The Gospel According To

The Gospel According to LinkedIn

The hidden assumption is that your professional profile is the truest summary of who you are, so that a person becomes a resume with a pulse. But a life is not a ladder, and a soul is not a skill set. Christ meets you before you have produced anything, calling you beloved first and useful second, which means your worth was settled before your first job and will outlast your last one.

Here is a question worth sitting with. If you deleted every accomplishment from your profile tonight, would you still know who you are in the morning? Most of us hesitate, and the hesitation is the point. We have quietly agreed that the honest version of a person is the promotable one.

It feels normal now to introduce ourselves by our function. We ask children what they want to be, and we mean what job. We meet a stranger and reach first for what they do, as though the doing were the being. The professional summary has become a kind of confession, the place where we say who we really are in language a recruiter would approve.

This did not fall from the sky. As work moved out of the home and the village and into the market, a person's standing came to depend on their sellable output. The measurable slowly crowded out the unmeasurable. A profile rewards what can be listed, titles, metrics, endorsements, and goes silent on everything that cannot be listed, tenderness, repentance, the way you sit with a grieving friend, the private faithfulness no algorithm will ever rank.

The cost is a strange loneliness. You can be widely known and never once met, because a curated summary is designed to impress and therefore cannot afford to be seen. It costs you rest, since a self built on achievement must keep achieving to stay real. It costs you honesty about failure, which becomes not a season to grieve and grow through but a gap in the record to hide. And it quietly teaches you to look at other people the same way, as assets rather than images of God.

Christianity interrupts this with an unsettling claim. It says you were known and loved before you were useful, that your name is written in a place no employer can see, and that the God who made you did not consult your output first. In this vision a person is not owned by the market or by their own achievements; they belong to their Maker, and that belonging is not earned and cannot be laid off. Jesus was, by the world's summary, an unremarkable worker from an unremarkable town, and the world's summary was catastrophically wrong.

The better way is not to burn your resume or despise good work. Ambition can be a form of love, and craft can be worship. The freedom is in the order. When your identity rests in being loved rather than being impressive, work becomes something you offer instead of something you cling to. You can build a career without becoming it, and you can meet a stranger and be curious about the part of them no profile will ever show.

If the profile has quietly become the truest thing you say about yourself, it may be worth standing somewhere that measures people differently. A community of faith is one of the few places left where you are received before you are ranked. Consider finding a local church or a small group here where you can be known slowly, by name rather than by title, and rediscover the self that does not need updating.