into their jobs, and risking their jobs becoming idols.

Nor the guilt of having too many other luxuries afforded educated or highly skilled trades workers: status in our jobs; financial rewards that allow us to let off steam in Venice instead of the casino, that sort of thing.

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