God's Pleasure @ Work: How a Biblical Worldview Invigorates the Workplace and Renews the Community

The project described herein seeks to bridge the gap between Sunday and Monday as evidenced by members of the Body of Christ who have difficulty believing that fixing potholes in a city street, flying a 767 jetliner, or painting an oil portrait can be as much 'the Lord's work' as what their pastors are doing. This gap is largely the result of a platonic dualism in the Church, which has produced a religious worldview that falsely divides all forms of work into so called 'sacred' and 'secular' categories. Such a bifurcation is illegitimate and debilitating to the effectiveness of the Church and its total mission in the world.

This D. Min. project is based on the belief that the removal of this faulty paradigm would go a long way toward invigorating the workplaces of the world and transforming the communities in which these workplaces are found. The persistent problem of dualism in the Church has been identified and lamented by many, yet efforts to remove this mental roadblock have been sporadic, with limited success. We have not yet reached a tipping point with respect to the massive paradigm shift necessary for a significant change in the status quo.

The proposed solution described here is an instructional curriculum targeted to the Body of Christ, called God's Pleasure @ Work: How a biblical worldview invigorates the workplace and renews the community. It is a multi-media, audio-visual, interactive workshop that incorporates fourteen hours of direct instruction (incorporating one-on-one dialogue and small-group discussion) and a personalized follow-up process done with the help of the Biblical Worldview Integration Discovery and Alignment Tool, or, the 'D.A.T.'

The workplace is the topic of this project because this is where most Christians spend 50-60 percent of their waking hours. Furthermore, if Christianity doesn't relate to life as it is lived in the workplace, then its benefits and blessings are severely truncated, and the community fails to be transformed to the degree that it can be. God's Pleasure @ Work was created to address this matter directly.