Coding for Christ: Is Remote Work Righteous?

My college roommate taught himself to code before social media made it look cool. By nineteen, he was a full-time independent contractor, running a business from what used to be our porch and was now a high-functioning tech cave. One afternoon, he emerged with computer-glossed eyes and asked me a question I wish I had a better answer to at the time, “Yo, Cobb. I’ve been thinking about how to glorify God in every part of my life… but how do I do that when I work alone all day?”

That question has only grown louder to me. Is remote work good for the span of a career or only a season?

This question may be indigenous, but not exclusive, to the Coder. Remote work has exploded in recent years. Isolated quarantine is included in the job description of every Solopreneur, Author, Artist, and CPA. Millions of us logged off the commute and logged into Slack channels that never sleep. And at first, it was kind of amazing. We could knock out a slide deck in a hoodie, walk our kids to school, and avoid Chad from accounting. Win-win-win.

But a few years in, the edges are fraying. You start noticing it in little ways. You reread an email five times because tone is impossible to decode. You are not sure if you are doing a good job because nobody really says so anymore. You click “Leave Meeting” and feel zero inspiration.[1] You finish your week and ask yourself, did any of this actually matter? Remote work may be required but is it righteous?

Gallup reports that 77% of workers are disengaged, remote or not. And while remote work is not the cause of all this, it has certainly revealed something: we may have gained flexibility, but we lost something too. Something more human. Something more holy.

The fruits of the Holy Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5). Each of these characteristics requires human interaction. As an example, we tend to need much less patience with ourselves than we need with our coworkers. So, if community is needed to express a full life in relationship with God, is it possible to express a relationship with God while working alone?

I wonder if Adam asked these questions. In Genesis 2:15, God initially put him in the garden of Eden to work it and watch over it. Adam had no community at work, so to speak; this was pre-Eve. Yet this missing component did not make Adam’s work useless to God. Quite the opposite. Adam’s contributions mattered beyond the presence of any other human to affirm him. God gave Adam this thankless work. This means that God’s vision for humanity began, oddly, with remote work. His vision for our work goes beyond the interaction, rewards, and appreciations we receive as a result.

Of course, three verses later, God also says it is not good for man to be alone (Gen. 2:18). This proclamation is not a divine judgment on remote work itself. Adam’s aloneness needed to be changed, but his skills retained meaning regardless of whether he was alone. Adam’s solo assignment affirms that relationships, while essential, are not what give work its value. We work to participate in something divine.

By this, we know God is not sentencing all introverts to endless togetherness and small talk. We also see our chief end of work is not accomplished in our immediate interactions with people around us. Coworkers are great, but they are not ultimate. We can glorify God through our interactions with our coworkers, but the goodness of work is not dependent on interactions with people. Otherwise, God can be accused of inviting Adam to do what was outside his best interest—which would change everything about how we view the Bible. Because if remote work is not good, then maybe Adam wasn’t entirely wrong for believing the serpent.

And still, Adam alone as an ultimate end is not good because it is not what God intended. In Genesis 2:18, word alone—לְבַדּ֑ו—implies Adam’s future connection to a body of people. God is not condemning every moment of solitude or isolation as sinful here. Alone is not rebellion; it’s incomplete.

God identifies Adam as the delegate of a people and gives a prophetic proclamation in the creation narrative. In other words, an unaccompanied Adam was never the goal. So, God renounces permanent isolation and builds anticipation for more people who are on their way into the narrative. Saying, “it is not good for the man to be alone” wasn’t a churchy way to express disappointment at a missing +1. It shouldn’t be looked at like Grandma’s relationship questions at Thanksgiving. Alone—לְבַדּ֑וֹ—implies that he was missing the relational fullness required to carry the image of a relational God.

The man was made to represent God (Gen. 1:27). God has community within himself: Father, Son, and Spirit. Man, likewise, was made to dwell in community, yet community for man does not mean being fastened together every moment of every day. God did not say, “I am making the man a conjoined twin,” fit for him. He said, “I am making a helper,” meaning he is building a community of people, people with different functions and roles. So, God instituted marriage as the union from which this beautiful community would proceed. And as lovely as marriage is, the man needs his own space sometimes—the woman too, from what I see.

But is there not also a sense in which we are naturally beings who grow tired of being alone? There is a reason all of us are experiencing an extreme level of Zoom fatigue, for instance. Nobody wants online meetings and the pretend proximity that accompanies them. Covid showed us that a certain level of solitude can be healthy, but only when mixed in with consistent human contact. And while remote work can honor God, I don’t think we have determined whether remote work can be endless.

At some point, human nature will kick in and say, “It is not good for man to be alone.”

Consider how in June of 2023 The Washington Post published an article with a title including the words, “..remote work is here to stay.”[2] Fast forward to today, January 2025, remote work at the Washington Post has been discontinued. The Washington Post, Amazon, Apple, and others are returning to a five-day in-office work week.[3]

Working remotely is not a sustainable long-term solution. We start to realize that all the work is not actually getting done, or it is at least not getting done at the frequency or level of quality that it could be if we were more connected or more thoroughly supervised. This is where remote work begins to break down. It begins to break down when we are steadily away from community, away from accountability, away from the camaraderie and connection and care and cultivation we need to do excellent God-honoring work—the type of connection that can only be maintained in person.

Is this not exactly why, at the height of the pandemic, Facebook decided to purchase 730,000 square feet of office space in New York City? Maybe the office is not just inevitable, but good.

Can remote work honor God? Yes. Maybe the better question is for how long?

Gallup’s latest “State of the Global Workplace” report revealed that more than one in every five employees frequently feels lonely.[4] I have found it to be a rule that when you want to work remotely, loneliness is near. For this reason, remote work is helpful for a moment, not as a mandate.

The longer the span of your remote work, the more you will be unable to avoid its seasonal nature.

This is not to say remote work cannot be good or godly. It can be both. But it carries a shelf life. Remote work is like manna, it nourishes, but only for the time allotted. Manna fell from heaven for the people of God in the wilderness. They ran into trouble when trying to store up manna beyond what God provided. We are in a similar moment with remote work. Covid was a wilderness. We were blessed with the technological means to move much work forward even in this wilderness. But now we have made an era out of provisions God meant for an episode. Attempting to preserve this provision beyond its time will indefinitely spoil what was meant to be a blessing at the proper time.

We must recognize that human beings are not merely minds that think or hands that produce, but bodies that relate. In the biblical vision of creation, God places Adam in the garden not just with purpose (Gen. 2:15), but with presence—walking with him in the cool of the day (Gen. 3:8). Hearing the footsteps of God after the scene of the fall, was Adam ever truly alone? Work and presence go hand in hand. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, “Man does not live by his own life. He lives by the word proceeding from the mouth of God, and by the life of his brother.”[5] We are sustained not just by divine vocation but by embodied community. Activity that is communal by nature understandably causes harm when that community is never actualized.

Loneliness, then, is not an incidental drawback of remote work; it is a spiritual alarm. When our work becomes fully abstracted from shared physical space, we risk disembodying our vocation. Miroslav Volf warns that modern work, severed from communion, leads to “a functional reduction of the human being.”[6] In such a system, the soul begins to atrophy, even if productivity metrics rise.

To live as energized, full-bodied, and full-souled workers requires more than permission to glorify God in any setting—it requires conditions in which we can flourish.

Gallup’s findings are confounded, however, when we begin accounting for the general sentiment about remote work today. A recent poll, which reached over 500 LinkedIn users, revealed that 63% of people prefer remote-only work. It almost seems as if people are banding together to declare their desire for isolated work. But deep down these workers are also professing a higher rate of frustration with work culture. We hear what everyone is saying, but the rate of therapy introductions might suggest otherwise. The emotional outcomes are not agreeing with the narrative being told. The cracks are showing. The show is coming to a close.

Disembodied work is permissible, maybe even preferred, but it will rarely be sustainable. It may glorify God in the short term, but over time it erodes the communion we were designed to crave.

Remote work has an expiration not because it lacks utility, but because it lacks totality. It cannot bear the full weight of human vocation. And so, as Christians who care about both calling and communion, we must treat remote work not as a permanent paradigm, but as a useful arrangement that must eventually yield to something more incarnational. Something in-person.

[1] Hoch, Julia E., and Steve W. J. Kozlowski. “Leading Virtual Teams: Hierarchical Leadership, Structural Supports, and Shared Team Leadership.” Journal of Applied Psychology 99, no. 3 (2014): 390–403.

[2] Washington Post. “Remote Work Is Here to Stay. Here’s How It’s Affecting Families and Social Life.” Washington Post, June 22, 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/06/22/remote-work-family-socialization-time-use/.

[3] New York Times. “Washington Post Orders Employees Back to the Office Five Days a Week.” New York Times, November 7, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/07/business/media/washington-post-return-to-office.html.

[4] Gallup. “Employees Worldwide Feel Lonely.” Gallup.com. Last modified May 30, 2024. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/645566/employees-worldwide-feel-lonely.aspx.

[5] Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Life Together. Translated by John W. Doberstein. New York: HarperOne, 1994.

[6] Volf, Miroslav. Work in the Spirit: Toward a Theology of Work. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1991.

Additional Resource

Harvard Business Review. “The Remote Work Revolution and Work-Life Balance.” YouTube Video, April 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHJ8TAUzt4A