Non-Holy Work - Christianity Today

This month’s cover package reminds us with both contemporary examples (“The Mission of Business,” page 24) and theological insight (“Work Is Our Mission,” page 30) that all work is holy. As Uwe Siemon-Netto writes, “[W]e perform our priestly duties by going to the polls and running for election, by cooking for our families and doing the bookkeeping, by cutting someone’s hair. …”

For my birthday recently, my wife bought me a gift certificate to a local hair salon. She apparently thought that my barber was not doing his priestly duty well. When my new stylist was done, I could see her point, and I was reminded of what a service—and even a gift to one’s wife—a simple haircut can be.

Most would assume that the people at Christianity Today don’t need to be reminded of the holiness of their work. After all, we’re “A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction” that thinks and writes about Christianity. Indeed, we begin each week with a prayer meeting, and whenever someone embarks on a major journey (like designer Gary Gnidovic’s and editor Rob Moll’s recent trips to China), we gather to ask for God’s blessings on their journeys. Seems holy enough to most people.

But what I’ve discovered both as an editor of a religious magazine and as a former pastor is that a lot of holy work boils down to non-holy work done well.

Take pastoring: It is indeed about the “cure of souls,” but the calling requires one to perform myriad soulless tasks well. To be a good pastor, you need to be able to balance a budget, run meetings, proof newsletters, manage worship-flow, and most importantly, remember to mention Mrs. Hansen’s granddaughter’s graduation in the announcements. These are the sorts of things anyone managing an organization has to be proficient at. A pastor’s calling is, in many ways, very secular.

Or take putting out a magazine: Our editors, designers, and administrators actually spend very little time thinking about God (thank God). Editors ponder such transcendent realities as passive constructions and run-on sentences. Designers like to meditate on color palettes and font sizes. Administrators fill their hours plowing through e-mails and opening packages of books. It’s all so non-holy. Yet because the staff is driven to do non-holy tasks well, God seems to bless our ministry.

• • •

One way God continues to bless this ministry is by sending us people who do non-holy work well, as in the case of our new assistant editor, Katelyn Beaty, a recent Calvin College graduate who assumes the role of copy editor. Talk about a non-holy calling. A copy editor is someone who really cares about the difference between restrictive and non-restrictive clauses, and when gospel is capitalized (when it refers to one of the four Gospels) and when it is not (when it refers to the Christian message). Fortunately, Katelyn cares, which will make her a fine copy editor. And that too is a holy calling. As another writer put it describing a copy editor he knew: “[She was] a copy editor, possessed of the rare capacity to sit all day in a small cubicle, like a monk in a cell, and read with an almost penitential rigor.”