How Can the Church Encourage Vocational Stewardship?
Religion & Liberty Online

How Can the Church Encourage Vocational Stewardship?

One of the major focuses of On Call in Culture is to remind Christians that discipleship doesn’t end when Sunday service concludes. Yet in going about our daily work, we should also be careful that we don’t neglect the important role the church can fill when it comes to matters of vocational stewardship and daily cultural engagement.

Over at (re)integrate, Dr. Amy Sherman, author of Kingdom Calling: Vocational Stewardship for the Common Good, offers ten suggestions for how the church might encourage whole-life discipleship and vocational stewardship:

1. During corporate worship services, pray for members by vocation. This could take a variety of expressions:

  • pray aloud for a different occupational group (e.g., educators or businesspeople) each week
  • invite congregants who are facing difficulties on the job to come forward during or after the service for prayer
  • pray for individual members by name and vocation

2. Visit church members at their places of work.

3. Recognize vocational achievements and awards of congregants in the church’s newsletter or on its website.

4. Offer an adult education class that helps participants discern the dimensions of their vocational power (skills, networks, etc.) and gets them talking about how to deploy that power to advance Kingdom foretastes in and through their work.

5. Encourage the church’s small groups to incorporate regular times of discussion and prayer focused on members’ work lives.

Read the rest of her suggestions here.

To join the On Call in Culture community, like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

Joseph Sunde

Joseph Sunde's work has appeared in venues such as the Foundation for Economic Education, First Things, The Christian Post, The Stream, Intellectual Takeout, Patheos, LifeSiteNews, The City, Charisma News, The Green Room, Juicy Ecumenism, Ethika Politika, Made to Flourish, and the Center for Faith and Work, as well as on PowerBlog. He resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with his wife and four children.