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Christians talk a lot about “shaping culture” and “having an impact on society.” What springs to mind when you hear those phrases? I tend to think of Christians trying to spread evangelistic or moral messages through entertainment or politics. Those are certainly major places where Christians can live out their values—but there’s a more mundane, perhaps even more important, place where we are called to live out our faith: the business world.

From the Enron scandal a decade ago to the recent economic crisis, it’s clear that Christlike values are as needed in the business community as they are in any other aspect of life. At the Lausanne World Pulse site, John Terrill addresses this in A Revolution of Vocation, which argues that the church should do a better job of equipping and supporting Christians who are called into business:

We desperately need to recover the sacredness of a calling to business. The Church must continue to renounce the sacred/secular divide that has beleaguered Christian communities for too long. As A.W. Tozer rightly notes in The Pursuit of God, far too many Christians get snared in this trap: “They cannot get a satisfactory adjustment between the claims of the two worlds…. Their strength is reduced, their outlook confused and their joy taken from them.” And I might add that their impact in the world is severely constrained.

Christ followers serving in business, law, healthcare, the arts, media, government, and every other profession need to experience in tangible ways the Church’s blessing of their Christ-honoring work in companies, law firms, clinics, studios, press rooms, and congressional chambers.

Terrill thinks the church has much to say about the role of business within a community, and that in today’s globally interconnected economy, business is a means of doing Christ’s work in the world.

It’s a challenging and helpful read, especially if you or someone you know is a professional trying to figure out how their profession relates to their Christian faith. Terrill’s is a fairly high-level approach; for more ground-level articles about living out your faith in your day-to-day job, see this collection of essays about Christianity in the workplace from Discipleship Tools.

How about you? Do you feel your church supports you in your career? Do you feel called to your profession? Do you have a sense of how your job fits into the big picture of your Christian life?

The anxiety of losing a job can be crippling. One feels as if the life they have cultivated over the years just collapsed, and even in good economic times job searches take time. One’s purpose in life seems fleeting as the days of unemployment start to count up.

It is often while waiting for interviews or during the days of trawling the classifieds that even the ardently optimistic succumb to hopelessness. The weight of it all just becomes overwhelming.

Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Here’s a brief excerpt from a helpful article by Christian Career Center titled Finding Hope in Troubled Times:

While there are key tactics that can help people find jobs more quickly, one of the most important strategies is cultivating a sense of hopefulness. Hope is critical to a successful job search. Without hope, we lose momentum and stop taking action to move forward. With hope, however, we are motivated to keep going. Hope enables us to believe that things will get better and that we will be able to overcome the present difficulties.

The source of hope for Christians, of course, is not a new President or new economic strategies, but, rather, God. And yet, while we may profess to believe in a God who knows us by name, cares about our lives, and has the power to see us through whatever difficulties we encounter, we may still find ourselves wrestling with despair and discouragement. How about you? If you could use more hope in your life and job search, try out these suggestions…

Head over to Christian Career Center to finish the article.

Our featured topic this week has been vocation. It’s a word that carries a lot of different meanings and connotations: job, career, calling. For Christians in particular, however, the word refers to something bigger than just holding down a 9-to-5 job or landing a promotion at the office. When we speak of pursuing a vocation, we’re talking not just about day-to-day jobs, but about a lifetime of good works and faithfulness to God.

But obviously, your career is a huge part of your vocation—it’s where you spend much of your time. So what careers should a Christian pursue? Are some career “callings”—such as missionary work of pastoral service—more “Christian” than others? While we might have stereotypes of ministry work as being holier than other jobs, the Bible doesn’t quite make that distinction. In fact, the Bible never lists out what jobs and careers Christians should follow; it merely states that “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.”

Finding your vocation, then, is as much about serving God in your everyday life as it is about finding just the right career. Here are a few resources from the Gospel.com community that can help you think through this:

• Into Thy Word has a good, short introduction to the idea of spiritual gifts—special talents that God has blessed each of us with individually.
• Many Christians try to identify their spiritual talents and then use that knowledge to help them find the place in work, school, and church where they’re best able to serve. The Church Growth Institute has an online test you can take to identify your spiritual gifts.
• The Christian Career Center has many good resources to help you find a vocation that fits your gifts and interests. See their career guidance articles, particularly Making Career Decisions within God’s Will for Your Life and Discovering Your Unique, God-Given Design.
• …and plenty other links to job openings, career counseling, and more at the Jobs page.

Take a look through these resources and see what you can learn about your vocation—what you’re doing now, where you want to be, and how you can serve God with all your heart no matter where He’s placed you.