The Theology of Work (Part 1): Working in a Post-Covid World

When the Covid-19 pandemic descended on the globe last March, it forced us, among other things, to reimagine what the work-world looks like. Stay-at-home orders required many of us to change dramatically the way we did our jobs, forcing us to work over the internet in ways we’d never done before. Business lock-downs put many of us on long-term layoffs with no viable alternatives for employment. Increased pressures on certain sectors of the work-world, especially in hospitals, medical clinics, nursing homes and schools, required many of us to work under a strain we'd never had to bear before. While all this was going on, the Government of Canada was providing wage-subsidies and financial assistance with such liberality that it made many wonder out loud if we were ready to test-run a universal basic income program for the country.

I have thought more than once during the last year that one of the long-range outcomes of the pandemic will be a dramatic restructuring of the role of work in our lives. This was already happening in nondescript and incremental ways. As automation pushes more and more human beings out of jobs, as A.I. begins to replace human brains in decision-making jobs, as the advent of self-driving cars threatens to put vast swaths of people who drive for a living out of work, as online-shopping and automated-home-delivery renders retail jobs obsolete—as our human ingenuity, that is, finds more and more ways to do the job without us, it’s already been forcing us to reimagine what work looks like in a robotic age. The pandemic has not caused all this, but it will accelerate it and intensify it. When we’ve finally come through Covid and we’ve started to rebuild all the things it toppled over, navigating the changes it has wrought to the nature of work will be one of primary social challenges we will have to face.

I call this a “social challenge” because having good work to do is essential to human flourishing and individual well-being, and the changes to our work that the pandemic is accelerating will inevitably cause corresponding changes to those things—our flourishing and well-being as people. Regardless all those times you woke up and went in wishing you didn’t have to, still, human beings need to have meaningful work to do, something that gives us a sense of purpose and allows us to make a positive contribution to the common weal of the community.

In saying this, I am using a very broad definition of work, one that includes those important activities that are not usually remunerated materially—like child-rearing or managing a household—but are just as crucial to the flourishing of society as the more obvious ones like doctor or construction worker. Whether it is done for money or not, work allows us to express our God-given creativity, to gain a degree of self-determination while remaining connected to the communities we are part of. Work matures us, broadens our horizons, and helps us attain a healthy self-actualization. At least it can do that, at its best; and it is not immediately clear how it will continue to do so in a post-Covid world, where we’ve not yet figured out what exactly we’ll do or how exactly we’ll do it.

I may have overstated the problem somewhat in the preceding paragraph. Certainly many of the jobs that existed in the pre-Covid world will continue to need doing post-Covid; and the pandemic itself has created all sorts of new jobs that need doing now and will still need to be done long after the last lockdown order has been lifted. It’s not as though a jobless dystopia is looming on the horizon (or a work-free utopia, depending on your perspective).

But there is a change in the wind.

It had me thinking about the various jobs I’ve had over the course of my working life. I will turn 47 this month, and inasmuch as I entered the workforce, roughly, at age 15, I have been working more-or-less steadily for 32 years. In those 32 years I’ve had a variety of jobs, including: hardwood flooring installer, summer camp youth leader, waiter, schoolteacher (then substitute teacher), stay-at-home dad, and now pastor. 

With the exception, possibly, of the second last item on that list, none of jobs I’ve worked at over the years would have continued unchanged had I been working at them when the pandemic hit. Some would have ended abruptly, others would have continued in a dramatically different form than they’d previously had. The job I actually was working at when Covid came along—the work of a pastor—has changed in all kinds of ways, some of which I’m only now beginning to understand, and some of which I may never fully grasp. The basic duties of the work are the same, of course, but how I discharge those duties in an age of live-streamed worship services and online prayer meetings looks very different than it did a year and a half ago.

I offer this all by way of introduction to a series I will be presenting here at terra incognita over the next number of weeks, looking at the theological meaning and spiritual dimensions of work. Given the profound role that our jobs play in our lives, and given also the way that this role is in an unprecedented state of flux for many of us, it may be a far richer topic for theological reflection than it appears at first blush. Does the daily grind really have any theological meaning beyond the brute fact of the grind itself? Does it really matter if we move into a world where the lines between work and home are irreversibly blurred? Does it matter if our work looks different than it ever has before? Does it matter if we even have any work to do at all?

You may be surprised to learn that the Christian message actually offers concrete answers to many of these questions, and even those it doesn’t answer directly it certainly provides the theological raw material necessary to infer an answer to them. In the coming weeks we will examine that raw material closely and see if we can’t determine what posture a Christian should take towards his or her work, even as it takes new and hitherto unimagined forms in a post-Covid world. I hope you will check back in for coming installments of the series, as we do our best to look at our work from God's perspective, and develop some theological handles for managing our work well, for his glory, whatever shape it takes in the days to come.

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