Compensated Work is Ministry

Acton PowerBlog: The Sheep and the Goats: Work and Service to Others

Jordan Ballor offers some good insights drawing on the work of Lester DeKoster.

… One reflexive response to this claim is to argue that when we do work for money, when we profit from our labor, we are really serving ourselves and not others. …

…The concept of work being at once remunerative and service-oriented is not totally foreign to us. We tend to think, at least generally, of those in “public service” as working for the good of others even though they receive a paycheck. The same typically goes for doctors and teachers, as well as for a host of other jobs. But if it is the case that these kinds of professionals can legitimately be said to serve others (even though they are paid to do so), why is not the same true for the entrepreneur, the waitress, the garbageman, the farmer, the babysitter, or the factory worker? The fact that our work is “salable,” as DeKoster puts it, is one important piece of evidence that what we are doing is actually of use to someone; enough use, in fact, for them to compensate us for it.

This perspective on work and service as understood in the parable of the sheep and the goats also provides us with other norms for judging whether our work is true service or not. One measure, as we have said, is whether someone finds our work to be valuable enough to pay us for doing it. But given the corruption of human nature, people will pay us to do all kinds of things that are not good for them (or for us). So beyond mere “salability” of our work we must judge it by its orientation and effects. Does our work actually help others? Is it for their good that this work is done? Does it foster independence or dependence? Does it humanize or dehumanize? Does it feed addiction or satisfy legitimate appetite? By necessity, then, things that are inherently harmful, such as the distribution of illegal drugs, pornography, or abortion, are ruled out of bounds. But there are innumerable ways that otherwise valid service or work can be undermined by human sinfulness.

Even so, whether it is giving someone something to eat or drink, something to wear or somewhere to live, or any of the other myriad ways we serve one another in daily life, all legitimate forms of serving others, whether paid in wages or not, are valid ways to serve Christ. The key to this perspective, writes DeKoster, is to understand that our daily work is “the form in which we make ourselves useful to others, and thus to God.”