Faith and work

I'm reading a biography on Charles Schulz by David Michaelis and finding the life of the most influential cartoonist of the 20th century to be quite interesting.

Specifically, I find it interesting that Schulz was struggling with many of the same issues of his faith and church in the 1960s that I hear now in the emerging church movement. Having had a conversion experience in his early adulthood and then becoming an active member of the Church of God, he became less enamored with institutionalized religion, but seemingly not with God, as he became older.

I may or may not have blogged about another book I read awhile back by Dennis Bakke, Joy at Work, where Bakke talks about the value placed by the church on different kinds of work - missionaries up at the top, then pastors, then lay ministries, and then way at the bottom is the kind of work that has, in the church's eyes, no spiritual significance, but is where most of us spend the vast majority of our hours. Bakke questioned this hierarchy, and encourages the view that all of our work has spiritual significance.

Likewise, Shulz often felt that his work was not appreciated as being important or significant. He was once introduced to the wife of a new pastor as the man who wrote Peanuts, and she said, "Oh, what other work do you do?" In 1967 he said, "I draw [Peanuts] because it is the one thing which I feel I do best, and I can see no reason why I should give up drawing the comic strip in order to go to the mission field, for instance, and become a terrible missionary or to study for the ministry and become a terrible minister, merely because the ministry would seem to be closer to spiritual things. I think it's much better to be a good cartoonist than a terrible minister."

I know I was also swallowed up for a time by the belief that any effort is only really important if it results in "souls being saved". It was a narrow view that was ultimately very unsatisfactory, because most of us are suited for occupations that are far removed from formal ministry, and have little time and/or little natural ability for lay ministry. But yet the things we're good at may be totally unappreciated by the very people who are most important to us, our faith community. I think the distance that many people find growing between themselves and the institutional forms of religion they have been a part of is probably necessary so that we can start to appreciate that when we do what we are best at (assuming what we are best at is moral), it is good, it is God-pleasing.