It's been a bad couple of weeks for the Stranraer economy. Last week's Free Press headline was about the "hammer blow" of the proposed closure of the Gentex Factory. This week it's been confirmed that McDonalds have scrapped plans to build a restaurant in Cairnryan. Someone commented on Facebook: "Will the last person out of here please turn off the lights".
It was a stark contrast to someone who had phoned in to the Jeremy Vine Show a week or two before. The 3-minute phone call went viral, with over half a million people having watched it on social media platform X. According to the caller, a man named Peter: "It's a very Puritan concept that work is good for you. Work is punishing and horrible and I don't want to work". Peter himself was "independent on benefits".
Some have written it off as a spoof, but Peter no doubt speaks for many. On the individual level we may complain about work, and fondly imagine what life would be like if we didn't have to do it. And yet we also know — or can imagine — how we feel when our jobs are threatened. We know instinctively that the closure of a factory in a town, as well as the withdrawal of the 120 proposed McDonalds jobs, is not good news. It's bad news not just for the economy, but on an individual level. Various studies highlight what we might already suspect: unemployment is associated with a substantially higher risk of mental health problems.
And yet although they might not come out and say it as starkly as the phone-in caller, many would choose not to work if they could. Be careful what you wish for however: it might not be the idyllic existence we imagine. Peter is right that it's a Puritan concept that work is good for you. But the Puritans got it from the Bible. Perhaps the biggest misconception about work, even among Christians, is that it's part of God's curse on this world. We assume that in a perfect world, no-one would have needed to work. And yet work existed before sin came into the world. The second chapter of the Bible tells us: "The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it". And that was BEFORE everything went wrong in chapter 3! It's true that work is much harder now in a sin-cursed world — "by the sweat of your face you shall eat bread" — but work itself was part of God's original manifesto. And so work isn't simply a Puritan concept — our Creator tells us it's good for us. Indeed, the New Testament's message to Peter would be: "If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat"! (2 Thessalonians 3:10) Yes, there are those who would love to work and can't. And certainly not all valuable work is paid work. But an unwillingness to work isn't a virtue according to Scripture.
The Bible also gives a dignity to the type of jobs many would look down on. It was the return to the Bible during the sixteenth-century Reformation that abolished the divide between "sacred" and "secular" work. The German Reformer, Martin Luther, wrote that the work of monks and priests did "not differ one whit in the sight of God from the works of the rustic labourer in the field or the woman going about her household tasks, but all works are measured before God by faith alone".
As with anything, it's possible to go to one of two extremes. Some seek to avoid work at all costs; others become workaholics. Indeed, some would lay the blame for overwork at the door of the "Protestant work ethic". And yet in the churches of the Reformation, a major emphasis was on Sabbath rest: a weekly day of ceasing from all unnecessary work in order to worship.
We could sum it up by saying that work is a gift, but it is not God. Whether we are currently employed or not, it’s important for us to remember that our work doesn’t define us. The Bible defines us all as people made in the image of God. The big danger of placing our identity in work or family or anything that can be taken away from us is that once it’s gone, our identity has been so tied up with it that we don’t know who we are anymore. Rather, we have a dignity and value that can’t be taken away from us, no matter what outward changes take place in our lives.
The Bible's view of work is as something to be valued, but not worshipped. It's not ultimate, but we reject it at our peril.
Published in the Stranraer & Wigtownshire Free Press, 12th November 2026