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Mission Chattanooga, an Anglican church in Tennessee, did a grant project that helped workers narrate their experiences in prayers and liturgy. Gathering with people from their vocational fields helped them tune their hearts to experience God in the workplace. You can use and adapt their curriculum to your context.
“Healer of our every ill, when my patient died, thank you for reminding me that you brought healing between estranged family members.”
“Dear Lord, forgive my impatience with customers who don’t understand how to order or pay using our app or kiosk.”
“God, we don’t understand why our students go through such hard times. Our class sizes are too large, and we feel overwhelmed by all the needs in our school community.”
“May the Lord bless and keep you. May he walk before you and with you into the workday to give you peace, direction, wisdom, and language.”
These kinds of expressions of gratitude, confession, lament, and blessing can happen when you bring workers together to explore the priesthood of all believers. “If all of life is worship, then experiencing God in all of life is possible,” says Matt Busby, who led a 2024 Vital Worship, Vital Preaching Grant project funded by Calvin Institute of Christian Worship.
Busby is senior associate pastor at Mission Chattanooga, an Anglican congregation in downtown Chattanooga, Tennessee. Through worker-specific retreats and adult Sunday school classes, he helped participants enlarge their imagination for how God works. They learned to narrate their work experiences in the form of liturgies and prayers. They explored how to participate in the priesthood of all believers. And they began piecing together worship elements for specific vocational blessing services.
Busby wrote “Bless the Work of Our Hands: Liturgy and Vocation: A Retreat for Workers” for his master of ministry thesis. He used this curriculum to guide retreats and classes for his grant project at Mission Chattanooga. In the first and second sessions, on the theology of work, Busby explains that there’s more to this world than what we see.
He talks about the idea of the “immanent frame” from A Secular Age (2007) by Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor: People once believed God was directly involved in everyday life. They saw the world as mysterious and magical, with angels, demons, and spirits causing things like storms or sickness. Today, many see the world as limited to an immanent frame. Science alone can explain this closed system. Taylor says that in our modern “Age of Authenticity,” people look to personal experience rather than institutions to find their own meaning and purpose.
Yet Busby says we sometimes have moments at work that feel sacred. He points to Hartmut Rosa’s idea of “resonance,” those times when something deeply connects with us, like a meaningful conversation, music, or nature. Busby believes these experiences push against a purely closed view of the material world and can open us to experiencing God in our work.
“We need one another’s stories of resonance, where we sense God in our work,” Busby says. “This helps us experience mutuality and respond to God, who continues to move in the world despite our doubts.”
“We need one another’s stories of resonance, where we sense God in our work. This helps us experience mutuality and respond to God, who continues to move in the world despite our doubts.”
To notice moments of resonance in your work, Busby suggests, try writing out a daily audit of a typical workday, starting with whom or what you see, say, or do when you arrive at work. Doing a daily prayer of examen is helpful too.
Busby led retreats for workers in three fields: medicine, education, and hospitality. Medical and education workers met on Friday night and Saturday. Sunday night meetings worked best for the hospitality workers, including bartenders, baristas, restaurant owners, hotel workers, and a barber. The Sunday school classes included mixed vocations and were shorter.
“I found the 4A Sequence helpful to structure my curriculum: anchor content in learners’ experience, add new information, apply it in practice, and ask what the learner will take away and use,” Busby says. Here’s how the third session explores lament:
Busby says, "An educator wrote, ‘Lord, forgive me for when I am unable to hear others’ perspectives because I am stuck in my own path for resolution.’ A healthcare worker wrote a call-and-response that began: ‘God, I’m overwhelmed and can’t bear the brokenness I encounter with each patient. We cry out to you, O God. In your great mercy, hear our prayer. I don’t know why you allow such suffering. I feel powerless to fix it. We cry out to you, O God. In your great mercy, hear our prayer.’
“We found that the particularity of our testimonies, prayers, and liturgies really matters,” Busby says. “When one nurse hears another nurse share a moment of resonance within the same daily grind and hardships, it shifts the horizon of what God can and does do in a particular work setting. Many said the lament session was a highlight. Some valued being able to sit in hardship without rushing to a solution. Others found that naming their feelings in prayer helped release them.”
In the fourth session, groups of four discuss what shalom would look like in their workplace. They learn how believers can practice their priestly role by being a source of blessing at work. In small groups, they write corporate workplace confessions, prayers of the people, and vows. Finally, they create personal entrance liturgies for their vocations.
“Many people translate ‘shalom’ as ‘peace,’ but often our own definitions of peace fall short of the full definition of shalom,” Busby says. “Shalom is more than just the absence of conflict. It is wholeness or completeness. As followers of Jesus, we believe the Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:6–7) came on a mission of restoration that brings shalom to all places. Jesus gives us the ministry of reconciliation.
“You have opportunities to hold up your vocational field to God,” Busby continues. “You can thank God for the overall good that your work brings to community and society. But what structures in your vocational field dehumanize colleagues and those you serve? Acting as priests in our workplaces begins by being intercessors for those places to which God has called us. If you aren’t doing this in your workplace, then maybe no one is.”
Busby explains that entrance liturgies help workers identify a specific embodied action to do when starting the workday. They add a phrase from the Lord’s Prayer to that action. For example, when he arrives to help set up for church services, he brews coffee for the pastors, worship team, kids’ leaders, and welcome team. He prays, “Father in heaven, may your kingdom come in those who will enjoy this coffee, may your will be done in them as it is in heaven.”
Participants wrote simple entrance liturgies such as “Lord, may your kingdom come on those turning on their laptops this morning and entering meetings. May your will be done on Earth as it is in heaven,” and “Our Father, who dwells in this spare bedroom, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come in today’s rhythms, thy will be done through each email, Zoom, and liminal space, on earth as it is in heaven.”
Busby originally planned for his grant participants to create vocation-specific worship services during the final session. “These services would be based on the legacies of year-end covenant renewal services in the Wesleyan tradition and Watch Night services in the African American church,” he says. “I also introduced grant participants to the Anglican ordination service for commissioning priests.”
In graduate school, Busby created a worship service for medical workers. He offers a worship template that can be customized to any field of work. It suggests that workers together choose an offering for a ministry or nonprofit related to their work, such as a low-cost health clinic, tutoring program, or housing ministry.
Mission Chattanooga healthcare workers wrote a set of vows that includes this exchange: “Are you persuaded that ultimate healing comes not from medicine, therapies, or surgeries, but through Jesus alone, [and] that our work as practitioners is but a temporary reflection or lightpost of the healing to come at the restoration of all things? I am so persuaded.”
However, Busby says, “I realized that worker cohort retreats and worker-centered worship services are two [different] things. It didn’t work to squeeze them together.” He still hopes to gather three or four healthcare workers to create a vocational commissioning service using words produced by grant participants.
Choosing when to do a vocational commissioning service depends on whether a church follows a highly structured church year. “Mission Chattanooga already includes students and teachers during August prayers of the people. We once had a commissioning element at the end of a Labor Day service. Given the Anglican church calendar, Sunday evening may be the best time for us to do an entire worker-centered order of worship,” Busby says.
Busby offers his master’s thesis, “Bless the Work of Our Hands: Liturgy and Vocation: A Retreat for Workers,” for churches to use and adapt. You can also use or adapt his worship service for medical workers and vocational commissioning service template.
Additionally, Busby recommends these resources:
The Porter’s Gate 2017 album Work Songs includes songs that many congregations have added to their worship music repertoire, such as “In the Fields of the Lord” and “Your Labor Is Not in Vain.”
