“What Kind of Calling Do All Christians Share?” - Andy Crouch

I love how Andy has a way of both drawing distinctions and broadening our ways of thinking. We spend a lot of time on this site looking at the ways in which faith and work, two often separate worlds can interact, but Andy reminds us that both are part of the same world that God has created.

Being a Christian and being a whole, flourishing human being engaged with the world in a thoughtful, loving, and reverent way are two sides of the same coin. As Andy reminds us, we are called to both.

Want to hear more? You can find this interview and dozens more videos over at the High Calling YouTube Channel.

Transcript

I think we as Christians actually have two different callings. One is to be Christian in the places where we are, and that means essentially to bear witness to the name of God, which is Jesus Christ . . . the way that God has made himself known. The other calling is not just to be Christian—not only to be Christian, not only to be witness bearers—but to be human. Reaching back beyond the beginning of the New Testament to the beginning of the whole Bible, when human beings are placed in the world for shalom . . . which is this Hebrew word that we often translate as peace. But I think it's better translated something like comprehensive flourishing. Shalom is a description of the situation where everything in creation is becoming everything it could be, and it seems that that does not actually happen, unless human beings get involved in tending the creation: caring for it, even transforming it, exploring it, discovering what it's capable of, or creating new goods with it. So we're called both to be bearers of the very specific message that God has made himself known in Jesus and to be bearers of simply what it is to be a human being, which is someone who creates shalom—comprehensive flourishing—in everything we do.