Unraveling the Standard Account of Power

How the Church can live under the power of the risen Christ

I pray that you might know … what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power. God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places.. Ephesians 1: 16-20

To all my readers: below is the first half of the introduction to my soon to be released book Reckoning With Power: Why the Church Fails When it’s on the Wrong Side of Power (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2024). There’ll be more excerpts from the book to follow on this substack, so if you’re interested, subscribe today! And the book is available for pre-order at Amazon etc.

The American Church on the Wrong Side of Power

The standard account of power says there’s only one kind of power in the world and we, the good people, must get on the right side of it, using it to bring justice into the world. Power is power. It is the way the world works. There is no getting around it. And so let us get the good people in charge of that power, putting it to work toward righteous ends.

What follows in this book calls that standard account into question. Instead of that account, I intend to show that there are really two kinds of power at work in the world, not one. There is worldly power, which is exerted over persons, and there is godly power, which works relationally with and among persons. Worldly power is coercive. A person or organization takes control of things with worldly power. Worldly power is enforced. It is prone to abuse. God’s power, on the other hand, is never coercive. God works by the Holy Spirit, persuades, never overrides a person’s agency, convicts, works in relationship. Through His power God heals, reconciles, and reorders not only our personal lives but the social worlds we live in as well. It cannot be emphasized enough, God’s power works not just personally in individual souls but also among social realities, to disrupt oppressive social systems, and bring justice to the world. God’s power is  miraculous because it always works beyond the expectations of human imagination (Eph 1:19;3:20-21).

Seen through this lens, to be on the controlling side of worldly power is to be on the wrong side of power. Cooperating with God’s power is the right side. Certainly, there will be times for Christians to use worldly power, but always for limited ends. It is when Christians use the coercive power of the world to do the unlimited work of God in the name of God that they are unequivocally on the wrong side of power. All hell breaks loose, abuse and trauma follow, and we have a dumpster fire on our hands. This book attempts to dissuade all Christians from being on that wrong side of power.

Power and the American Church

Take a quick survey over the landscape of evangelical church in America and you see the ruins of power gone bad. You see morally failed leaders and sexual abuse perpetrated or excused by pastors. In the name of Christian nationalism, you see Christians seeking political power everywhere to enforce a Christian culture over America. In its wake, you see destructive violence unleashed with self-righteousness. You see ugly racism and misogyny either ignored or defended in the name of God. It is all an unconscionable mess.

As a result, many of us are shaking our heads, disillusioned with a Christianity gone sour. We cannot trust the church anymore. We’ve been watching the parade of abusive leaders fall, one church at a time, wreaking irreparable damage on our institutions and our witness. Our churches, and their leaders, have become notorious as abusers of power. We want to reject those forms of power, but we still need power. We don’t know what to do with power.

It is this cultural moment that begs for a reckoning with power. We need to take an inventory of what has been happening. It’s time to move beyond the bandages that seek to hold our institutions together by managing the power better each time we go through an episode of a scandalous leader and institutional disgrace. Instead let us go deeper to examine the corrupting power that lies beneath it all. Amid our shock at what has become of the American church, let us examine the way power works and how the church is called to live under a different power: on the right side of the power of the One who reigns until all have been made subject (1 Cor. 15:25). This is the invitation of this book.

Why Does This Keep Happening?

In recent years, many books have narrated the history of evangelicalism’s abuse of power and the destruction it has wreaked on people’s lives. Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise described the history of evangelicalism’s (and its predecessors’) complicity with slavery and racism. Anthea Butler’s White Evangelical Racism accomplished a similar feat. Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne detailed the evangelical church’s cultivation of a toxic masculinity and patriarchy within its own culture and politics. Kevin Kruse’s One Nation under God told the story of evangelicalism’s (and its immediate predecessors’) leaders joining with corporate economic power to gain the control necessary to lead a “Christian nation.” John Fea’s Believe Me outlined the evangelical church journey to align politically with Donald Trump. These are just a few of the books that have been published within this genre in the last decade. They all expose, in horrific detail, the history of evangelical Christianity’s complicity with abusive power that led to hideous cultural sins.

These complicities, once revealed, leave us incredulous, asking, “Why does this keep happening?” Are these examples of just a few bad apples in evangelicalism, or is there something woven deeply within the fabric of evangelicalism itself that leads again and again to these moral failings? Are these examples of Christianity or apostate heresy? Or is naming something apostasy just an easy out? Is there a problem in the design because this same apostasy keeps happening again and again in the name of Christ?

In this book I seek to answer these questions by asserting that it is evangelicalism’s (as well as many other past historical Christianities’) complicity with worldly power that has led it to its present demise. It is the church on the wrong side of worldly power. But just as important, when the evangelical church has been on the right side of God’s power, in submission to Christ’s power by the Spirit, some of the greatest social revolutions in history came forth.

Unfortunately, evangelicalism (and Protestantism in general) has often failed at discerning the difference, between worldly power and godly power, between being on the wrong side of (worldly) power and the right side (of godly power). The modern Christian’s understanding of power is thin, and it has fostered a regular alignment with worldly power in the name of Christ, and it is ruining us.

There is no escaping it. The problem of power lies at the core of evangelicalism’s failure to be the church, the social body of Christ’s power in the world. It explains the church’s complicity with grotesque injustice. It is the how and why of a church gone apostate. And so we need a better theology and practice of power. This is the reason for being of this book.

Jesus and Power

In Mark 10:35–45 Jesus’s disciples are jockeying for power in the coming kingdom. Given the imminence of the kingdom as they looked toward Jerusalem, James and John assume power will look like worldly power over people’s lives, and they jockey for the seats to the right and left hand of Jesus, the positions of power. Upon hearing about this, the other disciples get angry, not liking that they are being sidelined in this process. Jesus gathers them together and says the famous words: “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all” (vv. 42–44). This episode repeats elsewhere in the Gospels and is played out over and over again in Jesus’s ministry. It could not speak more plainly of Jesus’s theology of power.

Jesus is saying in no uncertain terms that worldly “power over” shall not be part of His kingdom. Indeed worldly power closes off the space for God to work in His power. According to Jesus, the use of worldly “power over” is not just a problem for the church of Jesus Christ; it is a heresy for this church, and it impedes the church’s calling to be the center of Christ’s healing power at work in the world. For those who are in his kingdom, worldly power is not an option. It shall “not be so among you.”

And yet among most Protestants, evangelicals and postevangelicals, we are tempted to go the way of power, worldly power, to do God’s work. Jesus, we think, is too impractical to get things done. We believe that good people changing laws, and then enforcing them, will change the world. We believe that godly experts, putting into effect new programs from the top down, will change our churches. We believe the abuse specialists implementing accountability into the leadership structure will keep the leaders in line. We believe that by educating people to be more aware of their racism, patriarchy, misogyny, paternalism, abuse of power, and all other grievous social sins, we can surely induce these people to repent and change. And all these approaches will surely accomplish some changes. But I suggest that, apart from reckoning with the power that undergirds our systems, drives our cultures, and corrupts our leaders, these changes will merely be window dressing, making things look better while the same power with its corrupting tendencies perpetuates itself until the next time it blows up in our faces all over again. These changes will at best be a bandage put over the problem of power, covering over the cancer that metastasizes beneath the surface of our lives.

This book urges us to avoid bandage solutions to this gaping wound of the church, a wound we name as the abuse of power. Instead, let these sins of power be revealed for the sinister forces they are, at work deep beneath the surface of our lives as Christians in the West. The problem, you see, is power. It is not just the wrong use of power. It is being on the side of the wrong power. We need a theology and practice that enables us see power for what it is and see how it works so we can be on the right side of God’s power, under the power of God unleashed in Jesus’s person, work, and reign, participants in the power of the Holy Spirit extended from Jesus and at work in us and around us.

What Follows in This Book

What follows in this book is an exploration of the idea of power, how it works, how we think about it, how it shapes the way we lead and otherwise do the things we do in church and in the world. It explores the church’s relation to worldly power in the church of evangelicalism but also the modern Protestantism that preceded it in North America. It digs deep into the ways worldly power corrupts human beings and institutions when power is exercised in independence from God. It asks, How can we practice leadership and engage the world differently in the power of the God of Jesus Christ, for his mission? How can we be the people of Jesus under his power?

---