Note: part of this review appeared first in Sight Magazine

Book review:

Work and Worship: Reconnecting our Labor and Liturgy, Matthew Kaemingk and Corey B. Wilson, Baker Academic, 2020. Access to galley proofs of the book was made available by the publisher.

One of the most interesting titles to emerge in the last 12 months in the bustling world of Faith–Work literature is Work and Worship. This book addresses a serious problem facing Christians in pews, as the authors explain, “Modern Christians are living their lives in pieces, and the pieces are dying”. They list the following ways that churches fail to provide worship experiences that nurture workplace Christians:

The worship service often focuses on the institution of the church: its programs and practices and people as the centre of God’s attention and work. Instead, the church should include all the contexts of those present.
It can focus on the spiritual, creating a barrier with the material world. The material is seen as less important, and far from God. Instead, the church should model Jesus who was both human (material) and God (spiritual).
Western spiritual practices can make faith seem like an individual journey, between “me and God”, rather than faith being expressed and grown as the gathered and scattered people of God.
Sometimes worship can be overly positive, ignoring the real struggles that many Christians face in the workplace. It can be thin in content and spiritual depth, not allowing for a full expression of the hurts and struggles faced.
Sometimes the worship service is presented as entertainment to consume, rather than practices to engage in, and there is no opportunity to participate, reflect or respond.
We can go to church to receive a spiritual adrenalin shot. Rather, worship should be formative.
Sometimes, church worship can reinforce faith as a private affair, which can seem to have no place in our public lives. However, Jesus came to reconcile all things in heaven and on earth to himself. God cares about the public square.

Rather than simply focusing on how churches fail workplace Christians, this book demonstrates that there is a rich biblical and Christian history of worship shaping work practices. It is a corrective to the trajectory of much writing in this genre. As Nicholas Wolterstorff points out in the preface, knowing a theology of work alone does not help us cross the divide between Sunday and Monday, church and work, sacred and secular. Instead the authors suggest that “theologies of work need to be practiced, embodied and embedded in communities of worship”.

While there are several books that suggest this, most recently Neil Hudson’s Scattered and Gathered, this is an academic integration between theology of work and Christian worship, with a proposition that the key to integrating faith and work is through worship.

To present their argument, the authors work through the Old Testament and early church history, bringing to light some interesting connections. Their examination of the Torah, including the Sabbath, harvest celebrations and the Jubilee, reveals the indelible link between worship and work. They analyse the Psalms for the way these songs both mention work, but also reshape work around God, by touching our minds, hearts, spirits and hands. They point out that the prophets railed against Israel’s tendency to idolise work, as well as injustices in the marketplace. They claim that, “According to Isaiah, the integrity of your work directly impacts on the integrity of your worship.”

They then trace practices in the early church where Christians brought the tangible fruits of their labour to services, as an offering to God, including “articles of clothing, bread, currency, cheese, oil, wine and a variety of crafts.” These offerings were either distributed to the poor, used in ministries or became incorporated in the worship service, thus being transformed into acts of love, mission and adoration. Ancient mosaics in early worship places in Venice are filled with images of “work, workers and workplaces”.

They provide evidence that the church service was the place where there was an exchange of work between worshipper and God, and a continual offering and receiving of work that continued outside the church service. Unfortunately, these tangible work offerings have been replaced by symbolic bread and wine, and the collection.

This is a useful addition to the Faith–Work movement, because it is a formal and academic approach to including work in worship, rather than merely pragmatic. It reinforces that each worker is a priest as they go out to their workplace, and sees worship services as places of formation for workplace Christians.

Although academic in approach, it is accessible in language and concept, and workplace Christians will find it helpful, since it answers the question about how we move head knowledge (a theology of work) to impact on our hearts, spirits and hands. The book also suggests helpful patterns of worship to enable individual workplace Christians develop spiritual disciplines to deepen their awareness of God in their ordinary work. There is also a diagnostic, yet beautiful, discussion of the exchange between God’s work and our work in communion through the processes of examination, approaching, thanking, sharing, holding and consuming.

Along with a critique of current worship practices, pastors will find this volume helpful because it reinforces the significance of church worship in shaping Christians for all of life. It provides a considered biblical argument for the integration of theology of work and vocation into ecclesial practices, creating a lived liturgy for daily life. There is also some excellent biblical theology grounding the ideas, for example, that “the concept of holiness in Israel encompassed the spiritual and material, private and public, liturgical and economic.”

The book provides many practical ideas about how churches might assist workers to bring their work to worship, including aspects of art and architecture, an invitation from the front, celebration and lament, prayers, as well as offerings and interviews of workers. As well, there are practical ways that we might help workplace Christians as they scatter to orient them to Monday, including commissioning services.

Where the book over-reaches, is its claim that the central idea is radical. Authors such as Steven Garber, in Visions of Vocation, have explored in detail that it was Greek philosophy and western modernity that split what the Scriptures have always testified as ‘whole’. Worship and work were always integrated in the tent of meeting, in the Temple worship and feast days, in the synagogue, and in the early church, because it never occurred to Hebrews, Israelites, Jews or Gentile converts that work and worship should be separated.

However, providing the evidence for lived liturgy in the early church, and applying it to the modern church (an extension of some of James K. A. Smith’s work) is really helpful in thinking through levers to enable that rediscovery of wholeness and integration for church leaders and workplace Christians alike. The next step will be to imagine how worship-shaping work can be enabled outside the four walls of the church.