Most of your congregants were never taught that their jobs might be doing something to their souls. They assume work is neutral at best, a distraction from “real” spiritual life at worst. Matt Rusten, president of Made to Flourish and author of Pastoring for Monday, makes the case that work has been central to God’s design since the first page of Genesis, and that what happens in your people’s workplaces forms them just as much as what happens in your sanctuary on Sunday.
A Working God, From the First Page of the Bible
Rusten points out something easy to miss: before Scripture ever calls God holy, righteous, or merciful, it shows him at work. Genesis 1 introduces a Creator God who makes things, physical things, and calls it work. In the ancient world, that alone was radical. Matt Rusten argues that because your congregants are made in the image of this working God, the making, crafting, and building they do all week aren’t distractions from their calling. They’re part of it, though most of them have never heard that from the pulpit.
Your People Are Already Ruling Something
A lot of the people in your pews don’t feel like their work looks like “ruling” anything. Rusten’s response: everyone has some sphere of dominion, whether it’s how they manage an inbox, treat a customer, or run a household. Helping someone name that sense of ownership over even a small domain, Matt Rusten says, is part of helping them see how they bear God’s image at work.
How Work Forms Your People, For Better or Worse
One of the more sobering ideas Rusten raises is that work doesn’t just occupy your congregants’ time, it shapes their character over decades. He tells the story of Dallas Willard, who noticed that being a professor meant always having the last word, and who deliberately gave that up on a regular basis to guard against pride. Rusten’s point for pastors: the people in your congregation are being quietly formed by their jobs whether they’re paying attention or not, and naming those patterns from the pulpit is part of discipleship, not separate from it.
Why Jesus Kept Telling Stories About Work
Rusten notes that 32 of Jesus’s 37 parables use work and workers as their setting, likely because Jesus himself spent far more years as a tradesman than he did in public ministry. Later, John the Baptist tells tax collectors and soldiers who come to be baptized to stay in their jobs, just to do them differently. Rusten connects that directly to Zacchaeus, who responds to grace not by leaving his profession but by changing how he collects taxes, paying back four times what he’d taken. For Rusten, that’s the pattern worth preaching: transformation shows up in how your people do their jobs, not just whether they keep them.
What Pastors and Churches Can Actually Do
Matt Rusten offers a few low-lift starting points for churches: giving one person in a small group five minutes each week to share about their work and be prayed for, doing short “This Time Tomorrow” interviews during a service, and visiting people at their jobs yourself. He describes a pastor in Manhattan, Kansas who spent time with a hog farmer and a crane operator in his congregation and said it completely changed how he preached, prayed, and pastored them.
Discussion Questions
1. Where in your preaching and teaching do you currently treat work as separate from faith, and where have you connected the two?
2. Rusten says Genesis introduces us to “a working God.” How might that reframe the way you talk about work from the pulpit?
3. What would it look like to help someone in your congregation name their “sphere of dominion” this week, even if it’s just their job, home, or a small team?
4. Dallas Willard gave up having the last word as a spiritual discipline. What’s a story like that you could share to help your people see how their own jobs are shaping their character?
5. Rusten distinguishes between work as an illustration of the kingdom and work as an application of the gospel. Which shows up more in your own preaching?
6. John the Baptist sent tax collectors and soldiers back into their same jobs, just to do them differently. How could you help someone in your congregation see that staying in their role, but doing it differently because of Christ, is itself a faithful response to the gospel?
7. Zacchaeus responded to grace by changing how he did his job. Who in your congregation might need to hear that story this month?
8. Has your church ever prayed publicly for someone’s work? What would it take to start?
9. Rusten talks about pastors visiting people’s workplaces to understand them better. Whose workplace could you visit this month?
10. What’s one small step your church could take this month to help your congregation treat everyday work as spiritually significant?
