Resources

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Spirituality and Work Resources
Title & Author Language Links Tags
New Financial Twists by Steve Brinn
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New Financial Twists, Same Old Fallen World

Steve Brinn

Boeing makes cruise missiles, as well as airplanes.  Is an investment in its common stock sinful?  What about day trading?  How much current income should we stash in a retirement account before giving more than a tithe to the church? Are we responsible, in the eyes of God, if the managers of our pension fund invest in unjust enterprises? Is it a trespass to borrow money using multiple credit cards to keep rolling the sum over?  What about making money by selling short?

These questions illustrate why thoughtful Christians can feel overwhelmed today by issues concerning investment.  Many specific quandaries we face simply weren't present during Christ's life on earth. Still we believe God gives us all the guidance we need to faithfully work through both old and new questions regarding financial stewardship. 

Here is a survey of some of that guidance for pilgrims facing new financial twists and turns in the same old fallen world.

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My Paddles Keen and Bright by R. Paul Stevens
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My Paddle’s Keen and Bright: A Reflection on Canoeing in Canada

R. Paul Stevens is Professor Emeritus of Marketplace Theology, Regent College. He is married to Gail, who canoes from the bow, has thee married children and eight grandchildren.

My paddle’s keen and bright,

Flashing with silver,

Swift as the wild goose flies,

Dip, dip and swing.

At an international party outside Lijiang, the ancient cross-roads of the Silk Road in Yunnan Province China, each person was asked to sing a song from their homeland. Will we sing our national anthem? (A cartoon once showed Canadians singing the anthem with the first line in bold large type and then trailing off in smaller and smaller type until there was nothing coming out of their mouths!) Gail, my wife, and I decided, after a brief conference, on a canoeing song. “My Paddle’s keen and bright / Flashing with silver / Swift as the wild goose flies / Dip, dip, and swing.” The song itself, which we both learned at Pioneer Camp in Ontario as young teenagers, has a rhythm that is evocative of the spiritual journey. It was at that camp that my love for the Canadian canoe and canoeing was birthed. There I learned the “J” stroke, the draw, the circle stroke and the Indian stroke. Now, to be politically correct, it should be called the First Nations stroke—it is a marvellous twist of the paddle so you never remove it from the water enabling you to move forward soundlessly. This amazing craft opened up our vast land of rivers and lakes. One forty pound canoe can carry two adults and a load of gear, and can be portaged over the head by one person with paddles lashed to the thwarts to rest, uneasily to be sure, on the shoulders of the canoeist.

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Money in Christian History by John G. Stackhouse, Jr.
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Money in Christian History

by John G. Stackhouse, Jr.

Many medieval manuscripts blossom with splendid decorations: fabulous animals frolic within huge capital letters; lush vegetation curls through margins; and intricate abstract patterns form dazzling frames. By the year 1300, however, gothic manuscripts began to present more distasteful sights. In one of these drawings, a worried-looking ape crouches and defecates three coins into a golden bowl. In another, a monster-head vomits gold coins into a golden bowl. The subject of money—the subject Jesus is said to have addressed more often in the Gospels than any other—now shows up graphically in Christian reflection.

It shows up, furthermore, in all of the strong ambivalence that has characterized Christian views of money through the ages. Money is shiny and beautiful, but also somehow related to filth, waste, and evil. Sigmund Freud drew modern attention to the linkage between money and excrement. Our own colloquial speech makes plain our ambivalence and even antagonism toward money: that man over there getting out of the limousine is "filthy rich" or "stinking rich," while the poor fellow leaving the casino penniless has been, ironically, "cleaned out."

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Is There a Biblical Definition of Economic Justice? by Ronald J. Sider
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Is There a Biblical Definition of Economic Justice?

Ronald J. Sider

How do we as Christians discern the nature of economic justice?  Whether or not we realize it, some normative system of values partially determines every economic decision we make.  The Bible provides norms for thinking about economics in two basic ways: the biblical story and a biblical paradigm on economic justice.

THE BIBLICAL STORY

The biblical story is the long history of God’s engagement with our world that stretches from creation through the fall and the history of redemption to the culmination of history when Christ returns.  This biblical story offers decisive insight into the nature of the material world, the dignity and character of persons, and the significance and limitations of the historical process.  For example, since every person is made by God for community, no one will ultimately be satisfied with material abundance alone, or with material abundance kept for oneself.  Since every person is so important that God became flesh to die for her sins and invite her to live forever with the living God, economic life must be ordered in a way that respects this God-given dignity.

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Is Business A Calling by R. Paul Stevens
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IS BUSINESS A CALLING?

DOES SCRIPTURE WARRANT REGARDING ENGAGEMENT IN COMMERCIAL ACTIVITY AS A PARTICULAR CALLING OF GOD?

R. Paul Stevens

“The Christian Church has never found it easy to come to terms with the marketplace.”
Brian Griffiths[i]

INTRODUCTION

This subject is of great interest to me because I grew up in a business home where my father conducted himself in business as a company president as though this was a calling of God. But he never spoke of it that way. In fact he always verbalized that it would have been a better thing for him to have gone into pastoral ministry. The subject is of some importance to Regent since a significant number of people come to Regent from business life but leave it and find their way into pastoral or parachurch ministry. They do this, often, on the basis of what Calvin called “a secret call,” a call within the general call that all Christians have received. A few go the other way. But behind some of this occupational transition is not only the question, Is business my calling? But is business anyone’s calling? This question is certainly important for the church. By and large the church honours the call of the pastor and missionary but does not speak of, or commission to, serve roles which people undertake in civic life or commercial enterprise. My friend William Diehl puts it this way in his earlier book, Christianity and Real Life when he was sales manager for Bethlehem Steel: ...

 


NOTES

[i] Brian Griffiths, The Creation of Wealth (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1984), 9.

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Envy and Leadership Insecurity by Jon Escoto
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Envy and Leadership Insecurity

Jon Escoto

 
Leadership + Insecurity = Corporate Suicide
 
I haven’t had so much Math since I graduated from my Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering.  I’ve always consigned the work of deriving mathematical formulas to the Galileo’s and Pythagoras’s of this world.  Not until today.  I just wrote one above as I reflected on the following drawing...

 

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Drivenness by R. Paul Stevens
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Drivenness is behind one of the most respectable of all addictions—workaholism. But it is also expressed in a wide variety of addictive behaviors not covered in this article: chemical abuse, religious zeal, sexual addiction, perfectionism and fitness, which are all subject to the law of diminishing returns as people try to meet their deepest needs in these ways. The condition of drivenness usually arises from sources deep within the human personality, as well as systemic problems in our society. Drivenness reveals a spiritual dysfunctionality usually associated with a failure to accept the unconditional love of God. Driven people tend to focus all their energies on an activity that feeds their inner dysfunction, and this activity becomes an addiction.

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Day at Work: Love-Recovering the Christian Amateur by R. Paul Stevens
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LOVE: 

RECOVERING THE AMATEUR STATUS OF THE CHRISTIAN

"To discover God in the smallest and most ordinary things,   as well as in the greatest, is to possess a rare and sublime faith.  To find contentment in the present moment is to relish and adore the divine will in the succession of all the things to be done and suffered which make up the duty to the present moment."
Jean-Pierre De Caussaude[i]
 
"What you do in your house is worth as much as if you did it up in heaven for our Lord God."
Luther[ii]

"Does God work?" Willie MacMichael asks his father in George Macdonald's book for children. His father answered biblically:

"Yes, Willie, it seems to me that God works more than anybody - for He works all night and all day and, if I remember rightly, Jesus tells us somewhere that He works all Sunday too. If He were to stop working, everything would stop being. The sun would stop shining, and the moon and stars; the corn would stop growing; there would be no apples and gooseberries; your eyes would stop seeing; your ears would stop hearing; your fingers couldn't move an inch; and, worst of all your little heart would stop loving."


[i]. Jean-Pierre De Caussaude, The Sacrament of the Present Moment Kitty Muggeridge, trans.(Glasgow: Collins, l981), 84.

[ii]. Martin Luther, quoted in Roland Bainton, Here I Stand......

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Marketplace Theology Resources
Title & Author Language Links Tags
Day at Work: Faith-Discovering the Soul of Work by R. Paul Stevens
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"And now these three remain: faith, hope and love.  But the   greatest of these is love." 
1 Corinthians 13:13
 
"We continually remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ."    
1 Thessalonians 1:3

FAITH: DISCOVERING THE SOUL OF WORK

LOVE: RECOVERING THE AMATEUR STATUS OF THE CHRISTIAN

HOPE: MAKING OUR MARK ON HEAVEN

FAITH:

DISCOVERING THE SOUL OF WORK

            "There is no work better than another to please God; to pour water, to wash dishes, to be a souter (cobbler), or an apostle, all are one, as touching the deed, to please God."

William Tyndale[i]

            "Do you like your new job?" It was a foolish question, a very Western question to ask a Kenyan.  But Esther had been my student in a rural theological college in East Africa for three years.  She had hoped, like the others, upon graduation to be placed as a pastor of a church.  Instead she was given the enormously demanding task of being matron for three hundred girls in a boarding school.  It was a twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week job with little recognition and limited remuneration.  So I had reason to ask.  But her answer revealed a deep spirituality, one which I covet for Christians in my home country and myself.  She said, "I like it in Jesus."

 


[i]. William Tyndale, "A Parable of the Wicked Mammon," (l527) in Treatises and Portions of Holy Scripture (Cambridge: Parker Society, l848), 98, 104.

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Business as a Calling and Profession Part B by Gordon Preece
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Having surveyed the relatively positive biblical view of material work and clarified the difference between status wealth then and now and productive wealth, it is important to examine some of the Greek philosophical and historical factors disparaging work and business, against which Protestant notions of vocation subsequently reacted.

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