Do you ever feel like you are a blue-collar person stuck in a white-collar church? Or maybe, you’re a white-collar person trying to understand a blue-collar culture? I grew up in a blue-collar family. My dad was a mechanic for twenty years and my mom managed the high school cafeteria. My first jobs involved manual labor. I learned to work on cars, mow lawns, paint houses, and repair decks. I went off to college and got a white-collar education and then to seminary to further cement myself among the white-collar crowd of professors and pastors. In this episode, I offer a few tips on how to embrace blue-collar Christianity.
Your thoughts are helpful. As I see it, the blue collar / white collar distinction is one of various cultural differences that a church or a pastor may face. The temptation is for each of us to think that the way we were raised is the right way to be and to think. People may have lived near one another for decades, but may have quite different ways of dealing with conflict or making family decisions or budgeting money or thinking about time, to name just a few areas. With humility, we can learn from one another and can enjoy one another while all growing more like Jesus.