The Church has lost her hold on reality…

“In nothing has the Church so lost her hold on reality as in her failure to understand and respect the secular vocation. She has allowed work and religion to become separate departments, and is astonished to find that, as a result, the secular work of the world is turned to purely selfish and destructive ends, and that the greater part of the world’s intelligent workers have become irreligious, or at least, uninterested in religion.

But is it astonishing?  How can any one remain interested in a religion which seems to have no concern with nine-tenths of his life?  The Church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays.  What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.”

~ Dorothy Sayers

This excerpt is from Dorothy Sayers’ important essay, “Why Work?”  Sayers was a friend of C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams and is sometimes considered part of the Inklings group that include authors such as J. R. R. Tolkien and Owen Barfield.  However, she never attending their meetings.

This essay is also included in the outstanding collection of her writing published by Thomas Nelson, Letters to a Diminished Church: Passionate Arguments for the Relevance of Christian Dogma.