Tom Lutz is the author of the newly released “Equipping Christians for Kingdom Purpose in Their Work”. An expert in faith-work integration, Tom joins Greg to discuss some key elements from his book and help give practical ways to influence the faith of others outside of the church. Tom is a Convene Chair based in the Atlanta region.
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Equipping Christians For Kingdom Purpose In Their Work With Tom Lutz
I’m here with Dr. Tom Lutz on the show from Atlanta and California. We’re coast to coast. Tom, thanks for joining us on the broadcast.
I’m very excited to be here, Greg.
Tom has decades of entrepreneurial experience. He’s built and sold businesses. He’s a Convene chair in Atlanta, where he coaches marketplace leaders. He’s in the game, getting his hands dirty. He’s in his spare time. He got his Doctorate of Ministry from Covenant Theological Seminary. He’s been a PCA pastor in the inner city of Baltimore, where he knows what real life is all about. He was there for seven years. Tom, I love the title of your doctoral dissertation, Discipling Christian Sea Level Business Executives. Thanks for joining us. We’re so excited to talk about this.
It’s obviously a passion of mine. I’m glad to talk about it all you want.
Combining Theology With Practical Ideas
You wrote a book in your spare time, Equipping Christians for Kingdom Purpose in Their Work. Let’s start with this. One day, you heard a voice. We all hear voices, and we wonder sometimes, “Is that me? Is that God? Is that Satan?” You heard a voice, and it went like, “Until every Sunday from every pulpit, every sermon is illustrated from and applied to the marketplace, the work will not be done.”
The work is still not done. You and your co-author, Heidi, have made a giant leap forward in helping all of us to turn the Sunday stuff into Monday stuff, as we sometimes forget. In this book, you take rock-solid theology, and you mix it with practical ideas. There are so many books out there that are a little dry because they’re talking about faith at work, and we all get lost in the exegesis of a particular passage, but you made it real by saying we’re all image bearers. We’re all disciple makers. What does that mean?
The theme of the book, a theme of the way I lead my convened groups, the way I lead my men’s discipleship groups, and the sermons I preach. It was interesting. You mentioned I was a pastor. I was a pastor for seven years while we were starting what turned out to be a very large business. Almost all of my early uh learning to teach the Bible, whether it was sermonic or whether it was Bible study or whether it was discipleship, it was all done at my place of work.
I naturally applied or illustrated from what was happening around my work road. Those were the illustrations. I tell people I speak as a pastor, and I speak as a business guy. I can bridge those two worlds. Anyway, so what dawned on me after a while, especially when I got my master’s divinity, was ordained a pastor.
A basic theme of the book is that those of us who are called to disciple, whether it’s a mentoring relationship, a coaching relationship, a convened chair relationship, a men’s Bible study, a women’s Bible study, whatever it might be, we were subliminally taught that we are discipling them to be church members.
We talk all about the stuff that happens nights and weekends, and we don’t really ever talk to them about what they’re called to do. The big theme in the book is let’s learn to read the Bible in an image bearer rather than a church member context. Quickly, the concept it’s in the book. I could go on for hours about this, but it’s basically this. When the image bearers were created, they were put in the garden and given three instructions.
Instruction number one was to create abundance, fill it up, have children, of course, but also produce food, produce all the things that you see in the world today. Number two, we were told it has infinite potential. Cultivate that potential. Number three, it was dangerous and incomplete. We were called to subdue it all for the flourishing of humans. When I talk to people, I talk to them about what God wants done. God wants the world to flourish. He doesn’t just want the gospel to be preached.
God wants the world to flourish. He does not just want the Gospel to be preached. Share on XWork Spins The Wheels Of The World
That’s great. You and I both love a quote that I’ve said to you, and we really do need to do this. I’m going to say it right on the air. We really need to do this. We need to get you into the convened studio or somewhere and film you drawing this on the whiteboard. Let me do this quote and speak to it on the other side. This is by somebody we both love, Lester DeCoster, in his book. He’s quoted by Pastor Tim Keller in Tim’s book, but here’s the quote. “We know that work spins the wheels of the world.”
No work, nothing else. Culture and civilization don’t just happen. They’re made to happen and keep happening. Imagine that everybody quits working. What happens? Civilized life melts away, food vanishes from the store shelf, gas pumps dry up, streets are no longer patrolled, fires burn themselves out, communication and transportation end, and utilities go dead. This is my favorite line. “Those who survive at all are soon huddled around campfires, sleeping in tents and clothed in rags.” Does that embody some of this?
If you think about it, that’s exactly right. I do a lot of speaking. One of the questions, like I often do, I’m doing a convene group next month and next week in Boise, Idaho. One of the first questions I ask people is, “What would happen if nobody did what your company does?” Very profound question. I’ve had answers, for example, I was at a convene group one time and one of the members had a trash collection company. He got this look on his face and a big smile, and he said, “We’d all be dead.
Doesn’t matter if Billy Graham is preaching the gospel if the health of the nation is not taken care of.” I had another case where a manufacturer of what they call fasteners, so hinges and plates and screws and bolts, and all that stuff. He got laughing thinking, “Read that last phrase again, we’d all be sitting around campfires, living in tents, because you couldn’t build anything.” If the image bearers don’t do what we call the cultural mandate, create abundance, extract potential, and then subdue the world for the flourishing of God’s people, what Lester Decoster says is exactly what will happen.
Why People Feel Disconnected Between Monday And Sunday
Why is it do you think that people don’t understand this? Why do they feel so disconnected between Monday and Sunday? I was talking to an executive just in the last few weeks, where we talked about this, and they said, “I’ve never heard that before.” Why is it that we get that we’re supposed to be discipled? Meaning learn the tenets of the gospel, learn how to be a good Christian. We go to church on Sunday, and we hear sermons about how to be a better Christian. We come to Monday, and we say, “All I do is make pizza.” “All I do is take X-rays of people’s knees.” “All I do is make chairs.” Why the disconnect?
Again, I think it goes back to the voice hearing was basically from this, is that I was at a conference on the theology of work, which I had spoken at and I had attended for 15 or 20 years. I looked around the room and I realized it’s all the same characters. We’re all patting ourselves on the back about how clever we were to understand this theology of work, this esoteric biblical concept. That’s when I heard the voice.
I think it was God speaking to me. I think what he said was, “Until every Sunday from every pulpit, this message is preached. The work’s not done.” People can go to a conference. They can go to a Made to Flourish conference, or they can hear Tim Keller speak. They go back to their discipling role, but no one talks to them about how to talk to people about what it means to be an image bearer.
Within that result that the illustration, pastors are not bad people. They’re not trying to create this problem. If you think about it, they’re trying to be relevant to you when they preach. Their illustrations and applications are where your life connects with theirs. Where are those hobbies? There’d be illustrations about golf, there’d be illustrations about running, whatever it might be, motorcycle riding. There’ll be illustrations about family, because the pastors have families. There’ll be illustrations about what happens at church. What’s missing is ever talking about someone’s work in the context of a theological teaching.
I teach a course at the seminary where one of the assignments is, “Go look at the way Jesus taught. You take one of the gospels, and every time Jesus mentions someone’s job or someone’s workplace, highlight.” It’s everywhere. Jesus constantly talked about people’s jobs to the result that after the Sermon on the Mount, the people said, “This one speaks with authority, not like our scribes and Pharisees.” I think that’s the problem is we’ve just never heard work spoken of in the con, either illustrated from or applied to the workplace when we do our theology.
Understanding The Concept Of Christo-Platonism
Let’s be hypothetically practical here for a minute, and let’s pretend that you’re speaking to somebody who owns a furniture manufacturing company. They hire you and you fly to their city and they say, “Tom, I read your book, but I appreciate everything you said in there, but I cannot connect the fact that the furniture that I make has any impact on the kingdom. I did feel really great when I got back from the trip I just did to Africa, where we dug a water well, and just the joy on those people’s faces that they had water. Now I come back and I just make furniture, we’re $50 million in revenue, but I feel empty when I make furniture.”
That’s not at all uncommon. I speak a lot at business owner groups or executive groups, and I hear that all the time. Part of it is, again, it’s right back to the same issue, which is we’ve been taught that what’s spiritual is what happens in church. At one point, I’ve said this, “When I say spiritual, you think non-physical. When I say redemption, you think preaching the gospel.
When I say heaven, you think disembodied. It’s what Randy Alcorn calls it, Christo-Platonism, this separation we call it sacred secular. One of the questions that I mentioned was, “What would happen if nobody did what you do?” Imagine a world without furniture, for example, is how I would approach that, and help him understand how the world flourishes. “I’m sitting in a chair. It’s a good chair. It’s well built. It provides comfort for my back.”
The other question I ask people is, “Have you considered the fact that nothing that you call ministry will be done in the new heaven and the new earth?” Just think about that for a minute. There will be no trips to Africa to dig wells because sin will have been banished and the curse will have been banished. We will be building furniture in the presence of God. God will sit in his furniture. Isn’t that amazing? That’s how I typically have approached it with people. Usually, you see the lightning of the face when they begin to think, “God really cares about furniture.”
Sometimes I like to remind people that God is creative. We all know that. He made the furniture maker in his image, which means the furniture maker is creative, which means when the furniture maker makes furniture, he or she reflects the creative nature of God.
Not only that, but Jesus built furniture. Jesus spent more time on earth in the workplace than he did preaching the gospel. I think that those are separate activities.
I’m guessing that if Jesus made crooked furniture, the drawers didn’t work, the legs were not the same length, the finish got mangled, and it doesn’t look good, nobody would be buying his furniture.
That’s true. Do you remember the movie Passion of the Christ?
Yeah.
There’s a scene in the beginning of that where Jesus is coming up with a new concept for furniture, a tall table and tall chairs. His mother looks at him and says, “That’ll never sell.” Jesus made mistakes. He made marketing mistakes. He learned. The book of Hebrews tells us he grew in wisdom and stature with God and men. What is wisdom? Wisdom is the ability to do what image bearers do and to do it well. When someone builds furniture well, that’s biblical wisdom in practice.
Equipping Christians For The Kingdom Purpose
Amy Sherman, your friend and mine, senior fellow at the Sagamore Institute and, author of to book Kingdom Calling: Vocational Stewardship for the Common Good. She made a pretty blunt assessment, saying that discipleship that doesn’t equip people for the activity. They spend 40% of their waking hours doing is not discipleship. Say more.
I don’t want to be a broken record, but discipling people for church work is that we don’t talk about their work. We don’t talk about what they are uniquely called and positioned by God to do. We talked about if I were a pastor, I’d be talking to you about you doing what I’m called to do. It’s a fascinating passage in Ephesians 2:10, after it talks about you being saved by grace, not of yourselves, it’s the gift of God, etc., it says, “For you are Christ’s workmanship created in Christ Jesus for Ergon, Callois, good work.”
If you look up in a Greek dictionary, that word, air God, it’ll tell you it’s the main meaning. The meaning that Paul would have pulled a dictionary off and read is what one normally does as a job. That’s to me is so profound, but that’s reading the Bible in an image bearer. When I read that verse, I say, “It’s not about the good works that I do at church. It’s about the good work that I do in the community.”
Discipleship is not about the good works you do at church but the good works you do in your community. Share on XThat’s very cool.
She’s basically saying they’re called to build furniture. They’re called to collect the trash. They’re called to fix the coffee machines. If we don’t talk to them about that, then we’re not talking to them about their calling, which means we’re not discipling them to be what God wants them to be. I think Amy’s dead on with that.
Hiring A Guy With A Unique Arm Tattoo
Let’s get very practical. You tell a story in your book of a convened CEO. Who hired a guy with a satan tattoo on his arm? He thought long and hard about this, whether he should or shouldn’t. What happened next?
It was early on in his role at Convene. He’s just beginning to understand that God cares about the way he shepherds his people. We talked a lot about those kinds of concepts. One of his good workers had brought this person as a possible candidate. He was chain-smoking. He had a Satan tattoo on his arm and failed the drug test.
By the way, he subsequently sold his company. In a one-to-one coaching session, he says to so “Tom told me the story, failed the drug test, Satan tattoo, chain smoker, but I think God’s telling me to hire him.” I’m thinking, “Time out. You’ve got to be kidding me.” He said, “You’ve been telling me that we need to shepherd these people and we need to nurture them in the workplace.” I was like, “Sure enough. We prayed through it.”
He brought it to his group for discussion because I didn’t want to advise on that one at that point. We talked to the group and they said, “Yeah, if that’s what God’s calling you to do.” They built some curbs around it. Regular drug testing, certain three-strikes policies, all that stuff. He put a structure to it. Anyway, fast forward about 2 or 3 years later, David came to the group, brought a letter, tears in his eyes.
He said, “He told the story of this young man, who had become converted, become a Christian, straightened up his life, found a Christian woman that he married, and was moving on to North Carolina for a much improved job in the future. That’s what we’re called to do.” Shepherd people in that sense. Now, we don’t want to be irresponsible. At first, I thought maybe he was being irresponsible. He was very responsible, but he was also listening to the voice of God. Great story. I think that’s in the book.
What’s that quote from Dorothy Sayers? This is a loose quote, “The church has for so long told people not to be drunk on Sundays, on weekdays, instead of saying make great tables.”
Somebody Googles why work Dorothy Sayers, you can get that article, and it’s worth it.
Tom’s Dissertation About Convene Members
I was thrilled that Convene became a living laboratory of Christian CEOs who learn together, and you did some research based on some of those real members. What are some of the research and findings?
The dissertation was what we call qualitative research on a group of men, some of whom were convened members. In my case, it was all men because it was a men’s group, who came together and studied in a very well-developed traditional discipleship model, but took out the church-related content, and we put in faith-based work content. A couple of things that we found in the dissertation that we documented were all of these men, I think all of them were elders at their churches.
They were very mature, they were Young Bucks, massive increase in their sense of spirituality, their sense of spiritual maturity. One of them actually said to me, “God has invaded all of my life.” Whereas he used to think of spiritual things as what happened in church. Now he’s recognizing the spiritual things. I could tell you a dozen stories. I’ve got a couple of community members who took over businesses from their dad. One had been a pastor, but his dad took ill.
He called me up and said, “I’ve been running this company for years now.” He couldn’t get over the guilt that he’d left the ministry. Being able to walk him through that, “No, this is exactly what God made you for.” Another man, $50 million HVAC company. When he came into Convene very discouraged, just no sense of purpose or spiritual direction. “Why am I here? I make a lot of money, but what good is it?” If you were to see this fellow today, he’s glowing. Understanding that I was laughing, I said, “When you get to heaven, we will still be changing filters in HVAC belts, because if we want to be cool in heaven, it’s going to be here. The systems have to be maintained.
Aren’t you glad that certain jobs, certain inventions have happened? I’m pretty glad that somebody invented X-rays because they looked inside my knee last week to figure out why it hurt. The x-ray technician might not have felt like they were a Christian that they were doing anything to glorify God, might feel like, when I serve on the finance committee tonight or the building committee or the whatever committee at church, then God will like me better than when I x-rayed Greg’s knee.
That is very common. I’ll take you back to the quotes you pointed out, until every Sunday from every pulpit, every sermon is illustrated from and applied to the workplace, the work’s not done. What has motivated me to do is we have got to train the disciples, and that’s the reason for the book, is train the disciples how to disciple people as image bearers, like we talked about, not just as church members. That person will walk into that work and realize that God cares. She’s doing the work that God wants done because, as a result of it, in mosaic, the world is flourishing, or more flourishing.
Disciples must be trained how to disciple people as image bearers, not just as church members. Share on XI remember sitting one day, it was at Keats Island in Vancouver, Canada. I could take you to the exact steps I was sitting on. It was a business leader who was involved in church pastoring type roles in a new way. He went back to business, as you just alluded to with one of your friends. He was very emotional on the steps one Sunday morning, saying, “We build houses and we work on Sunday because of whatever reason, but I’m so distraught because I’m not inviting these people to go to church on Sunday, we’re building a house.” I was able to share with him that most likely the people who were his subcontractors and employees would never go to church. He was in the church on Sunday while they were hitting 2 by 4 with nails, right?
Exactly right. Again, think about what Jesus’ parable is about, the builder who builds on the sand or on the rock. Jesus actually did for eighteen, and he was a tecton. An architect, a builder, is what he did. That’s all the relationships that he had with all the other people in the community.
A Talbot professor whose name I’m forgetting, Talbot Seminary at Biola University, said that Techdon we always mostly translate as carpenter, and it can best be translated as a general contractor type person.
That would be our modern version of that.
We’re going to have to retitle Josh McDowell’s book, and instead of more than a carpenter, we’re going to call it a contractor.
Good point.
Get In Touch With Tom And Buy His Book
What would you say to somebody who is listening and they say, “This is fascinating. I’m a learner. I’d love to grab a copy of your book. What should I do?”
Of course, it’s available everywhere that you buy your books. Tindale is a very large publisher. They’ve got distribution. Christian bookstores will have it. You can certainly get it on Amazon. You can get it at any bookstore you want to walk into. Will have a distribution arm from Tyndale. Wherever you buy books, you’ll be able to pick them up.
The title again, for those of you tuning in and are interested, Equipping Christians for Kingdom Purpose in Their Work by Tom Lutz. I didn’t mention the name of your co-author, so why don’t you tell us about her?
She is marvelous. Heidi Unruh. I’m more of a verbal communicator. I don’t like the discipline of putting all the words down. Heidi is a brilliant writer. She has just been able we’ve huge contributions from her own life experience in there. It’s Heidi Unruh. She’s written her other recent book is called. She’s going to get mad at me because I don’t remember. It’s about social connection, and it’s also quite good.
I think that the world needs to hear this story. This movement of faith work that began, whatever you want to call it, back in the ‘80s or something, the book Your Work Matters to God.
It’s a seminal book, absolutely.
It’s the first time I ever heard that my work mattered to God. There you go.
It’s in my section of my library or the theology workbooks.
I used to fly out Sunday night to work for service master at a facility. I would leave the church service while the elders were laying hands on the missionaries who were going to work in some foreign country. I remember walking out the back door to catch the late-night flight, thinking, “Maybe someday I’ll be in ministry too.” How wrong is that? If you’re tired of thinking that your work doesn’t matter to God, run, don’t walk, to buy this book by Tom Lutz, Equipping Christians for Kingdom Purpose in Their Work. Tom, I am super proud and super blessed that you’re a convened chair as well as the many things you do. It’s been a great journey to get to know you.
I’ll just add to that. If it’s a Christian business owner or an executive who wants to learn this, go join a Convene group.
There you go. We’ll put it in the lower thirds, the Convene website, ConveneNow.com. We’d love to have you spend the next many years in a Convene group learning as a group of peers about these things we’re talking about and applying them to the workplace. Tom Lutz, thank you very much.
It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Greg.
Important Links
- Dr. Tom Lutz on LinkedIn
- Equipping Christians for Kingdom Purpose in Their Work
- Kingdom Calling: Vocational Stewardship for the Common Good
- Your Work Matters to God
- Convene
- Tom’s Convene Team
