Strong and Weak: Embracing a Life of Love, Risk and True Flourishing

by Andy Crouch

is hard to think of many things that do more damage to an organization than leaders who have no plan for how they will hand over power.

confession is the routine task of every Christian. It should be as natural as breathing for us to admit fault and ask for forgiveness, part of the constant dance between authority and vulnerability that leads us all to flourishing.

Good leaders, and friends, increase our authority and vulnerability, even while they carefully assess how much authority and how much vulnerability we can stand.

in fact Christ has been raised—this is the wager of the Christian life—then no meaningful risk is too great for his capacity to rescue.

We do not lack for authority. In Christ we have all the authority that we need and more—“all things are yours” (1 Corinthians 3:21). But what unlocks that authority is the willingness to expose ourselves to meaningful loss—to become vulnerable, woundable in the world. For this, too, is what it means to bear the divine image—if the One through whom all things were made spoke into being a world where he himself could be betrayed, wounded and killed. What we are missing, to become like him, is not ultimately more authority—it is more vulnerability.

This is why the evidently vulnerable are such crucial parts of all of our flourishing—why my niece Angela is not just the object of our care but a subject in her own right, someone who draws out from us the capacity to be truly and fully human. This is why our hidden and obvious flaws, failures and limitations are in fact the path to true strength. This is the good news for everyone who feels too vulnerable and powerless to have real authority: in the upside-down economy of the Kingdom, you possess the pearl which everyone must seek. Like Paul, who discovered that his “thorn in the flesh” was in fact the path toward God’s power being made perfect, you have with you, and within you, the secret of a life that unlocks true power.

Understandably, the felt need of nearly every young person is how to acquire authority—how to gain the capacity to act in the workplace and in the broader world. And yet, my advice to them almost always comes down to this: embrace more risk. Only those who have opened themselves to meaningful risk are likely to be entrusted with the authority that we all were made for and seek. Indeed, to seek out meaningful risk actually is its own kind of act of authority, because in the economy of the world’s true Creator and Redeemer, meaningful risk is the most meaningful action, the life that really is life, the flourishing for which we were created.

The researchers found only one significant difference: one group was consistently quicker than the other to speak up when something was going wrong in their area of responsibility. When they spotted impending failure, they grabbed anyone who would listen—coworkers, their boss, their boss’s boss—and got them involved in figuring out what was going wrong and what could change. The other group tended to minimize potential failure, avert their eyes from warning signs and cover up the eventual damage.

We learn to speak up early when something feels wrong. To raise the possibility of failure is always a risk—but it is a risk that can actually increase, not diminish, our authority.

we turn over power to others, giving them authority to act on their own behalf, to cultivate and create in their own right rather than just implementing our vision. We discover the joy of true power, which is to make room for others to act with authority. We measure our lives increasingly by what others have done—and received credit for—thanks to our advocacy.

By exposing ourselves to the risk that others will fail us, we also open up the possibility that they will surprise and delight us with the flourishing they create.

Solitude, silence and fasting. Embracing the three most essential spiritual disciplines opens us to the deepest kind of risk: the risk of discovering who we ...

Without solitude, silence and fasting, we have no true authority—we are captives of others’ approval, addicted to our personal soundtracks and chained to our pleasures.

“You only have to do three things to be an effective public speaker. Do your homework, love your audience, and be yourself.”

Do your homework—acquire the proper authority to address the topic at hand. Love your audience—open yourself up to their vulnerability, their fears and dreams, their ambitions and failures, and see them for the image bearers they are, with their own authority and capacity. And then be yourself—bring your own authority and vulnerability together, in all your beloved incompleteness, in their presence. Like all the best maxims, it is both utterly simple and a life’s work to fulfill.

“And I would add that to love your audience is actually to need something from your audience—to go out on stage knowing that if they don’t meet you, give you what you need, you can’t do what you came to do. Real love only exists where there is a mutual need.”

If you want one last picture of authority and vulnerability together, laughter will do the trick. To laugh, to really laugh out loud, is to be vulnerable, taken beyond ourselves, overcome by surprise and gratitude. And to really laugh may be the last, best kind of authority—the capacity to see the meaning of the whole story and discover that our final act, our only enduring responsibility in that story, is simply celebration, delight and worship. After we have borne our hidden vulnerability, even after we have descended to the dead, after we have been rescued from our suffering, our withdrawing, our exploiting—we will be raised up, restored to our rightful place. And we will laugh.

distracted by the demands and opportunities of fruitful work and the countless distractions of the thin, virtual world, we—maybe the more honest word is I—could easily have missed the call to flourish together. But Angela has concentrated our attention and our love. In a centrifugal world where everything and everyone flees the demands of love, Angela was a center of gravity, drawing us back to one another and to true life—the life that really is life, the life that money cannot buy: the life of making flourishing possible, at great cost and with great tears.