Definitions of Work

“The place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.”
         -Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC, (Harper, 1993), p. 119

“Work is any activity undertaken with a sense of obligation to self, others, one’s community, or one’s God.”
         -D.H. Jensen, p. 3

“Work is honest, purposeful, and methodologically specified social activity whose primary goal is the creation of products or states of affairs that can satisfy the needs of working individuals or their co-creatures, or (if primarily an end in itself) activity that is necessary in order for acting individuals to satisfy their needs apart from the need of the activity itself.”
         -Miroslav Volf, Work in the Spirit: Toward a Theology of Work, (Wipf and    Stock, 2001), pp. 10-11.

“What is the Christian understanding of work? It is that work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties . . . the medium in which he offers himself to God.”
         -Dorothy Sayers, “Why Work?” in Creed or Chaos? (Harcourt, Brace, 1949), p. 53.