Have you ever watched somebody at work closely? I mean, somebody really engaged in their work?

Right now, I’m sitting on an airplane, and across from me is a young man, explaining a Keynote presentation on his work for Exxon mobil. Hands animated, hat turned backward (must be off the clock), and utterly fascinated with geology and the contours of the earth’s surface. It’s as if he’s not just explaining his work – but something about himself.

And here comes the Southwest airlines stewardess. She is serving us drinks – coke, juice, Fat Tire. Patiently taking orders, kindly responding to requests, balancing liquid on a moving jet liner. Her eyes look tired. But she smiles. And I smile back, and thank her for her work. I think to myself – our culture has few jobs more obviously fulfilling the role of a servant than that of a server. I sip my cold drink, grateful. She glides down the aisle.

Behind me, a heavy set man with glasses, slightly balding, reads his magazine. I can’t quite tell what it is, but he is engrossed. Whatever he is reading, it is a part of him. His mind is absorbing some information, knowledge, fundamental to his work. His being and his work are one.

Work, to these people, is not the source of their dignity. This comes from simply being made in the image of the Creator. But it is a basic expression of their dignity. It forms the social relationships that we call civilization. It gives us the order to work together as the human family to provide for one another’s needs – and wants. Work is the overflow of culture, and in many ways, it is culture. Work fills our days, engrosses our minds, worries our hearts, yet stimulates our imaginations. When work is dull, we are less than human. When it is exciting, it can become such a bright morning star, we are tempted to worship it as a god.

The Christian must come into the world and direct the world to a God who works, and a God who rests. And as we rest, and worship, our work can be funneled, like a river, to stream of refreshment for ourselves and our neighbors. The simplest of activities can communicate a gentle beauty.

The Gospel is not work. Indeed, when work is the Gospel, life is destroyed. No, the Gospel is the story of the life, death, resurrection and Second Coming of Jesus Christ. And when the Gospel animates and enlivens work, the world becomes almost magical.

Look. The magic even animates his excited explanations of fossil fuel exploration, over a glowing Apple computer, with hand gestures and inflected, anticipatory voice tones to complete stranger on an airplane.

Theology

A Prayer for Work

August 27, 2014

O Lord!

May all my work today be for you, and you alone!

Teach me to see my daily labor in the piercing light of your Truth. Open my ears to hear the great cloud of witnesses who have gone before me, that I might walk in paths of righteousness for your name’s sake.

Stir my heart to speak and embody your gospel of grace to all, employees and co-workers, bosses and clients, patients and students – to all that all might have life, life, eternal life!

O Christ of the cross, in the pain of my work, give me the courage to sacrifice for the good of others, all the while pointing to you, he who suffered and died, and overcame death! May I not turn back from the plow, but may the sweat of my brow bring the first fruits of new life!

O incarnate King of Heaven, show me where I might draw close to others as you draw close to us, that the human family might truly become a community, as you are Community, Triune Creator and Redeemer!

O Savior who has even called us the Body of Christ, may we too give our bodies, our very flesh for the life of the world!

When darkness and death overwhelm, may we be as bold as lions, and stand against evil in our work, and in our world! May sin not rule over us, but may you reign, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace, Lord of life!

Lord of all wisdom, teach us to be innocent as doves yet wise as serpents as we seek to solve intractable problems and unyielding difficulties. Fill our minds with your unsearchable wisdom!

Defender of the weak, open our eyes to the poor and marginalized in our midst. Teach us to not just to serve the poor, but to see the poor. And may we too become poor, as you became poor, that we all might be filled with the riches of heaven.

Lord of the Vine, I can bear no fruit apart from you. Draw near to me, Savior, as I draw near to you. And by your mercy, bring abundant fruit and everlasting life from my labor this day!

Lord, may each word, each email, each meeting, each idea, each product, each service, each goal – May all that I am and all that I have be consecrated to you, my sweet reward, my secret joy, my firm hope.

O Lord!

May all my work today be for you, and for you alone!

Culture Politics

Interview with Michael Lindsay

August 10, 2014

As I sat down for lunch at The Broadmoor, a historic, five-star resort in Colorado Springs, it quickly became clear I was among the elite. White linen table clothes, waiters in black ties, and a view of the rolling green golf course nestled at the foot of the Rockies. I was glad, then, when Michael Lindsay, the President of Gordon College, joined me. His wide smile, gracious disposition and articulate brilliance exuded confidence and calmed my middle class nerves. He had been among the powerful before.

In 2008, Lindsay published his Pulitzer-nominated Faith in the Halls of Power, an unprecedented look at influential evangelicals from Washington DC to Wall Street. His latest book, View from the Top (Wiley, 2014), is the result of a 10 year study of “Platinum Leaders,” 550 elite politicians, CEOs and nonprofit executives who hold many of the most significant positions of leadership in the world. Over lunch we had the chance to discuss the White House Fellows, a liberal arts view of life, the power of elite networks, influence through institutions, the perspective of top-level leaders, and why he wants more Christians in positions of power.

Michael Lindsay and Jeff Haanen

An edited version of this interview was published recently in Christianity Today. Here is the uncut, unedited version of the June 2, 2014 interview in its entirety. It includes all the original details and my candid responses to Michael’s findings in View From the Top.

It’s longer than your typical blog post, but Michael offers a deeply insightful look into the highest levels of global leadership. It was a conversation I won’t soon forget.

Let’s talk about institutions. I think most Americans are very skeptical of large institutions, but the leaders you found in View from the Top are drawn to institutional leadership. Why?

It’s the locus of power in our culture. I started out thinking that individuals would have a lot of say. The way in which I went about my data was focusing on individuals. I got about two-thirds of the way through and I thought, “These people sit at the top of institutions. And that’s were there’s power. That’s how things get done.” You can see that within the private sector. You can see it in nonprofits. And you can certainly see it in government. It became a way in which I could understand what was taking place. Institutions matter significantly.

It’s interesting. The current generation of college students have a love-hate relationship with institutions. They hate bureaucracy, and they hate the machinations of big organizations. But they are real builders. They believe in starting things, and they want to build them up to make a real difference.

So, one of the hopes of the books is to help them to see [that] if you really want to make a difference long-term, you have to be connected to an institution.

One of your chapters is entitled, “Act Institutionally, Think Personally,” but I think many personality-driven churches and para-church organizations are really quite the opposite. We think about the celebrity at the head but rarely think about the institution itself. What can evangelicals do to change that bias?

Here’s one way to process this. Max Weber describes it as the routinization of charisma. Weber has this theory about different forms of authority.

Traditional authority, which is what the Queen of England has. You inherit it from your parents. Rational-legal authority, which is the authority President Obama has, which is, you’re on top of a major bureaucracy and that’s how you get things done. And charismatic authority. This is the authority that Billy Graham had, for a while. It’s the authority that Jesus had for a while. It’s the authority that gathers and collects around an outstanding individual, a persona.

But in order for that person to have lasting impact, Weber says, it has to be routinized. It has to be transferred from the authority of a charismatic individual, and has to be transferred into a rational-legal bureaucracy. So, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association is a great example of the routinization of charisma. After Billy Graham is gone, you’re going to still have his ministry continue. Chuck Colson died two years ago. Much of the work of Charles Colson is continuing on in Prison Fellowship even though the founder is no longer there.

So, while it is true that evangelicalism does prize the personality, and there is a cult of celebrity in the church, what we are witnessing is evangelicals coming to appreciate the importance and the primacy of institutions.

Let’s think about leadership. You found almost all the leaders in View From the Top had a “leadership catalyst” experience. For many of them, it was a program called the White House Fellows. You’ve studied other leadership programs. What was the key to the White House Fellows that set it apart from the rest?

They did four things very, very well. I studied this deeply because I care about developing leaders at Gordon. One, it uses a cohort approach. Most of the research today will show that leadership development works the best in group settings. Leadership is as much caught as it is taught. So that’s very important.

Second, they were given substantive work assignments. If you have a program for leadership development, but there’s no real work assignment, it lacks the teeth, it lacks responsibility and accountability and the feedback loop that’s really important. So you don’t really know if you’ve done it or not.

Third is the importance of a broadening education. So, you have to expose emerging leaders to senior leaders. They have to be able to rub shoulders, get to know them up close. And those senior leaders also have to be willing to speak honestly and off the record. So it’s really important that you not just bring in talking heads but that you also find people who can be real.

The fourth element that the White House Fellows program does well, that other effective leadership development programs do well, is public recognition. So you have to be able to say, “These are really special people.” And we’re singling them out to say that they are worth our investment of time and energy.

Those are four things I’ve found that make a huge difference.

Is that what the Presidential Fellows program at Gordon College looks like?

Yes, the Gordon Presidential Fellows program is exactly modeled on that. So, we take a competitive group of students that come from all different majors, all different backgrounds, and we choose a cohort of 10 students. They have the chance to work directly with one cabinet officer. I require them to literally sit in the office of the cabinet officer. Each cabinet office has a little conference table in their office. That’s where the student works. The idea is that they will pick up on things, even when they’re doing their own work.

So, the students I work with will hear me interview people, talk with donors on the telephone, think about strategy. All kinds of things. And then we’ll have a chance to debrief. And then I have lunch with my fellows usually on Saturdays. And so that’s an intentional strategy.

We bring to campus about ten guest speakers per year. And so we ask the speakers to meet with the Presidential Fellows over breakfast or lunch. And then we do give them public recognition. We often take them on travel with me or with the college. We single them out. They meet with the trustee. It’s clearly our top leadership cohort on campus.

Tell me about the difference you see between the evangelicals you interviewed in Faith in the Halls of Power and those in View From the Top. Did you see a difference between evangelicals and their non-believing counterparts?

So, 70% of the people in View From the Top are Christian.

Seventy percent?

Now, they are not all practicing Christians, and they’re not all serious about their faith. Faith in the Halls of Power drew a larger constituency of serious Christians. So if I compare the 70% of Christians in View from the Top with those who are not, then in general, Christians who I interviewed tended to be more grounded. They tended to be more oriented toward relationships in the workplace. They tended to be less frazzled with disappointment or failure occurs. Now, that’s not to say that’s true for everyone. I’m speaking in broad generalities.

In your book, you mentioned these leaders have a “liberal arts” view of life. How do average folks cultivate this generalist perspective in their work – a teacher, a mid-level manager. What does that look like for us?

It’s all about how we live our lives. It’s how we build certain practices in our lives. So, I find that you have to be intentional to develop that liberal arts approach to life. It doesn’t occur naturally because we tend to be in pretty homogenous groups. We tend to get the news from the circles of people that agree with us. We tend to not challenge ourselves.

So, the people in View From the Top, part of the reason they got to the top is that they had cultivated this liberal arts approach when they were 20. It’s generally not something you do when you’re 70. It’s something you develop.

Is this a reading diet? People you spend time with?

Yes, it’s about reading. Where do you get your information from? Do you have a regular practice of checking news sources that don’t align with your own philosophy? So, I tell my students one of the best things they can do is get a subscription to Christianity Today and The Economist. The Economist is really important. It’s different – you’re getting a more European-centered view of the world, not American centered. So, you’re able to get a broader vantage point.

I tell my liberal students they need to watch Fox News once a week. And I tell my conservative students they need to watch MSNBC once a week. You have to get to a place where you have a wider diet of input.

It also means cultivating a habit of attending lectures, being exposed to experiences that are different than their own vantage point.

One of the persons who most impressed me was this guy named John Mendelsohn who just stepped down as the head of the MD Anderson Cancer Center. He was a world class cancer researcher. Really a top flight scientist. When I was doing the interview, he was reading a book on the history of opera. What does the history of opera have anything to do with leading the world’s leading cancer center?

It’s so rare to find people like that.

But it’s not among these people! They develop a lifestyle that has that kind of breadth. They’re great conversationalists. They make connections. Now not everybody is reading about the history of opera. But they’re intentionally building practices in their life that give them a wide variety of experiences.

This is why the preaching of Tim Keller is so popular among these individuals. Because he’s so widely read. If you haven’t read classical literature since college, you can get snippets of it in Tim Keller’s preaching. And so, how do you get those kind of experiences? Those are the kind of things I’m interested in.

Tell me about the “leapfrog method.” In 2003-2004 you started interviewing prominent evangelical leaders, and in ten years, you were able to meet some of the most powerful leaders in the world. Tell me about how you were able to open up these networks over time.

In social science, the two methods for selecting informants in a study of elites is the reputational method, where somebody recommends an individual, or the positional method, which is to say, “I’m only going to talk to CEOs of Fortune 1000 companies and that’s it.”

The kind of research I was interested in doing was a little more textured than the pure positional method would allow. I was interested in the kind of data I’d get if I interviewed a former President of the United States or a former Cabinet Secretary who’s no longer in office. I was less interested in “What do you think about President Obama?” and more interested in how you get things done. So, you didn’t have to be an office holder for that to work. I decided I wanted to do a combination of those two approaches.

In middle of doing that, I realized I needed a networks-based approach. To get access to the really top level folks, you need somebody to say, “Hey, this guy is okay.” What I did at the early part of the process was I set up appointments with 100 early informants who then made recommendations of those at a much higher level. So, Rich Mouw, the President of Fuller Seminary, says, look, you need to go see Ralph Winter, who’s a Hollywood producer – very successful. I never would have gotten to Ralph if I would not have first talked with Rich.

So, the leapfrog method allowed me to jump over a number of different hurdles which allowed me to get there. But then I modified it slightly as I had some measure of success reaching people. I no longer needed somebody to help recommend someone. I needed a council of advisors who could help me say, “There are all these CEOs you could go interview, but you really need to go and figure out who’s most strategic,” and give me some help. So I built a board of advisors.

Networks. This is obviously a big reason why people got to the top. But I could see people misconstruing this and think, “The way I get to the top is to know the right people and that way I can climb the ladder.” It feels like people, then, become almost instrumental. They have value only because we can use them. I wonder, how do we avoid this temptation as people of Christian faith?

I’m absolutely persuaded that for evangelicals to have influence, they must be in the room when decisions are made. You must. And I can point to countless examples of how individuals at a particular moment are in the room and are able to change history.

One example I think I used in the book is Condoleezza Rice’s story. She was in the room when the decision about PEPFAR [President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief] was made. Condoleezza Rice was serving as National Security Advisor. There were two big camps. The compassionate conservative crowd, which is some of the evangelical network: Michael Gerson, Karen Hughes, that kind of crowd. Then there was the Neo-Con crowd: Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney. Condoleezza Rice was one of the few individuals who straddled both of those worlds.

There had been a conversation that had been going for about a year, where the President’s compassionate conservative agenda is being put to the test. What if the US government made an amazing commitment to address the AIDS pandemic is Sub-saharan Africa by making an allocation of $15 billion of US aid to extend the life of AIDS patients?

There were having the final meeting. It was called the principals meeting with about 15 folks in the oval office. So they turn to Condoleezza Rice to give her speech. Basically they’re asking, “Is this a good use of money just to extend lives for $15 billion?” She tells the story of how her mother, who battled cancer, was able to have her life extended for about 15 years from the moment she was diagnosed until the moment she died. During that time, Condoleezza Rice went to high school, went to the University of Denver, decided to change her passion from being a concert pianist to being an expert in the Soviet Union, earned a degree from Notre Dame, got a teaching job, and was well on her way at Stanford University. And Rice said, “It changed my life that my mother was able to be involved in that 15 years. If we can do that for an entire continent, and don’t do it, it’s a moral failure.” That one moment swayed human history in a significant way.

In order for evangelicals to have influence on key decisions that affect millions of people, you have to be in the room. Elite networks matter.

The difference, however, is that the gospel compels us to not live our lives to curry the favor of those in authority. Jesus is clearly not spending his ministry trying to get the Roman authorities to believe his position. And yet, not once does he curse the Roman authorities. The harshest thing he says about Rome is “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s.” That is certainly not a condemnation, and his disciples were begging him to condemn Rome. Just begging him, and he never does.

Why? Jesus recognizes that a lot of good can come when people committed to God are in positions of responsibility. What we have missed in the evangelical community over the last ten years is an insight that a social thinker named J.P. Nettl has advocated. He says social movements are akin to stalactite rock formations, which come from the top down, and stalagmite rock formations, which come from the bottom up. The column is most powerful, he says, when those formations meet. If we want cultural change, we have to attend to both grassroots movements as well as top down efforts.

What would that look like for evangelicals? What would it look like to build the top-down structure, since we’ve historically worked with the poor and weak? Does this mean seeking more positions of authority?

Think about the mobilization of concern we’ve seen for international justice in the last 15 years. It’s a wonderful example of how an organization like IJM has engaged policy makers, folks at very high levels. So, Gary Haugen speaks literally at Davos. That is where the world’s power elite exist. Gary is not repudiating it. Gary’s actually speaking there. He wants to be a part of it. It makes a real difference. At the same time, Gary is trying to get college students, who are really far from Davos, interested in international justice. They’re doing things in the local churches.

That’s a great example of how you can engage both top-down and bottom-up and can actually work a coordinated effort that can make a lasting impact.

Let’s change the pace a bit. I think many Americans see leaders at the top and they seem incredibly disconnected from the rest of us. True or not? If so, what should change?

It’s both true and false. It’s true in that there is a plurality, not a majority, who lead gilded lives, far removed from the everyday concerns of ordinary people.

But the people who are in these positions don’t stay there their whole lives. They don’t even stay there for 10 years. They move out. So the people who are in very powerful positions in the White House are at most in those powerful positions for 10 years. They don’t have a life that is so disconnected from everyday experiences forever.

So they have opportunities to reconnect. But when they’re in the top seat?

When they’re in the top seat, it’s very hard. It’s hard to know what’s happening in your organization much less what’s going on outside your organization.

You see our current political discourse, and I would say it’s become nearly sport for both conservatives and liberals to cast “the elite” onto the rocks.

Even though they’re both the elite!

Yeah, ironic. What would you say to that mentality, that pent up frustration against elites that I think permeates much of our public discourse? What would you say to those who are just watching the news, and joining in to say, “Yes, it’s their fault”?

The moment of the greatest cultural angst against elites occurred in the wake of the financial meltdown, where certain industries, like finance, seemed to be above the fray, and not really experiencing the country’s challenges. I will say, it is difficult when you are making an unbelievable amount of money to stay grounded. It’s really hard.

The people that really impressed me were the people who had willingly given up compensation they had come into because it was a way that they practiced generosity. But it was also a way in which they could bridle ambition, consumerism, and all the things I think we need to be attentive to for those who have power and privilege.

So it is unjustified that these few thousand people who have an enormous amount of influence on our culture and on the world? It is unjustified that there be such a frustration? Does the average guy voting really have any influence on, for example, the making of policy?

There’s a guy named Robert Michels who studied what everybody believed was the most democratic of all forms of social organization: socialist political parties in early 20th century in Europe. If anybody is going to have an egalitarian ethos, where nobody is above anybody else, it’s this group. He went into that expecting to find justification for this belief.

His most famous concept is the Iron Law of Oligarchy, which is to say, at the moment a group begins to organize, an oligarchy forms. In order to get things done, you are always going to have a small group of people with disproportionate privilege and power. It is how we work together in public life.

The reason I care deeply about having more serious Christians in positions of responsibility is because there are very few world views that preach a gospel of self-sacrifice, and none that are built around the very concept of self-sacrifice, like the Christian gospel.

The antidote to the pernicious effects of power is giving up power. It is sacrifice. Why, then, would we not want more people who believe in that, and that say these are their values? Why would we not want more people like that setting the example in the upper reaches of society?

Work

How To Get Unstuck From a Mid-Career Plateau

August 4, 2014

It’s not uncommon for many of us to come out college, full of ideals and ready to change the world. What is uncommon, however, is to see that kind of idealism as a mid-level manager well into his mid 50s.

Often I meet people who are kind, able, and competent, yet they’ve been stuck in the same job for nearly a decade, and they start to “check out.” They don’t want to, but they’ve lost a spark for their work. It seems to me there are at least four reasons why people plateau out in mid-career and get “stuck.” And there are at least four good ways to get “unstuck” from a mid-career plateau.

I’m Stuck #1: We’ve become technicians. It’s a common career path: go to college, perhaps get a professional degree, and reach a management position – but no further. Many become highly competent as business managers, senior engineers, or perhaps as a partner at a law firm, but become limited by highly specialized education which has prepared many of us to be technicians – competent in one, narrow area, but ignorant of most of the world.

John Gardner, the architect behind the White House Fellows Program, lamented the myriad of well-paid professional training programs that drive potential leaders further down the road of specialization. Academia, government, and public corporations all tend to isolate departments and disciplines from one another, creating silos that prevent broad understanding. Gardner said, “Leaders have always been generalists. Tomorrow’s leaders will, very likely, have begun life as trained specialists, but to mature as leaders they must sooner or later climb out of the trenches of specialization and rise above the boundaries that separate the various segments of society.” Why? Because the higher you go in an organization, the more need there is to be a generalist. Senior executives must know not only their company and product, but also something of finance, cultural trends, ethics, psychology and political processes or current events that affect a large corporation.

Technical competence can get you a good paycheck – but if we’ve become only technicians, our careers are sure to plateau.

How to Get Unstuck #1: Adopt a “liberal arts” perspective.” I recently interviewed Michael Lindsay, the President of Gordon College, on his new book View From the Top. The book is the the result of a 10 year study of “Platinum Leaders,” 550 elite politicians, CEOs and nonprofit executives who hold many of the most significant positions of leadership in the world. One commonality he found among many of them was that they had developed a “liberal arts” perspective on life. That is, they made a regular habit of cultivating perspectives and viewpoints different from their own.

For instance, Michael told me the story of John Mendellson, one of the world’s best cancer researchers at the MD Anderson Cancer Center. “He was a world class cancer researcher. Really a top flight scientist. When I was doing the interview,” Lindsay, recalled, “he was reading a book on the history of opera. What does the history of opera have anything to do with leading the world’s leading cancer center.” I replied, “It’s so rare to find people like that.” And Michael exclaimed, “But it’s not among these people! They develop a lifestyle that has that kind of breadth. They’re great conversationalists. They make connections. Now not everybody is reading about the history of opera. But they’re intentionally building practices in their life that give them a wide variety of experiences.”

A liberal arts perspective is a conservative willing to watch MSNBC, and a liberal watching Fox News. It’s a botanist reading philosophy, and a mechanic reading history. It’s a Kindergarten teacher attending lectures on foreign policy, or a member of congress attending a ho-down in rural Nebraska. The first way to get yourself “unstuck” from a mid-career plateau is by reaching way outside your area of expertise, and to start learning from the wider world.

I’m Stuck #2. We’ve overlooked the centrality of emotional intelligence in career development. Our traditional educational and managerial programs tend to treat people like repositories of information that is to be downloaded through webinars or PowerPoint presentations. As a result, we have scores of would-be influencers who are loaded with data, but lack the soft skills necessary to lead.

Recently The Economist did a a major study asking corporations and large employers the most important skills they needed from graduates. The top three responses were all soft skills, (1) Critical thinking/problem solving, (2) Collaboration/Teamwork, (3) Communication. All three of these require significant emotional intelligence. An ability to listen to people, understand other’s needs, empathize, and build positive energy among a team are the rarest of qualities, it seems, yet the most needed.

Anecdotally, I’ve seen dozens of “smart” people – people who always excelled and got good grades and the right answers – who never advance in their career because they are nearly oblivious of the people around them and how they make their co-workers, employees or even bosses feel. Maya Angelou once said, “People will forget what we told them, but they will never forget how we made them feel.”

How To Get Unstuck #2. There are two angles to getting unstuck here.

(1) Spend time with emotionally mature leaders. Emotional intelligence can’t only be learned from books or articles. It must be caught rather than taught. Find people who motivate, inspire, and make you personally feel like a million bucks. It’s likely that they’re high on the EQ quotient. Find time to buy them coffee, go visit them in their office, invite them over to your house for pot roast on Sunday afternoon. This is the best way to improve your EQ.

(2) Get an honest 360 degree evaluation. I have a friend who’s an executive coach. He does this for all his clients. He not only asks them what they’d like to improve, he also asks their employees, co-workers, board members, spouses, friends and even kids what they see needs improvements. Hearing this type of feedback can feel like taking a huge bite of humble pie, but self-awareness is invaluable. And it is a necessary step in getting unstuck from a mid career slump.

I’m Stuck #3. Our work has become stagnant and boring. This is by far and away the most common problem I see among mid-career professionals. Though millenials tend to be highly optimistic about their career prospects, over time, something changes. Today, over 70% of the American workforce is either not engaged or actively disengaged from their work. Globally the numbers are even worse – it’s 87%. Work for most is a grudging set of tasks to be completed; for many it is simply a necessary-evil that pays the bills.

I believe many would be tempted to say, “You’ve found the wrong work. You should go and explore what your ‘true calling’ is.” But I think for most this is bad advice. First, any kind of work can become boring after doing it long enough – even your dream job. Second, for many with a home mortgage and bills to pay, this is not realistic. Third, this is a narrative of self-actualization, and not one of genuine service. Most people are satisfied in their work if they’re actually lost in a purpose beyond themselves, and not just feeling personally fulfilled by their job. But this disengagement is so common in America, it’s worth asking what we might do if we find ourselves bored with our work.

How To Get Unstuck #3. Here I see three paths forward.

(1) Learn new ideas by studying the best practices of peers. I believe this is usually best done through off-site training or arranging a number of off-site visits. You need to get out of your current context, and see the wide world of possibility outside the four walls of your office. Because we are embodied beings, changing the location of our bodies – and taking in a new array of sights, sounds, images, smells, ideas and feelings – is powerful. And experiencing first-hand the ideas of your peers is bound to give you a few ideas of your own.

(2) Find a new challenge or tackle a new assignment. Meeting real needs and solving real problems – either for your company, customers, community or even industry – is a fast track out of boredom. Meaningful work has its foundation in being pushed and challenged. Likely, this will need to be done alongside of your supervisor. But imagine your boss’s expression if you come into her office and say, “I’d like to solve the biggest problem on your plate right now.” You may get a snicker – or you may be a jubilant, “Okay! Here ya go!” Either way, you won’t be bored.

(3) Make space for a sabbath rest. Creativity is found in times of leisure, not high production. God created the world in six days, and rested for one. And he commanded the Israelites to observe a Sabbath day to both refocus their hearts and minds on him, as well as to renew their work, which was always intended to be satisfying and creative (like His own work of creating the universe). The Israelites were saved by God from slavery, which meant working 7 days a week, every week, a slavery many self-impose today.

About a decade ago, Andy Crouch, the Executive Editor of Christianity Today, found himself in his mid-thirties and out of a job. The magazine he was editing went belly-up, and he was unemployed for over a year. But this year was the most creative in his career, and during that time he produced the manuscript for what would become the best-selling book Culture Making. It was helpful because he used this time as an extended Sabbath, not unlike God commanding the Israelites to rest from planting one year out of every seven.

If you’re work has become stagnant, consider observing not only a one-day-per-week Sabbath rest, but build in longer times as well – one week a year, or even 3-6 months every 7 years. And don’t spend this time sitting on a beach for 8 weeks. Find ways to re-discover the liberal arts. Learn to play a new instrument. Visit a museum. Climb an icy ravine (um…with a professional guide). Read Hume or Dante. Pray on a mountain top and listen for the voice of God. Whatever Sabbath looks like for you, use it to renew the call – and your passion for your work.

I’m Stuck #4. We’re isolated. The further up you move in your organization, the harder it becomes to find peers with whom you can share and think openly. Your subordinates expect you to have the answers, and you cannot openly speak about your personal challenges or organizational issues without causing either a firestorm of gossip or, minimally, a breach of confidence. Tom Clancy, the best selling novelist once said, “I wish somebody would have told me that when you reach the top, there’s nobody here.” Nobody here. That’s how many in mid-level to upper level leadership feel. Isolated.

How To Get Unstuck #4. Find a group of peers. Generally speaking, these people should be outside of your organization, and face similar challenges, and thus be in a similar level of leadership. But a group of peers is often the necessary context for choosing paths that take you beyond the world of the technician, can help you grow in your emotional intelligence, find ideas to cut through stagnation, and get out of isolation. These peers, of course, should have similar goals. This could be a university class, a professional society, or even a group from your church. But often the most powerful learning, from Kindergarten through adult education, comes not from teachers, but from peers.

Mortimer Adler once said, “A technician is a man who understands everything about his job except its ultimate purpose and its place in the order of the universe.” He’s right. To get ourselves unstuck, we have to start asking big questions again and humbly accept life as a life-long joinery of learning. And this can by done by mechanics or stay-at-home moms, executives or elementary teachers. For those who step back to re-evaluate and intentionally renew their careers, new horizons emerge around every corner.

Summary

I’m Stuck.

1. We’ve become technicians.

2. We’ve overlooked the centrality of emotional intelligence in career development.

3. Our work has become stagnant and boring.

4. We’re isolated.

How To Get Unstuck.

1. Adopt a “liberal arts” perspective.”

2a. Spend time with emotionally mature leaders.

2b. Get an honest 360 degree evaluation.

3a. Learn new ideas by studying the best practices of peers.

3b. Find a new challenge or tackle a new assignment.

3c. Make space for a sabbath rest.

4. Find a group of peers.

Craftsmanship & Manual Labor

The Handcrafted Gospel

July 25, 2014

Recently I bought a small, red cabinet for my wife and kid’s homeschool books. It was from IKEA, so how hard could assembly really be? Yet in only 20 minutes, I had managed to drill three holes in the wrong side of the red cabinet door. My wife took the project away from me, and assembled it for herself. I have concluded that I not only lack a manual and spacial intelligence, but that I’ve significantly undervalued those who build just about everything I see.

My respect for our culture’s craftsmen has grown – especially since Christ Horst and myself recently did an article for Christianity Today entitled “The Handcrafted Gospel.” The editor chose the subtitle “Meet the craftsmen reclaiming the honor of manual labor.” In our culture, “honor” and “manual labor” don’t often go hand in hand. We steer our students away from ‘tech schools’, believe thinking is for the office, not the shop, and have precious few “faith and work” events for electricians, contractors, carpenters or plumbers. Yet there is a huge skills gap and labor shortage for skilled manual labor in the US.

We have a problem.

Here’s a sneak preview of our theology for the craftsmen. Enjoy.

“I’ve always enjoyed building and fixing things,” says Brandon Yates.

After high school, Yates became an electrician. A fast study, he advanced quickly through the first two electrical certifications, apprentice and journeyman. Finally, when he became a master electrician in 1999, Yates founded KC One, an electrical contracting services company based in Kansas City, Missouri.

“Craftsman is a lost word in our day,” says Yates, now 37, who aims to change that by recruiting hardworking high-school graduates with an aptitude for making things. KC One’s apprenticeship program provides on-the-job training and certifications for one or two young electricians each year. “Society teaches these kids that they’ll become losers if they become electricians. My job is to unteach them.”

The perception that the trades offer less status and money, and demand less intelligence, is one likely reason young people have turned away from careers in the trades for several generations. In Yates’s school district, officials recently shuttered the entire shop class program. In our “cultural iconography,” notes scholar Mike Rose, the craftsman is a “muscled arm, sleeve rolled tight against biceps, but no thought bright behind the eye, no image that links hands and brain.” Thinking, it’s assumed, is for the office, not the shop.

But considering that Scripture identifies Jesus himself as a tektōn (Mark 6:3, literally “craftsman” or “one who works with his hands”), we think it’s high time to challenge the tradesman stereotype, and to rethink the modern divide between white collar and blue collar, office and shop, in light of the Divine Craftsman who will one day make all things new.

Apprentices and disciples

Craftspeople (harashim)—masons, barbers, weavers, goldsmiths, stonecutters, carpenters, potters—are replete in the Bible. The first person Scripture says was filled with the Spirit of God was Bezalel, who was given “ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze” (Ex. 31:1–5, ESV). Passages like these suggest God cares about craftsmanship, above all in his most holy places. From the tabernacle to the temple, what was built was meant to reflect and reveal God’s character. The temple was not just a majestic building; it spoke powerfully of his holiness.

Likewise, some of the most important New Testament figures worked with their hands…more

Work

What’s Wrong with, “Do What You Love”?

June 18, 2014

We’ve said it for so long to graduating college seniors it’s become almost gospel. Do what you love. Do what you’re passionate about. Don’t settle for just a job. Follow your dreams. But is this wisdom or just hot air?

Gordon Marino recently wrote an op-ed for the New York Times about his experience at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. In contrast to the college students who came into his office, “rubbing their hands together, and furrowing their brows,” wondering if they should become doctors, philosophers, or stand-up comics, many people in Northfield delivered papers at 5am or became roofers. Marino’s own father worried very little about “doing what he loved.” He worked at a job he hated for most of his career in order to take care of his family.

The rub, says writer Miya Tokumitsu, is that the “do what you love” ethos is actually elitist because it undermines work that is not done out of “passion.” Moreover, it severs the traditional connection between work, talent and duty. The vast majority of the world’s workers are not working because they love the job, but instead are simply providing for their loved ones, and they had little choice in the matter.

Kate Harris of The Washington Institute for Faith, Vocation & Culture has aptly pointed out that in today’s culture, the word vocation has been twisted from its original meaning of living one’s entire life in response to the call of God. Instead, for many it refers to an ideal job, one that forever seems over the rainbow. In my own experiences in Denver, I’ve found this to be the case as well. Mentioning the word vocation elicits a range of responses, mostly involving: “I feel called to…” or “I don’t feel called to…” The emphasis is on our personal feelings, self-fulfillment, and career preferences, not necessarily on hearing and obeying the voice of God.

Throughout its usage in Christian history vocation has rarely if ever meant “do what you love.” More often than not, the call of God was actually a call to suffer for the sake of others. Moses was called from the desert to free the Israelites from slavery, only to be burdened with the task of another 40 years of wandering the desert with a bunch of grumblers. Jeremiah was called to suffer as a prophet to the nations; a calling he rued later is his life. (“Cursed be the day I was born! May the day my mother bore me not be blessed!” [Jeremiah 20:14]). Paul was called to be the great apostle to the Gentiles, and God tells him through Ananias, “I will show him how much he must suffer for my name,” (Acts 9:16). Not exactly “do what you love.”

Of course, the biblical idea of calling is not for sake of suffering, it’s for the sake of Christ, and for the sake of serving others. This is why Tokumitsu’s critique is so ripe. There is a historical connection between being called, and using your gifts to serve the needs of others. For some this means doing what you love. But for most, it means doing what you must. It means using your skills to bring value and life to your community.

Is this life, this call to do what you must, inherently unsatisfying? I don’t believe so. My mother was a public school teacher in Hopkins, Minnesota for 35 years. Her days were long, and when she came home, she cooked, brought us to basketball practice, and most nights corrected papers for her third graders until she dozed off. Did she love it? Many days, yes. All the time? No way. Being a single mother supporting two kids is a life of duty and a life of service. It’s not one of self-actualization. But in the giving, my mother made a huge impact on the lives of my sister and myself.

Ironically, when we think about work, chasing after our own happiness will never bring us happiness. It is in serving others and pointing beyond ourselves that happiness is tossed in along the way. To find happiness, forget about passion. Give yourself to what the world needs. Or better yet, give yourself to God, and let him use you as He sees fit.

At the conclusion of Christopher Wright’s magisterial The Mission of God, he says, “I may wonder what kind of mission God has for me, when I should ask what kind of me God wants for his mission.” Exactly. But be prepared, this just may not be a job that you love.

This article first appeared on the Missio blog at The Washington Institute for Faith, Vocation, and Culture.

Illustration by Leslie A. Wood

Economy Finance

Review of Young Money

June 12, 2014

Today Christianity Today published my review of Kevin Roose’s Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street’s Post-Crash Recruits. The book was literally hard to put down. As Roose unfolds the experience of eight young college graduates at the world’s most powerful investment banks, he captures the reader with a haunting portrayal of work that in almost every way destroys a soul. If I ever needed motivation to build Denver Institute for Faith & Work, I need look no further.

Here’s the first part of the review:

Only halfway through his first year as a financial analyst at Goldman Sachs, an investment bank, Jeremy Miller-Reed fell into a deep depression. The 100-hour work weeks and endless Excel spreadsheets he could handle. But his boss, Penelope, he could not. Penelope looked like Julia Roberts but had the personality of Genghis Khan. Junior analysts dreaded her wrath. After assigning a 20-page memo to Jeremy over her vacation, she returned to find a single page missing. “You had all week to get this right!” she screamed. That night, Jeremy went to the roof of his apartment, lit up a joint, and cried in the rain, thinking to himself I can’t do this anymore.

In college, Jeremy, like most young financial analysts, was bright, motivated, and had high hopes. He graduated from Columbia University, and in the summer of 2010 was excited to begin a career at Goldman Sachs selling commodities—oil, gas, corn, wheat, precious metals. Lured by a starting salary of $70,000, plus bonuses of up to $50,000, he rationalized that a two-year stint as an investment banker would be good experience for a planned career in urban design or politics. It was a common decision among his peers. At Harvard in 2008, 28 percent of seniors headed into financial services, and at Princeton in 2006, it was a stunning 46 percent. But for Jeremy, it was a decision that would haunt him—as it would the sorry cast of Kevin Roose’s new book Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street’s Post-Crash Recruits.

From 2010-2013, Roose, a business writer for New York magazine, shadowed eight freshly minted investment bankers during their first two years on Wall Street, tracking their stories. From starry-eyed interns to disillusioned, exhausted, and depressed spreadsheet jockeys, Roose’s Young Money reads like a handbook for everything and anything than can go wrong with work.

Moral Black Hole

The work of young analysts is often mind-numbing. Most investment bank rookies spend days (and nights) creating “pitch books”—hundreds of pages of financial data for companies considering buying other companies. After hours of formatting cells, creating graphs, and producing Excel models, often pitch books would be blasted by bosses… (read more)

Culture Technology Theology Video Work

Keynote Addresses from Denver Institute

May 19, 2014

Well, I’m a bit biased here, but DIFW has been killin’ it lately. Here are keynote addresses from the past 6 months on the topics of technology, power, law, business and vocation. Enjoy.

https://vimeo.com/79194491

Craftsmanship & Manual Labor Work

How We Lost the Craftsman

April 24, 2014

It was a crisp, winter morning and I stood outside Manual High School, traditionally one of Denver’s lowest performing schools. Along with twelve other seminary students on an urban ministry site visit, we listened to our professor. “Manual is one of Denver’s oldest institutions,” he said, pointing to the brick edifice. “It opened in 1896, and was named Manual because it was originally intended as a vocational school to train students for manual labor.”

We quietly shook our heads in disbelief. How could educators have such low expectations for their students? Didn’t the founders believe all students could go to college? So great was our 21^st century disdain for manual labor that we naturally connected Manual High School’s low academic performance with its original intent: preparing students for the manual trades.

Americans today devalue manual labor with an almost righteous indignation. We can see it in our economy, in our schools, in our entertainment, and even in the church. And it’s causing all sorts of problems. Let’s take these one by one:

Economy. Consider these statistics. The average age of today’s tradesperson is 56, with an average of 5-15 years until retirement. As skilled laborers retire in masses, America will need an estimated 10 million new skilled tradesmen by 2020 (such as a pipefitters, masons, carpenters, or high-skilled factory workers). But even today, an estimated 600,000 jobs in the skilled trades are unfilled, while 83% of companies report a moderate to serious shortage in skilled laborers. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and BusinessWeek have all recognized the huge shortage we have of skilled laborers.

Schools. Across the US, as the need for skilled laborers has increased, the number of classes in “tech ed” – traditionally known as “shop class” – have all but disappeared. For example, in Jefferson County Public School District in Colorado, only three remaining schools have any kind of “tech ed” programs – of a district of over 84,000 students. And in Denver Public Schools, there are only two shop classes remaining – and one of them is currently selling all their equipment to local buyers. As high schools prepare youth to be “knowledge workers,” they unload lathes, table saws, and other “vocational ed” equipment in droves.

The assumption that every student should go to a four your liberal arts college has almost become sacrosanct for urban, suburban and rural students alike. Going to a two-year trade school is seen as a path for “average” to underperforming students. As educator Mike Rose has said in his book The Mind at Work about the cultural image of the tradesmen: “We are given the muscled arm, sleeve rolled tight against biceps, but no thought bright behind the eye, no image that links hands and brain.” Real thinking, our schools have taught us, happens in the office, not the shop. And today have a veritable mountain of student debt – an estimated $1.2 trillion in the US alone – and the lowest labor participation rate since 1978.

Culture. Even in entertainment, we’ve persistently devalued trade schools and community colleges. NBC’s satirical TV show “Community,” portrays American community colleges (which train many skilled tradesmen, among other professions) as the pit of the academic world. The show takes place at Greendale Community College, where “Straight A’s” are “Accessibility, Affordability, Air Conditioning, Awesome New Friends, and A lot of fun.” Perhaps community college is “a lot of fun,” but such merciless mocking finds its way into the future plans of high school students – plans to avoid trade schools and community college at all costs.

Church. In the past 5-10 years, there’s been a renewed interest among protestants in the topic of work. Three years ago Christianity Today launched the This Is Our City project, which profiled evangelicals working in various industries for “the common good” of their city. Tim Keller’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City has launched a “Center for Faith and Work.” Gabe Lyons’ Q Cities convenes conferences of culturally-minded evangelicals who work in industries like art, media or education. Conferences, books, and seminars on God and work have multiplied, and evangelicals in finance, business, technology, art, science and nonprofits have received renewed attention. But one sector has largely been overlooked: skilled manual labor.

James K.A. Smith, a professor of philosophy at Calvin College, recently wrote, “Do people show up to your ‘faith & work’ events in coveralls? With dirt under their nails? No? Then whose ‘work’ are we talking about?” Though surely not everybody in the modern economy will have “dirt under their nails” after a day’s work, he makes a good point: where are the examples plumbers, landscapers, carpenters, and electricians among this renewed interest in vocation? And more broadly, where are the examples of craftsman and “blue collar” workers who are intentionally living out their vocations in and through their trade? Are executives and professionals the only ones privileged enough to wed meaning with work?

All of this is strange for at least two reasons. First, we all depend on the work of craftsmen every single day. Whether it’s your HVAC repairman, plumber, or electrician, heat, clean water and even light flow as a direct result of their work. The work of the trades is of the utmost importance for nearly every aspect of modern life.

But as a Christian myself, this cultural situation strikes me as even more strange. After all, the Bible is replete with craftsmen – masons, goldsmiths, gem cutters, potters and weavers. The Bible even states that the first person explicitly filled with the Holy Spirit is Bezalel, whom God filled “with wisdom, with understanding, with knowledge and with all kinds of skills—to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze, to cut and set stones, to work in wood, and to engage in all kinds of crafts,” (Ex. 31:3-5). And, lest we forget, Jesus was a tekton, translated literally as “craftsman” or “one who works with his hands” (Mk. 6:3).

What has gone wrong here? How is it that we came to devalue the craftsman, to the detriment of our economy, schools, churches and culture? To find answers, we need to look to history.

Losing the Craftsman

Such a disdain for the trades was not always so. In the mid-nineteenth century, craftsmen were an integral part of the professional and scientific community. For example, the Mechanics Institutes of Britain had over 200,000 members, which hosted lectures that satisfied the intellectual curiosity of millwrights, metal workers, mechanics and other tradesmen with evening lectures by professors and scientists.

Likewise, in the 1884 book The Wheelwright’s Shop, George Sturt relates his experience of making carriage wheels from lumber. Previously a school teacher with literary ambitions, Sturt was enraptured with the challenges of shaping timber with hand tools: “Knots here, shakes there, rind-galls, waney edges, thicknesses, thinnesses, were for ever affording new chances or forbidding previous solutions, whereby a fresh problem confronted the workman’s ingenuity every few minutes.”

Manual labor was not only integral to scientific discovery, it attracted many of the best minds of its day. In the 18^th and 19^th century, some of history’s finest scientists – Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), James Watt (1736-1819), Samuel Crompton (1753-1827)– were also craftsmen who built what they designed, and knew no separation between working with the hands and the mind.

Yet the forces of industrialization were changing the skilled trades. Even as early as The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith marveled at the efficiencies of the factory: “One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head…Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins a day.” The division of labor could produce more pins in a day between ten people than one person alone could produce in a lifetime.

Although the factory had been around for generations, the automation of work took on a new dimension in 1911, when Frederick Winslow Taylor published his Principles of Scientific Management. As Matthew Crawford has pointed out, Taylor’s work focused on gathering the knowledge of craftsmen, organizing it into high efficiency processes, and then re-distributing that work to laborers as small parts of a larger whole. After extensive time and motion studies, Taylor was able to design processes, overseen by management, which allowed employers to cut labor costs by standardizing much manual labor. According to Taylor, “All possible brain work should be removed from the shop and centered in the planning or lay-out department.” Thus the previous harmony of craftsmen and thinker, skilled labor and scientist, began a long process of separation. A “white-collar” labor force of planners and “blue-collar” mass of workers began to emerge.

The positive side of mass manufacturing was unprecedented wealth creation. In 1913, Henry Ford’s assembly line was able to double worker wages and still produce cars more cheaply than his competitors, allowing thousands to afford an upgrade from a carriage to a Model T. Yet the negative side of automation was the monotonous routines for workers, which, according to Ford’s biographer, meant “every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personnel, it was necessary to hire 963.” Skilled craftsmen would simply walk off the line, with a sour taste for work that made them feel like machines themselves.

(Perhaps business philosopher Peter Drucker was right: “Machines work best if they do only one task, if they do it repetitively, and if they do the simplest possible task…[But] the human being…is a very poorly designed machine tool. The human being excels in coordination. He excels in relation perception to action. He works best if the entire human being, muscles, senses and mind, is engaged in the work.”)

At the turn of the 20^th century, engaging work seemed like it was being lost in the cogs of industry – and in the mean time, craft knowledge was bowing to mechanical processes.

In the days when Teddy Roosevelt was preaching the virtues of the strenuous life to East Coast elites, many felt education needed to change to ensure the survival of craft knowledge. Only 4 years after Ford’s assembly line, the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 gave federal funding for manual training. Yet because the bill established separate state boards for vocational education, it had the unintended effect of separating the trades from a liberal arts curriculum. General education would be focused on the liberal arts (college), and vocational education would focus on specific job skills (trade schools).

The advent of shop class began to track all “blue collar” work – whether the high skilled tradesmen or the low skilled assembly line worker – into a single category. Over time, shop class meant children of “white collar” workers could make a bird feeder or toy car in shop class, but they had little remaining skills of the craftsmen, which for centuries had been passed on through a process of apprenticeship.

We feel the lingering effects of this division between “vocational ed” and a liberal arts education today. Most of those who graduate with degrees in film studies, sociology, or even mathematics or physics haven’t the foggiest idea how to actually fix a car engine, build a table, or wire a light fixture.

Yet the greater effect is the enormous economic problem we now have before us – there are literally millions of “dirty jobs,” as Mike Rowe, the former host of the Discovery Channel Show, would call them. But swathes of young people would would never consider a career in plumbing or construction, despite evidence that these jobs both pay well and are here to stay. Computers and technology have certainly changed our labor force (and will continue to change the economy, as a recent article in The Economist convincingly argues), but they will never change the fact that we live in a physical world – and we will always need physical things because we are physical beings. We will always depend fundamentally on the physical goods – whether made or repaired – that are the unique domain of the craftsman.

Signs of Hope

What is to be done about this problem? Although this is a monumental challenge, we can do at least two things. First, praise examples of excellent craftsmanship – from chefs and jewelers to masons and electricians – that arise from above the criticism and display an ethic of skill, beauty and manual intelligence in their work.

For example, every four years, France hosts the Meilleurs Ouvriers de France (MOF) competition. One event features a fierce three-day competition between 16 international pastry chefs jockeying for the blue, white and red striped collar that signifies culinary excellence. Chefs are judged on artistry – the visual appearance of the desserts, buffets and, for example, sugar sculptures – taste – entries have very specific size and ingredient specifications – and work – how clean and efficiently the chefs work; including spotless aprons, no waste (exact planning is required), immaculate kitchens. Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker, producers of the documentary “Kings of Pastry” said in an interview , “The idea of recognizing excellence in manual trades and elevating them to a status equal to intellectual or academic fields is what is uniquely important about the MOF Competition” (emphasis mine). Indeed, Meilleurs Ouvriers de France, when translated, is “Best Craftsman in France,” a title won only by the finest chefs exhibiting the highest levels of skill and manual intelligence. And France’s competition isn’t just limited to chefs; there are also competitions for stonemasonry, plumbing, tailoring, weaving, cabinetmaking, soldering, glassblowing, diamond-working, and a host of other trades.

In America, Tad Landis Meyers, a photographer, recently published Portraits of the American Craftsman – a stunningly beautiful photo journal of the work of a “lost generation of craftsman.” Scotty Bob Carlson of Silverton, Colorado makes hand-crafted skis; Nell Ann McBroom of Nocona, Texas cuts, dies and sews baseball gloves; Steinway and Sons Pianos in Long Island New York makes pianos “designed to last not just for years, but for generations.” Meyers’ five year journey of photographing American craftsmen has revealed an almost forgotten way of life, defined by careful skill, mastery of the physical world, and satisfying work. Brett Hull of Hull Historical Millwork in Fort Worth Texas says, “The simplicity of the clean lines or the intricacy of the detail are exciting to me. It’s something that just fills my soul.”

But praising excellent craftsmanship can also be more commonplace. Drop a laudatory comment to the construction worker who’s laying pavement; marvel at a gang of conduit that winds itself above light fixtures; choose to buy a table that will last not for years but generations. The simple act of recognition is powerful.

But second, and most importantly, encourage more young people to go to trade school. That’s what more people are doing around Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. They recently announced a $2.5 million dollar grant to expand training programs for high-wage, high-demand manufacturing jobs. And with a a 95 percent job placement rate, minimal student debt, and jobs like an industrial apprentice that can start at $60,000 with full benefits, more students are taking a look at choosing trade school over a 4 year college degree.

I’m not encouraging more young people to be vocational mercenaries (go get the quick money!), but for those students who nod off in British literature (God forbid) but come alive when rebuilding an engine, we must acknowledge that some people are designed to be builders – and that’s okay. It may even get them a better job than their peers who end up as debt ridden, college-educated baristas who can make a mean latte, but find trouble getting into a career.

The craftsman lives on – yet still in the corners culture more enamored with the virtual world than the physical world. But for the sake of our economy, schools, culture and even our churches, we would profit to once again appreciate our culture’s makers and fixers – the craftsmen.

Photo: American Craftsman Project

This essay first appeared in The City, a publication of Houston Baptist University. Also, Chris Horst and myself have a feature essaying coming out in Christianity Today this summer on the topic of craftsmanship and the gospel.

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Craftsmanship & Manual Labor

Knotted Dreams: A Carpenter’s Story

April 2, 2014

Josh Mabe led me behind his shop. “It’s a mess back here,” he said. What I saw was not your typical Home Depot fare: old railroad carts, wine barrels, deserted barn doors, discarded flooring from nineteenth century homes, planks from the bed of a semi-truck trailer – each piece had a common theme: it had been abandoned by somebody else.

But for Mabe, each piece of discarded lumber is the object of his craft, an opportunity to bring life from decay. Josh is the owner of Twenty1Five, a small furniture business specializing in reclaimed wood located in Palmer Lake, Colorado, nestled at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. Josh, a carpenter and craftsmen, has attracted state-wide attention. Rocky Mountain PBS, 5280, a Denver magazine, and Luxe magazine have praised his attention to sustainability and “upcycling” – creating new products from used materials.

Yet it’s the products themselves that turn heads. His tables are a mosaic of shape, texture and color. He can turn drab boardrooms into a collage of natural beauty, and sterile kitchens into a wild array of Mountain West history. Each cabinet, door, and coffee table is invested with slow, careful skill.

[easyrotator]erc_33_1395890583[/easyrotator]

“I’ve always enjoyed working with my hands,” Mabe recalls. After college he taught shop class for eleven years at a public school. A retiring co-worker would leave scrap wood behind the school and collected scraps from local contractors – “what people would consider ugly wood.” But Mabe, unable to part with the discarded lumber, took it home and built a table for his wife from the “reclaimed” wood. The table caught the attention of his neighbors, but initially nothing came of it.

Until September 29, 2011.

For financial reasons, Mabe took a job selling insurance. “But I was dying on the vine,” he told his wife, lamenting the confines of an office. “But that day,” Mabe recalls,” I distinctly remember God telling me, ‘Go, make tables. And in two weeks I’ll bring you orders.’” That Monday, he went to his shop and began to build. Orders came in. Word began to spread, and Twenty1Five was born.

This process of restoration inspired the name Twenty1Five, which is from Revelation 21:5, where Jesus says: “Behold, I make all things news.” Their name peaks curiosity with both Christian and non-believing clients. Yet he tells the story faithfully just the same. And so far, sharing the gospel as he shares about his craft has not yet cost him any customers.

Mabe travels to abandoned barns, weary homesteads, and to the forgotten corners of rural Colorado. He works with customers to “source” each piece of discarded lumber, ultimately to be refashioned into a dining room table, door, or TV stand. He offers custom booklets to customers that tell the knotted history of each piece of furniture he crafts in his shop – the lifespan of lumber that served, was forgotten, and finally renewed. And in so doing he shares a subtle tale of redemption – of buying back the useless, of uncovering hidden beauty.

Knotted Dreams

Yet Mabe’s story has not been without challenges. The first challenge was embracing a call to be a tradesmen in a culture that has abandoned shop class and “tech ed” in favor of a virtual world.

Mabe had been a teacher in the Jefferson County Public School District, a district with less than three schools remaining that teach tech ed – and one with more than 80,000 students. As high schools prepare youth to be “knowledge workers,” they unload lathes, table saws, and other “vocational ed” equipment in favor of iPads, smart devices, and entrance into four-year liberal arts colleges.

Though Josh attended college, it was always in the shop rather than the classroom that he found his gifting. “Coming from a school system that so pushes college down kid’s throats —,” Josh paused, as if to remember his first grade son. “I have a son who’s so wired to build…I just want to cultivate that and honor the gift that God has given him.”

Yet even as educators emphasize preparing students for an “information economy,” employers are yearning for skilled tradesmen. In 2012, Manpower Group reported 53 percent of American skilled-trade workers were 45 years of age and older, and nearly 18.6 percent were between 55 and 64. As America’s plumbers, electricians, steelworkers, machinists and carpenters retire, America will need an additional 10 million skilled tradesmen by 2020. Even today, 83% of companies report a moderate to serious shortage in skilled laborers.

But an economic demand for tradesmen doesn’t guarantee a smooth career path. Since our interview in October 2013, more knots have emerged in Mabe’s story. Last fall, his business partner, Randy Valentine, decided to move on. Randy did the marketing and business development, and Josh made the furniture. But now, as the sole owner of Twenty1Five, Josh had to renegotiate his dream. His wife went back to work full-time, and Josh now works part-time. He drives his kids to and from school each day, and fills orders as he’s able.

But the knots in Mabe’s story have not dampened his dreams for Twenty1Five. “I still have big dreams,” says Mabe, “but I now hold them more lightly.” In his earlier days as an entrepreneur, the vision held a tighter grip on his heart. But now, with hands held open, he trusts God will provide and continue to lead the way in his vocational journey.

Thinking back to the advent of his business, Mabe recalls, “What really spurred us on was the story that parallels between our lives and what we do. Most of this stuff,” pointing to a knotted board, “is beat up and has got scars, and is discarded lumber. But if you take that stuff and see beyond some of those scars, you can make something really beautiful out of it.”

Josh Mabe is speaking at the April 11 dinner event with Amy Sherman. To hear Josh’s story in person, you can register by clicking here.