How Can a Pastor Serve Business People?

Mark Prater answers the question, "How can a pastor serve business people?" in less than ten minutes.

[Transcript lightly edited for clarity.]

Host: Have you ever been in the middle of a situation as a pastor where you really needed some timely, seasoned advice on a current situation you're facing? So you shoot off a text to an experienced pastor that you know, full of wisdom, and by the end of the day there's a voice memo or a voicemail waiting for you with exactly the kind of advice you need, rooted in sound theology, full of practical and wise application. That is what this podcast aims to do. This is the pastor's voicemail. On this podcast, we're aiming for the intersection of sound theology and daily pastoral and ministry life.

This is a resource from Sovereign Grace churches and sgcpastors.com. today we've got a voicemail from Mark Prater on the topic of how we care for and serve business people in our congregations. Mark is an elder at Covenant Fellowship Church and the executive director of Sovereign Grace Churches. He spent many years himself in the marketplace, and now one of the areas he serves in his local church is caring for and equipping those in the marketplace themselves. Let's listen in as Mark answers the following question.

As a pastor, sometimes I'm not sure how to best equip some of the business people in our church. They work long hours with demanding jobs, they're not always available, and their world in the marketplace feels so far removed from what we normally do in our local church. How can I help them?

Mark Prater: Thank you for wanting to build up and strengthen people in your church who work in various vocations, many of them 40 to 60 hours, maybe even more per week, because they need the church and they need a biblical perspective regarding work.

They need a pastor to equip them for the various issues they face daily in the workplace, and they need encouragement and fellowship. See, I brought an awareness of those needs into pastoral ministry because before I became a pastor, I worked for 14 years for a pharmaceutical company.

I was in sales and later in management, and as a Christian, had those same needs that I just described. See, I loved what I did. I didn't leave that vocation because I didn't like it. I actually loved it quite a lot. But even though I loved it, there were challenges for me and other christians that we faced really daily in the workplace of ethical questions regarding approaches to different approaches to sales or sales techniques, or a boss or a customer that would ask me to do something that I thought was pretty unethical or unbiblical. When I was in management, a challenge I faced was how do you terminate an employee for consistent low performance and do so in a biblical, faithful, Christ honoring way that certainly did recognize their dignity as an image bearer of God. There are new issues today that I didn't face when I was in the workplace. Artificial intelligence, for example, the emergence of that and the use of that today.

It's for those reasons that I started a faith and work group study at Covenant Fellowship just a little over nine years ago. Let me just say on the front end, this is just a practice. I don't think a pastor has to have a faith and work group to serve the people in his church. It's just one practice that you can consider. So here's what we do with our faith and workgroup study. We study scripture together and we read relevant books together. Our studies are somewhere between four and eight weeks in length, depending on what we're reading. And for each study, I write a curriculum that has weekly reading assignments, and I also write weekly discussion questions and send those out just to give us a basis for our discussion. And the purpose of our group is really fourfold.

First of all, to give a theologically informed vision for work, which the Bible clearly does. There's just a wonderful biblical theology of work from genesis through revelation that really helps your people to see in their bibles.

Second, it's to equip christians for the various issues they face in the workplace.

Third, it creates a context for fellowship to talk about those issues, which is what we've enjoyed in our study.

And fourth, it really is there to encourage mission opportunities, whether that is the use of your vocation and missional endeavors or potentially missional opportunities in your workplace.

And over the years, we've just seen some wonderful fruit by the grace of God.

First of all, I think there'd be those in our church who've been a part of our study who would say, my vision for work has expanded and become much more God centered because I'm seeing the bigness of my work as it fits into redemptive history in the way that God has designed it. Another one that they would talk about is they feel more equipped for challenges that they face. We've recently were talking about the emergence and use of artificial intelligence, and that raises all kind of ethical questions. We then decided to read God, Technology, and the Christian Life by Tony Reinke and discuss that book. And we had such good discussion over it.

I decided to create a faith and work seminar that was on a Saturday morning where I taught on technology in the christian life and addressed artificial intelligence in that teaching. And then after that, we broke people down into vocational groups and there was just really good conversation about technology and the use of AI in the workplace. I got a lot of good feedback regarding that seminar. One fruit, if you can say it that way, that I prayed for and hoped for was good biblical fellowship around issues people face in the workplace. And we've seen that happen many times, probably in every study, people are facing issues at work and they bring them into our group.

And it's just wonderful to see how believers help one another in the church, apply scripture to the challenges that they're facing and get encouragement for what they're facing. One other fruit that I didn't anticipate is how it's actually stirred generosity among those who have been participating. Because we've read some books on money, a book entitled God and Money, for example, and sort of an unanticipated result was that there's been a stirring of generosity in our church. Now let me say again that faith and work group study is just a practice.

I think a pastor can be faithful to equip his people for issues they face in the workplace by doing other things. For example, when, when you're teaching through a sermon series where the text allows include relevant application that can apply to the workplace. Consider a short teaching series on faith and work in your church. That can be another way to serve folks. And then just encourage, in the course of a normal rhythm of fellowship in your small groups, the discussion of issues that people face in the workplace. That's an important encouragement because sometimes there can be this sort of secular sacred divide when it comes to this issue, and the Bible doesn't create that divide.

And so christians need to bring those issues into biblical fellowship and benefit from them. So just a few ideas that I hope help get you started in serving those in your church. And if you do, I believe you'll see by God's grace. Wonderful fruit.

Host: Thanks for listening. This has been a resource from sovereign grace churches. You can find more resources like at sgcpastors.com maybe you've got a question about pastoral ministry. We would love to help find an experienced and seasoned pastor. To answer it, you can submit your pastors@sovereigngrace.com using the link there. Oh, and one more thing. If you found this resource helpful, let us know and consider passing it along to a friend in ministry or in life. Thanks so much. We'll see you next time.