Work Was Never Just: Faith & Work for Christian Leaders

A theological response to a sociological question — for the leaders quietly tired of the Sunday-to-Monday gap.

A column ran this week in The Wall Street Journal arguing that America has lost its will to work.

The author cited Tocqueville, who in the 1830s described American work as “a natural, honest condition of humanity” — something everyone did, regardless of wealth.

There are good people on every side of it.

We will say what is rarely said in those columns: The question is not whether Americans work enough.

The question is what they think work is for .

Why this matters now (TL;DR) America hasn’t lost its will to work.

It has lost the conviction that work counts .

The crisis is not laziness — it is lost meaning.

Genesis 1 frames work as the original gift, given before the fall, never rescinded.

Colossians 3 reframes every spreadsheet, every hiring decision, every Tuesday afternoon as worship.

The cultures that stop working are not lazy cultures.

They are cultures that have stopped believing work means anything.

It comes from one calling , one Tuesday morning meeting, one leader at a time.

A confusion older than the welfare state For most of the leaders we equip — marketplace leaders in Worcester, Cairo, Cartagena, Gabon, Abidjan, Central Asia — the diagnosis lands differently.

They have never lived in a culture that took work for granted.

In their cities, work is the thing that holds a family together, that builds a city’s spine, that turns one generation’s labor into the next generation’s possibility.

But even in those places, the deeper question is the same one Tocqueville was circling without fully naming.

If work is an identity, you collapse under it.

The cultures that stop working are not lazy cultures.

They are cultures that have stopped believing work means anything.

Genesis 1 had something to say first Before the column.

There was a six-day pattern in Genesis 1 in which a Creator made a world and pronounced it good — and then made an image-bearer and gave that image-bearer a job.

The first thing God said about humans was that they were made to make.

Work was the original gift, given before the fall, never rescinded.

The book of Colossians, much later, summed it up in a single instruction: whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men (Colossians 3:23).

If your spreadsheet is for the Lord, you will not pad your numbers.

If your hiring decision is for the Lord, you will not hire the version of yourself that is easier to manage.

If your Tuesday afternoon is for the Lord, you will not coast through it.

The cultures that have lost their will to work have not lost their will to do things .

They have lost the conviction that what they do counts.

What we are not saying We are not saying that everyone who struggles to find work is morally compromised.