Book Brief: Whatever You Do
Six Foundations for an Integrated Life
Brief Summary
Title: Whatever You Do: Six Foundations for an Integrated Life
Editor: Luke Bobo
Published: 2019 by Made To Flourish
What It Teaches: Whatever You Do explores how we can pursue integrating our faith into our life through six theological themes: the Bible’s grand narrative, redemption and renewal, personal wholeness, flourishing-minded work, economic wisdom, and the local church.
When To Use It: Whatever You Do is a thoughtful and thought-inspiring book. Christians seeking to integrate their faith more holistically into their life will likely find some ideas and concepts here that will help them on that journey.
Brief Review
Made to Flourish is a ministry focused on helping local churches help their people integrate their faith into their work lives. I like that. They are also located in the same town as me, but I have seen them having a global impact. So they’ve been on my radar for awhile. One of their ads in a national magazine offered a box full of resources for free, so I filled out the form. Whatever You Do was in the box that arrived.
Whatever You Do is a theologically-rich book. Three of the six authors are theology professors at major Christian universities. They don’t shy away from Scripture and its application to work. To be sure, there were a few phrases or sentences that had me slightly uncomfortable theologically, but for the most part I was comfortable with their presentation of Biblical truths.
That doesn’t mean the content is unchallenging.
The book’s introduction talks about the sacred versus secular divide which many have discussed before, but it doesn’t let us stop there: “while we may agree that we shouldn’t have a sacred/secular divide, we might unknowingly hold a spiritual versus material divide, a soul versus body divide, a for-profit versus non-profit divide, or an individual salvation versus cosmic renewal of all things divide.”
The first chapter makes the point that many churches reduce the Bible’s story from four great acts down to a much simpler two. Most churches, and therefore most christians focus purely on the fall and redemption (we are sinners and we need a savior). These two acts are critical, but they don’t tell the complete story. The two acts left out are creation (God made everything good, including work) and consummation (Jesus will return to make all things new, including work).
Chapter three talks about “personal wholeness”. Early in the chapter the author makes the point that “what out increasingly secular, post-modern, post-Christian society is coming to re-realize is that economic, political, and social systems that affect huge swaths of our lives are themselves, like it or not, inherently moral realities…. We must maintain a vivid understanding of what is good and bad, right and wrong, true and false in order to live good lives.” The focus on the chapter is on the “goodness” of leaders and the author lays a heavy charge at the feet of churches: “Our evangelical institutions (churches, universities, seminaries, parachurch organizations, etc.) have, for some time now, largely overlooked the subject of personal, moral character formation. We, and many of our most ‘successful’ institutions have tended to focus on evangelism, and/or numerical/financial growth, to the detriment of robust discipleship.” He blames this, at least in part, on an overemphasis on justification and an underemphasis on sanctification.
The author of the fourth chapter starts by making the observation that, no matter how much we talk about the goodness of work, most Christians “tend to regard their employment as jobs that put food on the table and pay the bills but not as a vocation or dimension of flourishing (flourishing is what happens once one is off from work in this view).” He lays the charge at the feet of local churches where “the approaches to the formation of Christians is disconnected from work. This kind of formation of Christians is incomplete and makes it difficult to see the significance of matters often regarded as non-spiritual…” He goes on to describe our redemption through Christ as a “re-humanizing” event that breaths into all of our life, including our work.
The next chapter carries these same themes into areas that can often be divisive, partisan, or ideological. This is hard, but our guide is the Word of God. The final chapter, by pastor and Made To Flourish founding president Tom Nelson brings it all back to the local church as God’s plan for supporting human flourishing through our work.
Bottom Line: Whatever You Do does not shy away from digging into theological topics and applying them to the world of work. It calls us all out, as individual Christians and as local churches, and challenges us to think deeply about how the Bible’s grand story, and God’s call on our lives, translates into our daily work. The book doesn’t try to provide specific answers, but rather helps each of us to think through what we believe and how that should impact the decisions we make every day.
