Tom Nelson pastors Christ Community Church in Leawood, Kansas. PreachingToday.com editor Matt Woodley talked with Tom about preaching's relationship with a Christian theology of work.

PreachingToday.com: Why the passion for preaching on faith and work?

Tom Nelson: My current passion has come out of my past failure.

I would call it "theological malpractice." It wasn't intentional—I graduated from a very fine seminary. I grew up in a Christian home and loved my tradition. But after being a pastor a while, I realized that I was spending the minority of my time addressing what the congregation did for the majority of their lives. This Sunday-to-Monday gap was theological—how I understood how the gospel speaks into all of everyday life. I missed the integral nature of work in God's story in Scripture.

When I realized this 10 or 15 years ago, I stood up before my congregation and said, "Hey, I want you to forgive me because I have not been the pastor I should be based on the vocation God's called me to, that I've not spent the amount of time that I should equipping you for what you do Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. That's going to change from now on."

How did your congregation respond?

Well, early in my ministry people would say, "Pastor Tom, I'm not a missionary. I'm not a pastor. Tell me that my work matters. I feel like a second-class citizen." I didn't really hear them then theologically. I heard them trying to connect Sunday to Monday, but it didn't click.

When I woke up to how I was failing them theologically and pastorally, they got excited. Their calling to the arts or to the home or to a corporation or to a school is not a second-class calling. God is really about that. People appreciate the affirmation and my honesty that I missed it for a long time.

Tell me about the theological foundations for vocation.

Vocation is integral to the whole Christian story. It's integral to the Imago Dei image of God and the Missio Dei, the mission of God in the world. I'm inspired by the bookends of the story. Early on, I didn't think deeply about the early chapters of Genesis and the trajectory of that for biblical theology. Nor did I look carefully at the end of Revelation. And so I missed the connectedness of the material in between because I hadn't spent enough time on a rich theology of God's creation.

Vocation is woven all the way through the Scriptures if we look for it. It's a very thick thread in Genesis 1 and 2. God presents himself as a working God. The first verb of the Bible is bara, which is God working. When I slowed down and really looked at the trajectory of God's story from that, it helped me see how work is fundamental to what it means to be human, that work is integral to God's creation design. This theme runs even through Genesis 3 and the story of the Fall. God promises to restore this fallen creation and our place in it. Both the curse and the restoration include work.

And of course Jesus is often missed here. He was a carpenter. He spent thirty years in Nazareth, working his trade, and then three years as an itinerate rabbi. That has to say something about God's design, his mission in the world. It doesn't eclipse his mission to the cross. That's central. But I think it puts it in context that God wanted to redeem all of creation and redeem us to be fully human.

It pops up everywhere, until the final restoration of Revelation.

This is great, but how do you practically put this theology into your preaching?

If we recover a robust theology of vocation it changes our language as preachers. We avoid problematic words related to our work like "fulltime Christian work," "sacred," and "secular." We begin to present God's story as an integral one, wherever we are in the text, whatever topic we're covering.

And it impacts other parts of preaching than just the exegesis. I think of illustrations differently because I'm involved with people's workplaces. I read differently now. I ask questions. I listen. I read a lot of different workplace kinds of things, different vocational things. Life percolates into my sermons. The illustrations connect. The application points connect not only with a stay-at-home spouse but someone who is working for remuneration in a workplace. It profoundly changes my messages, the language I use. And it shapes the liturgy of Sunday morning. We do a lot of different things now on Sunday, based on our theology of vocation.

If a church really believes that their everyday work matters, what difference will it make?

Recovering a more robust theology of vocation has made a bigger difference in our congregation than anything I've ever done. That's not hyperbole.

It changes people's lives. And I'm careful how I say that. It changes their paradigm, their priorities. It changes them when they see that their work is an act of worship. It teaches them that there's a seamlessness of work and worship in the Scripture all the way from Genesis 2:15. It helps people connect Sunday to Monday if they understand that what they do on Sunday is an act of worship no less important than what they do on Monday, whether that work is paid or nonpaid.

The biblical definition of work involves contribution not remuneration. That's not to minimize the importance of economics or being paid, but that whatever stage of life—student, stay-at-home spouse, retiree, unemployed, underemployed—that our understanding of work is our contribution to God and the common good. It is an intrinsic part of being human and has intrinsic value and it's an act of worship. That's profoundly affirming.

So where can pastors start to begin preaching on work?

The preaching flows from marinating in the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. If we're preaching the text of Scripture with this in mind, the robust nature of vocation grabs us, and it gets a hold of us at a heart and mind and hand level that transforms our preaching. There has to be rediscovery of this integral picture of vocation from the text.

But apart from theology, we have to listen. We must become teachable and listen to the people who are in different vocations and to be truly interested in them, to find out about their life, their work, to learn from them. If you can bring those two pieces together, you'll find a rich theology of vocation that's biblically based and Spirit empowered. And your congregation will take notice.

Tom Nelson is the senior pastor of Christ Community Church in Leawood, Kansas, and the author of Work Matters.