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“We just cannot figure out the blue-collar piece.”
I have heard this line so often in ministry that it has started to sound like a fading mantra. After fifteen years in the faith and work conversation, I still feel the gap in the movement’s ability to understand, educate, and serve blue-collar workers. We speak with confidence about vocation and cultural engagement, yet our focus keeps drifting back to the lives of professionals, leaders, and knowledge workers. Meanwhile, the daily labourer in the Home Depot parking lot, the maids cleaning homes, the teenager behind the fast-food counter, and the home health aide on a punishing schedule often hear our language as though it belongs to someone else’s life.
A theology of work that begins with self-actualization or specific doctrinal foundations sounds foreign in many work settings. For most, work begins before a good day is certain. In the early light of a parking lot, men stand near the edge of the asphalt, hands in pockets, scanning the slow turn of pickup trucks (or the hint of ICE on the horizon). Conversations are short, half in hope, half in caution. A truck pulls up, a window rolls down, a few words are exchanged, and a decision is made in seconds. Minds mull not on calling or fulfillment but on an arithmetic of necessity with rent, groceries, and medical bills. In this early morning setting, our abstract theological topics and frameworks evaporate quickly.
I think our largely academic faith and work cohort needs to walk for a moment with Simone Weil, a French Marxist-friendly intellectual who laboured on factory floors, which, many scholars suggest, hastened her death through untreated tuberculosis and intentional malnutrition from fasting. Weil’s radical solidarity with the factory workers sits uneasily alongside gatherings of faith and work leaders in carefully curated ecosystems of exposed brick and kombucha taps, where artisanal coffee flows and existential uncertainty lingers just beneath the surface. Across the noise and heat of the factory floor, this gaunt, intense woman turns and fixes her gaze on us. Her crippled frame stands as a living rebuke to every comfortable theory of work we tell ourselves.
The Achievement and Limits of the Faith and Work Movement
The contemporary faith and work movement, indeed, recovers something vital for Christian discipleship. Thinkers like Max Stackhouse, Miroslav Volf, and Amy Sherman offer intellectual foundations; practitioners like Timothy Keller, David Kim, and Tom Nelson reintroduce the Calvinist conviction that calling extends beyond clergy to every sphere of human endeavour. The result has been a generation of Christians who see daily labour not as a distraction from spiritual life but as one of its central arenas. Their theological work bridges the sacred-secular divide often assumed in the evangelical imagination and calls the church to faithful work in the shared life of institutions and cities of this world. This has been my intellectual and spiritual home for the past fifteen years; these are my people.
A sociological reality, however, has subtly shaped the movement’s tone, audience, and emphasis. Much of the conversation emerges from and continues to address most naturally knowledge workers, professionals, and the creative class. Conferences, books, and magazines reflect a level of autonomy, education, and professional mobility revealing elite social locations. The dominant metaphors of calling, fulfillment, and cultural engagement assume a degree of choice and agency that is less available, if at all, to those whose work is constrained by economic necessity or structural limitation. The language of calling too often assumes autonomy, the rhetoric of purpose presumes choice, and the stories we celebrate emerge from pristine co-working spaces rather than shop floors. Until the wisdom of welders, warehouse workers, and truckers shapes our frameworks, and not only our illustrations, the movement will continue to speak more easily about the potential of work rather than its hardest realities.
A Different Starting Point
Simone Weil offers us a different place to begin. Born in Paris in 1909 to an affluent, secular Jewish family, she trained as a philosopher at the École Normale Supérieure, then left the classroom to work incognito in the factories of the mid-1930s. She intentionally lived among agricultural labourers and machine operators, volunteered in the Spanish Civil War, and spent the final years of her short life writing some of the most arresting spiritual reflections of the twentieth century. Mystical encounters with Christ brought her to the threshold of the Roman Catholic Church, though never to baptism. She is one of the few Christian thinkers formed not simply by ideas about labour but by the physical experience of it. She writes from the noise, monotony, and bodily exhaustion of the assembly line and the meat processor’s kill floor.
Because of where Weil chose to stand, her central conviction is simple: work tells the truth about the human condition through necessity and constraint. She avoids first asking whether work is meaningful. She asks what work does to a person, regardless of meaning. Her vocabulary for labour is affliction, attention, and decreation. Affliction describes the weight suffering lays upon a life. Attention is the discipline of seeing reality without illusion. Decreation, a concept further developed by Rowan Williams, is the difficult relinquishing of the illusion that we are the centre of all things. Weil refuses to sentimentalize either work or the worker, and she is wary of any theology that cannot account for labour’s exposure of human fragility and dependence. “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,” she writes in Waiting for God, a line that captures her conviction that the first task is not to fix work or the worker but to see both truthfully.
Do we really—no, really—see as they see?
At a fast-food counter during the lunch rush, orders stack faster than they can be cleared. The worker’s hands move in a practiced sequence: Bag, fill, pass, repeat. Bag, fill, pass, repeat. A customer sighs at the wait. Another checks a phone without looking up. The worker apologizes, though the pace is not hers to control. By mid-shift, the rhythm has settled into muscle memory. There is little room for creativity and no applause for competence. Set self-expression aside. The question here is whether patience and care can survive repetition.
The faith and work movement sees difficulty for what it is and has a vocabulary for it. We wax eloquently on brokenness, frustration, fallenness, the groaning of creation, the thorns and thistles that attend toil. These terms name real experiences. Any honest Christian account of work must include them. Yet, where our existing language runs out, Weil urgently presses further.
Weil distinguishes affliction from ordinary suffering. Suffering, in her account, includes inconvenience, disappointment, and even significant physical pain. Affliction, however, is something else. It is suffering that has penetrated so deeply into a life that it marks the soul itself, altering not merely what a person feels but who a person is. “Affliction is an uprooting of life, a more or less attenuated equivalent of death,” she writes. Affliction operates simultaneously on the physical, psychological, and social planes. Its most characteristic feature is that it strips away every illusion the sufferer has maintained about the world and herself. The afflicted person does not simply hurt. She is, in Weil’s phrase, stamped with contempt, marked in a way from which others instinctively turn.
The faith and work movement tends to process workplace difficulty through categories that carry a softness Weil would find suspicious. We speak of brokenness, and we mean it. Yet the word often functions as a general acknowledgement that things are not as they could be. We nod to the fall before we move quickly to redemption and restoration. In each case, the notion bends toward resolution. The arc runs from problem to purpose, from disruption to deeper meaning. Weil would not deny that such an arc exists. She would insist, with a bluntness born of her factory experience, that we arrive at it far too quickly. In doing so, we skip over the reality that defines work for billions of people. The woman who changes hotel beds for ten hours does not need us to tell her that her work is broken. She knows. What she may need is someone honest enough to say that her daily labour is genuinely afflictive: that the repetition, the invisibility, the physical toll, and the social contempt she absorbs press on the soul in ways our theology has not learned to name.
A theology of work that does not have a category for hard labour deforms rather than develops. Therefore, we will find ourselves perpetually unable to address the people we wish to reach.
Attention Versus Fulfillment
The dominant note of the faith and work movement is purpose. Find your calling. Discover what you are made to do. Align your gifts with the world’s needs. In Kingdom Calling, Sherman frames this through the fourfold work of the kingdom: fruitful, skillful, redemptive, and restorative. In Every Good Endeavor, Keller and Katherine Leary Alsdorf situate work within God’s creative design and redirect its aim toward service and worship (avodah, the Hebrew word that holds worship and labour in unresolved tension). These are serious theological contributions, and I have built my own ministry around them.
Yet both frameworks begin with the question “What is your work for?” Weil begins elsewhere. She asks, “Can you see what is actually in front of you?” That distinction matters more than it first suggests. The emphasis on purpose and fulfillment presumes a degree of reflective distance from the task at hand. It works well when you are a lawyer discerning whether to take a case, an entrepreneur weighing a new venture, or a pastor crafting a sermon series on vocation. It works less well when the task is unchangeable and the worker has no margin for reflection because the next order is already on the screen.
The dominant metaphors of calling, fulfillment, and cultural engagement assume a degree of choice and agency that is less available, if at all, to those whose work is constrained by economic necessity or structural limitation.
The famous chocolate factory episode from I Love Lucy offers a comic, but actually tragic, parable. Lucy and Ethel step onto a factory floor and discover immediately that the candy conveyor belt will not wait for them. They improvise furiously, stuffing chocolates into their mouths, hats, and blouses. The comedy is irresistible because we recognize that the logic of the factory floor is alien to the logic of their lives as housewives and full-time mothers. What makes the scene ironically devastating is that beneath the hilarity are the women who return to that belt day after day, year after year, without the laugh track or the escape hatch of a comfortable home and bread-winning husbands. Their endurance is the invisible premise on which the comedy relies. And, oh, we laugh.
Rather than fulfillment, Weil emphasizes attention: the willingness to look at reality as it is, without flinching, without reframing it into something more palatable. “The love of our neighbour in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: ‘What are you going through?’” she writes. Attention does not depend on autonomy. It does not require a corner office, a flexible schedule, or a compelling personal brand. The Amazon Fulfillment Centre worker (ironic name, right?) who notices the new hire struggling with the pace and slows down to help without being asked is practicing attention. The hospice aide who sees the fear in a patient’s eyes and sits for thirty seconds longer than her duties allow is practicing attention. “Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening,” Weil observes in her Lectures on Philosophy. Our lexicon runs more naturally toward impact, influence, and calling than toward such crushing realities of work that have no name.
Purpose is not Weil’s target. Her questions sit underneath purpose and ask whether we have confused it with the attention that precedes it. Seeing comes before serving.
Decreation and the Surrender of Agency
There is a temptation embedded in the very word “vocation” as we have come to use it. The temptation is to equate calling with fulfillment, to hear in the word a promise that faithful obedience will eventually resolve into a life that feels whole, purposeful, and aligned. We do not always say this explicitly. Yet we imply it in the arc of the stories we tell, in the testimonies we platform, and in the unspoken assumption that a rightly ordered vocation produces a recognizable sense of meaning for us. All along, we are the centre of our work.
Weil’s counter to such self-centred narratives is the concept of decreation. “Decreation: to make something created pass into the uncreated,” she writes in Gravity and Grace. It is the painful and deliberate movement of stepping out of one’s own way so that reality, and ultimately God, can be seen without the distortion of self-interest. The self’s claims are diminished so that something truer can come into view.
The hotel maid who has no illusions about the significance of her task, who does not console herself with the notion that bed-making is secretly world-changing, and who nonetheless gives herself to the work with care and presence is practicing something for which our movement does not yet have words. She is not fulfilled per se. She is not exercising her gifts in a way that a vocational assessment would affirm. She is, in Weil’s terms, however, consenting to reality.
We have a robust theology of redeemed agency and almost no theology of a relinquished agency. We know how to talk about the Christian who transforms her workplace. We do not know how to talk about the Christian whose workplace transforms her, not toward flourishing but toward a deeper dependence on God born of exhaustion and constraint. Until we can speak both languages, our theology of vocation will remain, at best, a theology for some vocations.
Can we even see our truncated project for what it is, truly? Applying decreation to ourselves might include incorporating some hard labour on a factory floor at our next colloquium, or joining migrant farmers in the fields picking tomatoes. Maybe it’s to put this article down and join my housekeeper at our teenage sons’ toilet, do the scrubbing with her, and speak more to her soul, and my own, than my Venmo’d $175 ever could.
Toward a More Cruciform Theology of Work
I do not introduce Weil to dismantle what the faith and work movement has built. I introduce her because the movement deserves a deeper foundation, and because I love it too much to leave its blind spots unnamed.
The four-chapter gospel we employ in the faith and work conversation—creation, fall, redemption, restoration/consummation—remains indispensable. However, what Weil teaches us is that we have not yet taken the third chapter seriously enough. We have lingered in creation, celebrating the dignity and goodness of work as God designed it. The fall gets ample attention, and then we rush toward restoration. The cross sits between them, and we have treated it more as a theological hinge than as a place to dwell. We speed by Good Friday on the way to Easter and then let our imaginations run wild with the New Jerusalem of Isaiah 60 and Revelation 21.
Weil insists we sit at the cross longer by asking an uncomfortable question our movement has largely avoided: Does the structure of modern work itself—its speed, its fragmentation, its relentless efficiency—carry within it the capacity to deform the human person regardless of intention? W. David Buschart and Ryan Tafilowski make a similar argument in Worth Doing, contending that prevailing frameworks rely too heavily on creation and future hope while neglecting the lived realities of finitude and futility. A movement that never interrogates the structural conditions of labour will always end up ministering to those who succeed within the system while saying little of, and to, those whom the system grinds down.
What emerges from this cruciform approach of Weil’s is a richer account of work. Work remains participation in creation. Every act of labour, from architecture to dishwashing, participates in God’s ongoing creative activity. Weil does not deny this. Yet she insists we hold it alongside three truths the faith and work movement avoids: affliction, attention, and decreation. In her framework, work’s crush of the imago Dei is the very school of attention and a site of decreated surrender.
The daily reality of labour is not self-expression but self-denial, not the deployment of gifts but the acceptance of limits. A theology that can name such surrender as spiritually significant, rather than as a problem to be solved through better vocational alignment, speaks a word we have not yet learned to articulate. Work also trains our capacity for attention. The nurse who notices the change in a patient’s breathing, the mechanic who listens to the engine with a precision that no diagnostic tool can replicate, the teacher who sees the student behind the behaviour—these are practitioners of attention, and their skill is spiritual before it is professional.
What This Looks Like on Tuesday
These corrections will remain theoretical unless they translate into practices that fit constrained lives. Consider a story that, under the current rubric, will not appear in a conference video testimonial. A woman clocks in before sunrise at a hotel she cannot afford to stay in. The cart is already heavy, the hallway already loud, the schedule already tight. She strips sheets, scrubs sinks, replaces barely used soaps, and wipes away fingerprints that reappear within hours. A guest asks for extra towels with the impatience of someone who does not notice the labour that makes the room possible. Her work is honest, even necessary. Her work is mostly invisible, and her work requires endurance.
A theology of work centred on agency will rush past her with advice calibrated to freedom. A theology that learns from Weil asks what happens to this woman’s soul under repetition, under humiliation, under the pressure of necessity. It then dares to call this worker not merely a recipient of our ministry but a teacher of the church, because she knows something about practicing attention when attention is costly.
If our movement is serious, the changes must be concrete. Worker-led testimonies belong on main stages, not as closing illustrations but as primary theological witnesses. Workers should be paid for their time and coached in advance. Discipleship groups should be organized around shift work, rotating schedules, and child-care constraints rather than professional affinity. Micro-practices of attention—a two-minute liturgy for clock-in, a brief examen while washing hands, a prayer that fits into imminently demanding work—should be standard offerings. Pastoral visitation should include daycare centres, garages, and orchards. A standing “front-line council” of hourly workers should review sermon applications and small-group materials with the authority to say, “This does not fit our lives,” and have the curriculum revised accordingly. The options abound, if only carefully constructed for the labourer.
“We just cannot figure out the blue-collar piece” really is a liturgical confession. We say it with genuine frustration. We say it, I suspect, because saying it feels like progress, as though naming the gap is the same as closing it.
It is not.
The answer may not be better programming or academic pondering. It may require a willingness to let the cross do more than transition us from fall to resurrection. A willingness to sit where work is not meaningful, where calling is not visible, where the only available spiritual act is the discipline of remaining present and refusing to let the weight of necessity crush the capacity for love.
Simone Weil, the gaunt French philosopher, is still looking at us on the factory floor. The question is whether we will look back.
