Review for Ministers-at-Work by Rob Fox July 2004

Whatever else it achieved, Mark Greene’s book ‘Thank God it’s Monday’ opened up the Faith and Work field to the Charismatic / Evangelic constituency. There is a growing genre of books addressing this theme written from and primarily addressed to this constituency, this one from the particular viewpoint of those emphasising the importance of the 1994 dispensation of the Spirit.

David Oliver is “an associate director of the Marketing Guild and senior partner of ‘Insight Marketing’”, a similar working background to Mark Greene. He is a leader at Basingstoke Community Church (what used to be called a house church, before they greatly out-grew houses).

The book has 19 chapters and 6 appendices, so each is fairly short and enables the reader to take regular and convenient breaks. This is valuable as the style of writing is quite didactic - each chapter reading like a sermon, the structure loose and not always easy to follow, and key ideas often repeated or broken up into different chapters. At times the reasoning comes across as mechanistic and determinist; at others there are moments of deep insight. Another irritating feature is the use of throwaway comments without development or citation (for example, “Jesus operated in all the gifts of the Spirit”, p.41; “the concept that work is secular is a pagan Greek concept”, p.49). These stand out all the more as developed arguments are an important element in the book. On the plus side the use of story and anecdote is usually helpful and illustrates points well.

The best way to describe the book is therefore through themes: Breaking down the church = sacred / work = secular myth; Seeing work as a valid place of ministry and not merely as a means of supporting church based activities; Personal morality in the workplace; Bearing witness to the Gospel in word and deed.

David Oliver is keen to emphasise that a balanced Christian worldview sees the Kingdom of God in all places, not just those defined as sacred, rightly identifying (particularly in Chapter 2, ‘Overview and trends’) the increasing pressure on work patterns in modern society that blur traditional time boundaries. ‘The Church’, he notes, has been slow to take on board the rapid changes to work patterns of the last few decades and has not supported its members in their ministries ‘in the world’, being rather concerned with “sucking their members into ever increasing – and sometimes increasingly more irrelevant – meetings” (p.33). As he puts it, “the Church gets into trouble whenever it thinks it is in the Church business rather than the Kingdom business” (p.37). In this context ‘full-time’ Christian work is not only that which is paid or directly supported by the Church, but what all Christians do by virtue of their calling. “Church can never be the full expression of my calling, it is the equipping centre to enable me to fulfil it” (p.52).

Work includes voluntary work, and David Oliver notes well the central role played by workers in the Old and New Testaments, whether it is using their gifts of craftsmen to build the Temple, or delivering God’s word to His people as Prophet. “The Old Testament was, in the main, was written or dictated by working men who we would say were in ‘secular’ employment” (p.43). He also notes (p.44) that we could learn much from the way in which Islam holds work and those who carry it out in respect. He calls ‘The Big Lie’ thinking that work is firstly a means of earning to support church-centred activities: “The issue is not ‘sacred or secular?’. The issue is, ‘Is what I do in the flesh or in the Spirit?’” – a classic Pauline perspective. He notes that most of us will spend most of our time in the service of Christ outside the Church – so rather focussing on serving it, it ought to be focussing on ensuring we can serve God wherever He has called us. There is an engaging discussion in Chapter 6, ‘Six months without pay’, on the motives for work, identifying many errors and pointing to some more valid reasons.

One issue that recurs in the book but is never satisfactorily dealt with is that of the ‘link’ between faith and prosperity. David Oliver is at pains to criticise the mechanistic view that material prosperity is a sign of God’s blessing on the believer, devoting Chapter 12, ‘Money!’ to it: “If you believe that godliness is a means to financial prosperity – it’s a lie, it’s a delusion, it’s a deceit” (p.124). Prosperity may be a by-product of godliness, but to pursue it for it’s own sake is to fall into the ‘love of money’ trap. Yet he asserts (without supporting it) a page later that “poverty was a curse under the law, so we are redeemed from that”, implying that presence of poverty (material and / or spiritual) indicates the absence of a right relationship with God. Prosperity is “something God adds, rather than something we take … . If we are kept in a constant place off need, then we need to check our attitude – God may be keeping us there for a reason.” The question ‘from whence cometh poverty?’ appears to be answered by from the poor themselves and from God; deeply unsatisfactory.

That there has been so much to say about this book shows how thought provoking it has been to read it. Even if you do not share all (or many) of David Oliver’s assumptions, it is worth venturing into the local branch of Wesley Owen, and the modest outlay, in order to learn where this constituency are at on faith and ministry in work, and use it as a critical tool in your own journey.