The Great Divorce

I would like to borrow from C.S. Lewis' book title for this post. There is a "Great Divorce" currently in place, with the idea of people in "full-time ministry" and "the rest". This has proven to be extremely unhelpful, and can be attributed to a dualistic understanding of the world: a lower, material realm, and a higher, spiritual realm. This is reflected in the current dichotomy between "spiritual" work and "menial" labour. However, I think that we need to recover a more integrated view of the world, a view that looks back to Genesis and God who creates the material world and sees that what He has just created is "very good" (Genesis 1:31). He has just brought the land and sea, animals and humans into being, and He stands back in admiration of His handiwork.

Do you see this? God is a worker! He has blessed and sanctified work by His own work! Make no mistake, work can be terribly difficult and frustrating (see the account of the curse of work in Genesis 2:17-19), but because God works, work itself can also be a blessing if done in an attitude of service and gratitude (Colossians 3:17).

There are some encouraging signs of the removal of this dualism in Christian thinking, but there is still a lot of work to do. Mission is something that can (and should) be done by anyone, wherever they are found (a la Matthew 28:19, the "as you go..." making disciples etc).

Perhaps another term to distinguish those who are engaged in Gospel work but do not work in business from those who do, is "paid Christian ministry" and "unpaid Christian ministry"? Or maybe there's a better one out there... The Protestant formulary coined by Luther was of a "priesthood of all believers", which desperately needs to be recovered in the Church, so we can recover from the damage caused by the "Great Divorce" of sacred and secular.