Page 11 - Contact Autumn 2018

Her point, however, was not just about work. It was about
the gospel. And it applies today. The failure to teach a rich
vision for daily work is part of a wider challenge to offer a
rich, whole-life embracing vision of life in Christ to believers
and non-believers. Of course, there are all kinds of reasons
why people may not be gripped by the gospel, but might
one of them be that the message presented and the teaching
offered rarely include any compelling vision for the
transformation of ordinary daily life? Might it be that we are
much clearer about what we have been freed from by Christ’s
glorious self-giving on the cross than what we are freed for?

And one of the things we are freed for, Sayers argued, is to
celebrate the significance and dignity of our daily work – the
pipe laid, the meal cooked, the algorithm written, the sentence
crafted, the customer served. Work matters in itself to God:
not only work as a platform for evangelism, or as a means to
generate funds for church initiatives but work as work.
For Sayers this is rooted in the biblical portrait of a creator,
worker God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, co-labouring in
creation and cosmic redemption – and doing good work that
declares his glory. How could we doubt it? Has any
generation ever seen more evidence of the finesse, beauty,
grandeur, generosity of God’s work? To this God, work
matters. And good work matters. As she wrote:

‘No crooked table legs or ill-fitting drawers ever, I dare
swear, came out of the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth.’

Sayers summoned the church to live and share the mysteri-
ous, reassuring, liberating grandeur of the ten-tenths gospel:
everything we do really does matter to him (Colossians 3:17).

She summons us still.

Mark Greene
Mark is the Executive Director of LICC.

LICC is the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity and
this article from taken from their website
www.licc.org.uk/resources/one-tenth-gospel/