As I’ve stepped into my new role in Student Guidance, I have found myself thinking a lot about work. Front Range Christian does not only exist to educate the minds and encourage the faith of our students, but it also seeks to prepare our graduates to impact the world–shaping culture and ushering in the Kingdom. And what is one of the primary ways that our students can endeavor to accomplish these things? Through their work.
While exploring the vocational opportunities that abound for our future graduates, I’ve been constantly confronted with societal messages of careerism, “hustle culture,” and “burn out.” Scrolling through Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn today seems to reveal a disheartening current of frustration and despair within the American and global workforce. So how do we prepare our students to enter a workforce often dominated by careerism and soul-level exhaustion? What does the Christian life offer a member of the modern workforce that is different, that is promising? In Lesslie Newbigin’s book Signs Amid the Rubble, he says this of work:
“Every faithful act of service, every honest labor to make the world a better place, which seemed to have been forever lost and forgotten in the rubble of history, will be seen on that day [at the final resurrection] to have contributed to the perfect fellowship of God’s kingdom….All who have committed their work in faithfulness to God will be by Him raised up to share in the new age, and will find that their labor was not lost, but that it has found its place in the completed Kingdom.”
To the followers of Christ, work is the opportunity to knit together broken things and reweave the glory, grace, and peace of original Creation. Work done well—from the mission field to Wall Street to the local coffee shop—is a chance to set things right, little by little, and bring life back into a world that simply isn’t as it should be. We do not work solely for the paycheck, the bigger office, or the promotion. We work for the Kingdom.
What are some ways that the FRCS community can instill this understanding in the hearts and hands of our students? It is our ECE and Elementary students learning to pick up after themselves and others, design and create in art classes or the Genesis Center, and commit to their studies with integrity. It is our junior and senior high students learning the value and purpose of their work in the classroom, on the field, in the hallways, and on the stage. But it is also all of you—our parents & families—who model a healthy work-life balance and a redemptive perspective through your own work.
As we seek to form our students into the kind of people who will actively bring the Kingdom to earth, it matters that we teach them, from the littlest to the eldest, why engaging in the redemption of all things through our work is such a necessary and beautiful practice.
