“Work & leisure” is subject of online SBTS course

LOUISVILLE, Ky.  After 30 years in fulltime music ministry, God led Philip Griffin into a bi-vocational ministry role along with a tandem job as hospitality coordinator for a Chick-fil-a restaurant in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Through that experience, Griffin has learned firsthand how church members cope with inflexible work schedules, stand for eight hours a day on the job, deal with cranky customers and find opportunities to minister through it all.

Griffin, minister of music at Sagamore Baptist Church in Fort Worth, is among dozens of laborers featured in a new online course on “work and leisure” at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Taught by professor Mark Coppenger, the course is designed to help ministers understand and appreciate the varied vocations of their parishioners.

“Many ministers that come from a Christian home, that go straight to a Christian college [and] go straight to seminary [then] straight to a fulltime ministry position live in a bubble and don’t live in the real world,” Griffin says in a course video.

His Chick-fil-A job has made evident to Griffin the practical difficulty of late-night choir rehearsals for working people and the spiritual strain of attempting to live in a Christ-like manner before nonbelievers in the workplace.

Coppenger first taught a course on work and leisure 35 years ago as a philosophy professor at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill., where it was among his favorite offerings. When an opportunity arose to bring a similar course to Southern, he “jumped at the chance.”

Following a successful pilot version of the course last year, Coppenger is slated to launch an enhanced online version in 2017.

“I shot ‘field videos’ [for the course] at dozens of places,” Coppenger told the TEXAN, “including the AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, D.C.; a limestone quarry near Bedford, Ind.; the Grohmann work-art museum in Milwaukee; a furniture assembly line in Dumas, Ark.; along a walking trail in Nashville’s Radnor Lake preserve; at an elaborate kids’ playground in Owensboro, Ky.; while browsing in a four-story used-book store in Detroit; at Wrigley Field in Chicago; [and] a half-mile inside a coal mine near Pikeville, Ky., where I interviewed miners by the light of our headlamps.

“I interviewed a hotel room maid in Monticello, Ark.; a used car salesman, a car-repair shop owner and a dentist in the Dallas area; SBC disaster relief volunteers in Warren, Mich.; a blacksmith in Indianapolis, Ind.; SBTS faculty members and doctoral students about their prime spots/times/setups for writing; [and] SBTS staffers at a retreat in Lexington, Ky., where I asked about the chores they had as kids.”

The videos help students consider the so-called creation and cultural mandates of Genesis 1:26-28, homemaking, evangelism in the workplace, bi-vocational ministry, the work ethics taught by other religions and whether there is a distinction between sacred and secular aspects of life.

“A huge question,” Coppenger said, “is, ‘Do we work that we might gain leisure, or do we use leisure to recoup our powers for fresh work?’ I’m inclined toward the latter, including the conviction that we’ll have delightful work to do in Glory.”

Another Texan featured in the course, Daniel Brackeen of Inglewood Baptist Church in Grand Prairie, helps students understand the work of a food manufacturer. Founder of Heritage Family Specialty Foods, Brackeen helped develop the formula for TCBY frozen yogurt in the late 1970s.

“Every day I come to work I’m thankful, and I know [God’s work in my life] is the reason I’m here today. And I ought to give God all the credit for our business success,” Brackeen says in a course video.

The aim of the course, Coppenger wrote in the catalog description, is “to prepare the students for the wise and joyful stewardship of their work and leisure in Christ, equipping them for impactful, exemplary and sustainable service, priming them to flourish as creatures of God, and equipping them to lead others in their own search for godly balance in life according to their various callings.”