Why do churches easily distance themselves from issues of work, politics and ideas? Why do churches focus on ‘family values’? Why are churches better at evangelising families and friends than evangelising the wider society and nation? Why do churches flourish in the suburbs, and find ministry and witness in the city or the workplace more difficult? Why do people find that they are living in two different worlds, and find it hard to make links between the two? Why is childcare an increasingly difficult issue for our society?
Suggesting an Answer
The answer is the massive effects of the Industrial Revolution, which began in the 1750s. Here was the birth of centralised, mechanised and specialised workplaces for the production of goods. Prior to this, individual potters worked from their homes; after, you had mechanised potteries. Prior to it you had a miller grinding flour at a local flour mill: after you had a big mill, serving a larger area. Before you had a baker for a village who would bake at home; after had a big bakery, with up-to-date machines.
Furthermore, this centralising also increased the need for transport. People now needed to leave their homes and travel to factories and then home again; the raw materials had to be transported to the factories and the finished products transported from the factories. Before the Industrial Revolution, people worked where they lived, and lived where they worked. ‘Home’ and ‘work’ was the same place and ‘work’ was often a family business in which members of the family all participated. Sometimes servants or apprentices were received into the family to help with the business.
However, after the Revolution, ‘home’ and ‘work’ were separated. While initially women and children went off to work at factories as well as men, eventually it was mainly men who left home each day to go to work. So for the first time there was a general and significant separation between ‘home’ and ‘work’. This separation was made more complete when there was an increasing separation between suburbs for homes, and industrial suburbs and city centres for work. People lived in the suburbs, and men went to work elsewhere.
The Impact of the Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution had dramatic effects upon society. Men went off to work—to a different world, with different issues and pressures. They became absent husbands and fathers (‘just wait till your father gets home’), and were valued for the money they brought home as the result of their work. Women stayed at home, became domestic, and became the effective parent. They did not earn money but became responsible for running the household. They were concerned with family and domestic matters, not issues of the workplace. Children were raised mostly by mothers (with the help of aunts, and grandmothers). Child-rearing became women’s business, and children suffered from the absence of fathers.
Churches flourished in domestic suburbs, because that was where people were on Sundays. So they focused on family issues, on domestic matters, and on issues of power to break up families. As a result, women felt increasingly at home in churches while men felt an increasing gap between work issues and their local church, and so less at home in church. Churches, because of their domestic focus, became increasingly distant from workplace issues and from non-home and family issues in general. They thought of evangelism in terms of suburban locations, and neglected wider society and its issues.
This post-Industrial-Revolution picture of the roles of husbands and wives came to be regarded as the Christian norm, despite the wonderful picture of the wealth-making woman of Proverbs 31! Moreover, Titus 2:5 where wives were to be ‘busy at home’ was read as reinforcing this view, even though originally to be ‘busy at home’ would have included working at the family business. Conservative Christians became socially conservative, but only as far back as the post-Industrial-Revolution age!
People who work, men and women, sometimes felt when they came to church, that they were in weekend, non-work mode, and that the last things they wanted to do was to have to think about work issues, about how Christianity impacts the workplace and society. They may have been influenced by the home–work separation that is inherent in their lives more deeply than they realised.
A Recent Significant Development
A recent but significant development has been that women have gone into the workplace. However, this change has not changed the basic structure of the post-Industrial-Revolution age. There is still a massive separation between home and work and that gap is no easier to cross for women than it is for men. Moreover, the problem is not just absent fathers but also absent mothers. Who is left to look after children? The effect on churches has been that most of their major workforce, disappeared with increasing work hours exacerbating the problem. Churches still tend to focus on domestic issues, and to forget issues of workplace and society evangelism.
What Should We Do?
It is not likely that we will be able to diminish the home–work dichotomy in the way we live, even if some people are able to work from home, and some live in cities. However, we need to find ways to minimise the harm. We need a vision of the Christian life that embraces home and work, the church and the society, the neighbourhood and the world. We need churches to address issues of work, society, and the world as well as issues of home and church.
We need churches to escape their suburban captivity, tackle workplace issues and workplace evangelism, and to value the daily work that people do. We need specialist ministries to focus on ministry in the workplace, witness in society, and witness in the world.
We need patterns of work that do not consume people. We need a solution to the daily care of children, when parents are working.
