Everyday obstacles, Part 1: ‘What do you do for work?’
/Reformed evangelical churches want to share the good news of Jesus with everyone – so why are we struggling so much to find lost everyday people?
One very real obstacle is culture. Most Reformed evangelical churches today are predominantly made up of university-educated professionals – and almost entirely led by university-educated professionals.
As a result, the cultural values of these professionals shape everything about the church: from how a service is run, to what is said from the front and how, to how ministry and discipleship are structured and organised, to the way people dress and talk to each other.
A different kind of cross-cultural ministry
All too often, university-educated Christians assume everyday people in their communities have a similar culture and will easily fit into the local church. After all, they live (and maybe even grew up) in the same suburb, town or country.
But this assumption is wrong.
Many Reformed evangelical churches struggle to find the many everyday people living in their communities because they fail to realise that what they actually need to do is cross-cultural ministry.
Work and identity
Here is an example of how culture can present an obstacle.
In Western culture, what is usually the first thing a university-educated person asks someone they have just met for the first time?
More often than not, it’s this: ‘What do you do?’ (meaning ‘What is your work, your job?’).
Why is this so often the first question that we ask? Most of us probably don’t know. It’s just what you do. It’s how you start a conversation. It’s how you get to know someone.
But ultimately, it is part of professional culture and reflects the values of university-educated people. Like many aspects of culture, it’s taken for granted that this is an acceptable question to ask.
It’s a cultural blind spot.
Why do people ask that question?
Here’s one explanation of why we ask the question ‘What do you do?’
University-educated people can tend to find their identity in their work. They have succeeded in an education system that has allowed them to enter a well-paid, respected occupation. They can be proud of being a doctor, accountant or engineer. They value their work and the status it brings, and this can also become what they value in others, shaping the questions they ask when they meet someone for the first time.
Do you agree with this explanation?
There are other ways to define identity
It may surprise you to know that the Western, professional cultural inclination to find one’s identity in work is not universal.
A few years ago, I worked with a Turkish interpreter in a hospital in Western Sydney. I learned that in Turkish culture, family and religion are what define someone, giving them value and identity. As a result, when you meet someone from Turkey for the first time, you ask about their family and religion.
To give another example, in Maori culture, genealogy and place of origin is very important. So Maori people introduce themselves formally by where they are from, their land, their mountain, their river, the canoe their ancestors came on, their tribe, their subtribe, and then their name!
Everyday identity
Like Turkish and Maori people, many everyday people in the West also do not find their identity or value in their work.
Why?
Often their work is not highly valued or honoured in society (driving a truck or cleaning office buildings, for example), and neither is it paid well. It follows that many everyday people are less likely to ask each other what they do for work when they meet each other.
My wife and I were involved in a local dog training club for years, where people predominantly came from everyday backgrounds. At the end of three years, we didn’t know what most of them did for work; but we did know a lot about their families, their dogs, their hobbies, their hopes and dreams, and their struggles and pain.
Professional pride and its effects on others
Unfortunately, the problem of asking what someone does for work goes deeper than just being interested in people’s occupations. Pride can make university-educated people in Western society value status so much that they look down on everyday people as less valuable or less intelligent because they have not achieved the same kind of education level and career status as them.
Thankfully, this is not normally the case among Christians who seek to love all people equally.
But many everyday people perceive this attitude in the general society around them; so it’s worth thinking through the impact that may have on the way they see themselves as they walk into a church whose members are predominantly university-educated.
A few years ago, a friend of mine, Ian, wrote the following in a reflection about ministry and church:
This year I’ve also grown a massive passion for industrial workers, after talking to friends in the factory, Andrew and many others. I remember when I was working (in a factory) that people would often look down on us which made some of the staff look down on themselves. The workers don’t think they are worthy enough to go to church because of the fact that they look down on themselves. They often think of church as an upper-class gathering so they feel like by going to church they will be looked down on.
With this in mind, let’s consider what happens when an everyday person visits a church full of professionals and the first thing they are asked by the first person they meet is ‘What do you do?’
What the questioner has just unintentionally communicated is something like this: ‘We value people around here based on what they do for work.’
The visitor can then easily make some assumptions: ‘If this is the first thing a person is interested to know about me, it must be what they value in people around here. It probably means people will look down on me because I work in a factory.’
Within the first 30 seconds of meeting someone from the church, the everyday person feels they may be judged and looked down on, and is wondering whether they could ever belong and be valued here.
What should we do?
I know most Christians would be horrified to think that they had communicated to another human being, made in God’s image, that they were less valued because of their work.
But this is the problem with cultural blind spots. We are often blind to our cultural values and practices, and to the impact they are having on others; and if we can’t see the issues, we can’t apply God’s Word to them.
Maybe we need someone from outside our culture to come and look at the way we do things and help us untangle what is biblical about our practices from what has been inadvertently adopted from our family of origin, our social group, or our society.
And we can definitely train ourselves to ask different, more meaningful questions – like ‘What do you like to do for fun?’ or ‘What do you like to do when you have some free time?’ – so we can get to know people based on their interests and hobbies rather than their work.
At the very least, further exploration of some of our blind spots is a worthwhile exercise, don’t you think?
This article is one of a series that I’ve written about making disciples of ‘everyday people’.
It can be read on its own, but if you’d like to gain a greater understanding of how my thoughts around this important topic have developed, you may wish to read the full series of articles in order.
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