God's Week Has 7 Days

Forward

By Pete Hammond

I am delighted to have Wally Kroeker’s wisdom in a package that can travel far beyond the circulation of the Marketplace periodical published by Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA). Wally writes as a realist with the gift of lively candor salted down with healthy humor.

These reflections range far and wide across the church’s deep need for more connections between our faith and everyday life. Wally touches on basic flaws in our worship experiences that tend to exclude God from daily work. He probes the frequently mentioned but seldom helped gray areas of workplace relations, decisions, routines, negotiations, and dilemmas.

Wally is much more than a good journalist and writer. He has slugged it out in the ever-challenging roles of being a Christian as a university student, employee in agribusiness, professional journalist, husband, dad, grandpa, and long-term member of the MEDA team. Along this journey, he has regularly listened carefully to associates and reflected on what it means to love and serve Jesus Christ in such contexts.

This can be a lonely road. The church of North America has often not made good-faith connections with the areas of work, citizenship, and daily relationships. Only in recent years are new stirrings surfacing on these issues. We are seeing the beginning of a new era in which the daily application of faith is emerging as a major new agenda.

Christians are challenging the old ways of faith as a Sunday-only experience, with occasional bursts of interest in world missions. In the last twenty years, they are giving fresh attention to what believers face in daily life. On such matters, we have seen a steady flow of new books, publications, videos, seminars, and workshops, and a growing number of sermons and Bible studies.

This development of daily discipleship might be just in time. The young generation is demonstrating its impatience with compartmentalized faith. They are hungering for a more seamless and integral experience with Jesus Christ.

Wally’s reflections fit right into this stirring within believers. He invites his readers to a year of weekly engagement on faith that shapes how we work in government, healthcare, business, education, food production, and economics. And he does it with a compelling style. His wit, personal vulnerability, and agonizing realism are right on target.

I admit that I really like this stuff and want many others to taste and see that the Lord is very concerned with the routines and challenges of our workplaces in homes, companies, schools, farms, and the halls of government. Jesus is Lord of every element of creation, and he longs for us to follow him in every activity of daily life. This book is an excellent contribution to that exercise.

Join me in figuring out which of our Christian friends and seekers of spirituality should receive this gift of applied faith.

—Pete Hammond
VP, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship
Director, Ministry in Daily Life

Read the current God's Week column...

God's Week  |  Preface  |  Forward  |  About the Author