The Perils of Being a Professional: You’re a Teacher, Lawyer, Doctor, Pastor? Congratulations! But Beware of These Traps

This year I turned 45, a vantage point halfway between college graduation and, if God wills, retirement. It is an event that prompts reflection. My two decades in higher education have been rewarding and intellectually challenging. But my most severe spiritual struggles have emerged from the turning points in my professional pilgrimage.

As a senior in college, I stood one night on the roof of a building, the vast, glittering Chicago skyline before me. The prospect of leaving the safe confines of college stirred up deep anxieties that I would remain in a backwater and the world would pass me by. I wrestled with acute questions: What do I want to do with my life? How will it make a difference? What can I accomplish, given my gifts and limitations? No one could make those tough decisions for me, and my reservoir of wisdom and experience had as yet accumulated only a trickle of insight.

Then, when I finished my doctoral studies, I faced the bleak prospect of almost no openings in my field. Anxiety over whether four years of advanced education had been in vain lasted for months. It was not just a vocational crisis, but a spiritual one.

More recently, I have come to see how professional struggles touch the most sensitive nerves—regret in the wake of difficult decisions, disquiet at the lack of tangible accomplishment, stress from interpersonal conflict, and frustration with hidebound systems. Rarely are our souls sheltered from the storms that arise on the vocational horizon.

Each of these experiences illustrates how our sense of well-being often flows out of our professional standing or our career goal. Rightly or wrongly, our fondest hopes are wrapped up in professional identity. What is the allure of the professions? And what are the perils?

The professions young adults choose shape them during their pivotal years. Whether it be law, medicine, engineering, accounting, business management, theological education, or graduate school in arts and sciences, professions grip the attention powerfully. It is your law firm, your medical practice, your management-training group that consumes your waking hours and exacts your creative energies. Your profession tells you when to get up in the morning, what neighborhood to live in, what to wear to work, and where to “do lunch.” Professional cultures define the meaning of success and acceptable standards of conduct. And, in all likelihood, you form close friendships with those who toil in the same professional vineyard.

Why do we let professional life shape us so?

First, we are molded by the professions because we enter them at a pivotal stage of life. Most young university graduates are in no position to dictate to IBM or to Arthur Anderson and Company the standards by which they are to be judged. An eagerness to please makes them malleable. As an aspiring history teacher in graduate school, I burned the midnight oil to meet the standards set by my professors. As an outsider seeking admission to the guild, I riveted my mind to the profession and its norms. I was more than eager to play by the rules of the game.

Second, we are inveterate professionals because we are Americans. In the United States, professional aspiration has replaced social class and family connection as the way we sort ourselves. The professions reward hard work and performance rather than family connection. This appeals to our democratic instincts. At the same time, the professions allow those with ambition to gain wealth and social standing.

Thus, in America, nearly every line of work clamors for professional status: undertakers call themselves morticians; makers of eyeglasses, opticians; garbage men, sanitation engineers. Even those who trim diseased branches call themselves tree surgeons.

But Christians gravitate to the professions for yet a third reason. We are trained to think of work as a vocation, a higher calling in which to serve God in the workaday world. This fits the ideal of most professions, where the measure of success is not mere financial gain, but some larger purpose. Most professionals find their work intellectually engaging and inherently worthwhile. For the Christian, then, professions are doubly alluring: they can be inherently satisfying and can fulfill a religious sense of vocation.

What are the perils of professional life? The greatest danger is not that Christians will sink into disrepute, turning into greedy physicians, crooked lawyers, or corrupt government officials. For dedicated Christians, those shoals are easy to avoid. Most of them become honest, hardworking, and respectable—in short, model professionals.

Unfortunately, professionalism can corrupt the soul in far more subtle ways. The danger is not that we will forsake professionalism’s standards but that we will drink too deeply at its springs and uncritically adopt its informal creeds. Because these ways of seeing are appealing and partially true, they place our souls at risk. In particular, we face three dangers:

First, professional life is based on self-confidence and competence. But this fuels the incurable human tendency to be smug and self-reliant. Professional life is based on expertise that lay persons do not share. All day long doctors, lawyers, psychiatrists, and accountants profess that they know certain matters better than others do. They do this in language that is hard to understand and difficult to challenge. Self-reliance comes with the turf.

As professionals move up the ladder of success, their unquestioned authority and sense of control increases. There is a very fine line, however, between professional competence and confidence on the one hand, and smug self-reliance on the other. This smugness our Lord condemned. Professional success increases the danger of relying on our own expertise and ingenuity. We forget that any favor accorded us, any big break, comes as much from God’s hand as from our own efforts. Ultimately, whatever we do is possible only because of the gifts he first gave us. “In heaven,” Robert Farrar Capon wrote, “there are … no upright, successful types who, by dint of their own integrity, have been accepted into the great country club in the sky. There are only failures, only those who have accepted their deaths in their sins and who have been raised up by the King who himself died that they might live.” The first danger, then, is self-reliance.

Second, professional life rewards good work. Unfortunately, this reinforces a sense that success is the measure of all. The professions are a meritocracy: An accurate diagnosis leads to a successful cure; a sound legal argument wins a case; a correct design makes a bridge withstand traffic. The professions reward competence and penalize incompetence. Who can argue with that?

But success easily becomes the measuring stick for evaluating people. Life becomes a balance sheet of merit and reward. We applaud success in ourselves; and we rank other people accordingly. The professions reinforce our love of being winners. All too soon, professionals get to the top of the heap, congratulate themselves, and look down on others.

Such an ethic of success runs a collision course with the gospel of grace we profess. Christ did not come to save those who could succeed by their own striving. He came to save the wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked. The gospel breathes not one word about rewarding the rewardable. It is about giving life to the lost and the dead. And it is about a kingdom whose priorities are inverted: the last will be first, those who lose their lives will find them. Christ forsook the company of the religious and sought out publicans and sinners, fishermen and tax collectors. Success is dangerous for Christians because, in its grip, we lose sight of grace.

Third, professionals come to believe they deserve what they have achieved. Professional work involves personal sacrifice and delayed gratification. To the extent that they succeed, it is easy for professionals to conclude they deserve esteem and financial reward.

This is the most subtle and pernicious danger of all because it has a ring of truth. Was it not my ingenuity in teaching and research that led to being granted tenure? Was it not my willingness to sacrifice that created a successful dental practice? Was it not my creative insight that led to an advertising triumph? The professions do little to challenge the notion that their members deserve every dime they earn and every perk that society bestows. A new residential community promised with its motto to pamper its residents: “You deserve it.” Likewise, the professions assure us, “You’ve earned the raises. Now stop and smell the roses.”

Yet a Christian has to check the impulse that says, “I deserve it.” How does this square with other biblical truths—that our standing before God is not as accomplished experts, but as miserable offenders desperately in need of grace? Furthermore, all of our gifts, our creativity and good health, our time and energy, are themselves God’s good gifts. Their end must not be self-exaltation, living the good life, but the service of Christ and his kingdom.

The professions, then, are always nudging us to be more self-reliant, more success oriented, and more convinced of how deserving we are, But I am not suggesting we avoid professional careers or carry out our work responsibilities half-heartedly. Those called to the professions should bring to them a full measure of energy, diligence, and creativity. Yet our pursuit of the excellent should spring from a different motivation—our calling as Christians. The church of Christ does not need smug professionals, preoccupied with managing their own careers. The church does not need success-oriented members who reach out only to other winners. The church does not need those who expect the good life because of how hard they work. Instead, Christians are to live out the original ideal of the professions: to serve rather than to be served.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.