How Involved
Are You at Church?

What this is about

A church needs people to do things. Somebody has to set out the chairs, and there is nothing wrong with asking who is willing.

The trouble is what the answer has come to measure. In practice “how involved are you here?” works as a reading on a gauge: high involvement means spiritual health, low involvement means decline. Nobody asks the plant supervisor whether the eleven people he is responsible for are treated fairly. Nobody asks the mother of the three-year-old how the three-year-old is. Those are not on the form.

So the question is what the form is actually measuring, and what God is doing with the rest of your week.

The short answer

Read the last clause carefully, because it is the whole thing. Luther grants the difference. He does not say a cobbler and a bishop do the same job, and he does not say the bishop’s job is unnecessary. He says the difference is one of office and work and not of estate — a difference of what you are for, not of what you are. The first is obvious and useful. The second is the ladder, and it is the only thing being denied.

The claim on the positive side is broader than career advice. It is that God, who could feed you directly, has chosen instead to feed you through a farmer, a lorry driver and a baker; that he protects you through a magistrate and a constable; that he teaches your children through a schoolteacher. These people are not doing secular work while the real business happens elsewhere. On this account they are the means.

Where the ladder came from

It is worth knowing that the idea being attacked was not a muddle. It had a name — the state of perfection — and Aquinas defined it carefully:

That is a more modest claim than it is usually reported to be. Aquinas is not saying a monk loves God more than a farmer does; he is saying a monk has entered a formal, permanent, solemnly undertaken state, and a farmer has not. In the same article he concedes the obvious consequence: “some bind themselves to that which they do not keep, and some fulfil that to which they have not bound themselves.”

The problem is what a structure like that does once it is loose among ordinary people who are not reading the Summa. If one kind of life is formally ordered towards perfection and yours is not, then yours is the other kind, and everybody knows what that means without anyone having to say it.

The test: six statements. Which are old?

Below are six statements asserting, one way or another, that religious work stands above ordinary work. Three are genuine and old. Three were written by this page in a modern or deliberately archaic register. Date each one before you reveal it.

If you find you cannot reliably tell the thirteenth century from something you heard last year, that is the finding, and it is the argument of this page.

0 of 6 answered.

This is a confessional matter, not a private opinion of Luther’s

Luther can be quoted in almost any direction. The doctrine is on firmer ground than that, because it was written into a confession of faith presented to an emperor in 1530, where every sentence had to survive hostile reading by lawyers. Three articles matter.

Article XXVII names the ladder in order to reject it — “they preach that it is a state of perfection, and they put it far above all other kinds of life ordained of God” — and then supplies the replacement:

Note the order, because it is not decoration. Fear God; then faith; then, third, diligence in good works and service in one’s calling. The calling really is in the definition of Christian perfection. But it is third, and downstream of a reconciliation that has already happened — which is what stops this doctrine turning into a new and busier ladder.

Article XXVI contains the sentence this page exists for. The Confession is describing what the preaching of its day had done to ordinary people:

Three examples, and they are a parent, a parent and a magistrate. Not a scholar, not an artist, nobody whose work is interesting. It was filed as a formal grievance against the preaching of an era, which is worth sitting with by anyone who has heard the same thing said in the present one.

Article XVI goes further than tolerating ordinary life. It classifies it: “lawful civil ordinances are good works of God,” followed by a list — holding civil office, sitting as a judge, serving as a soldier, making contracts, holding property, marrying. And then: the Gospel “does not destroy the State or the family, but very much requires that they be preserved as ordinances of God.” Required, not permitted.

The masks of God

The most striking thing Luther wrote on this is an image. Expounding Psalm 147, which is about God feeding the young ravens, he asks what human work amounts to:

The Latin is larvae Dei and the image is theatrical: the mask an actor holds up, which is not the actor. Two things follow and they pull in opposite directions, which is why the image is better than a slogan.

Ordinary work is dignified past anything a motivational account of it could manage: the person doing it is the instrument of divine provision, whether or not he has noticed. And the mask is not the face: nobody behind a mask is owed the credit for the play. The doctrine elevates the job and demotes the worker in the same movement, which is what keeps it from being flattery.

If that sounds like theological poetry with no practical consequence, the catechism settles it. Luther takes “give us this day our daily bread” and expands it until it contains most of public life: the petition covers “everything that belongs to our entire life in the world,” and there is “the greatest need to pray for temporal authority and government, as that by which most of all God preserves to us our daily bread.” In the same passage he suggests a prince should bear a loaf of bread on his coat of arms instead of a lion, because the loaf is what the office is actually for.

Practical version: the next time somebody hands you something you needed, you have two true things to say — thank God, and thank the person — and on this account they are the same thing said twice, once from outside and once from inside.

The biblical case is stranger than people show

Defenders of this doctrine usually quote Colossians 3:23 and stop. There is much sharper material available.

The first man God says he has filled with his Spirit is a metalworker. Search the Authorised Version for the first place God himself says this of anybody, and you arrive here — not at a prophet, and not at the man who will serve at the altar:

The gift is craftsmanship and it is named as such. The next verse extends the same provision to the whole workforce.

Men in disreputable trades were told to stay in them. Publicans — tax farmers for an occupying power, a byword for dishonesty — came to John the Baptist at their baptism and asked what they should do. If there were ever a moment for a call to leave secular employment, this is it:

Not one word about leaving. The reform is inside the occupation and tailored to its own particular temptations, because that is where the neighbour is standing.

The Authorised Version calls a tax official God’s minister. Romans 13 calls the ruler “the minister of God to thee for good” (v.4), and then, of the men who collect the tax, “they are God’s ministers, attending continually upon this very thing” (v.6). Twice in three verses, on a revenue official.

And Paul’s standing instruction is to abide. Three times in eight verses: “as the Lord hath called every one, so let him walk… and so ordain I in all churches” (1 Corinthians 7:17); “let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called” (7:20); “let every man, wherein he is called, therein abide with God” (7:24). The last three words put God inside the station rather than beyond it.

Two things this doctrine is not

It is not a licence. The obvious abuse is available immediately: if my station is my divine calling, then whatever I do in it is God’s work, and an employer or an official has just been handed a warrant for anything. The Augsburg Confession blocks that in the same article that authorises the office. Having said Christians may hold office, sit as judges and serve as soldiers, Article XVI ends: obedience is required “except when commanded to sin; for then they ought to obey God rather than men.”

The structure is simple. The station supplies the duty and the authority to discharge it. The commandments supply the content and the limit. “It was my responsibility” settles who must answer for an act; it settles nothing about whether the act was right.

It is not a comfortable Christianity. This is the strongest objection to the whole doctrine and it deserves a straight answer: a teaching which says your job and your household are your Christian service is exactly what a comfortable person wants to hear. Three things in the doctrine rule that use of it out.

The standard is the neighbour, not the activity — a job that serves nobody but the man doing it does not become service by being called one. The duties are fixed by the commandments and not by the office-holder, and anybody who honestly lists the duties of six or eight simultaneous stations has not been handed a lighter load than a rota. And the doctrine explicitly denies that the work will feel rewarding, be noticed, or succeed. Its own name for that condition is the theology of the cross: God’s work characteristically appears as its opposite — unimpressive, unrewarded, and often indistinguishable from wasted effort. Nobody applauds a decade of unremarkable honesty in a job, or the parent who did not lose his temper on the four hundredth similar occasion.

And the work earns nothing. Justification is by grace through faith, so no work is credit — which changes the direction the work faces. It stops being something offered upwards to improve your standing and becomes something handed sideways to somebody who needed it done.

Levelling the ladder does not empty the pulpit

The other serious objection is that this dissolves the church. If a magistrate is God’s minister and a mother’s work is a holy order, what is the pastor for?

The same confession that flattened the estates made the ministry an institution rather than a convenience. Article V has the ministry of teaching the Gospel and administering the Sacraments instituted so that faith may be obtained; Article XIV forbids public teaching or administering the Sacraments without a rightly ordered call.

The logic is straightforward. Vocation is where faith serves. It is not where faith comes from. Nothing a man does in his station gives him faith, forgives him, or tells him the news he needs; those come from outside, through the Word and the Sacraments — which is exactly why the office that delivers them is not one item on a list of equally good ways to spend a Sunday.

Church membership is itself one of the stations, and it carries duties like the rest: presence, hearing, receiving the Sacrament, bearing part of the cost, being useful when something needs doing. The doctrine of vocation does not put those on a lower rung; it declines to put anything on a rung. Which means a demanding job is not an exemption from them, any more than it is an exemption from being a father.

What changes is the question. What belongs distinctively to the pastoral office turns out to be five things, and they are all about public answerability — who may preach in the congregation’s name, who administers the Sacraments, who is answerable for souls, who decides what is taught, who may be called to do it. Not one of them is a claim to a higher spiritual condition. That is what “office and work, but not of estate” means in practice.

Where this page lands

My own view, offered as opinion. The church-involvement gauge is doing real damage, and almost nobody defends it in the terms it actually operates on, because stated plainly it is indefensible. Nobody will argue out loud that a man who chairs two committees is further along than a woman who spends her evenings with a parent who has stopped knowing her name.

The gauge does not need a defender. It only needs to be the only thing measured, and it is. Worse, what it measures is availability — which is mostly a function of how many other people depend on you. So the gauge systematically rewards those with the fewest obligations and penalises those with the most.

What I find most persuasive in this doctrine is not the levelling, which can be made to sound like an excuse. It is the change of question. And the replacement is not softer: it is more specific, it cannot be answered by being busy, and nobody but the person asked can answer it at all.

A congregation that cannot tell a member his work and his household are where his Christian life is chiefly conducted has mislaid something that was recovered at considerable cost, and has put a rota in the space it used to occupy.

Check it yourself

Six things. Five of the six are free.

1. 1. The Augsburg Confession, Articles XVI, XXVI and XXVII — then V and XIV. Forty minutes, free in the 1921 Triglotta translation. This is the whole confessional case and it is shorter than most magazine articles. Read XXVII for the definition of Christian perfection and note the order of its clauses; XXVI for the sentence about the father, the mother and the prince; XVI for the list of offices and the limiting clause at the end. Then V and XIV, two sentences each, which restrain everything this page argues.
2. 2. Luther, An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520) — the section on the first wall. Thirty minutes, free at Project Wittenberg. The cobbler and smith passage, and “office and work, but not of estate”. Read the surrounding argument too: Luther arrived at this by way of a constitutional dispute rather than a devotional one.
3. 3. Luther, The Large Catechism (1529) — the Fourth Commandment and the Fourth Petition of the Lord’s Prayer. An hour, free. This is the doctrine as it was actually taught to ordinary people, and it is far more concrete than any treatment of it since. The loaf on the coat of arms is in the Fourth Petition, at paragraphs 73 to 77.
4. 4. Exodus 31:1–11, Luke 3:1–20, and 1 Corinthians 7:17–24. Thirty minutes, free. The three passages that carry the most weight, read whole. Read the whole of Luke 3 rather than the three verses, so the instructions to the publicans and soldiers sit inside a call to repentance rather than apart from it.
5. 5. On the other side of the argument: Luke 10:38–42 (Mary and Martha — and note what is actually named as the fault); Luke 5:1–11 and 9:57–62 (men who did leave their nets); Matthew 19:16–30; and Acts 6:1–4, where the apostles decline to be diverted from the Word to serving tables — which is the hardest text here for the doctrine as stated. An hour, free. A reader who takes the affirmative material and not these has taken half the evidence.
6. 6. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II q.184. An hour, free at New Advent and CCEL. Read this before accepting this page’s account of the position being attacked. It is more careful than the polemics against it, and the detail that shows what kind of claim it is is in article 6: a parish priest is excluded from the state of perfection on a technicality about whether he may resign. Whatever the scheme is measuring, it is not pastoral usefulness.