A joint enterprise

more by Margaret Killingray | Word for the Week | Work

by Margaret Killingray (Word for the Week 23-07-07)

So God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.  God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful… fill… and subdue.’  Genesis 1:27,28

I have a memory of a scene in some apocalyptic disaster movie where a couple wandered in a world undamaged, except that nearly everyone else was dead.  All the monuments of human achievement were there – the libraries full of books, the buildings and machinery undamaged but silent and dark.  I have no idea what happened next.  Did they manage to get things started up again?  If so, what skills and knowledge would they have had to acquire?  How many books would they have had to read?  And could they do it on their own?

We can see that everything around us has only come about with a multiplicity of gifts and enormous human co-operation.  Think how many people take part, from the first ideas to the finished product, in producing a diamond necklace or a supermarket, or a zoo!  Our first ancestors were blessed together, and over the millennia together we have used the brains and inventiveness that God gave us.  We have built civilisations and homes, constitutions and space rockets, nuclear plants and symphony orchestras.

The goodness of God’s good creation still shines through, but so does the destructive corrupting power of evil, not least in the way we work together. Slavery and exploitation, forced labour and corrupt capitalism, talents wasted and denied, children made to work and women forced to stay at home.
 
To fulfil this pre-fall creation mandate, to build the Kingdom of Heaven here, we should be seeking to restore human flourishing and cooperation by ending the workplace discriminations of gender, age and ethnicity, by campaigning for fair distribution of the wealth produced, for encouraging the best use of training and education for all, by incorporating the disabled into our workplaces.  And at the more personal level of work practices we should be watching out for the times when we are tempted to claim recognition of successes for ourselves; protect our skills from ‘plagiarism’; patent our discoveries to protect our profits; enjoy our triumphs but ignore those who worked with us along the way.  

How can we restore some of that creative generous togetherness in the way we work?  Who are you going to work with today?