It’s one thing to embrace customer service. It’s quite another to live a life of sacrificial service.

Jesus calls his followers to “take up your cross and follow me.” Peter wrote that serving as Christ did will entail suffering (1 Peter 2:21). It’s one thing to follow Christ when things are going well. But, in the words of biblical scholar Bruce Waltke, how many of us would qualify as the “righteous” – those willing to advantage others, even if it means disadvantaging ourselves?

People who commit to sacrificial service of a community through their work are rare. New York Times Columnist David Brooks wrote in his book The Road to Character that the median “narcissism score” has risen in the last two decades. When young people were asked about whether they agree with statements like “I am an extraordinary person,” or “I like to look at my body,” Brooks says, “Ninety-three percent of young people score higher than the middle score just twenty years ago” — they score about 30 percent higher, to be exact.[i] Behind the thin veil of careers with social impact is often the Almighty Self, ever ready to find the perfect mix of social impact, comfortable work hours, and financial reward in “meaningful work.” Especially since the pandemic, I believe the willingness to sacrifice for a cause greater than ourselves is diminishing.[ii] Especially if it costs us.

Yet, meaningful work is found not in success or financial reward, but in sacrificial service. When people struggle to find a cause worth sacrificing for, boredom and meaninglessness tend to creep in. “Far too many people in this country seem to go about only half alive. All their existence is an effort to escape from what they are doing,” writes author and dramatist Dorothy Sayers about how most people view their work. “And the inevitable result of this is a boredom, a lack of purpose, a passivity which eats life away at the heart and a disillusionment which prompts men to ask what life is all about.”[iii]

People need a reason to sacrifice for something beyond themselves. It’s what puts wind in sails, feet on the ground, and energy in a workday. Paradoxically, what we’re really looking for is the right cross to bear, not the best throne from which to rule.

We live in a cultural moment in which there are multiple issues calling for sacrificial work. Take, for example, the growing inequality in American society. In 1989, the Federal Reserve Reports that the bottom 50% held $22 billion in wealth while the top 10% held $1.7 trillion. Fast forward to 2021, and the bottom 50% held $260 billion in wealth while the top 10% swelled to $36 trillion.[iv] To make that clearer, the top 1% of US households has 15 times more wealth than the bottom 50% of households combined.[v] The simmering discontent and anger so prevalent in American society has its root, I believe, in millions of people seeing the wealthy get much wealthier — even in the last 20 years — while their standard of living stagnates or declines.

And yet, some decide that sacrificial love for others trumps personal comfort.

Julie (Sapp) Stone works as an investment director focused on family economic mobility at Gary Community Investments, a philanthropic organization in Denver. Before that she worked at Teach for America, an organization that places talented young teachers in low-income schools. Bright, energetic, connected, and committed, Julie was deeply formed by Catholic social teaching, which motivates her work on behalf of low-income families. When I asked Julie about her commitment to issues around justice, I was surprised to learn it didn’t come from academic study. Rather, it came from growing up at a truck stop on the Wyoming-Nebraska border.

Julie’s grandpa and his brothers were Depression-era survivors who bought a car dealership, which turned into car leasing and eventually into a small truck stop chain headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska. Her dad became the general manager of Sapp Bros. Cheyenne Travel Center, and her mom the store manager. The establishment employed over 100 people between a motel, gas station, restaurant, and store. Julie grew up just a few miles away and started to work in the family business alongside her brother at just age five, picking up trash around the truck stop because of her parent’s pride in their work. As she grew, she waited tables, stocked shelves, and served the truckers. Her dad would famously pause mid-bite while eating in the restaurant to check out a customer after their dinner because “nobody should have to wait to pay.”

“I’ll pound the table in defense of truck drivers. They are an extraordinary community,” Julie says. “They’re hard working, responsible, God fearing, family centered, and make tremendous sacrifices for their work.” Julie pauses, with almost reverence in her voice. “My dad always trusted that I’d be okay at the truck stop, whether he was there or not. Truckers know that their actions reflect on other drivers, which creates a sense of shared responsibility. If there was ever a conflict or a tactless comment, without fail, another driver would step in and sort things out.”

Sapp Bros. was employee-owned, provided full healthcare coverage, and even paid for college tuition, which was practically unheard of in the 1980s. Julie’s parents believed that their job was to lead and serve their employees sacrificially. “I remember one Christmas my dad had it out with corporate. Since the combined portfolio of travel stations didn’t turn a profit that year, there would be no Christmas bonuses,” she recalls. “I watched my mom and dad divide their past and future paychecks to make bonuses happen for the Cheyenne employees.”

Julie believes her parents’ leadership was built on love. “At the end of the day Mom and Dad recognized that each employee was giving of their time and talent to help make our company successful. My parents were genuinely grateful for their people, which explains why so many who were hired on opening day in 1983 were still there when I graduated from college in 2003.”

Julie’s commitment to justice today isn’t abstract. She sees the faces of those who worked for her parents for 30 years in front-line jobs — people of enormous integrity. “I see working families first. They show up for the physical work. They provide services and make products the rest of us rely on, they almost always go unnoticed. These are the families whose sacrifices benefit us all.”[vi]

***

This is an excerpt from my new book Working from the Inside Out: A Brief Guide to Inner Work That Transforms Our Outer World (IVP, 2023). Buy a copy or listen to the audio book today.

[i] David Brooks, The Road to Character (New York: Penguin Random House, 2016).

[ii] See my article: Jeff Haanen, “Where Are All the Workers?” Comment, September 1, 2022, https://comment.org/where-are-all-the-workers/.

[iii] Dorothy Sayers, “Vocation in Work,” quoted in: William C. Placher, Callings: Twenty Centuries of Christian Wisdom on Vocation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).

[iv] See: The Rationale, Ownership Works,https://ownershipworks.org/the-rationale/.

[v] Tommy Beer, “Top 1% of U.S. Households Hold 15 Times More Wealth than Bottom 50% Combined,” Forbes, October 8, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2020/10/08/top-1-of-us-households-hold-15-times-more-wealth-than-bottom-50-combined/?sh=3067585a5179.

[vi] Candidly, this was my favorite interview in the book. A special thank you to Julie Stone for sharing her story, and for her beautiful revisions.

Craftsmanship & Manual Labor Culture Economy Faith and Work Movement Vocation Work

“God of the Second Shift: The Missing Majority in the Faith and Work Conversation” (Christianity Today Cover Story)

September 27, 2018

By Jeff Haanen

The following is the cover story for the October 2018 print issue of Christianity Today. To access the full article for free, click the “friends and family” link below. Also, if you’re not a subscriber, please consider subscribing to Christianity Today to support their work. Here’s an excerpt of the story.

Our group was white, college-educated, and passionate about helping people find meaning in their careers. We looked at Josué “Mambo” De León, pastor of a bilingual working-class congregation called Westside Church Internacional, eager to hear his thoughts on a recent “faith and work” conference.

“For us, work isn’t about thriving,” Mambo said. “It’s about surviving.”

Between bites of salad, it slowly became clear who the man in a red baseball cap, World Cup T-shirt, and jeans really was: an emissary from another world.

“You start with the premise that you have a job and that you feel a lack of purpose,” he said. “But that doesn’t resonate with us. How are you supposed to find purpose and flourish when you don’t even have opportunities?”

On my way home from the office of the nonprofit I run, Denver Institute for Faith & Work, I stewed over Mambo’s comments. They reminded me of a similar conversation I’d had with Nicole Baker Fulgham, president of an educational reform group called The Expectations Project. Baker Fulgham, an African American working with low-income kids, asked me bluntly: “So when do we start talking about faith, work, and life for fast-food employees?”

In the past decade, the faith and work movement has exploded. Hundreds of new conferences, books, and organizations have sprung up from San Diego to Boston. But there’s a growing anxiety among Christian leaders that our national vocation conversation has a class problem.

A hundred years ago, partnerships between clergy and labor unions flourished. Yet as the forces of industrialization transformed the trades in the late 19th century, and vocational education and liberal arts schools parted ways, a new mantra for the college-educated took root: “Do what you love.” The late Steve Jobs, in a 2005 Stanford commencement speech, stated, “You’ve got to find what you love. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.” Work done out of necessity was devalued, and eventually conversations about Christianity and work applied the word vocation mostly to college kids contemplating work they would most enjoy.

Today, when American evangelical leaders talk about work, the working class—which is two-thirds of the American workforce—is largely absent. What are we missing?

Daily Meaning or Daily Humiliations?

Years ago, I started Denver Institute after reading Studs Terkel’s 1971 classic Working, an oral history of working-class Americans. Work, Terkel says, “is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”

Of course! I thought. This fit well with my graduate school angst (and growing boredom with my assignments). I liked the quote so much that I put it in my email signature.

But somewhere along the way, I forgot that Terkel also believed work was centrally about “violence—to the spirit as well as the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations.”

This didn’t sound like the workplaces I was used to. But the tension between Terkel’s two statements has started to resonate with me. In the past five years, we in Denver have hosted thousands of doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and other young professionals at our events. But there’s been a conspicuous absence of home care workers, retail sales clerks, landscapers, janitors, or cooks.

Calvin College philosopher James K. A. Smith—who once pulled 10-hour graveyard shifts on an air filter assembly line—observes, “The bias of the [faith and work] conversation toward professional, ‘creative,’ largely white-collar work means that many people who undertake manual or menial labor simply don’t see themselves as having a voice in this conversation.”

It may be time to do some soul-searching. Have we, by which I mean myself and presumably many of this magazine’s readers, seen the culture-shaping power of work but been blind to the “daily humiliations” of those whose work we depend on each day? Have we been interpreting Scripture through our own professional class bias and failed to ask how working-class Americans think and feel about their work?

The Great Divide

“Because hard work was such a high value for our family, it was also demoralizing,” says pastor Jim Mullins of Redemption Church in Tempe, Arizona. “One of the most difficult aspects of growing up was not the lack of money but the shame that would come with not having opportunities. That shame would boil into anger. I think a lot of the drug use and alcohol [use] that we experienced was a sort of numbing of the shame.”

Mullins’s story echoes the stories of millions of working-class Americans who have seen life deteriorate over the past 50 years in nearly every economic and social category. (I use the term “working-class” to mean those without a four-year college degree.)

The growing body of research is astounding…

(Read the rest of the article at Christianity Today.)

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

Jeff Haanen

blue collar

Sacrificial Service & the Sapp Bros. Cheyenne Travel Center

“God of the Second Shift: The Missing Majority in the Faith and Work Conversation” (Christianity Today Cover Story)

The Handcrafted Gospel