Over the past fifty years, the faith and work movement has undergone a quiet but important transformation. What began as a question of normative truth has unfolded into a deeper inquiry about culture, and now into something even more essential: the formation of the whole human person grounded in the love of God.
To understand where we are today, and to discern where the Spirit may be leading us, we must first look back.
A Movement Rooted in Context
Faith and work has always been, at its core, a form of contextual theology. I first heard of this phrase in my class with missiologist Harvie Conn back in 1998. In his work Eternal Word, Changing World, Conn described theology as emerging from a living trialogue among theology, anthropology, and mission. There is no such thing as pure theology formed in abstraction. Every generation inherits a different world, and every generation must ask, what does it mean to live faithfully in our work within this particular moment?
Conn’s insight, drawn from decades of cross-cultural ministry in South Korea, was that faithful witness always requires holding these three perspectives in tension. To collapse the trialogue is to distort the gospel. To preach as though culture does not exist is to speak into the air. To follow culture uncritically is to lose the anchor of Scripture. And to pursue Scripture and culture while ignoring the concrete lives of real people is to trade the living God for an abstraction.
This framework illuminates something important about the faith and work movement itself. Viewed over time, it has moved through three recognizable phases, each shaped by a different cultural context, and each asking a different central question. Before I begin, I need to be clear that there is no one “faith and work” movement as this work has been carried globally by the Spirit throughout the ages. The following is admittedly an (oversimplified) attempt to draw some distinctions in the American context and loosely apply Conn’s trialogue from a Reformed, evangelical perspective.
Phase One: 1975–1995 | Ethical Distinction
How do I witness the gospel?
The early faith and work movement arose in response to a postmodern world that had deconstructed truth. Into the growing secular humanism of our society, evangelical voices posited that not only did normative truth exist but that it was found in the person of Jesus Christ and the Scriptures. This bold claim of the Christian faith was lived out through evangelism in the workplace and the living of ethical lives that testified to this salvific reality. To witness the gospel at work was to live with the ethical distinction that would open the way for evangelistic opportunity.
Within the Christian world, a different battle was being fought: the assumed sacred–secular divide. Many Christians had inherited the idea that ministry was sacred while everyday work was, at best, morally neutral, or at worst, a consequence of the Fall. Work was something to be endured on the way to what really mattered. In this Christian context, the central task became one of recovering the theology of the priesthood of all believers. As royal priests, day-to-day work was not only sacred but was as much a calling as traditional ministry and mission. The dismantling of the sacred–secular divide was a meaningful achievement as the gospel needed to go forth into every domain of life. Its focus, though, remained largely individual, as the question of witness was answered by personal conviction and ethical behavior.
This was an era of stable institutions and long-term careers, where professional identity was often bound up with a single organization for life. You worked for IBM or for the telephone company, and when your tenure was over, they took care of you through a well-earned pension. The hierarchies were clear, the paths were legible, and your sense of who you were was largely mediated by where you worked.
Phase Two: 1996–2015 | Cultural Renewal
How do we transform culture?
The internet and subsequent dot-com boom created an almost utopian sense that a new kind of economy was emerging where creativity, entrepreneurship, and meaning could all coexist. With this new digital connectivity, globalization accelerated and cities became centers of creative and economic influence. Along with the rising influence of cities came the language of culture wars that began to turn public spaces into ideological battle grounds. This phase asked a new question: Can Christians transform the culture itself and turn the tide of its radical secularity?
The Christian language shifted accordingly. “Cultural renewal,” “culture making,” and “faithful presence” became the animating phrases. The theology of Abraham Kuyper, the sociology of James Davison Hunter, and the cultural application of Tim Keller became a powerful and intellectually robust trialogue for this era of headlining scandals that eroded trust in formerly stabilizing institutions like large businesses, the church, and government. Work was no longer seen merely as a site of personal ethics but as a platform for cultural engagement and transformation.
In this unsettling social context, the gig economy was emerging, knowledge workers were on the rise, and the creative class was being named as a cultural force. There was growing energy around the idea that strategic presence in arts, finance, law, and media could lead to meaningful transformation. Christians were challenged to pursue excellence in elite organizations not merely for personal success but as a form of faithful gospel renewal. The city became a theological category and the coveted destination for many young, serious-minded Christians. The imagination of the impact that our work could make upon larger societal realities made faith even more compelling.
And yet, over time, cracks appeared. The assumption that culture could be “changed” through the right people in the right positions proved more complicated than anticipated. Often by the time leaders rose to positions of influence, they were either worn thin by the climb or found themselves more attuned to the loudest voices in their industry than to the quiet invitations of God. People of Christian faith were no different than the very people they were working hard to replace. The optimism of cultural transformation gave way to a more fragile and disillusioned reality that led many to question their faith and leave the church. Deeper questions of healing, identity, and spiritual grounding remained unresolved, or had simply never been addressed.
Phase Three: 2016–Present | Spiritual Formation
How do I remain grounded?
In recent years, a convergence of forces has reshaped both work and the human experience of it. Political polarization, economic instability, a global pandemic, and now the accelerating disruption of artificial intelligence have together produced what researchers at the Institute for the Future describe as a “BANI world”: brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible.
The brittleness is real as systems that historically looked strong break easily. Institutions that took generations to build seem to collapse in a matter of years or even months. Anxiety is rising as the constant stream of alerts and breaking headlines create a low but persistent hum of hyper-vigilance. The nonlinearity is disorienting. Cause and effect no longer feels discernible or worth pursuing due to the growing variables. This gives rise to a sense of the incomprehensibility of a world that has simply become too complex to understand. All this gives rise to disorientation, information fatigue, and a quiet despair.
The numbers are sobering. The most recent Gallup report on global work found that 78 percent of global employees are disengaged at work. That means nearly four in five people are spending the majority of their waking hours detached from a sense of meaning and purpose. The economic toll is estimated at $438 billion in lost annual productivity. This is difficult to fathom, but even more staggering is the loss of human potential and dignity.
And of course there is now the unprecedented disruption of AI. Current projections from the World Economic Forum suggest that by 2030, 92 million jobs will be displaced over the next several years, even as 170 million new positions are created, yielding a net gain of roughly 78 million roles. The net number sounds reassuring. But job creation and job destruction are not synchronized. The pain will arrive palpably before the promise. Many workers know this, even if they cannot name it, and the anxiety it produces is real.
In this BANI context, the central question has shifted again, not outward, but inward. How do we remain grounded amidst all the uncertainties of our age? We have entered the existential phase of the faith and work movement, and with it comes a necessary deepening. The gospel does not merely call us to behave differently or to influence culture. It invites us into a transformed way of being.
To respond to our world faithfully in this moment requires spiritual competencies that anchor us when the ground feels shaky. This phase invites an attentiveness to God’s presence in the midst of ordinary work. It asks us to listen for God’s voice not only in special seasons of discernment and uncertainty, but in day-to-day life that includes the realities of loss, disorientation, and grief. And it begins to reimagine work itself as something that the gospel can enlivened from the inside out.
The question is no longer simply, What should I do? It has become, Who am I, and what vision of the future do I embody? In this way, the pressing question is no longer about how can faith enter my workplace, but how does faith change me and my very conception of work itself?
Beyond the Phases: Toward Enlivened Work
As I have outlined these three phases, the first two are not meant to be cordoned off or discarded. We still need ethical clarity. We still long for cultural renewal. But without spiritual formation, both become unsustainable. Ethics without interiority produces hypocrisy. Cultural engagement without humble groundedness produces triumphalism. What is emerging now is what I hope will be a growing holistic vision of work that is spiritually attentive, relational in its posture toward others, and creative in its participation in God’s active work of renewal. We must be confident that God is indeed making all things new, but to participate in this, we are dependent upon hearing God’s invitation, not merely identifying our own sense of gifts in addressing the needs of our world.
At Goldenwood, we describe this as enlivened work: work that flows not from excellence or ambition alone, but from a deep awareness of God’s presence. This vision draws us further into the nuancing of the biblical story. We look to Genesis, where work is created good, but also to Proverbs 8, where wisdom, creativity, and joy define our co-laboring with God. We turn to the prophetic texts, which add dimensionality to work in the context of exile, and to Revelation, where work culminates in New Creation.
The faith and work movement stands at a threshold. We are being invited to move beyond strategies for influence and frameworks for success into something more foundational: a Spirit-led imagination of what it means to become more fully alive before the God who holds all things together. In this vision, the future of work will be shaped by loving people who are attentive, grounded, and alive to the Spirit. This often arises from those who have learned to remain present to God in the midst of trauma, loss, and disruption, and who carry, even in these pains, a quiet and persistent hope. As we live in our BANI world, how, through our work, might we become people of great hope who cast a compelling vision of the future that is generative, expansive, and enlivened by the very presence of God?