Being the Church in the Workplace
The quotation below continues from yesterday’s reflection in that it focusses on the relationship between the church and the workplace.
“The essence of the church is as a community of disciples both gathered and scattered. We don’t go to church, we are church. If we are not living as disciples in the situations of everyday life we are not being disciples at all! So how to be disciples individually, and how to be church corporately in the world of work, is the central calling and challenge to that decreasing proportion of Christians who are not yet retired. The kingdom of God is not restricted to the world of leisure and family. Work is the place for church!” (The Rt Revd Graham Cray)
So often, in Western society in particular, we focus on ‘doing’ and not ‘being’. As well as challenging the Church-Workplace divide, the quotation above urges us to thinking about ‘being the Church’. We miss the boat when we think along the line of “Well, I’ve done my duty today – I went to church”. In fact, the duty part comes after worship. We need to stop seeing worship as the thing, and move to seeing it as preparation to go and do the thing. That’s one of the challenges we face when we think about our vocation to be Christians, to be the Church.
How can we be the church in the workplace, and in the world where we spend almost all of the 168 hours that there are in each week?
