For some reason I recently got to thinking and remembering a shift that took place in my life over the summer of 1976. I turned 23 that summer and was in Montana serving as manager of our Conference’s Camp. Manager was a pretty exaggerated title for a job that involved doing a lot of maintenance work, a bit of janitorial work, a bit of helping in the kitchen, a lot of running errands, shopping for groceries, and a touch of public relations. I was one of four paid employees of the camp. There was an assistant manager, a cook, an assistant cook and a nurse. The cook was my wife. The assistant cook was my sister-in-law. It was my second summer in the job and I had learned a lot from the mistakes of my first summer.

That summer, however, was a transition in my working life. Up to that point, I had served in a variety of different student jobs, from opening the library in the morning to cleaning bathrooms. I had worked in a bakery, assembled machinery, driven truck, and done a host of other jobs. I knew how to sweat copper pipe to make plumbing repairs and refinish furniture. Most of my jobs up to that point in my life required practiced skills and a fair amount of muscle memory.

After the summer of working at camp, I came back to Chicago and began two years of working as a student intern at a church-based health care clinic. On the side, I was also serving as a part-time youth ministry worker. My job the year before had been as a janitor in a different church. I was moving up. I had a small office. I began to dress up to go to work instead of donning jeans and t shirts. From that point on, my income has come from what used to be called white collar work, though my career was long enough to see the end of ministers wearing white shirts to work.

When I was in high school, there were two tracks for students. Some students were slotted into the vocational career track, which assumed that their formal education would end with high school graduation. Others were prepared for college and careers that were assumed to involve more working with their brains than their hands.

Looking at my life and the people who work around me, I know that that vision of the world was inadequate for our careers. The distinction was artificial. Humans aren’t either strong or smart. They need both qualities and practical skills are as necessary and valuable as is creative thinking. As a minister, I did my share of repairing things, cleaning buildings, and moving furniture. That work never hurt me. It gave meaning and purpose. I also administered sacraments, performed ceremonies, read books and did a lot of planning and thinking. Those skills were also valuable.

Yesterday, my work as a minister involved something that I never imagined would be a part of my job. I was crunching a deadline editing a short three-minute video that will take the place of the reading of the scripture for our worship service this Sunday. It contained clips from six interviews that I had conducted with children and youth in the church about the scripture, and paraphrases of the scripture in their words. The task of editing video and sound tracks is tedious. I had to set up marks on the graphic timeline of the clips and when they were placed correctly, insert breaks. Then I had to reassemble the clips into the final presentation. It involves a lot of work with a computer trackpad and a few memorized keyboard functions.

At the same time, the church custodian was performing the annual testing of the smoke alarms in the building. His job involved knowing how to operate a touchscreen that controls the computer that manages the church’s security system as well as using compressed air to remove dust from the sensors that monitor heat and smoke throughout the building.

We both were doing repetitious work. We both were doing work that required significant knowledge of the operation of computers. We both were doing work that is important in the life of the congregation. The distinction between our job titles of minister and janitor was not a meaningful one in terms of the work we were performing.

It occurs to me that the transition in my early twenties from blue collar to white collar wasn’t all that dramatic. It also occurs to me that the changes in fashion over the span of my career has matched my perception that such a distinction doesn’t mean much at all. Nearly a half century later the world has changed and the most important skills for working are flexibility and adaptability. I occasionally use some of the things I learned in school, but it has been a long time since anyone cared about what grades I got in high school and which track I had followed. The degrees and titles I worked so hard to achieve are less important to me than the people I have met and the ways we have learned to work together on tasks that are too large for any individual.

Some days I am happy to have a lead pastor who does much of the big picture thinking while I focus on my three minutes of a worship service. Last Sunday I got to ring the church bell, which in this congregation is still done by pulling a rope attached to the bell itself. Most of the members of the congregation heard the sound of the bell coming from the speakers on their computers and home entertainment systems, but the initial sound was produced with simple mechanical means involving a wheel and a rope. The bell weighs 600 pounds, so there was a sense of having done a bit of work as I returned to my place in the pew.

One of the things I used to say jokingly is that ministry is about 75% moving furniture. That is, of course, an exaggeration. Still, I am deeply grateful for the wide variety of jobs I have discovered on my career path. And I am grateful to still have the ability to move a bit of furniture after all of these years.