One Easy Thing" to Help Pastors Engage Their Audience
This article was originally published by Made to Flourish.
Pastors are exhausted. Though I do not lead a church week in and week out, I meet with pastors regularly and I see and hear their weariness. Many of their congregations are polarized and it is unclear if some members are ever coming back to church. As some communities sputter, pastors are not sure what their primary focus should be. Even more concerning is the worry that they are not the right person to navigate all the changes.
Given the state of flux and confusion, pastors likely do not have the time, energy, or finances for a new strategy, program, or technique. But what if you could do just “one easy thing” that might help your church?
I use this concept called “one thing” whenever I need to solve a problem. While I first learned it at a management conference to assess what I could improve in my personal leadership style, I now apply it more broadly to organizational issues as well. The crux of the method is this: if you could only do one thing to improve things, what should it be?
Based on my experience and research, I think “one thing” that can make church feel more relevant and applicable to the day-to-day lives of your congregants (and doesn’t cost anything) is to implement faith and work in your sermons.
Work is a topic that everyone in your congregation can relate to. But how often do you talk about their careers from the pulpit? Despite clear data that both going to work and listening to sermons are matters of great importance to Christians, most churches struggle to embed their liturgy with the concepts of work, its accompanying toil, and seeing it as an opportunity to love God and others.
Hear me out. A Gallup poll surveyed members of 167 countries (both developed and developing) and found what the organization claims is the single largest finding in its history: Work matters more to people than almost anything else, regardless of a person’s geographic or socioeconomic context. While we could debate the reasons for that and acknowledge that they likely vary by person, we cannot debate the reality. People care significantly more about work than we might think. As Gallup CEO Jim Clifton writes in his book The Coming Jobs War, “Humans used to desire love, money, food, shelter, safety, peace, and freedom more than anything else. The last 30 years have changed us. Now people want to have a good job, and they want their children to have a good job.”
The Connected Generation, a 2019 global study of 18-to-35-year-olds by the Barna Group and World Vision, confirms Gallup’s findings. Specifically, the study highlights that millennials are not finding answers to their questions about day-to-day life in their churches. This generation longs to find fulfillment in their work and make a difference in their society. The church must help by providing vision and hope. According to the study, “Those who have left the faith are particularly inclined to find flaws or gaps in its teachings which they believe cannot address their questions, their day-to-day life, or real issues in society…. One of the clear imperatives of this research is to offer more holistic forms of leadership development and vocational training and to mobilize a generation already inspired toward justice.”
At the same time, work is a source of great stress for people. In the U.S., over 85 percent of people report work-related stress, and only 30 percent of people worldwide consider themselves fully engaged at their job. A recent New York Times article about wealth and happiness quotes researchers who claim that “work is the second-most miserable activity; of 40 activities, only being sick in bed makes people less happy than working.”
If work is as important to people as love and security yet also a place of great pain, and if 18-to-35-year-olds are clamoring for the church to answer questions relevant to their day-to-day lives, then the subject of work deserves a strategic place in our weekly church gatherings.
Data shows us that work is particularly important to the people in your church, and as I mentioned earlier, it also reveals that the sermon is also particularly important. A different Gallup poll about church attendance reveals that “a full 75 percent of respondents indicated that, of all the offerings from their places of worship, they cared most about sermons, preferring those which taught scripture and were relevant to their lives.”
Jesus routinely used work as a metaphor to teach through everyday examples. In Jesus’ 37 parables, 32 refer to work as part of the narrative. In 27 of them, work is the main point of the parable. And across all of them, 22 different types of work are mentioned. But the parables were not necessarily about how to work. For instance, Jesus taught lessons about grace, God’s kingdom, mercy, and obedience through workplace examples. As Klaus D. Issler observes, “To convey spiritual concepts, [Jesus] incorporated work images and technical and commercial terms familiar to his audience.” While Jesus may have been well-informed about the pains of work due to his years in the carpentry trade, the frequency with which he used work as a teaching metaphor makes it evident that he saw work as an important context to mold human hearts. One thing pastors can effectively do—starting as soon as next week—is add work-based metaphors into their sermons just as Jesus did.
Many pastors have shared with me that they feel uninformed about many spheres of work and thus unqualified to talk about their congregants’ work. But while a pastor may not understand the specifics of advertising or construction, they do understand creational goodness and brokenness—and every industry has both. A pastor may not understand the pressures of profits, but they do understand pressure and how it exposes idolatry. (The Theology of Work website is a great resource for understanding the work implications of an industry or a passage of scripture.)
A pastor can discuss how the desire to be affirmed by our boss can become bigger than our desire to please God. They can speak into the nature of our hearts by highlighting times when we are jealous of a colleague’s accomplishments or angry at being passed over for a promotion.
A pastor can address how our desire for leisure can make work a necessary evil instead of something God created us to do. Ask what God would say to you about your job if he came back tomorrow. What changes would he want you to make? Remind your congregation that he is a suffering savior that comforts those who face unjust work conditions.
Consider opportunities to share stories of biblical wisdom in a workplace context. For example, the story of the prodigal son is often told using metaphors of family relationships. How might this parable play out in a work-based metaphor? How can it illustrate how we can be the wayward son or the self-righteous son at our jobs—and that we need a savior?
If you are preaching about the call to live missionally, consider including looking at both the creational goodness and brokenness in banking as a way to embrace the “already-but-not-yet” nature of the new heaven and earth. Could a banker push against the greed in their industry by day, or find ways for underserved people in their community to be served with access to financial capital?
Preparing for a sermon is an opportunity to call a church member to get some ideas and feedback for a sermon application that is specific to an industry. One phone call or visit to a congregant’s workplace is sure to reveal an example, as well as engage a congregant who may be wondering about their relevance to the church.
People care deeply about work and need their faith to make sense in the context of their daily reality. They want churches that speak on the day-to-day pain points of their lives, and sermons play a significant role in their church selection. When pastors speak about both of these things through the great lens of the gospel, they can equip people with spiritual guidance Monday through Friday—and help them understand how the hope of Jesus Christ changes everything.
About the Author
Missy Wallace is the former Director of Global Strategic Services for City to City. Before that, Missy was the founder and Executive Director of the Nashville Institute for Faith and Work (NIFW). She also holds a BA in economics from Vanderbilt and an MBA from the JL Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern.