We’ve clocked in at 9-to-5s and checked the boxes. Hustled and worked our way up. Plodded through long weeks and celebrated wins. And still, many people in today’s workforce wonder, is this it?
Last year, Gallup found that workers in the US are more likely to consider themselves “struggling” than “thriving,” and many feel “stuck” in their jobs. A recent Fast Company headline declared, “The New Burnout isn’t about working too much. It’s about working without meaning.”
Something bigger is stirring in this cultural moment. People are longing to do work that matters, and the world around us is full of places in desperate need of repair. It’s time for an awakening of faith in action. The Church needs a revival of not only our hearts but our hands and minds.
Faith in action has been at the heart of our work at Praxis (and the meaning of our name). Our organization has spent the past 15 years supporting founders, funders, and innovators who put their faith in action to address the major issues of our time. We’ve watched these leaders build their ventures as a demonstrated apologetic, a lived-out witness of the love that God has for the world and the love that we’re to have for our neighbors.
“People I never knew existed were doing work and taking risks and building beautiful things that I’d really not heard anybody talk about but that made so much sense of what the Bible said and the Christian account of the world,” said Dave Blanchard, Praxis Co-Founder & CEO. “An alternative imagination came into view, a way to see good ideas not merely as economically good but as culturally good.”
Over time, we realized the formational ideas within our community—on sacrifice, generosity, creativity, mission, and risk—didn’t just apply to early-stage startups. They stemmed from a far more universal calling for the Church.
“It wasn’t just a way to see, but it was a way to live and a way to work,” Blanchard said. “Full risk and imagination and sacrifice and a sort of eternal optimism, maybe even to the point of what the world would call foolishness—I came to believe that these things aren’t just permissible for Christians, they’re vital to life with Christ.”
We made The Praxis Course to bring more people into this way of thinking, where the gospel shapes why we work, how we work, and what we choose to work on. We see our work as a chance to join God in the renewal of all things.
These are big ideas, like God’s-bigger-story big. We need them because we’ve got a lot of baggage around vocation and calling to overcome. Too many of us are burnt out, disengaged, and cynical. We can unwittingly buy into the divide between “sacred” and “secular” work or even feel-good aphorisms like “do what you love.” We can work faithfully and diligently without seeing the potential around us. We can miss the holy invitation God extends to us to create, renew, and restore.
We’re releasing The Praxis Course as a video-based small group course about vocation, calling, and mission. This is Praxis’s biggest production yet, and our widest invitation to the broader church. We’ve seen similar offerings transform church life—things like the Alpha Course for evangelism, the Bible Project for engaging Scripture, and Practicing the Way for spiritual formation. We hope that The Praxis Course can awaken imagination for redemptive action, equipping followers of Jesus to build and renew culture wherever they are.
Formation happens in community, so we designed the Course for groups to take together. Imagination precedes action, so it combines theological teaching and real-life examples, concluding each session with ways to put it into practice. Finally, we believe God guides our quests, so we built in time to listen, pray, and consider what’s next.
Before we can change the world, before we can take action, we have to see the opportunities before us, places where our creativity, our sacrifice, could benefit others.
We’ve seen the redemptive way—our call to creative restoration through sacrifice—change lives, friendships, and vocations. We believe this reawakened imagination can go on to transform our neighborhoods, communities, workplaces, and world.
In the words of Dave Blanchard, “God’s people have always been at their best, the most on mission, when they’ve been a counterculture for the common good, working faithfully and imaginatively, often in contrast to the spirit of their age, to love their neighbors.”
Before we can change the world, before we can take action, we have to see the opportunities before us, places where our creativity, our sacrifice, could benefit others. That’s what The Praxis Course is for—reshaping your imagination, naming your calling, and taking the next step into the hard and holy work of restoration.
“The world doesn’t just need a few more exceptional entrepreneurs,” Blanchard said. “It needs an awakening among all God’s people, an awakening of what we call redemptive imagination in our ordinary lives and work.”
We’ll be sharing more stories and ideas from The Praxis Course in the coming weeks. You can explore the Course and sign up for free at course.praxis.co.