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MLK on Creative Street Sweepers

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I love this quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.:

If it falls to your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep the streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, like Shakespeare wrote poetry, like Beethoven composed music; sweep streets so well that all the host of Heaven and earth will have to pause and say, “Here lived a great street sweeper, who swept his job well.” (Quoted in Tom Nelson’s Work Matters: Connecting Sunday Worship to Monday Work.)

Here’s what I love about it: He calls everyone to high expectations and recognizes that creativity and excellence can be exercised in any and every type of (lawful) work.

This stands in contrast to the thinking I encounter sometimes among some Christians of the more cynical variety. Most Christians don’t think so poorly, but sometimes I encounter people that actually have a problem with the call to exercising creativity and finding meaning in our work. They say things like “how can this or that person find meaning in their work — they sweep streets [or whatever]. You have your head in the clouds. They need to focus on just paying the bills, not finding meaning and purpose in what they do.”

This view is then justified on allegedly spiritual grounds as being “liberating” by “freeing” people in difficult jobs from the “obligation” to find meaning and purpose in their work.

But in reality this perspective is fueled by cynicism and low expectations. It is a very un-Christian way to look at work.

The call to find meaning and satisfaction in our work is not a new burdensome law; it is, rather, an invitation. The point is not “you better find meaning in your work.” Rather, it is: “guess what: you  can find satisfaction in your work, whatever it is.” It is pointing to an opportunity, not one more burden a person has to carry.

And MLK here captures it perfectly. We can all find meaning in our work, whatever it is, by doing it for Christ and doing it with creativity and excellence. This is something any person can do in any vocation — even street sweeping or collecting the garbage.

In fact, in my view, a sweet sweeper who does his work with excellence and diligence and creativity is creating just as much a work of art as anything Michelangelo did. Michelangelo’s art was on the canvas; the street sweepers is on the streets and the beneficiaries are everyone who walks by.

Art is more than just paintings and poetry. Anything you do with emotional investment and creativity is a type of art, and all work is to be done in an artful — rather than merely utilitarian — way.

Jesus Made Good Tables!

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God does everything he does with excellence, and Jesus surely never engaged in shoddy work in his time of working as a carpenter before his public ministry. Therefore, we should not settle for shoddy work in our occupations, either.

Yet, because much Christian teaching on work is still thin and compartmentalized, this often happens. We need to correct this by affirming that we are not to compartmentalize our work and our faith, as though God’s call on us applies only in the area of church and our personal lives. Further, if we were able to recapture the compelling biblical vision of work in the church, it would do wonders for the effectiveness of our testimony to the gospel before the world.

I love how Dorothy Sayers makes these points in Why Work:

How can any one remain interested in a religion which seems to have no concern with nine-tenths of life?

The church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays.

What the church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.

Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly — but what use is all that if in the very center of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry? [Great point! Shoddy and careless workmanship is an insult to God because it misrepresents his nature and pervasive concern for all areas of life.]

No crooked table-legs or ill-fitting drawers ever, I dare swear, came out of the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could any one believe that they were made by the same hand that made heaven and earth. No piety in the worker will compensate for work that is not true to itself; for any work that is untrue to its own technique is a living lie.

Yet in her own buildings, in her own ecclesiastical art and music, in her hymns and prayers, in her sermons and in her little books of devotion, the church will tolerate, or permit a pious intention to excuse, work so ugly, so pretentious, so tawdry and twaddling, so insincere and insipid, so bad as to shock and horrify any decent craftsman.

And why? Simply because she has lost all sense of the fact that the living and eternal truth is expressed in work only so far as the work is true in itself, to itself, to the standards of its own technique. She has forgotten that the secular vocation is sacred.

God is Not Served by Technical Incompetence

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Dorothy Sayers, in Why  Work:

The worst religious films I ever saw were produced by a company which chose its staff exclusively for their piety.

Bad photography, bad acting, and bad dialogue produced a result so grotesquely irreverent that the pictures could not have been shown in churches without bringing Christianity into contempt.

God is not served by technical incompetence.

Be Better Than Average

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This is something we continually need to be reminded about. I am amazed by the militant commitment to mediocrity of so many people — including in the church. Brad Lomenick gives us a great exhortation to continually seek to be better than average.

Is Competence Christian?

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Most of us immediately recognize that the answer, of course, is yes. But there is no shortage of overspiritualizers out there today who like to rain on the parade of common grace, and sometimes (strangely enough) the quest for competence can be wrongly labeled as idolatry.

Hence, it is important — not to mention interesting — to see the biblical foundation behind truths that are very clear simply from the light of nature alone. Competence is one of them.

One of the most fascinating passages here is Proverbs 2:2-4, where competence is said to be a component of wisdom, and we are exhorted to seek it diligently.

You don’t see this directly in many translations, because they tend to translate the term for “competence” here simply as “understanding” (and, obviously, there’s a relationship). But Tremper Longman brings this out most clearly in his more precise translation of the passage in his commentary on Proverbs:

My son, if you grasp my speech and store up my commands within you, bending your ear toward wisdom, extending your heart toward competence — indeed, if you call out for understanding, shout for competence, if you seek it like silver and search for it like hidden treasure…

So, to everyone who has an innate desire to do good work and be effective at what you do: be encouraged. This desire is not unspiritual, but is a reflection of the image of God in you. It is a very spiritual thing to be competent; indeed, God exhorts us to it.

Excellence is not the Opposite of Failure

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Marcus Buckingham states this well in Go Put Your Strengths to Work:

The radical idea at the core of the strengths movement is that excellence is not the opposite of failure, and that, as such, you will learn little about excellence from studying failure.

This seems like an obvious idea until you realize that, before the strengths movement began, virtually all business and academic inquiry was built on the opposite idea: namely, that a deep understanding of failure leads to an equally deep understanding of excellence. That’s why we studied unhappy customers to learn about the happy ones, employees’ weaknesses to learn how to make them excel, sickness to learn about health, divorce to learn about marriage, and sadness to learn about joy.

What has become evident in virtually every field of human endeavor is that failure and success are not opposites, they are merely different, and so they must be studied separately. Thus, for example, if you want to learn what you should not do after an environmental disaster, Chernobyl will be instructive. But if you want to learn what you should do, Chernobyl is a waste. Only successful cleanups, such as the Rocky Flats nuclear facility in Colorado, can tell you what excellence looks like.

Study unproductive teams, and you soon discover that the teammates argue a lot. Study successful teams, and you learn that they argue just as much. To find the secrets of a great team, you have to investigate the successful ones and figure out what is going on in the space between the arguments.

Well said.

The Good Enough Principle

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Rick Warren, in The Purpose Driven Church:

You may have heard it said, ‘If it can’t be done with excellence, don’t do it.’ Well, Jesus never said that! The truth is, almost everything we do is done poorly when we first start doing it—that’s how we learn. At Saddleback Church, we practice the ‘good enough’ principle: It doesn’t have to be perfect for God to use and bless it. We would rather involve thousands of regular folks in ministry than have a perfect church run by a few elites.

This is good counsel. Sometimes, in the quest to make sure we do something perfectly, we end up never getting to it all. We say to ourselves that we’ll do it “someday” because we don’t think we’ll be able to do it well right now. So we plan to wait until conditions are better, or until we have everything lined up and perfect. And then we never get to it.

Or, we might think we’ll never be able to do a certain thing well, and so we never even plan on trying — even though there is a clear need and we could do something. We say “I’m not able to do it up to the standard at which it should be done, so I won’t do it at all.”

It’s far better to realize that “less-than-perfect service is always better than the best intention.” If there is something you feel like you ought to do, get started now, with what you have. And, ironically, you’ll probably find that in the doing of it you will get better than if you had waited.

I’m not saying that there is not a time to prepare. There is — and sometimes preparation can be a long process. But if the reason you are holding off is because you have an unrealistic view of perfection, when you do have the ability to get moving now, then you should get moving even if it won’t be perfect!

Pursue Excellence, Not Being Elite

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A good interview with Andy Crouch, author of Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling.

Crouch argues that “everyone should strive to make culture by humbly mastering a field that intersects with the world’s brokenness.” And he believes just that: everyone can make culture, not just the elite.

That seems to be a major difference between his book and James Davidson Hunter’s To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World.

Wasn’t Mark using street language so as to communicate with common folks, not elites? Does the difference between street and elite play into the difference between your book, Culture Making, and James Davidson Hunter’s book To Change the World? He seems to argue that elites make culture, and you write more about everyone making culture. Is that a valid distinction? Yes, that’s so true. Dr. Hunter and I have different instincts. When you ask when I first made culture, I don’t think of my first publication in a national magazine. I think of the “ABC Song,” because that’s culture. Where does cultural influence come from? It’s very mysterious—the Holy Spirit can work through a lot of different vessels.

I think that’s a key difference.

I respect James Davidson Hunter’s book very much, and learned a lot from it. But I also think he makes some critical mistakes, chief among them being that he fails to take into sufficient account the changes brought about by the rise of the Internet. In many respects I think a helpful companion book would be Jeff Jarvis’s What Would Google Do?.