I sat across the breakfast table in a downtown restaurant talking to an attorney who owns a sizable law firm. He’s a leader in a large evangelical church and a mutual friend introduced us. We had a good conversation about what God is doing around the world through business — creating jobs and making disciples of Jesus.

Then he made this startling statement: “I don’t see how what I do as an attorney has anything to do with what you’re talking about. I don’t think I have anything to offer.”

How can that be? What did he mean? I thought.

But it’s true. Churches often still make a distinction between the sacred categories of ministry and the secular world of the workplace. As a result, people continue to devalue their secular work as something less than optimum to God.

These are startling statistics from LeTourneau University’s Center for Faith & Work:

• More than two-thirds of Christians cannot envision how the work they do serves God.

• Almost four out of five church-goers doubt that the work they do is equal in importance to the work of a pastor or priest.

So what can we do to shift this majority mindset?

All types of work, not just pastoral and missionary work, should be publicly celebrated. I suggested this recently when I spoke at a church in Portland, Ore. My topic that Sunday morning was on the theology of work — the basis that God’s people use their work to bring Him glory and make disciples.

I challenged the church to celebrate upcoming university graduates completing degrees in engineering, management, education, IT, and medical technologies. I suggested they commission them as ministers in their professions and their workplaces. The conversation after the service was interesting. Some clearly thought the idea was “too radical” and even unbiblical. However, others said that I had caused them to think differently.

Redemption Church in Tempe, Ariz., has begun to put this “radical” idea into practice. They conduct five-minute interviews during their Sunday morning services with people in the church who are in the so-called “secular” workplace. Each interviewee answers four questions:

1. How would you describe your work?
2. As an image-bearer of God, how does your work reflect some aspect of God’s work?
3. How does your work give you a unique vantage point into the brokenness in the world?
4. Jesus commands us to love our neighbors as ourselves (Luke 10:27). How does your work function as an opportunity to love and serve others?

Is this something your church could do? It doesn’t have to look identical to this, but the North American church needs a radical mindset shift.