A Pastor’s View of Faith and Work
An Interview with Pastor Scott Crosby, Part II
We are continuing from last week in an interview with Pastor Scott Crosby of Liberti Church Fairmount on the intersection of Faith, Work, and AI.
SCOTT from last week: …I think Christians have a larger set of questions available to us.…
RUSS: Thanks. That’s rich. There’s a lot there I want to explore, but before diving into AI, let’s start with those larger set of questions for believers as they relate to our work. As a Christian, who happens to be a business leader, how should my faith impact my work? Are there guiding principles that can help?
SCOTT: I might begin even a little further back and say that Christian faith does not merely tell us how to behave at work. It gives us an account of what work is.
In Genesis, human beings are made in the image of God and immediately given work to do within the world God has made. We cultivate, name, order, make, tend, and exercise responsible rule. So work is not a consequence of the fall. To work is part of what it means to be human.
That gives business real dignity. A business can make something genuinely useful, organize people and resources toward a good end, provide livelihoods, solve problems, create beauty, increase knowledge, care for places and communities, and serve needs that really matter.
But Christianity also tells us that work is not ultimate.
The Westminster Shorter Catechism famously says that our chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. Jesus says the greatest commandments are to love God with our whole selves and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Those give work its direction.
My business is therefore not finally about my business.
It exists inside a larger vocation before God and neighbor.
That does not mean profit is unimportant. A business that cannot remain economically viable will eventually stop serving anyone. But profitability by itself cannot tell me whether the work is good, whether the people doing it are flourishing, whether customers are actually being served, or whether the costs of my success are simply being transferred to someone I have learned not to see.
The fall matters here too. We can take good things like work, achievement, wealth, innovation, influence, or efficiency and ask them to give us what they cannot give. Work becomes identity. Success becomes justification. People become inputs. Power becomes self-protection. Even serving others can quietly become a way of establishing ourselves.
The gospel changes that direction.
Get Russell McGuire’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
If my identity is received in Christ rather than earned through my performance, I am freer to work hard without asking my work to save me. I can succeed without believing success proves my worth, and I can fail without believing failure destroys it. I can use authority to serve rather than simply protect myself. I can tell the truth when telling the truth costs me something.
And I can begin asking not merely whether my work avoids harm or creates value, but whether it might take a genuinely redemptive direction.
I appreciate the language Praxis has developed around redemptive entrepreneurship for this reason. They distinguish among exploitative, ethical, and redemptive ways of building. Ethical work rightly asks us to do no harm, play fair, and create real value. Praxis pushes the question further toward what they call “creative restoration through sacrifice.” That vision sits naturally alongside a way of thinking about Christian ethics that I have found especially helpful in John Frame.
In his Doctrine of the Christian Life, Dr. Frame approaches Christian ethics from three inseparable perspectives. In everyday language, I might turn them into three questions.
What does faithfulness require?
What has God revealed about truth, justice, stewardship, love, human dignity, promises, power, money, responsibility, and the purposes for which he has given us our work?
What is actually happening here, and whom will this serve?
What is the real situation in front of us? Who are my neighbors in this decision? Employees, customers, investors, suppliers, families, communities, perhaps people I will never meet. What good are we actually producing? Who benefits? Who bears the cost? What opportunities and limitations are present? What are the likely second- and third-order effects?
And:
What are we becoming as we do it?
What am I learning to love? What habits are we forming as an organization? Are we becoming more truthful, generous, courageous, attentive, responsible, and capable of seeing our neighbors clearly? Or are we becoming people who can rationalize almost anything as long as it works?
Those three questions belong together. They keep us attentive at the same time to what faithfulness requires, to the real world and people our work touches, and to the kind of people our way of working is forming us to become.
I’ve found those three questions to be a helpful way of bringing Christian faith to bear on the kinds of decisions business leaders make every day.
For someone who wants to pursue this much more deeply from Scripture, the Theology of Work Project is an extraordinary resource. Its Bible Commentary covers every book of the Bible, specifically asking what Scripture has to say about work, workers, workplaces, calling, leadership, economics, rest, truth, conflict, and related questions. Praxis approaches many of the same concerns from the particular world of entrepreneurship and organizational leadership. I recommend both.
And, as we’ll probably discover when we bring AI back into the conversation, all of this changes the question from merely, “Can this technology do something useful for me?” to the much larger question, “What would faithful participation with this capacity look like within the work God has actually given me to do?”
RUSS: That’s helpful framing. Within that context,…
Continued next week…
