Seven Deadly Sins Against Whole Life Stewardship
One of the great treasures from the Roman Catholic tradition is its longstanding list of the Seven Deadly Sins (e.g.: Envy, Greed, Gluttony, Anger, Sloth, Lust, and Pride). Even with its limitations, such as isolating only a few areas of failure, this teaching has highlighted human tendencies that offend God, and harm us. It has been a good teaching tool for young disciples.
I want to do a similar thing for the marketplace ministry movement. Here is my adaptation of the seven deadly sins concept as it impacts whole life stewardship or ministry-in-daily-life.
1. Clericalism
This is the longstanding and all-too-popular view that the “kingdom of God on earth” is basically, if not exclusively, developed by professional ministers, monks, missionaries, and martyrs, not the everyday believers, whose church job in the established church is to faithfully support and follow the “full-time religious professionals.”
Antidote: Restore “ministry” as the calling, privilege, and responsibility of every child of God and re-write the job descriptions of our pastor/teachers as equippers of all the people of God for ministry in all places at all times. (Eph. 4:11-17) Oppose the professionalization of ministry that isolates its responsibilities to a few paid professionals. (For help here I strongly prescribe Richard C. Halverson’s How I Changed My Mind About The Church, Zondervan, 1972 and Yves Congar’s Called to Life: A Study for a Theology of the Laity, Crossroad, 1987.)
2. Laicization
Labeling 95% of God’s people with the term laity is devastating. Webster’s Dictionary says, “Laity means uninformed and not involved.” What better way to de-motivate and marginalize God’s everyday saints and undercut their calling to deliver salt, light, and leaven into the world’s systems of family, community, and work. It is as if God’s enemy designed a way to thwart God’s creation and redemptive mandates for the church by establishing a two-tier structure with His body — the church.
Antidote: Stop using this demeaning description and recover terms like “people of God,” “believers,” “followers,” “disciples,” and “servants” as descriptors of our beloved communities of faith. (For help here see: Bill Diehl’s Thank God, It’s Monday, Fortress Press, 1982; R. Paul Stevens, Liberating The Laity: Equipping All The Saints for Ministry, InterVarsity Press, 1985; and Droel & Pierce, Confident & Competent: A Challenge to Catholic Laity, Ave Maria Press, 1987.)
3. “Calling” Is Professionalized
The view that only official employees of the church are “Called” by God is not biblical. And it is wrong and very destructive to the practice of faith in everyday life.
Antidote: Renew our understanding that in the Bible Calling is primarily used to emphasize God’s invitation to all lost sinners to return to him and be restored to the “image and likeness” of our creation, so that we can be managers/stewards of all our resources for God and humanity. (For help here, see Os Guinness’ The Call, Finding and Fulfilling The Central Purpose of Your Life, Word, 1999 and Bob Briner’s Roaring Lambs: A Gentle Plan to Radically Change Our World, Zondervan, 1993.)
4. Church-ism
The institutional captivity of the people of God as only being “church” when we are gathered in buildings we own and meetings that are led by church or religious professionals is biblically unsupported and historically filled with abuse. We need to believe and behave like we are the people of God or church 24/7.
Antidote: Break out of our edifice complex and institutional captivity and affirm to all believers that they are the church in both its gathered life and its scattered service. (For help here see Loren Mead’s The Once And Future Church: Reinventing The Congregation for a New Mission Frontier, Alban Institute, 1991.)
5. Work Is Cursed
The “Thank God It’s Friday” (TGIF) syndrome of the American culture thrives when believers slip into viewing jobs and work as the result or sentence from the “Curse” in Genesis 3. In conforming to this distortion, we join the secular mind that views work as a long dark tunnel between leisure weekends or the necessary evil we have to suffer to gain resources for fun and leisure pursuits.
Antidote: Remember that Adam and Eve worked before the fall and that work was assessed by God as “…very good!” Then celebrate the truth that our DNA is that we are designed to be workers like God (Gen 1:1-31), and that the curse has impacted, but not irrevocably, damaged work. (For help here see: Robert Bank’s God The Worker: Journeys Into The Mind, Heart and Imagination of God, Judson Press, 1994; John C. Haughey’s Converting 9 to 5: A Spirituality of Daily Work, Crossroad, 1989; and David McKenna’s Love Your Work: Your Daily Work Can Be a Great Spiritual Resource, Victor, 1990.)
6. Privatized and Institutionalized Spirituality
To isolate spirituality to just personal devotion, church activity, and religious volunteerism is wrong, unbiblical and reductionist. It is not God’s wish that He be compartmentalized and reduced to being like a rabbit’s foot, used only as a charm for some very select portions of life we identify as religious or “spiritual.”
Antidote: Recover biblical truths like avodah, the Hebrew word that describes both worship and work as devotion to God. State that the ancient and dangerous “sacred-secular” divide is a lie and a contradiction of “God so loving the world that he gave….” to bring salvation, redemption, and renewal to all of creation so that we might develop examples of “The kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven” for all to see and join. (For help here see Laura Nash, Believers In Business, Thomas Nelson, 1994 and “Work” in the Word In Life Study Bible, Thomas Nelson, 1998.)
7. Limited Lordship
To reduce Jesus’ rule and reign to a few leftovers drains him and his authority over all creation. But we do practice “Limited Lordship” in several ways. These “leftovers for Jesus” include: money (only 10% belongs to God, and that actually only happens for a minority of believers!); time (only 1/7 of the week is labeled “the Lord’s Day,” and less during professional football season); real estate (Only a few buildings in town are identified as “the Lord’s House”); and work (Only when we are paid religious professionals or volunteering in religious service so we call it “The Lord’s Work”). This really illustrates the point of J. B. Phillips Your God Is Too Small, MacMillan Publishing, 1955.
Antidote: Rediscover Jesus as “Lord of all” including broken families, dangerous communities, and challenging job environments, as well as troublesome leaders, bosses, and employees. Train ourselves to engage these contexts with the intention of finding how God is already at work in the world, and then design our activities to compliment, extend, and add evidence of the kingdom to this ongoing “moving upon the waters….” (Gen 1:2) (For help here see Leland Ryken’s Redeeming The Time: A Christian Approach to Work and Leisure, Baker Books, 1995, and Work and Leisure in Christian Perspective, Multnomah, 1987.)
A final point about sin and evil: We must take seriously the pervasive and subtle reality of evil and sin, and avoid over-simplifying its presence and power in all of life. The tendency for evangelicals to name just a few things as sin (adultery, pride, some addictions, greed, laziness, etc.) and assume that all else is neutral is naive and dangerous. We have our own blind-sides or our own “Seven Deadly Sins” too. To have a few personal failures define evil is a serious mistake. It blinds us to major evils like discrimination, ethnocentrism, environmental destruction, greed, oppression, poverty, war, and violence, etc.
One of the best resources available for this journey is Robert Banks and R. Paul Stevens Complete Book of Everyday Christianity, InterVarsity Press, 1997. This work is one of the top five best resources out of almost 2000 books in this field of holistic faith practiced every day in all contexts of life. It is in a Bible dictionary or encyclopedic format with over 400 articles about faith in all of life. It is currently out of print, but copies can sometimes be found by doing a web search. We also have about a hundred articles from this book on our website: www.ivmdl.org.
Let’s name our diseases, begin treating them, and thereby bring joy to God, obedience to Jesus and responsiveness to the Holy Spirit in all of life.
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Pete Hammond is vice president at large for InterVarsity. He is also the founder and director of InterVarsity’s Ministry in Daily Life.