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Spiritual Foundations

SPIRITUAL FOUNDATIONS OF PARTNERS WORLDWIDE

  1. THE IMAGE OF GOD in every human being is the primary foundation of Partners Worldwide, the driving force and central focus of all of its work.   
     
  2. The basic biblical mandate for developing and expressing the universal human calling to Image God is in Genesis 1:26-30, especially verses 27 and 28:

    So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

    God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

    This mandate is repeated and more specifically defined in Genesis 2:15:

    The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.

  3. This universal never rescinded mandate, like everything and everyone, has been distorted by sin.   Among the results are:
    • Perpetual widespread unemployment, especially in developing countries. 
    • Lack of opportunity to develop skills to be more productive in satisfying self-supporting daily work.
    • Widespread loss of dignity, hope, and God-honoring quality of life when pervasive lack of productive self-supporting daily work creates dependency and fatalistic lethargy.
    • Failure among Christian leaders to affirm highly motivated successful ordinary Monday through Friday daily work as the single most dominant and primary way most people can respond to God’s mandate to express the God-imitating image he has implanted in every human being. 
    • Acceptance of these sinful distortions in properly imaging God through our daily work makes everyone, including Christians, susceptible to the following temptations:
      1. Accepting an unbiblical hierarchy among different kinds of daily work, often going so far as calling some sacred and others secular, or speaking of only a few narrowly defined full-time specialized  Christian ministry vocations as being spiritual. 
      2. Accepting and doing little or nothing about high levels of unemployment which rob unemployed and underemployed people of the ability to respond obediently and joyfully to God’s holy calling to productive, ordinary, satisfying, self-supporting daily work. 
      3. Selfishly thinking that our God-given skills and opportunities that make our personal daily work successful may be used for mostly narrow personal benefit rather than also generously shared to empower others, especially those with fewer opportunities, to develop and achieve such productive successes through their daily work. 
      4. Acceptance and even speaking approvingly of a lower level of daily work achievement, especially in the areas of business and finance, than the maximum energy and productivity our God-given abilities and opportunities call us to achieve through joyful obedient ordinary daily work as mandated in Genesis 1:27 and 28 and 2:15.

 Partners Worldwide grieves when people are unable to image God through satisfying, productive, self-supporting ordinary daily work.   But neither passive acceptance nor guilt-based activity are options because we are privileged to be co-workers with Jesus Christ whose promise is “I am making everything new” (Revelation 21:5a). 

Partners’ special focus is actively seeking out ways to affirm and create satisfying God-imaging daily work for everyone*, especially for those living in poverty because of pervasive conditions of high unemployment. As members of Partners Worldwide, we see all ordinary daily work, both for ourselves and for those with whom we partner, as joyful expressions of our calling to image God as He originally intended in His good creation.  We believe working toward this goal for everyone will be blessed with surprising results because it is based on this biblical promise: The kingdom of this world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ” (Revelation 11:15*)

As Christian Partners we seek out ways to partner with other Christians to provide jobs and opportunities for profitable personal and business growth so that everyone, especially those unemployed and otherwise marginalized, will be more fully empowered to image God through productive, satisfying, self-supporting daily work.  We believe that inability to find satisfying, self-supporting daily work because of preventable unemployment conditions is a sinful distortion of God’s good creation; and that we have special abilities which God calls us to use to overcome such debilitating conditions.

In the light of this biblical perspective, every member of Partners Worldwide is already engaged in life-long full-time Christian ministry precisely in each one’s ordinary Monday through Friday daily work.  As an organization, our task is to do everything we can to help ourselves and as many others as possible, especially those unable to do so because of lack of opportunity, to expand their capacity  to more fully image their Creator through dependable, productive, satisfying, self-supporting daily work.  And as this happens to each of us through God’s blessing, to become an ever-increasing army of full-time daily work Christian ministers who empower more and more other people to achieve the same in their own lives, churches, Christian business organizations, and communities.

*Both personal experience and extensive research confirm the central importance of meaningful daily work. Researcher and best-selling author Jim Collins comes to this conclusion: “When all of the pieces come together, not only does your work move toward greatness, but so does your life. For, in the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work.” (Good to Great, p. 210)