The Church says all work matters to God. I’m not sure we believe it

She asked how the church was going. 

I knew the tone. The slight lean. The expectation of a good report. Numbers up, lives changed, the place alive with something.

I’m a church leader. Have been for years. So I used to be able to give that answer. Instead, I told her I’d cut my ministry hours. That I was running a business now. I watched something shift in her face. Not unkind. Just recalibrating. I said something vague about how it all fits together and the conversation moved on.

The feeling followed me home. The familiar drop of someone who used to sit near the top of a table that they’ve now chosen to leave.

The church has a grammar, and you absorb it long before you examine it. It’s in the language that gets used around ‘calling’ and ‘vocation’, in whose news gets shared on a Sunday morning. Paid church work sits near the top of a hierarchy that nobody names. I know this because I’ve been there. 

Mind the gap

I remember a prayer meeting where we prayed for a missionary who’d set up a business to fund their work. We prayed hard. For the risks, the sacrifice, the kingdom purpose behind it all. It was right to pray for them. But I looked around the room and thought about the entrepreneurs sitting in the same chairs, taking the same financial risks, serving real people with real needs.

Nobody suggested we pray for them. It didn’t occur to anyone, including me. I sat with that for a moment, the gap between what we said we believed about work and what we actually thought was worth God’s attention.

Nobody warns you that reinvention has a grief inside it.

The irony is I’d told rooms full of people that Monday belonged to God. Preached on whole-life discipleship, work as worship and how every corner of our life belongs to God. I’ve watched it land for people who needed permission to take their Monday seriously.

I meant every word. And yet there I was, instinctively separating kingdom work from ‘ordinary’ work. Leading worship from leading a sales team. Church rota from takeaway shift. Without noticing. Without deciding.

God created

I was building a product earlier this year. Something new, that didn’t exist before I made it. A training resource designed to help people I would never meet. Solving a problem I understood because I’d lived it.

At some point, sitting at my desk, I felt something I wasn’t expecting. Not productivity, but something closer to alignment, like the work and the person doing it were finally the same shape. And I found myself wondering where this energy was coming from.

Later, reading Genesis 1, something snagged. In the beginning, God created. He made something from nothing, for the sake of others. When your own money, your own name is on the line, with no institution behind you, that verse opens differently.

Paid church work sits near the top of a hierarchy that nobody names

The risk of launching something that might fail. The creativity of making something from nothing. The particular satisfaction of serving people with needs that are immediate and real. I started to wonder if this was what it looks like to bear His image, not in spite of the exposure, but because of it.

I want to be honest: it didn’t dissolve everything. I still felt the drop in that conversation. I still said something vague and moved on. The hierarchy I absorbed doesn’t shift by theology alone. It shifts through accumulated experience — and I’m still accumulating.

Nobody warns you that reinvention has a grief inside it. That becoming something new means being less of something you were proud of, at least in rooms where that thing still matters. Sometimes I’m still in those rooms.

But I’m building something again tomorrow.