Travis Michael Fleming and Matthew Kaemingk sit down to explore one of the most overlooked aspects of Christian discipleship: the connection between worship and work. Drawing from Kaemingk's book Leading Worship for Workers, they discuss why so many Christians struggle to connect their faith with their daily vocations and how the church can help bridge that divide.

Together, they examine the biblical vision of work, the role of corporate worship in shaping believers for life beyond Sunday, and the practical ways pastors and worship leaders can better equip their congregations to serve Christ in every vocation. Kaemingk offers thoughtful insights into how churches can acknowledge the joys, burdens, and responsibilities of everyday work, helping believers see their jobs not as distractions from ministry but as opportunities for faithful discipleship.

Whether you're a pastor, worship leader, or someone seeking to honor Christ in your workplace, this conversation will challenge you to rethink the relationship between worship and work. Discover how recovering a biblical theology of vocation can transform not only the church's worship but also the way Christians live, lead, and bear witness throughout the week.

Takeaways:

• The integration of worship and work is crucial for believers to engage their faith throughout the week.
• Sunday mornings should serve as a transformative space where congregants bring their daily struggles before God.
• The church must actively encourage its members to rethink their work as a vocation under God's lordship.
• Pastors are challenged to bless and send their congregants out into the world as a part of their mission.
• Worship should not be viewed as a separate activity but as a holistic approach to everyday life.
• A thoughtful audit of worship practices can ensure they align with the needs and realities of the congregation's work lives.

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May the Lord our God grant you many opportunities to be refreshed as much as you have refreshed others.

If you want your work to be worship, if you want the people of God to be worshiping God throughout their week, you've got to encourage them to bring their work before the Lord.

So Sunday morning should be a place of profound welcome for their heartbreaks, for their longings, their dreams, their joys, to bring that before the Lord.

Because God can't bless the things that we're holding tightly.

Welcome back to Ministry Deep Dive, the podcast where we explore the ideas, conversations and practices shaping faithful ministry in an increasingly complex world.

My name is Travis Michael Fleming and I am your host.

But before we get in today, I want to ask you a question.

When the people in your church leave the sanctuary on Sunday morning, are they equipped for Monday morning?

Right.

That's the question that many of us wrestle with day in and day out.

For many Christians though, these things, worship and worship exist in completely separate worlds.

Because church is where we sing, pray and hear God's word.

Work is simply what pays the bills.

But what if our worship was actually how we rethink how to go about our world today?

I mean, really, how do we engage, what do we do?

How do we help people that are in the everyday world worship in a great fashion or in a faithful fashion?

In.

That's why we have today's guest on the show, and that is Reverend Dr. Matthew Kamenk.

I wanna make sure I get the name right, Matthew.

I wanna make sure I got it right.

He is an award winning author, speaker and Christian ethicist working at the intersection of faith, politics and culture.

He serves as professor of Public Theology at Theological University Utrecht and Senior Fellow at the center for Public Justice.

He also co directs the Templeton Pluralism Fellowship.

His scholarship focuses on worship vocation, public theology, Christian ethics, and helping the church faithfully engage every sphere of life under the lordship of Christ.

And today we're talking about his new book, Leading Worship for Workers.

Matthew, welcome to Ministry Deep Dive.

Oh, it's great to be here.

Thanks so much for having me, Jeff.

All right, let's get started.

Let's get into the book.

Let's just jump right in.

What and why do we need this book?

What made you wanna write this book?

Yeah, so you know, I've worked in marketplace ministry for many, many years working with Christians in the marketplace.

I actually got my start my, my pastoral internship at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, where you'll remember Tim Keller of blessed memory.

Yeah.

One of the big things for Tim in planting that church in New York was engaging the marketplace of New York because he said, you know, when people move to New York, it's.

It's for work.

They work as a huge part of their identity.

And for Tim, he would say, look, if.

If the gospel does not speak directly to the working lives of New Yorkers, they will have no time for.

For this faith thing.

And so he knew in planting his church in New York that the gospel had to be conversant with the working challenges, questions, dreams and struggles of everyday workers.

And so that's where I came up as a young pastor, thinking missionally about the workplace.

And if you spend any time with.

Workers.

And you as a pastor, you have genuine curiosity about their working lives, you'll discover very quickly that work can really eat away at your identity in all kinds of sort of gnawing ways.

And theology alone can't really touch those deeper struggles of workers.

So anyways, I became really drawn into this question of how can the church draw near to workers and how can pastors draw near to workers and, you know, inflame within this.

Them as sort of gospel imagination for their work?

So that.

That's really sort of my own origin story as a pastor and a theologian.

Thinking about those questions, in reading the.

Book, walking through it, one of the things that became apparent is your co.

Your co author, Catherine.

Yeah.

Mentioned because she's a worship leader, right.

Or worshiping a church.

And she's talking about.

She started to look into old hymns, trying to say, when did they actually stop talking about work?

Like, when did that happen and how did we get here?

And I thought it was very interesting because she's like, we.

Most of the old hymns from 100 years ago wrote about work all the time.

It's only in the last hundred years that we seem to lose it.

But she said, but it was always about farming because we were a rural culture.

So I'm like, well, how do you put that, though, into a modern context?

So let me go back then.

Where did the discrepancy occur?

Like, why did they write about it 100 years ago and what have we been doing the last hundred years?

Right.

So I mean, our theology has really gone off the rails in the last 100, 200 years when it comes to vocation.

Basically, what has happened in Western Christianity is Christianity has been reduced to a spiritual reality that is sort of up in the clouds.

So it's a sort of all Flyaway spirituality of Jesus rescues you from the world.

Jesus rescues you from the grind.

He.

He saves you out of the world, as opposed to Biblical Christianity, which he saves you into the world to be.

To be light in the darkness, to be salt, to be a leaven in the dough.

And so, yeah, American Christianity in particular, but, you know, Western Christianity overall, it's.

It's become spiritualized, and we've lost sort of the material element.

We've also lost the vocational element, which is that God not only calls us to Himself, but he calls us into the world.

And the primary way in which we love our neighbor is actually through our vocations, through the ways that we serve people in and through our work.

So I, you know, I mean, I think the way I, the one way I, I've often talked about this with people is we've developed a Western Christianity of the margins.

So what that means is I serve the church with my extra time, and I serve.

I serve the kingdom of God with my extra money.

So whatever I have sort of left over at the end of.

At the end of the day is what mission looks like, as opposed to.

No, your mission is actually through your vocation.

It's not something that you do on the margins of your life.

So if you are, you know, a public school teacher, it's not that you do mission trips, you know, during the summer, but your mission is actually there in that public school.

So that's a big part of the issue.

But, you know, this is where it lands with worship.

So my wife is a worship director, Katie, my co author, also a worship director.

And they're sort of haunted by this question of how can we help people see that it's not just a moment of worship on Sunday, but it is the beginning of a whole week of worship.

That what Sunday morning is meant to do is launch you and into your week on mission in worship.

And that's really what we're getting after in this book is how can a church move from just offering a single hour of worship to leading a whole week of worship?

That's the big question.

What does it look like to rethink your Sunday mornings, to reimagine your Sunday mornings as a missional launching pad as opposed to an escape from the world?

That's so often how Christians think I'm going to worship, to sort of leave the world and be with Jesus as opposed to be launched into the world.

Where did that split, though, come from?

I mean, why did we.

You said theology has gone off the rails.

I would agree.

We've talked a lot about that on this show, and I think a lot of us now are trying to recover that in a variety of different ways from several different angles.

But what did you see that's really helped?

One of the factors that you would say is a primary reason why the church has gone off the rails or theology has gone off the rails.

Yeah.

So it is modernity.

So modernity creates a series of dichotomies between facts and values, sacred and secular, church and world.

And so we all live within this modern Western mindset that certain things are just facts and other things are values.

And the church lives within the world of values, not the root in the world of facts.

Within the modern mindset, some things are material and some things are spiritual, and there's sort of a dichotomy between the two and that some things are sacred and another thing are secular.

And so this is the challenge of the modern West.

And I've got a little story for you to sort of highlight this.

I got picked up the other day by an Uber driver.

I think she was a Nigerian Pentecostal, right?

So about as far away from, like, the modern Western mindset as you can have.

And she was this lovely woman.

She was very passionate.

But when.

When she picked me up, she was upset.

I could tell she was upset.

I said, you know, what's the matter?

What's wrong?

And she said, well, I just had this woman in my car who told me that she is a Wiccan, that she was, like, experimenting with witchcraft.

And she was like, oh, goodness, this.

This lady needs Jesus.

That's what she said.

And.

And she said it was just so hard for me to talk with her.

And.

And she really needs Jesus.

I'm like, wow, that's.

That's.

You know, I. I completely agree.

And I asked her, so how do you.

How do you process all these different people who jump in your Uber car every day?

You get so many different people.

How do you.

How do you do that?

Like, as a Christian, what does that look like for you as an Uber driver in your work?

And she says, well, I. I'll tell you what, I need protection.

I said, okay, well, what does that look like for you?

And she says, well, every morning before I get in my car to do my Uber drives, she says, I walk around my car and I pray, and I put my hands on my car, and I asked Jesus to protect me, to guide me, and to be with me as I drive throughout the day.

Now, like, it's a beautiful story.

It's wonderful, but this woman, she was, I mean, what's so wonderful about it is she was not, she did not accept the modern split between the sacred and the secular, between the spiritual and the material.

And for her it was all fused.

For her mission is what she does as an Uber driver.

It's not something she does on the side of her life, it's right there.

And she had developed a spiritual practice for driving that car.

And she had a sense of mission, a sense of vocation for the people that she cared for.

And that is something we in the modern west forget.

That's something we, we've lost.

And so a big part of this book and this whole project of worship for workers is to develop a holistic mindset that, that your vocation and your spiritual mission is one.

And I mean that's what we're after.

Which we would call from our perspective, not to put words in your mouth, we call it missio Holistic.

I mean, it's the mission of God to do that.

And kind of jumping into that.

You know, one of the things that I did like about your book is you're not just talking about the theoretical, you're getting into the practical and what it might actually look like.

And I saw that you had this whole section or I mean, I read it, the whole section on auditing your worship, going through it, examining it.

Many of us don't think very, we don't think very critically about it.

We don't audit in that way.

Why is it so important for us to audit our worship practices, not to condemn it?

And you guys make sure to do that, like, hey, don't go changing everything overnight.

Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

But let's audit and see how is our worship actually forming us and the practices that are there and how can we tweak it to help it so that it actually addresses the very concerns, the issues that our people are facing on a day to day basis.

But why is that audit so important for pastors and ministry leaders to do?

Yeah, so we've, we've got to look with a sort of self critical eye at our Sunday mornings if we want them to truly launch people into a week of mission.

So there's a wide variety of just little mistakes that we make as worship leaders and as pastors.

I'll give you a couple of examples.

One is I walked into a worship service once with a very well meaning young man on the guitar and he said, you know, good morning friends.

I, I hope you've had a great week.

I Know, some of you have a lot of things on your mind.

Difficult, difficult things that have gone on this week.

Maybe you're thinking about work, some projects that you've got to do.

And then he, he, he messed up here.

He said, he said, but for the next hour, I just want you to put all of those things out of your mind and focus on God, which was essentially what he was saying is God doesn't care what's going on in your life or your work.

And here on Sunday Morning, we're going to pretend that those things aren't real.

Like, we're just going to have a sort of spiritual time of pretend, right?

So with a little, and just a little tweak could have helped him there.

He could have said, I know you've got a lot on your mind.

You've got a lot going on at work and at school.

But for the next hour, I want you to bring that to God.

Like, I want you to bring all of those cares from the week before him.

That's all, that's all he had to do.

One other example, okay, when I was a kid, we, we had mission Sundays where you bring, you bring up a missionary.

The missionary talks about, you know, what's going on in the, on the mission field, gives a testimony of the good works of God, and you see pictures of where they're working.

You get to see God at work on the mission field.

And then you all rally around the missionary.

You pray for them and you send them out.

But, you know, I mean, this happened very often when I was a kid in my church and my mother was, she was a nurse caring for, for mothers and new mothers in a hospital.

My dad, you know, was a cabinet maker and gave jobs to young men and those were their ministries in the city.

And there was never a mission Sunday for them.

There was never an opportunity for my mom to give a testimony of what God was doing at the hospital or what God was doing in the cabinet shop.

We had a mission map at our church where, like the missionary, there was flags for where the missionaries were around the world.

And there was like a mission map of our city.

But, you know, my mom's hospital was never on that mission map and my dad's cabinet shop was never on that mission map.

And of course, no one intended to leave them out.

And if you asked them, they would said, sure, you know, my mom is on mission and she has a vocation at the hospital.

But so often on Sunday morning we have these unintended consequences that say the real work of God happens inside the church, or the real work of God is done by missionaries and nonprofits, and the rest of us just support them, and we can sort of like, live vicariously through the missionary because he or she is doing the real work of God, and the rest of us just work.

And so what this book is designed to do is to give a new imagination for Sunday morning worship that.

That activates the entire congregation for the mission of God throughout the week.

So it's very common to have sort of a theology of the mission of God, but actually to develop a liturgy of the mission of God.

So if you want your Sunday morning worship to bless and send people into the city, what would you need?

What kind of songs would you need?

What kind of prayers would you need?

What.

What kinds of blessings and benedictions would you need?

So this book is a.

Is a very practical handbook for pastors and worship leaders who want that kind of worship.

That's what we're getting after.

Well, not just, though, with the vocation.

I mean, we do talk a lot about vocation on here, and you've written a lot about vocation.

But one of the things that I thought was really good is, let's face it, we have a lot of people where a spouse stays at home.

That, too, is work, even though it's not paid work.

And then we have, especially in the area that I'm in, and then a church that I'm serving at right now, there's a lot of retirees.

And you.

You even bring them in to the conversation, which I was like, oh, finally someone is actually doing where the people that I.

Where they actually live and what they do.

Why was it so important, though, for people to see that?

Well, so, yeah, let's take retirement, for example.

Oh, yes.

So, I mean, let's help you, right?

You've.

You've got a lot of retired folks there in Florida.

Retirement is a wonderful gift of God in American public life, but it is also full of temptations and idolatries and selfishness.

Well, isn't that the John Piper Seashell sermon?

Yeah, you know, that's what it is right there.

It's like, look, Lord, look at my shells.

I was like, what in the world?

Anyway, keep going.

Yeah, so it's sort of a question of how can pastors and churches reimagine retirement with their people?

How can they.

How can they do that?

And one of we.

One of the chapters we have explores what it would look like, you know, for once a year in worship, to mark the retirement of, you know, people who are retiring this year and to pray a prayer of blessing over their retirement, to ask them how we can pray for them in their retirement, how they want to glorify.

How do you want to glorify God with this retirement?

How do you want to serve your community with this retirement?

How.

How is this retirement going to be a part of the mission and glory of God?

And let's surround you and pray for you and pray for this retirement, that you're going to steward it well.

And so, I mean, that's just a little thing.

And we kind of walk pastors and worship leaders through.

Here's how you do it.

It takes five minutes on a Sunday morning, you know, but it can be a really powerful marker that in this church, we see retirement differently.

It's not just for the golf course.

It's not just for going on cruises, you know, it's not just for, I don't know, watching cable news.

So, I mean, but one of the big, big arguments here is that, you know, you could teach a Sunday school class about retirement, or you could teach a Sunday school class about faith and work.

And I think those classes might impact people.

But there is something about what you do in Sunday morning worship that really has an impact.

So I tell this story of two different nurses.

One nurse comes to her pastor and says, oh, I've got all these things going on in the hospital.

It's really frustrating.

I'm feeling depressed.

And the pastor hands her a theology book and says, here's a book about faith and work.

Maybe this will help you.

The second nurse goes to a different pastor, and the pastor responds, not by handing her a book.

He says, I'd love to have lunch with you and the other nurses at the church or at the.

At the hospital.

At the hospital.

So he goes to the hospital, sits down for lunch with the nurses, and he just asked them, what's hard about nursing these days?

What do you love about nursing these days?

What is your prayer for this hospital, for your work crew?

And he takes careful notes.

And the next Sunday morning, instead of offering a Sunday school class on faith and work, he brings all the nurses forward in worship, and he has the elders lay hands on them.

And he prays a special prayer that he wrote just for them in response to what he heard.

Now, it only takes five minutes on a Sunday morning to do something like that.

But I guarantee you, those nurses will never forget that Sunday morning.

They might forget the theology book that you hand them, right, or the Sunday school class that you teach, but that's the power of thinking about what you're doing on a Sunday morning for really blessing and sending workers into their week.

And that's what we're trying to get after.

Well, okay, I love this idea, but I also want to.

I mean, not offer a rebuttal.

Not offer a rebuttal.

No.

Push, brother.

Go for it.

Come on.

See, this is where we get.

So, okay, for those that are listening right now, when you get to be a theology junkie, you don't want people to agree.

You want to fight because it makes it better because you get bored.

Like someone said, someone's like, you know, surround yourself with people that are smarter than you, and if you can't find anybody smarter, find someone that you disagree with, which is why you're doing a podcast with a Muslim guy.

That's right.

That's right.

Because you guys want to have a little throwdown.

And I love that.

I love it.

Yeah.

So give me the rebuttal.

So, all right, now, here's the rebuttal.

Here's the rebuttal.

Right?

I got 30% of the people in my community, and it's growing, that are only online.

How am I helping them?

Because their stresses are going to be different.

I'm not going to their workplace unless I'm just hanging out at their house.

And it could be.

I mean, that could be.

But how do we do that when everybody's starting to do everything online?

Get rid of online church?

I didn't.

Talking about online church.

I'm not a huge fan of online church, but, I mean, but we got people that's picking up.

But I mean, like, how do we do that?

I'm not talking about online church.

I'm talking about people just work online and they work from home.

Oh, okay.

That's what I mean.

That's what I mean.

I see.

So, yeah, working remotely still has all kinds.

All kinds of challenges.

I mean, there.

There are all kinds of issues and questions for remote workers.

And so talk with them.

I would say one of the core things that I, when I'm talking with pastors is demonstrating vocational curiosity.

So often when pastors talk with their people, they're asking them questions about their marriage, about their kids, about their family life, about their neighborhood, but they don't really dig into the working life path.

How's.

How's work going?

Or what do you think about it?

Yeah.

Right.

And so one of the key pastoral skills that's not very well developed is asking the second, third, and fourth question regarding work that really digs into the heart of the worker.

So, like, what makes you just truly miserable at work?

What are you worried about?

What do you long for?

And then the key one that's really fun is what do you really delight in at work?

What just makes you sort of geek out?

That's just a wonderful pastoral question to ask people.

And then so with remote workers, a big problem.

And I'm actually talking with you from my.

From my house.

This is my home office.

So I'm a remote worker myself.

I think for those of us who work remotely, we don't interact with bodies very much.

So, you know, being in an office environment where you've got people around, you can kind of feel isolated.

Yeah, big time.

Like, sometimes my wife goes to the grocery store and I get upset because I wanted to go to the grocery store.

Cause I could actually meet people today.

I've been in my house, see humans.

Right.

I've been in my house all day.

I want to go meet people.

Why did you go get milk?

I wanted to.

I wanted to go to the post office.

I wanted to go get gas.

Why?

This is where we're at in the world, Matt.

This is where we're at in the world right now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So.

So that's it.

And I guess, you know, one of the things we talk about is with workers, encouraging them to bring their whole selves into Sunday morning.

And so the little thing we do is we say, hey, bring your trumpets, your ashes and your tears.

And what that means is bring.

Bring a word of praise from your work, bring a word of confession from your work, and then bring a word of lament, like something that just sucks about your work, and bring those things to God every Sunday.

And you know, that's.

That's just a big thing that you can do with any kind of worker or student or stay at home.

Mom.

Everybody's got those three things going on that they can bring from their daily life.

And that's how you tear.

That's how you sort of chip away at this division between work and worship is.

Is actually bringing that to God.

Okay, so let me.

Let me ask another question because I know that.

I mean, what is this movement?

Is it the work, the work faith movement?

Faith and Work movement.

Is that the proper name of it?

Yeah, yeah, the faith and work movement.

Movement.

Because I know that there's been an explosion of literature.

I don't know if you've read Andrew Lynn's book, Saving the Protestant Ethic.

Yes.

But, you know, he's talking about how there's been an explosion of this literature over the last 20, 30 years where we've gone, you know, in the 70s there was like one, and then the 80s had a few more, and then the 90s was a lot more than that.

Well, so it's deserved because there's been the pendulum principle.

It went one way and now we're trying to go back to the other.

But one of the things that's been in the critique is this presupposes a lot of people chose careers like they might be higher educated, they're more intellectual, they're not necessarily in a factory, they're not working at a fast food.

So how do we help those people where they're at?

Because I've got family members in those kind of industries that they're not what they chose to do.

This is the job they do just to make money.

They didn't go to college, they didn't have those opportunities in front of them.

Really small towns, the opportunities are limited.

How do we help them to see this kind of thing?

Yeah, well, this is why, this is why worship is so important.

Because worship provides space to talk about crappy work.

Right.

You know, I mean, go right back to the people of Israel in Egypt.

The first thing they learn about Yahweh is that they can cry out to him about their work.

That's, that's how God introduces himself to Israel, is I see your tears, you know, and I know your work sucks.

Yeah.

So there's, there's nothing romantic, there's nothing romantic about work in the Old Testament.

You know, there's not, you know, they're not saying, hey, you can change the world if you really believe in yourself and have that kind of a posture towards work.

So the Old Testament, the Psalms.

Oh yeah, all of this is very, it very much tells the truth about the difficulty of work.

So the way you respond.

So blue collar trade work, waitressing, you know, all of this, that kind of work, it's not so much intellectual work, it's work that you feel in your bones.

You know, your feet hurt.

Yeah.

Your back hurts, you've got injuries.

So it's very bodily.

And so worship on Sunday morning does engage your body.

And so one way that you can help blue collar workers, right, is, is actually engaging their body, asking them to open up their hands.

They like.

I want you to just a simple practice of.

I want you to open your hands and I want you to think about your coworkers right now.

I want you to think about the ones that you, that you love, who are precious to you.

I want you to think about the ones that you really struggle to love and feel the weight of them in your hands.

And I want you to lift your hands up and I want you to offer them to God.

And that's something they can feel in their bones.

Right?

So the blue, the blue collar worker does not need a 40 minute intellectual sermon on why their work matters to God.

That's not what they need.

They need, they need a way to connect their bones and their guts of what they carry with them from work.

Work that they might hate, worth of work that they might feel stuck in and offer that to God.

However, my rebuttal to like the Andrew Lynns of the world or others who would be critical is to say that there are a lot of blue collar workers who absolutely love their jobs, absolutely love their jobs, who are very proud of what they do and in fact have a much healthier relationship with their work than white collar workers.

And so sometimes I think theologians and scholars look at blue collar work and think, oh, that's just suffering and oppression.

They, they didn't choose that.

But there are many bus drivers out there and truck drivers who really love their jobs.

Oh yeah.

And they're not, they're not oppressed in the least.

They really do love it.

And so that's the other thing to be careful of is sometimes people are like, oh, no one chooses to be a truck driver.

No, actually some people really love it.

Absolutely do.

Well, I had a guy in my church that exact same thing.

That was, his dream was to be a truck driver.

And I was like, your dream is my nightmare.

I just couldn't imagine for me doing that.

But he did, he loved that idea.

And that's what I just realized.

God's created us all very differently.

There, there are people like, I have my son in law's dad, he's, he's a dedicated believer in Jesus and he's a, he's a union plumber in Chicago.

And he loves what he does.

He just absolutely loves.

I mean, he makes great money.

I mean you're in the union of Chicago.

But he also just uses it as an evangelism, you know, evangelism, opportunity.

But I know of other people, and we all know of people who really hate their job.

They, they don't like it.

I remember I've kind of put myself out there a few different times.

When I was in seminary back in the day with David Wells was one of my professors, the great theologian.

And he asked the question, he's like, is there work in heaven.

And of course, I was trying to be smarter than everybody in the class and get a laugh.

And I was like, it wouldn't be heaven if it was work.

And then he's like, you're going to be thoroughly disappointed.

And at first everybody laughed because they're like, yeah.

And then he said that, and we're like, oh, that was.

That was a mistake on my part.

You know, it's like I stepped on a landmine.

And he just totally lambasted me, you know?

Yeah, well, you know, I mean, that.

That famous verse, I think is Isaiah, talking about, you know, swords into plowshares and.

And spears into pruning hooks.

You know, we often quote that as talking about the end of war, but we don't think about what it's the beginning of, right?

It's.

It's returning us.

It's giving us garden tools, right?

It's returning us to our vocation, which God did not design us for war.

God designed us for work.

And that's.

And that's a good thing.

Like these, these hands are.

Are made for this.

And so, yeah, there you go.

Which, which leads me to a totally different question.

All right, because we've had episodes on AI and where AI is leading and of course, replacing jobs in the middle of all this.

What do we do with that?

We're created to work.

I mean, I have this picture in my head because my kids are.

I've got.

My kids are 24, all the way down to 12.

So I remember watching Wally and these big fat people on those floating chairs just drinking on sipping stuff, because everybody's doing the work for them.

I'm like, we're getting closer.

We're getting a lot closer every time.

That we sit at home.

And I mean, for crying out loud, we have phones that tell us how many steps we take in a day because we're completely separate, sedentary.

So what do we do with AI that's taking away some of that core identity of our vocation?

How do we.

How do we do that?

Well, this is the wonderful thing about AI is it's forcing all human beings, Christians and non Christian, to ask, what are human beings for?

What were we made for?

And what kind of work do we want?

Because for so long, for so long in the modern world, we've thought about work as something we want to escape or something we want to transcend.

And honestly, it's almost like for the first moment we're thinking, oh, goodness, I actually really want to work.

And if I didn't work I don't know who I would be.

So it's forcing secular society to ask a very theological question, which is, what are we for?

And so I just embrace it.

I'm just so happy that people are asking these kinds of questions.

They're essentially haunted by this potential future where they don't have any work at all.

And they don't actually.

That.

That's been.

The modern dream is to escape work and to retire early.

And now you're presented with the possibility, and society is like, oh, actually, I don't want that.

Maybe work is an important part of my identity.

So I think that's lovely.

I think that.

I mean, obviously human beings are created, you know, within the biblical worldview for creativity, for imagination, for stewardship, for vision.

But there's.

There's something about the friction of work, the difficulty of it.

So, you know, I mean, Andy Crouch talks about the difference between playing music with an MP3 player and learning to play the violin.

One takes decades, right?

The other takes the push of a button.

And they're both rewarding in a way, but in very distinct ways.

And there's something very beautiful and human about learning to play the violin that we wouldn't want to lose.

There's something wonderful about learning how to make an excellent omelet, you know, or a great birthday cake, and making it yourself.

So there's something about friction, that.

There's something actually about the difficulty of work, the learning, the slow learning of a craft that is lost when you just click an Amazon button and you.

And you get it at your door.

So I think that AI is inviting us to ask those questions of what is good work and how does it relate to the good life going back.

To something else, you said, I thought was pretty important.

And we talked about this at the beginning, and you've reiterated it throughout.

We thought work is.

We wanted to escape from work.

We wanted to retire and go on.

And I was talking to another pastoral friend of mine, and he had come into a church where the pastor had been there, I think, 28 years, if not longer, it might have been over 30.

And he retired.

Well, he'd had his admin assistant with him for over, like, 37 years.

And so they thought she would retire with him since he retired.

And she let it be known that she was not retiring.

And she had a cane at this time.

Well, now she's in a wheelchair.

And she's like, you are not making me retire.

Like, she's wheeling around the office and she's like.

And she's.

I think close to 80.

And I admire that.

She wants to stay relevant.

She wants to do it.

But I want to go back for another second.

You mentioned about identity and work being tied to our identity.

And we go back to the creation, the cultural mandate, creation, because all this goes back to creation and understanding God's good creation has structure and direction.

Now, in the book, he was talking about modernity and what modernity was doing to the church.

But one thing I remember him addressing, and I could be wrong, it's been a long time since I've read the book.

But he mentioned, he goes, when you meet someone, the first question we ask is, what do they do?

Because we often define ourselves by our occupations.

He says, instead, ask them just to tell them about, you know, tell me about yourself.

And he was trying to remove that.

I'm beginning to wonder now.

At first I thought that was pretty cool, you know.

Now, though, I'm older, I'm like, wait a minute.

I don't think that's the case because again, that is the question of our era.

What does it mean to be human?

And so does vocation really help in our discerning and giving that the proper understanding of humanity the way God intended and as a retirement in some respect, antithetical to that.

Yeah, I, you know, I've.

I've very commonly heard people complain about the question, what do you do?

Because they don't like to be.

They're bigger than their occupation.

Yeah, I'm bigger than my job or whatever.

I like it.

And I think there's an important reason why human beings ask that.

But the, I think the, the disordered part of it is status.

Right.

I want to hear what your title is, and I want to make decisions about your status.

And that's why, for me, when I meet someone, I ask them what they do, but then I will follow up with like four or five questions about the craft of their work and the experience of their work.

So I'm not interested in their status.

I'm interested in the craft of their work and what it says about who they are and what they delight in and what breaks their heart and getting into that.

So for me, it's impossible to talk about who I am without talking about my job.

That's an important part of who I am.

And.

And I don't think we can deny that.

So, yeah, I think that's kind of my take on that.

Well, I mean, we do.

We are concerned about status.

One of the things that we've done a lot of work on here with is neurotheology.

I've talked about this ad nauseam.

Sorry for those that have heard and listen to our episodes, you know, almost 300 episodes.

And our brains are designed to, to within a 40th of a second to determine your gender, but a 400th of a second to determine if you're my people or not and I belong with you.

And I wonder if that's part of it, is we're discerning who belongs with us, Are they above us?

You know, how does that fit?

Because we are always discerning, always scanning who's, who's with us, who's part of us, because we need that group identity.

And it helps us to know where the boundary lines are, what's safe, what's not, and some respect.

Know if it's just belonging.

But are you safe?

Yeah, well, I mean, I mean, to tie it back to the, the, the question of worship, one of the things we talk about is, you know, you just take the, the practice of communion or Eucharist, depending on what, what church you're tradition in.

Yeah.

And, you know, throughout the week while we work, we are always being graded and evaluated and sort of in these hierarchies of education and work and class.

And there's something really beautiful about a church lining up to take communion and you've got a janitor in front of a CEO and a grad student behind a kindergarten teacher.

And there in the church, workers can experience a gift economy in which they don't do anything to deserve what they receive and they have nothing to contribute to the table beyond sort of open hands and, you know, hungry hearts.

And this is another aspect of worship is the opportunity to participate in a gift economy of grace that you can extend throughout your week, that as you go, you're going to be participating in the economy of the world.

And you can be a witness to the economy of God and extend that table of grace to the people that you work with.

And similarly, in terms of how we think about time for workers who are very rushed, who are very anxious on Sunday morning, they can experience a relationship with time that is one of rest, that is one of patience, that is grounded in trust and hope.

And, you know, if we, if we think about our Sunday morning worship as a place to reorient workers to God's economy, to God's timing, to give them that space to reflect on what is the, the timing of their workplace and the hierarchies of their workplace.

That can be a real gift.

So that's a.

That's a part of our prayer with this, this particular book isn't the book,.

As I think about it, being this practical thing.

I mean, it's not just for workers.

It's for everybody, because we all work.

Right.

That's really what it's about.

It's for everyone.

Yeah.

So we, we define a worker as anyone who's putting some effort into their service to God.

So, I mean, that is students, that's stay at home, parents, that's volunteers, retired, whatever is people who work within the kingdom of God and the economy of this world pays some of us large sums of money for our service and others not at all.

And so, yeah, this is about blessing all the diverse vocations of the people of God on Sunday morning, not just the missionaries and the pastors.

So we don't just instrumentalize it for evangelism or things like that.

We need to understand again and go back to the cultural mandate.

We go back to Genesis again and understanding that God's plan works from Genesis through revelation in that same way, where he cares about who we are, how we work, how we engage every sphere of our world.

Matt, you know, this has been a great conversation.

I really enjoyed it.

We'd like to end the show because our ministry, while the show is called Ministry Deep Dive, the show is called Apollo's Watered.

We always like to leave our people with kind of like one concluding thought.

We like to call it the water bottle.

So what's the water bottle that we can leave with our audience today?

The water bottle is that if you want your work to be worshiped, if you want the people of God to be worshiping God throughout their.

Throughout their week, you've got to encourage them to bring their work before the Lord.

So Sunday morning should be a place of profound welcome for their heartbreaks, for their longings, their dreams, their joys, to bring that before the Lord.

Because God can't bless the things that we're holding tightly.

And it truly is a transformative and beautiful thing to see people carrying their work as an offering to God on a Sunday morning and having it blessed and sent.

I think one final encouragement would be, you know, for the pastors who are listening here, you know, next Sunday when you're giving the final blessing, just try this as a little practice.

Have the people turn around and face the door and speak a word of God blessing over their shoulders and out into the city.

Bless and send them to extend their worship into their work in this next week.

It really is a lovely practice and it's something I'd encourage your listeners to try out.

I like that.

I'm going to challenge our team to see if we can do something like that.

But Matthew, thank you so much for joining us today.

I do appreciate not only your scholarship fellowship, but your pastor's heart.

And Leading Worship for Workers reminds us that worship doesn't just go on Sunday morning, that it extends out into our everyday lives.

And I would I would really recommend the book Leading Worship for Workers.

Get it wherever books are sold.

Whether you're a pastor, a worship leader, an elder, or anyone involved in planning corporate worship, this book really does offer a compelling vision for helping God's people.

People connect Sunday morning worship with Monday morning faithfulness.

If you've enjoyed this episode, would you take a moment to subscribe, leave a review, and share this conversation with another pastor or ministry leader?

It helps others discover these conversations.

You can also learn more about the ministry of Apollo's watered by visiting ApolloSwatered.org until next time, keep helping people Think deeply.

Live faithfully.

Lead courageously.

This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off for Ministry Deep Dive and as always, stay watered.

Everybody.