Katie Roelofs has spent years thinking about the space between Sunday morning and the rest of the week. A pastor in the Reformed Church in America and managing director of the Worship for Workers Project, Katie is co-author of the new book Leading Worship for Workers. She argues that churches, often without realizing it, have widened the gap between faith and work, training people to leave their real lives at the door instead of bringing them into worship.
In this episode, Katie talks with Dwight and Alicia about what it looks like to close that gap. She describes a congregation that reimagined its offering plate around the ancient idea of first fruits, inviting people to bring forward the actual work of their hands. She talks about developing pastoral curiosity, the practice of genuinely learning what congregants carry into the pews each week, and about why the opening and closing words of a worship service shape people more than most leaders realize. Katie also addresses a question many pastors hear in one form or another: does God actually care about my job? Her answer draws on Genesis, on the theology of vocation, and on a vision of worship as the gathering and scattering of a people formed to carry faith into their daily work.
