BCNE’s First Faith and Work Director Will Lead a Study Group of Early-Career Professionals and Start a Network of Christian Work Mentors
Jonathan Moseley, the BCNE’s first Director of Faith and Work, was interviewed by a YouTube podcaster about the reasons he and his family moved to Boston, some opportunities they had when planting a church, and living on mission.
Jonathan Moseley, who was named in May as the Baptist Churches of New England’s (BCNE) first Director of Faith and Work, is planning to start a study group that ultimately will “saturate Boston with gospel access by equipping young professionals to bring their faith to the workplace.”
For eight months beginning in October, he will lead a study group of some twenty early-career professionals to explore how a Christian’s life and lifestyle intersect with theology and productivity so that it yields lasting differences for the kingdom of God.
The curriculum, still being written, Moseley said, will “help people have a kingdom vision for the vocations that they hold” and “equip young professionals to see work as worship.” More than that, though, the fourteen study modules will touch on everything from “Turning Your Job Into an Offering of Praise” and “Finding Worth Beyond Your Job Title” to “Finding Meaning in Trials, Disappointments, and Setbacks” and “Influence, Conflict, and Servant Leadership.”
A mix of the academic and the practical, the biweekly group sessions will give participants “a chance to immerse themselves” in the tapestry of “vocations” that include work, marriage, parenthood, and ministry, and guide them as they develop what Moseley described as “a correct theology, philosophy, and methodology, about how they enter into work.” Participants will read books and journal articles and listen to podcasts on faith-work topics, join in discussions and group projects, and spend time reflecting on what they learn.
Someone spends four or more years, he noted, “training for some sort of vocation or some sort of job where you can get paid, but there’s little training about how to integrate your faith into that. You’ve been trained professionally,” he explained, “but you haven’t been trained spiritually on how to integrate your faith in the workplace. So that's what this cohort is meant to do.”
Interpreting your life work “Christianly”
"Some are indeed called to be missionaries, evangelists, or pastors, and others to the great professions of law, education, medicine, and the social sciences. But others are called to commerce, to industry and farming, to accountancy and banking. . . . In all these spheres, and many others besides, it is possible for Christians to interpret their life work Christianly, and to see it neither as a necessary evil (necessary, that is, for survival), nor even as a useful place in which to evangelize . . . but as their Christian vocation, as the way Christ has called them to spend their lives in his service.”
— John R. W. Stott in his book Christian Mission in the Modern World, as excerpted online by the Faith at Work Network.
Adding Genuine Happiness to a Career
A young professional, whether employed in an office or a factory, will invest at least forty hours a week for fifty weeks a year on the job—for a total of 2,000+ hours a year. The young professionals’ pursuit of relationships, money, housing, food, family, and an honorable reputation is ultimately aimed at creating a life of genuine happiness.
Jonathan Moseley
By the time retirement rolls around, the now-old professional will have invested at least 80,000 to 100,000 hours in a forty-year career! The massive amount of time and talent expended on earthly pursuits ought to feature something more than profit and prestige—something of eternal value.
Happiness and a myriad of related topics are explored in the landmark Harvard Study of Adult Development and detailed in the related book, The Good Life (2023), by the current directors of the eighty-year research study, which may be the “world’s longest scientific study of happiness.” The authors reveal “that the strength of a person’s connections with others can predict the health of both their body and their brain as they go through life.” “Good relationships keep us healthier and happier,” said Robert Waldinger, the study’s fourth director in a TED talk. “It’s the quality of your relationships that matters,” he added.
Connections. Relationships. These are central to a biblical understanding happiness with God and in Christian community. The closely related and more lasting character trait of joy is the sixth study-group module Moseley is preparing, on “Work and Joy—Recovering Purpose, Passion, and Gratitude in Your Job.”
Jesus Christ taught his followers something about work, in Matthew 6:24 (ESV), that “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.”
As any pastor will point out, Jesus set the pattern of a balanced life-work focused on eternal, not temporal, significance. In the same chapter (6:33), he urged his followers to “. . . seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.”
Moseley, a native of Columbus, Georgia, who moved to Boston’s North Shore a dozen years ago to study at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, divides his time between pastoral ministry of a growing, innovative church and leading BCNE’s new initiative that blends the pillars of faith and work that Western culture prefers to separate. The part-time directorship is being funded for three years by the Baptist Foundation of New England (BFNE), and Joe Souza, BCNE’s Associate Executive Director, supervises Moseley’s ministry.
Moseley continues to be the Pastor of Teaching and Vision of King’s Hill Church, which does not yet own its own building but gathers Sunday mornings in the Fenway Room at the Hilton Back Bay, Boston, and midweek in homes, other churches, or temporary spaces around their Boston neighborhoods.
Hospitality Team members Kira Bosworth and Jonny Le welcome people as they arrive for worship at King’s Hill Church, Boston.
Church members and more than 200 out-of-state volunteers are planning to serve university students on September 1 as the students unload moving trucks and occupy off-campus housing. As reported by the New England Baptist News Service in September, Boston’s “Big Move-In” day, when students from around the world descend on New England’s largest city, was first identified as a citywide event in an 1899 Boston Globe story. This year will be King’s Hill Church’s seventh annual community engagement day focused on support for arriving students.
When insights are gained from leading the initial cohort, Moseley plans to present the same contextualized approach to other churches. He hopes that when a participant completes the first cohort they would “reinvest or pay forward” what they have learned by deciding to become “a Christian Work Mentor.”
Eventually, when cohort graduates are still living in Boston, he asked, “What would it look like to match an architect who’s gone through the cohort with a university student who’s studying to be an architect? Can we connect those two people together so the student can get some spiritual training from an architect who’s also a believer?”
“We want to create a network of Christian Work Mentors who can come alongside students, both men and women. Our audience is members of churches in Boston for now and, after we get our feet off the ground in Boston, we want to scale that to other areas of New England. The focus is not on pastors, but on members of churches in our region.”
Give to the BCNE COLLEGIATE MINISTRY FUND to support today’s needs or, for future campus ministry, invest in the BFNE CHAIR OF COLLEGIATE MINISTRY FUND
New England is home to more than 200 world-class educational institutions. Many historic colleges and universities educate the world’s social, political, economic, and cultural leaders. If we hope to reach the world for Christ, we must reach college students in New England. Baptist Churches of New England has thirty collegiate missionaries on New England college campuses.
Investing in the Collegiate Fund
Every July, as “thousands of students flood into Boston for the new school year,” BCNE Executive Director Terry Dorsett wrote in an email on July 19 that he celebrates his birthday (July 27) each year “by asking friends to reach college students in New England with the gospel by donating to the Collegiate Ministry Fund.”
His email mentioned King’s Hill Church and their “Big Move-In” endeavor as a worthy example of “churches across New England [that] are finding creative ways to impact students.” When churches need funds “to help turn their creative ideas into reality,” he stated, “the BFNE’s Collegiate Ministry Fund can help.”
When Dorsett started, in 2015, to seek birthday gifts for BCNE collegiate ministry he “was stunned by the response. Since then, by God’s grace and your generosity, we’ve raised over $100,000 for college ministry across New England.”
Leading a University-Focused Church
It is not an easy task to plant and grow a church in Boston, one of the world’s leading academic hubs. “When King’s Hill began, we wanted to be serious about embracing biblical truth, displaying familial love, and fervently serving a city that is only 3% Christian,” wrote Moseley, who earned a Master of Divinity from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (2015) and a Bachelor of Arts in Religion from the University of Georgia (2012).
“Though gathering spaces changed nine times over the span of its first three years, God has been faithful to not only sustain this family but also to multiply it. The vision now hasn’t changed since when we began” in September 2018 when a home-based small group “had a vision to see a spiritually healthy, Christ-exalting church started in the Fenway, Mission Hill, and the Back Bay area” of Boston.
In addition to Moseley and Pastor of Operations Kevin Henderson, a Southern Baptist Theological Seminary graduate, and the common roster of volunteers that lead worship, children, youth, collegiate, and tech ministries, members have also been chosen to lead the more innovative ministries of hospitality, connections, and mobilization.
Moseley reported that the church invited Robert Ward to relocate to Boston and join the staff as a ministry resident for eighteen months before he and his family will be dispatched along with some church members, in Fall 2026, to plant a church in South Boston.
Moseley made a point to mention that his young family is “an extremely important part of my life. Most of my life is being a dad. Chelsea and I have four girls. Just watching them grow up in the city and fall in love with the local church and fall in love with Boston, obviously, is a big thing for me.”
To prove that point, in 2021 he wrote and self-published a 24-page children’s book, Without a Care in the World, to convey a simple yet profound truth that would inspire his girls toward a bold faith and relate the truth of Matthew 6:33.