We talk a lot about good work as entrepreneurs driven by our faith, but how does rest play into our roles?

In this special episode, author and frequent contributor to the show, Andy Crouch, explains how we have a duty to not just create good work but to create good rest as well. For him, the two go together: “good rest is the fruitful contemplation of good work.” 

Hear the whole talk originally recorded for the 2022 Faith Driven Entrepreneur Conference and don’t forget to follow the show for more great content every week.

Episode Transcript

Rusty Rueff: Welcome back, everyone, to this very special edition of the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. Today, we're highlighting a talk Andy Crouch gave at our 2022 global conference on the role entrepreneurs play in creating good work and creating good rest. Andy is a thoughtful leader in the movement and a regular contributor to the show. He's also a partner of theology and culture at Praxis Labs, a venture building ecosystem with a redemptive imagination. Andy is an author of numerous books, including his most recent The Life We're Looking For Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World. Let's listen in.

Narrator: One thing that we get to do that no other creature on the planet can do is that we get to add value by creating things. And I went from $40 million in revenue to watching everything that I had built for God get sold.

Background song: Come on in. Has it been a long night?

Narrator: You've got to make sure that your identity is solidly rooted in who you are in Christ and not in having money. I sold my company and I really had a hard time getting out of bed.

Background song: Maybe been a long year. Maybe been a hard life. Maybe you're not. All right.

Narrator: Faith driven entrepreneurs to do what they want to do. Have to understand what God has given them. There's winners and learners, not winners and losers. I feel like I was chosen to be on this show for a reason and I had to do something.

Background song: If it got a little red in your eyes. You've come to the right place.

Narrator: And we're addicted to comfort and he's called me into really difficult positions. That's what he's told me, to walk into.

Background song: People like you people like me. This is where we all find great come out now.

Henry Kaestner: Entrepreneurship can be a lonely journey, but it doesn't have to be. This podcast in the whole ministry seeks to equip you the Faith Driven Entrepreneur to seize the unique opportunities that God has placed in front of you and overcome the challenges that life will throw your way. These are the stories of how he takes broken things and makes them new. Come for the podcast. Stay for the community. Welcome to Faith Driven Entrepreneur.

Andy Crouch: I want to talk today about the basic thing I think that entrepreneurs do, which is create opportunities for good work and good rest. So basically what you are doing as an entrepreneur anywhere in the world, any field or sector, is you are creating good work. I believe from a Christian point of view, there's never going to be enough work, not ever enough good work, because good work is the fruitful transformation of creation. It's our image bearing role, taking this beautiful, abundant world that God made, finding ways to explore and develop its possibilities and bring them forth in the world. And in a very real way, I think this work of being image bearers is an infinite game. There's infinite good work to be done, and entrepreneurs are the people at the sort of leading edge of discovering what the next set of work is for human beings to do in the world. And interestingly, this also creates good rest. Your job is not actually just to create jobs or just to create work. It is also to create good rest because real rest is the fruit. I work and then I, with gladness and delight, contemplate what I've done. And you actually can only have this kind of rest after you've worked. So if you think about the narrative of Genesis, one was God resting before he was created, and then he got to work. Now, whatever God was doing before he was creating. It wasn't resting. The resting came after six days of speaking and seeing every day. It's good. It's good, it's good. And then at the end he created his image bearer because he says it's very good and then he rests because rest is the fruitful contemplation of fruitful work. So the the work that we do as creators of opportunity is make more and more ways for human beings to experience the good work and the good rest that we were made for as God's image bearers in the world. So this beautiful, beautiful calling. Now, obviously, this is not the whole story about the world we live in because there is an alternative to work and rest, which we live with all the time, and I want to call it toil and leisure. So instead of the work and rest we're made for, we've ended up in the world, we actually have a toiling leisure. So think about toil as excessive, endless, fruitless labor. So you are definitely putting out effort in the world, but nothing of satisfaction is coming back. No sense of goodness is coming back. You end toil rather than sort of grateful and glad and resting in the good work you've done, you end up just kind of exhausted. Nothing worthwhile to show for what you've done. And when your life is full of toil, you start looking for just something to relieve the exhaustion and that I'm going to call leisure. This if toil is fruitless labor, leisure is basically fruitless escape from labor. It's when you get home after a fruitless day and you're like, Oh, I'm so tired. It's not you're not tired because it was a good day of work and you're now just glad to celebrate what you've done. You're tired because there was nothing worthwhile in this day. And what do you want to do? You want turn on Netflix, choose your kind of drug of choice to sort of escape, to sit back, to try to just escape from the disappointment of a day that was not spent in image bearing. And I think we have moved in the whole human story from the original design of work and rest to a very widespread reality of. Toil and then whatever leisure we can eke out as human beings to somehow compensate for the sense that our lives are not actually mattering in the way that we want our lives to matter. Now, let's take this a step further and recognize that something starts really with the rise of economic wealth in the modern era, when we start to have kind of the production of real surplus in human societies, which is we actually start to develop two classes. And you can think of them as the leisure class and the toiling class. So we actually end up with a class of people whose lives are defined almost entirely by the absence of work in their lives. If you happen to be a fan of Downton Abbey, right, it's a story of this kind of classic picture of an upstairs of a landed aristocracy, the leisure class, who, as near as we can tell, really never do any work. They sit around talking and having little intrigues and sitting at elaborate meals. And then downstairs is where a huge amount of work happens to create the leisure of the upstairs. So that is a world where toil and leisure are aren't actually divided in the course of the day. They're actually divided between different classes of people. Now, you probably don't feel like you live upstairs that Downton Abbey because it was the product of a very particular time. And in fact, very few people live that way today, although there might still be a few. But the leisure class was the fruits of the mercantile and financial revolutions of the 15th century, combined with the Industrial Revolution, revolution of the 18th 19th century. But we're living in a slightly different time. We're living after the next big revolution, the computational revolution that, when stacked on the financial and industrial revolutions, created what we call technology. And technology has generated a new kind of leisure and made a kind of leisure available for a very large number of people, which may well include many of the folks who are watching and part of this event. And let me put it in terms of making dinner. So how are you getting dinner at the end of a long day? So here's the work and rest way to get dinner. Someone or several members of the family work together, starting with relatively raw ingredients that other people worked to produce, of course. And you actually make a meal together and then you sit down and you enjoy the meal. This probably still happens in your home on special occasions, maybe Thanksgiving in America, where a big a lot of work is done to prepare a meal and then everyone sits down, ideally including the people who prepare the meal all together. And you just enjoy like, Wow, this is so good. We're enjoying this so much. Well, that's work and rest at the dinner table. But that's probably not what a lot of your nights are like at home. What you do in the leisure version of dinner for your family is you just order out and the doorbell rings. Somebody drops off a bag of stuff to eat, you take it in and you and your family sit down. You've done no work at all, thank goodness, because you're so tired from the day and you just enjoy the meal. This is in many ways a delightful experience to just have to have the food show up, enjoy the food without anyone having to work to prepare it. And many of us choose that leisure option any given night of the week two problems with it that we feel. I think one is we do wonder about the people behind the scenes who did work. In fact, all leisure requires someone else to work. This is a difference between work and rest and toil and leisure. Work can be done by everyone and then rest can be enjoyed by everyone. But for anyone to enjoy leisure, someone has to work. And we do wonder about those invisible people who make the meals that we enjoy and who deliver the meals that we enjoy. And we think, Are they getting good work or are they actually experiencing toil? And we're not sure. And we sometimes wonder and we sometimes fear that behind the leisure that we enjoy is actually a lot of toil. So that's one problem. The other, maybe more proximate problem is that as enjoyable as it is to just have the food show up and have the leisure of a nice dinner without having to make it. The leisure is actually far less good for us and restorative for us than the rest would be if our family had actually collaborated on making dinner and then sat down and enjoyed it. We would have developed a relationship, we would have developed skill. The kids would have gotten to maybe participate in making the food. They would have seen at least their mom or their dad or both preparing the food. There would be that kind of sense that we are actually doing something together that makes us different and maybe in some way better together. And I would say because we are doing the image of God when we do that culture making, but when we just have the leisure, we don't actually develop, we don't become, we just consume. So this is not great for us in large quantities or maybe even in small quantities. Leisure is not as good for us as work and rest. So what we've done in a psychological society is to provide a lot of seemingly fortunate people with a lot of leisure of this kind. Not quite the Downton Abbey kind, but the kind of which, on any given day, we can escape from the kind of fruitless ness of our lives and enjoy the work, or maybe the toil of others in ways that don't really develop us. But I actually think we've reached the point, and I think many of us sense this where easy is starting to have diminishing returns, the relief of toil, the sense that often we don't have to work for the good things we need, we can just buy them is actually not that good for us as human beings. Evident and maybe most clearly in what's happening to our actual bodies and the physical strength of our bodies, because it actually turns out you need load bearing activity to have a healthy body. And the other really strange thing that's going on is that at the very same time as we've ended up with this view, the seemingly beautiful amount of leisure, our lives don't feel like upstairs at Downton Abbey. Do you feel like you live a life in the leisure class? No way. You get to the end of any given day, you feel like you've actually been toiling a huge amount of the day. So even those who are fortunate in this economy end up feeling like their lives are toil toil toil with a little bit of compensating leisure and all of that, haunted by the awareness that behind the curtain of our modern economy is a huge amount of work that probably is more like toil. We went after the problem of toil at the dawn of the technological era, but we did not try to solve the problem of good work. We thought our job was to make things easy, but we haven't figured out how to make work good. And if anything, we've ended up creating more toil and fewer and fewer truly good jobs that are truly satisfying more toil for both the relatively powerful and fortunate and the relatively poor and unfortunate alike. So. This creates an amazing central opportunity for redemptive, faith driven entrepreneurship in the world. We need to be setting our sights on creating good work, which will then lead to good rest. The question is not how to make toil easier and make leisure abundant. It's how to make good, hard things possible because good work is a good, hard thing so that good rest will be possible for everyone in the economy that we're part of. Our job is not actually to make people's lives easier, to relieve people of difficulty. It's to help our neighbors take on worthwhile, difficult things and provide the right kinds of support that will help them actually thrive as they take that on in the good work we're meant to do in the world. So I have two examples for you, two examples from our community of entrepreneurs at Praxis. The first is an app, and it's called lasting. It's an app to help couples grow their relationships in healthy ways. To do that through a sequence of often very challenging conversations that invites you and your partner, your marital partner into so that you can actually learn how to make a marriage or a lasting relationship work. Lasting is not going to somehow make marriage easy. Marriage is a good, hard thing, and lasting is a technological offering that, if you take it seriously, will invite you to make possible something that otherwise might be very difficult, which is to have these real hard conversations that are part of any healthy relationship and to grow in the direction of life together. It contrasts so powerfully with, you know, maybe the single largest use of the Internet right now, which is porn. And if you think about it, porn, if I can put it this way, is like the ultimate leisure activity in the sense that it's it promises us like intimacy without vulnerability or commitment or even physical presence. It promises us kind of this leisure life where we don't have to exert ourselves in any way and have what we think we want. But all it does is create huge amounts of suffering for its consumers and huge amounts of toil, pure toil for the people who produce it. I love the fact that lasting steps into this world that so easily Click away offers us like the ultimate leisure and the ultimate degradation of human beings and says we're going to use the same basic technological stack to invite you to actually pursue the real thing. The fruitful thing, the image bearing thing. Second totally different example. We have a real estate holding company in the praxis community called Watch Capital. They're in multi-family residential real estate and they work exclusively for the moment with refugees. These are people who have had to leave the place they are. And our government has selected them out of our country's mission to assist those who are not safe where they are and to relocate them to the United States, a place where they can find opportunity and safety that they can't find at home. And those refugees need places to live when they land. Most multifamily developers will not touch this population. They think it's going to be too hard. They don't know how to communicate with people who may not speak English. They worry about whether they'll take care of the place. Who knows why. But it's very hard to find places for the governments and the agencies that resettle refugees, the United States to place arriving families in our country. Launch capital. Starting in Louisville, Kentucky, decided they wanted to make that happen. They have created now the largest refugee resettlement single refugee resettlement program in the country, in the city of Louisville that's run by a single company. And what they've discovered is that these newly arriving Americans make amazing talents, make amazing Americans and citizens. If someone will meet them with love and support and presence and give them a good place to live and get their new start in this country. Most of the multifamily real estate industry is moving towards easier and easier ways of doing their business. They're obviously looking for the easiest clients, the ones with the easiest credit histories and most reliable payment records, and they're automating all of their tenant relations so that if you're a tenant in many of these buildings now, you never meet a person connected with the company. You just pay your rent online, submit your maintenance request online. Launch Capital has gone the exact opposite direction in every multifamily development that they build or buy and repurpose. They place a family, a group of people who want to care for and welcome those who are arriving. This is super labor intensive, super time intensive. It's not easy. It's great work. It produces deep connection. It produces amazing results in the actual financials of the business. Launch capital has the best financials any real estate investor has ever seen, and they're doing it not by choosing the easy way, but by choosing the hard way. Not by just saying, Gosh, there's so much toil in real estate. Let's just make it easier by saying, let's use our expertise to make a good, hard thing possible. In our technological world, we have overdosed on leisure and we have no rest. We've overdosed on trying to make toil easy. And we have not really developed very much good work. I think this is the great blue ocean of our time. For Faith driven entrepreneurs, there's so much room for innovation here. There's so many hard, good things that people ought to be helped to do that if we could help them to do it, both our customers and our employees, we would see incredible fruit come from it. And at the end of the day, they would say this was a good day. And at the end of the week we would say that was a good week. We did good work. Now we can have good rest. And at the very end of our lives and the very end of our story, we can say the whole that was very good.

Henry Kaestner: We were grateful for the opportunity to serve the community and see the listeners come in from more than 100 countries. Entrepreneurship is often a lonely journey, but it doesn't have to be. The best way to stay connected is to join a group study with other faith driven entrepreneurs like yourself. There's no cost, no catch in person or online. You can meet for an hour a week with your peers from your backyard or the other side of the world. You can also stay connected by signing up for a monthly newsletter. Faith Driven Entrepreneur dot org. This podcast wouldn't be possible without the help of many of our friends. Executive producer Justin Foreman intromixed and arranged by Summer Dregs, Audio and editing by Richard Barley. Our theme song is In the House by David Crowder.