OUR JOURNEY
Towards a Holistic WholeLife Church
Our Vocation@Work (VW) Story
The year 2022 marks the beginning of a wonderful journey for Christ Lutheran Church (CLC) as we embarked on a new church model (The WholeLife Church) that will change the course on how we do church. This plan has been in my mind since I joined CLC but the journey only began late last year when the strategy- 'towards greatness' comes to its end. As we plan for the new strategy, many questions arises, and we began to look into what is God's direction for us, what should our strategy be, what methodology should we embarked towards church growth and all these has led us into what is our vocation and purpose?
The quest for a holistic church growth model that touch the whole fabrics of relationship of life has always been in our mind. We hope to develop a model that allows us to lived out the one holistic life through our faith and make life and church relevant. We called our work and faith integration model - Vocation@Work and the new church that we hope to develop 'the WholeLife Church.
It is through this model we hope to see the formation of 1 holistic life, where work and faith are integrated to address one issues that surfaces in the last model, the issue of the fragmentation of the life of faith and work.
It is around late last year, we realized the necessary for such integration as the core strategy of the church as many do not see the connection between work and faith and its benefit. For many of them faith only existed in church and this fragmented lifestyles has been the crisis many churches faced today. We felt we can no longer embarked on growth strategy that only looks into growing ministry through church programs and activities. We must addressed the highly comparmentalized lifestyles to addressed this issue.
So we started to devise this unique model of integrating faith and work knowing the benefit it has for the individual and the church and this called for a totally new approach in doing church where the totality of our faith must be lived out for, with, and in God in the community we are in.
We began to see how fulfilled and effective work life can be, when it becomes the catalyst towards church growth. We called it church that transcend Sunday, a gathered church on Sunday that speaks to the dispersed church on Monday, the church that breaks the wall of Sunday Faith and Monday works - This is how a Wholelife Church is formed.
This integration is done through a Discipleship Developmental Program where we are to Learn and Experience worklife through work and faith initiatives. For the model to stick, we know we need to shape an integration culture within CLC via a purposeful and intentional mindset to build trust for teh journey ahead.
The Learning part comprises of 3 Discipleship modules (VW Discipleship) and an experential part, designed to experience the presence of God (to bring God) to our work place through intentional and purposeful church activities to enhanced the learning part of the model (VW Physical Enhancement).
The Integration is governed by a strategic intent which is a set of questioning technique that helps us to check our purpose and methodology. The model must be grounded in a sound theological and biblical framework, and for this we are indebted to the reformers teaching on vocation and work.
Hence, our preposition is to develop a simple model that engages work life with faith, because we believed when our work life is engaged, the church will thrive because our work matters to God, and God matters to our work, thus making our work, the work of God in serving the world.