Curated by It’s That Part™ — Originally published by Faith and Proverbs on .
Should one “network” at church?
Perhaps you’ve been approached at church by someone selling anything from candles to makeup. Or maybe you’ve wondered if church would be a great place to find a career mentor or potential customers. Let’s unpack this.
In its most basic form, networking is building relationships with others with a particular goal in mind. In work culture, the goals can be to find opportunities or to advance organizational interests. While these aren’t inherently bad goals, they’re centered around enhancing, building, or sharing your work.
Relationship building within the church has a different set of goals in mind: loving God and loving others by serving, encouraging, and promoting each other’s spiritual growth. What’s appropriate behavior for relationship building at work, then, may not be appropriate at church. On the other hand, we do bring our whole selves to church, and sometimes we can love each other by helping with job connections.
So is it OK to bring my work into my relationships with other church members? Is it acceptable, or is it crossing a boundary?
Before we can answer this question, let’s name a few truths about what it means to be an image-bearer of God that must frame this conversation.
Image-Bearers
First, every member of your church body was made in God’s image and is called to bear his image in all he or she does. Genesis 2 depicts Adam and Eve as colaborers in the garden. They were commissioned to develop the earth under into a working, livable society. They were called to build and cultivate a thriving place to live, filled with all the systems, processes, and physical and immaterial frameworks that enable a growing population to flourish. They were called to bring order into the world God made. All image-bearers of God have this same call and capacity to reflect God’s goodness in the world by the way they work in it (Col. 3:23).
Second, every member of your church body was created for community. We’re intended to be in close relationship with one another.
Third, there’s no sacred and secular divide. Our work isn’t separate from our faith. God intended our work and faith to go hand-in-hand as a way to use the gifts we’ve been given for kingdom purposes. We can go into a secular workplace and honor the Lord in it, and we can honor the Lord in how we handle our work with people in our church.
Warning: Networking Gone Wrong
Sometimes we’re tempted to use work as a way to build our own kingdom instead of working to build God’s kingdom. Consider how and why we might build relationships with others.
Sometimes we’re tempted to use work as a way to build our own kingdom instead of working to build God’s kingdom.
We have a clear example in Scripture of what it looks like to bring a community of people together for prideful and selfish motives. Genesis 11:4 tells us, “Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.’” The goal of their relationship building and collaboration was their glory, not the Lord’s. They used their relational strength to actively work against God’s commands.
God has made humans to need each other. He has ordained for us to be in community with one another, build each other up, engage relationally, and create beauty together. But this collaboration is intended to have a singular purpose: God’s glory and the advance of his kingdom. If we strive to build relationships for our own sake, we miss the mark, just as the people of Babel did.
Here are some questions to consider when evaluating your motives in networking within the church body:
- Do I want to genuinely get to know this person? There’s a curiosity that comes with wanting to know and understand others. Do you want to get to know her, her interests, and her giftings, or are you seeking to know her for your own gain?
- Am I more concerned with the benefits this relationship would bring me? Are you intentionally trying to position yourself to know her for your benefit or advancement? Is your primary concern your own gain?
- Am I forthright in communicating my intentions when wanting to meet with this person? If your goal is to discuss something business-related, are you clear about that when scheduling time with someone? There’s no worse feeling than believing you’ve been invited to coffee for genuine connection, only to discover you’ve been invited to a pitch without your knowledge. Are you communicating honestly?
Networking Redeemed
Worldly networking brings people together for the sake of building one’s kingdom, while redemptive networking connects others for the sake of building God’s kingdom. In a world where relationship is currency, let the church be the model of what it looks like to leverage relationships for the good of others and the good of the community. Redemptive networking requires a perspective motivated by honoring the Lord and being others-focused.
To pursue godly motivations when networking within the church, ask yourself questions like these:
- How can I serve this person?
- How can I promote the good he’s doing?
- How can I encourage him?
- How can I help him do the good work that God has prepared in advance for him to do (Eph. 2:10)?
- How can I honor the Lord in the work he’s called each of us to do and connect others to it?
- How can I pray for him?
Networking with Greater Purpose
I’ve been a beneficiary of others-oriented and God-focused networking. When I was 19, I began attending and working at a church as an intern. During that time, I was invited to a woman’s home for countless meals and conversations. We built a relationship where she attended my recitals in college, checked in with me during stressful seasons, and helped me navigate big life decisions. She genuinely sought to know and understand me as a person and encouraged me in all the ways she saw the Lord had gifted me.
Redemptive networking requires a perspective motivated by honoring the Lord and being others-focused.
Once I graduated and we both moved away, we stayed in contact. In 2019, she called me to tell me about a nonprofit the Lord had put on her heart to start that she thought I might be interested in. That conversation birthed a partnership with Women & Work that’s invaluable to me today. Not only did she know me well enough to know I’d be interested in partnering with her, but we also had enough relational capital and trust built up that I knew she wasn’t motivated by self-promotion but by a genuine desire to connect my gifts to the work she was doing.
This is a small example of a relationship born out of church membership and genuine connection that later gave way to networking opportunities. The book of Acts describes the birth of the church, which involved all aspects of life being melded together in community. If our primary concern is love for God and love for others, and we share all things in common in Christ, then we’re freed up to love, connect, and serve one another.
Before you network at church, examine your heart and motives. The church can be the place where believers model networking with a greater purpose: God’s glory and God’s kingdom.
For truth in every fact, visit itsthatpart.com.
Originally sourced via trusted media partner. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/should-network-church/
