Dr. Amy Sherman, a senior fellow at the Sagamore Institute and director of the Center on Faith in Communities, as well as a senior fellow with International Justice Mission, recently released her latest book, Kingdom Calling: Vocational Stewardship for the Common Good. In the book, Dr. Sherman shares a vision of what it means, and she offers examples of what it looks like for people to lead integrated vocational lives within their churches and communities. We feature her book because she brilliantly shows us how one truly can connect Sunday to Monday, church with work with community, all so as to bring the Kingdom of God ever more into its fullness.
We at TWI highly recommend the book. Below we feature links to two interviews with Dr. Sherman about her book, as well as the book’s afterword by our own Steven Garber.
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Interview with Christianity Today’s Morgan Feddes, “Calling All Callings,” January 2012
Recording of Amy’s interview on “Afternoon Talk” on Pittsburgh’s 101.5 FM
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Afterward by Steven Garber to Kingdom Calling.
“You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.”
– G. K. Chesterton
I have a good friend who is a businessman; perhaps more accurately, an entrepreneur. From his undergraduate days on, he has had eyes to see opportunities, and then found ways to capitalize on his insight. Over time he has had his fingers in all sorts of things, and it is literally impossible for the average person to live life without interacting with his work. We live with and by his entrepreneurial imagination– his ideas have had legs.
A few years ago we were having lunch, and he asked me if I knew why he wanted to talk. Quite candidly, I didn’t, even though there is affection and respect between us that grows out of years of history. Over the table he said to me, “You think that what I do matters. You think that my work as a businessman matters. That my work itself matters. That the work of business matters. I’ve been in the church my whole life, and have been in and around the parachurch for years, and you know what? Both see me in the same way. When I walk into the room it’s as if a big checkbook walked in. That’s all I am. Nobody cares what I have done to make money.”
If my friend’s story was isolated, one among a thousand, it might be different. But sadly, his experience is the experience of most Christian people who spend their lives in the marketplaces of the world, hoping as they do that there is some honest connection between what they do, and the work of God in the world. They yearn to see their vocations as integral, not incidental, to the missio Dei.
Sorrowfully, most of the time the Church teaches the opposite. Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, we all stumble over this, more often than not offering instead that our vocations are incidental, on the side of what God really cares about and is doing—as my friend the entrepreneur has painfully discovered.
For many years I have traveled across America, taking up the question of vocation. Over the miles I have visited seminaries from the East coast to the West coast, asking deans and presidents, “How do you understand vocation? How is it taught to your students?” Sometimes that question has grown out of an hour’s conversation in an office, sometimes over a day with the seminary’s faculty. Eerily, I have heard the same words most everywhere I have gone; that is, “What you’re saying is our theology, but we don’t teach that here.”
Because of the history woven into those conversations, there is always a common ground of honor and hope. I don’t enter in to end a relationship; rather I always want to deepen a friendship, and to find a way to do something together. Sometimes I have said, in response, “But I wonder who you imagine your students will pastor? Most people in most congregations spend most of their lives in their vocations—and you have no time to address that reality in the years you have them here?”
If the story ended there, it would be one thing. But as ideas have legs, so does a curriculum. Not a week goes by that I don’t talk to someone whose life is immersed in the marketplace—and here I am using the word to cover a range of vocations, from business to politics, from agriculture to education, from journalism to medicine, from law to the arts, from building trades to architecture, and on and on and on. Everywhere I go I hear the longing folk have to see the work of their hands as integrally connected to the work of God. And usually that longing is bound up with the sadness that the Church doesn’t seem to understand; even more pointedly, that pastors don’t seem to understand.
One man I talked with this past year told me something of his life. For decades he has labored away in the business world, working hard, taking up increasingly complex tasks that involve people and money. Over the years he has given himself with honest humility to service in the churches where he has lived, and is a kind, loyal, thoughtful man (my reading of him, not his description of himself). With some pain, he said, “I’ve never had the sense that the pastor thought of someone like me when he was preparing his sermon. It always feels more like he imagines that people live in the church, not the world.”
What are we to do? I refuse to be a cynic, and with Bono believe that “tearing a corner off of the darkness” is a good life. We can all be glad that Amy Sherman has passions and commitments that have taken her into this question with remarkable theological richness. Always attentive to both the biblical vision and to the challenges of ordinary life for Everyman and Everywoman, she has set forth a vision of vocation that is profoundly formed by the reality of the kingdom of God, telling stories of men and women from all over the world who see their lives and labor as callings, as integral to the missio Dei.
My hope is that we will never again pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” without remembering Dr. Sherman’s very good work, calling all of us as she does to see our work as kingdom callings.