“I wish my pastor understood me, believed in me, commissioned me.”
I have been sitting with those words for weeks now. They were spoken at a recent conference by Jess Chin—Lausanne Movement board member and founder of Liminal, a collective shaping the next era of global leadership. Jess was talking about Gen Z’s desire for meaning and identity and how the Church might engage AI with wisdom and theological depth. She was talking about young people. But when she closed with those words—words she said she hears all the time—something in me went still.
She could have been talking about me.
I want to be understood, believed in, and commissioned by my pastors. And from what I hear from the hundreds of Christians I’ve met through my work in the faith & work movement, I am not alone in this.
There seems to be a big gap between how much our work matters to God and how little our churches reflect that—and our discipleship feels stunted by the gulf.
I want to say something clearly before I say anything else: I am genuinely grateful for the pastors in my life. One pastor, in particular, changed the whole trajectory of my professional vocation. About 20 years ago, he took me aside and asked me to start a marketplace ministry at our church. That one conversation ignited a passion that has shaped everything I’ve done in faith & work since. I don’t take lightly what a gift that was.
And yet.
Despite my deep appreciation for the pastors I’ve known, there’s often been a quiet gap between us. As if some of them don’t quite get me. As if they’re not sure what to do with me. Some of that gap, I think, has to do with being a woman in rooms led mostly by men—something I want to return to in another essay. But there’s another gap I feel just as keenly: the one around my work, and how much it matters to me.
I’ve heard many Christian professionals name this same disappointment. A lack of encouragement for their work achievements. A lack of support for the questions and tensions their work creates. A subtle sense, never spoken aloud but somehow communicated anyway, that their work doesn’t matter. But it does. It matters to God—deeply, specifically, profoundly.
Here is the truth I keep coming back to: our work matters to God, and God matters to our work.
I think of this as the gospel of work. “Gospel” means good news—and the good news is that the thing we spend the bulk of our waking hours doing is not outside the reach of God’s care. It is not a distraction from our faith. It is not a lesser calling we endure so we can afford the more important things.
Scripture shows us this from its very first pages. God was the first worker (Genesis 1:1–25). He created and commissioned us to join in that work—to do it with him and for him, as a vital part of what he is doing in the world (Genesis 1:26–28). But if your experience has been like mine, this is not the kind of thing we hear often at church.
Sometimes our pastors warn us not to make work an idol. Do not prioritize it over family, friends, community. Sometimes they encourage us to share our faith with our colleagues or invite them to an Easter service. More often, though, work simply does not come up. And that silence sends its own message: work doesn’t belong here. It isn’t sacred enough. It is for out there, not in here.
That message settles into us over time, whether we notice it or not. We begin to get the sense that pastors and missionaries are doing real Kingdom work—and the rest of us are here to pay our bills, give to the church, and share the gospel if an opening presents itself.
I know this feeling far too well. I hesitate to talk about my work at church too much, for fear it will seem like it is too important to me. I feel a low-grade guilt when I skip a church volunteer opportunity or a special event because I would rather spend the time working. I notice that missionaries are prayed over and commissioned when they leave for overseas—and I wonder why no one has ever laid hands on people like me and sent us into our workplaces.
This gap makes it easy to conclude that faith and work occupy separate worlds. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Let me take you back to a moment early in my career when I first started wrestling with this.
I was working as a Product Manager at Jack in the Box. The company culture was friendly and laid-back on the surface, but underneath there was a quiet current of competition within my department. We all wanted our products to succeed, our ideas to land, maybe even our names to come up at the next promotion conversation.
One day, a senior leader gave me a heads-up about some breaking news—a supply issue or a budget shift—something that would affect all of us. I had a choice: keep the information to myself for a small advantage or share it with my peers.
Keeping it quiet wouldn’t have been wrong, exactly. But I found myself asking a different question: What would it look like to respond not just as a professional, but as a Christian?
Ultimately, I determined God would want me to share the information, so I did. And yes—I felt good about it. Maybe a little too good if I am being transparent. But that small moment opened something up in me. It raised a deeper question: How is my faith supposed to shape the way I work? The decisions I make? The way I see the people around me?
Over time, I began to understand: my job was not just a job. It was one of the ways God was forming me—and one of the ways he was blessing the world through me.
That understanding didn’t arrive all at once. It grew as I learned that God is telling one sweeping story across all of human history—and our work is woven into it. The story begins with Creation in Genesis with God at work, creating the world and inviting human beings—made in his image—to share in that creative, purposeful labor. Work is not a consequence of the Fall. It is part of how we were made.
But then, the second chapter of the story: sin enters, and everything is marred by it. The frustration of work, the futility of it, the ways it can wound us and others—this is real. The world is broken, and we feel it most acutely in the places where we spend our days.
And yet—and this is the part I do not want us to rush past—God never withdrew the calling to work. Even in a broken world, work is still good. We just do it now with grief and hope mixed together, knowing that it is not yet what it will one day be.
That is because the third chapter of the story is Redemption. Jesus came not only to save our souls but to restore all things. Colossians 1 tells us that through Christ, God is reconciling everything to himself—things on earth as well as things in heaven. All things. That includes our actual, daily, ordinary work.
My Jack in the Box decision—small as it was—was a signpost that God wanted to erect. A tiny arrow pointing toward a different Kingdom. A Kingdom where honesty and generosity are the norm, where power is used in service of others, where the person across the conference table is a neighbor rather than a competitor. That is what the Resurrection sets in motion. New life breaking into every corner of the world—including our offices, classrooms, hospitals, studios.
And the final chapter: the story ends not with escape, but with Renewal. Revelation 21 gives us a vision of a city—not a garden. A place built through human hands, redeemed, and restored. Which means our work today can echo into eternity. Even the mundane tasks. Even the ones that feel invisible.
When I look at all four chapters together—Creation, Fall, Redemption, Renewal—I can only conclude that God’s purpose for our work is far more meaningful than we have dared to imagine.
And so we want to talk about it at church—we want our pastors to talk about it too. We want to understand how biblical principles apply to the decisions we make on Monday. We want to hear sermon illustrations that apply to our daily lives. We want to learn spiritual practices that don’t just help us endure the week but ground us within it.
We want our pastors to function less like the captain of a cruise ship—comfortable, entertaining, but removed from the reality where we live and work. And less like the commander of an aircraft carrier, sending us out into the world from the safety of the deck.
What if church functioned more like a race support van? You know the ones you see in the Tour de France, driving alongside the cyclists. Offering mechanical help when things break down. Hydration and food for nourishment. Data and perspective. Encouragement. Correction when needed.
Alongside. In real time. On the road. That is what we are longing for. Not to escape the real world and be kept comfortable. Not to be built up and then launched into enemy territory. But to be known—in our work, in our questions, in our daily lives—and supported as we go.
I believe the pastors I know could do this, if they knew how much we needed it. I wish they knew.
