Less Meaningful Jobs
by Roger Andersen

I just got back from a wonderful conference on church leadership. The speakers were outstanding and I learned a great deal. One of the speakers (Karen) got up and said this:

“I worked as a private equity banker for several years and I was very successful by the age of thirty. Then the Lord led me to leave my six figure salary to start a Christian ministry for criminals. I am so happy that I am now doing something more meaningful.”

The next speaker got up and told the story of a successful lawyer who had been to the same conference a few years earlier and had been led by the Lord to give up his six figure income to become an executive pastor. He felt satisfied that he was now serving the Lord in a “more meaningful way”. Everyone in the audience applauded and there were some wet eyes.

I started to recall so many other stories about people who worked in what seemed to be characterized as “less meaningful” jobs, where they provided well for their family and contributed honestly to society. They were given great praise for leaving such jobs – in order to totally rely on the charity from “us” who were still working in “less meaningful” jobs.

It would seem that “good Christians” should all leave their careers in the secular world to “serve God”. If so, where does that leave our secular world? I suppose it leaves us where it is today – with few Christians combating for positions of influence on Wall Street, in corporations, in education, on the judicial bench, in politics, in entertainment and in the media – a culture run almost exclusively by non-believers.

I began to pray. “Lord”, I said. “I know you led Karen to leave the private equity banking arena to start a wonderful ministry that is changing lives for some criminals. However, I also know something about the private equity and venture capital world. It is almost completely filled with godless, greedy and unethical people. I pray that you will replace Karen in this business community with one thousand godly Christians who will make this their career in order that our business world will become more righteous for future generations! Please call them, Lord. I also pray that you will uphold and strengthen those few Christians today who are striving mightily to be ethical and righteous in this vocation. They truly live in a world hostile to our faith and must feel terribly alone.”

Then I prayed, “Lord, thank you for leading the successful lawyer to become an executive pastor. I hope this has some impact on your kingdom. However, I do know that our nation is suffering because very few of our lawyers know you or fear you. And few of our judges regard you as a guide or even relevant in their decisions. Lord, I pray that you will replace this person with ten thousand more Christians who go into the legal field to uphold laws that are based on righteous principles. Please call young Christians to enter this field! And Lord, I pray that you will make bold and strong the very few Christians who are in legal practices and especially those rare judges who are Christians. Encourage them to stay in their careers and make a difference!”

Consider the tragic Enron story of corruption. Over 20,000 employees lost their jobs. Investors lost 60 billion dollars of personal savings! Thousands of families lost huge amounts in their retirement 401k plans. Just imagine if there had been a Christian running the company or if the Chief Financial Officer had been a Christian who was bold enough to stand in the way of those financial schemes. Even if there had been some Christians on the Board of Directors who watched carefully, this might not have happened! The lives of tens of thousands of employees and shareholders might not have experienced such grief, hardship and punishment.

Sixty billion dollars of savings and hope was lost in Enron! Let’s put this in perspective. The annual budget of Franklin Graham’s Samaritan Purse and Billy Graham’s ministries combined is less than ½ billion dollars. In other words, what was lost by families because of Enron was more than 100 times the combined annual spending of these two wonderful ministries. Having honest, high integrity Christians running our corporations, our schools, our courts, and other areas of our society like the media, arts and entertainment is worth a great deal. It is praiseworthy.

But we too often fail to affirm their calling – these people, these Christians who are consistently honest and good in a marketplace or government system which is increasingly immoral and unethical.

When Karen told her story about how she left a lucrative career in private equity banking, to struggle financially to start a prison ministry that has so far reached about one hundred people, there was hardly a dry eye in the auditorium last week, including my own. We all rose to our feet and applauded her story. However, I will tell you that many Christians in that auditorium who were earning a living in a “secular” job felt a little pang of guilt as he or she sat down – perhaps for remaining in that “less meaningful” job.

In fact, the more successful the person is, the more ashamed he might feel. We usually don’t hear about the person who left a $40,000 a year job to “serve the Lord”. The more the person left, the more we praise them. Therefore, the more we make, the guiltier we could feel as a Christian for staying in our job.

In my personal hobbies – golf, upland hunting and fishing – I socialize with many men who earn a considerable amount. Not one of them is interested in going to church. But over three quarters of their wives attend church and bible studies or other spiritual activities. Why is that? Is it in part because the successful business person feels tainted in church?

My friends are good people. They are honest people of high integrity, yet I think they feel at the bottom of a spiritual ladder, in a place of less respect because of their jobs. Their generous donations are greatly solicited by the church but they receive more honor and respect from secular charities and liberal causes!

They won’t come to church. They feel unrecognized and unappreciated for being an honest person of high integrity in a market which makes this exceedingly difficult. They will lose what stirrings of faith they might have. They will reject religion because religion seems to reject them. They will meld into the secular world. They will run Enron. They will be our judges and our politicians. They will run our schools. They will interpret the news. They will create movies for our children.

Our leaders will be lost. We, the church, will run smaller and smaller charities and ministries while the world continues to develop more and more leaders lacking faith – and they will run the institutions which determine our culture – God’s kingdom. Please, let’s work harder to change this!

I would encourage pastors to make it a point to honor the honest worker this Labor Day (and on other occasions). I urge everyone in the church community to thank the business or government or education worker who does his or her job with integrity and respect for everyone. Each person who works or leads righteously in secular jobs should be raised up and praised. It’s not so easy for them to honor the Lord in their vocation.

And every time we praise the Christian who leaves one of those “less meaningful” jobs as a lawyer or a business leader or a banker or a government official, PLEASE thank everyone who God has led to remain diligent in these vocations! They are the people who are trying to “occupy” until He returns.¹

I suggest that we have come to the day of the layperson, the day when the key operative in the Church is not a pope or a saint or a missionary or even a “highly committed” churchman – but the everyday worker who simply puts Christ first in his or her career, as in the rest of his life.²

Your Work Matters to God, by Doug Sherman and William Hendricks

¹ Luke 19:13 – “And he called his ten servants and delivered them ten pounds and said unto them ‘Occupy till I come’.” (KJV)
² Doug Sherman and William Hendricks, Your Work Matters to God (Colorado Springs, Colorado: Navpress, 1987), page 269

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