E. Stanley Jones on Church and Work
An avalanche of evidence points to an evangelical movement that has lost its way. A disgraceful parade of pastors and church leaders toppled by sexual sins. Church as theater for spectators. An embarrassing biblical illiteracy. Withdrawal from and irrelevance to the public square. A de facto divide between so-called “spiritual” work and the “secular” work that serves as our main point of contact with that public square.
If we lose our way, pushing doggedly on only makes things worse. At such times, we need to pause and look back to discover where we left the path. The insights of E. Stanley Jones, a 20th century missionary to India, can help us get back on track. In his 1970 book, The Reconstruction of the Church—on What Pattern?, Jones speaks both to the church that gathers on weekends and to the church that scatters on weekdays.
On church: Jones insists that we should look to the Antioch—not the Jerusalem—church for our pattern today. The Jerusalem church was “too racial and too authoritarian.” It was too racial because, “The Jews tried to enforce their outlooks and customs on the Gentile converts.” It was too authoritarian because, “the Apostles made all the decisions and handed them down. The laity were on the edges or stifled.”
“The tragedy of the Christian movement is that for the most part it has through the centuries been centered in Jerusalem. . . . They put the spiritual apart and above, unrelated, and put the material lower, unredeemed. That division is still with us today . . . .It has produced the very problem we are wrestling with now—the irrelevance of the Christian movement in not being related to life.”
On work: In India and elsewhere, Jones saw Christians putting their faith on display where they lived life—so much of it in the workplace. A few of his many examples:
• “A leather worker (a chamar, one of the low castes), had lost his son by death. A missionary sympathized with him and ended by saying: “Remember, God is love.” The chamar’s face lighted up and he replied: ‘Yes, I know God is love. No one could work for Foy Sahib without knowing that God is love.’”
• “Sollie McCreless came forward in one of my college meetings, came forward to receive a call to the ministry. Instead, he got a call away from the preaching ministry into the ministry of serving God through business. He told me about a friend who loaned him five hundred dollars to get started in the insurance business. Now he has as an expression of his Christian faith through the vehicle of an insurance business. . . .”
• Jones asked another Christian, “What is the basis of your business?” The man answered: “First, we give a basic wage equal to any union wage. Second, we set aside 5 percent for the investors. Third, we go fifty-fifty for the rest of the profits between the business and labor over and above wages. Fourth, we bring in labor and make some of its members a part of management.” Are there any conflicts? Jones asked him. “No, we are a family.” As to profits: “We are eighth in the national economy.” Jones observes: “It is a cooperative order in the midst of a competitive one, an example of loving your neighbor as you love yourself.”
Beyond Words to Demonstration
According to Jones, getting the church back on track calls for non-clergy taking the initiative. ““In the reconstruction of the church, let the laity of all churches organize themselves into an ‘Organization of Christian Employers and Employees to put Christian Principles into Industry.’ They could be the demonstration centers of Christianity in the secular world and the leaven for a new order.”
This new order, he said, “will not be accomplished by the clergy preaching at the old order to change into the new order. That would be the word of the new order become word. The demonstration by lay men and women would be the word of the new order become flesh. We need both, but the major emphasis must be not on the demand, but on the demonstration.”
He ends Chapter Two with this call: “The reconstruction of the church must be by the laity who are in a position of being at the core of secular life, and thus can change it from within by demonstration of the new order at the base.”
Jones’ emphasis on faith displayed calls to mind how Paul once described his aim in preaching—that people should “demonstrate their repentance by their deeds [literally works]” (Acts 26:20).
Now, a half-century after Jones’ prophetic word, can 21st-century-church ears hear it?
