In October, I had the chance to speak at Our Saviors Lutheran Church in South Minneapolis. I started with an exercise to demonstrate how unequally income is distributed in the economy. I asked members of the congregation, “what’s wrong with this?” They had great answers.

Then I shared my problem: To me, the unequal distribution of income and power among workers in our economy violates the second commandment: You must love your neighbor as yourself. I then elaborated, borrowing from a religious leader who’s spent his whole life fighting poverty, who thinks of the second commandment this way: you should want for your neighbor what you want for yourself.

Then I asked people to name what they expected from work. The list included wages that could support a family, health care, retirement security, time for vacation, and much more. I then went on to tell stories about the workers we partner with at WIN. As I told the stories, I listed what they could expect: low wages, expensive health care or no health care at all, wage theft, deportation for speaking out, and intimidation.

Later in the discussion, I referred to the first list as a set of community standards. A congregant quickly raised his hand: “Maybe those are standards, but I don’t have all that at my job.” Many in the crowd nodded. They had some of the things they expected from their work, but not everything, and in some cases, the gulf between expectations and reality was vast.

In this conversation lie the seeds for a new ministry of work. One that I believe will build the movement for worker justice. This new ministry of work has several elements to it. First, it starts with a conversation among people of faith about what they expect for themselves and their neighbors when it comes to work. It continues with a discussion of how their own work lives fall short of these expectations. It moves forward to consider how the work lives of others fall short as well. And it ends with a powerful analysis about why this happens and what people of faith and low-wage workers can do together to make things different. This is a fundamentally different conversation about work. Many congregations have ministries that focus in some way on helping the unemployed or the underemployed find work. Other congregations have ministries that ask individuals to think about how they can act more ethically at work as individuals. If congregations truly want to help their members to address what is happening at work, though, they will move beyond these ministries. They will focus on collective experiences and collective solutions. They will focus on giving people of faith tools they can use to improve their own lives at work. And they will focus on teaching people of faith about the common hopes, fears, and struggles they share with other workers.

If we succeed in building this new ministry, people in the religious community will join the broader struggle for worker justice not simply because we appeal to the teachings of their religious traditions, but because they will deeply understand that they share the same fate with low-wage workers. Perhaps more importantly, they will deeply believe that they can shape their common destiny in the economy together.