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

by Andy Crouch

Human beings have an indelible sense that our life has a purpose—and a dogged sense that we have not fulfilled our purpose.

Having both great hopes and great regrets is also, alas, the human condition.

They are not opposites—they have to go together. The Christian world has its own versions: Is the mission of the church evangelism and proclamation or is it justice and demonstration? Are we supposed to be conservative or radical, contemplative or active, set apart from the world or engaged in the world?

In the book Mountains Beyond Mountains, the renowned public health physician Paul Farmer tells his biographer, Tracy Kidder, “People call me a saint and I think, I have to work harder. Because a saint would be a great thing to be.” I think Farmer is entirely right that a saint would be a great thing to be. The saints are, ultimately, the people we recognize as fully alive—the people who flourished and brought flourishing to others, the ones in whom the glory of God was most fully seen. There really is no other goal higher for us than to become people who are so full of authority and vulnerability that we perfectly reflect what human beings were meant to be and disclose the reality of the Creator in the midst of creation. “Life holds only one tragedy,” the French Catholic Léon Bloy wrote, “not to have been a saint.”

The real test of every human community is how it cares for the most vulnerable,

Think of authority this way: the capacity for meaningful action.

Above all, meaningful action participates in a story. It has a past and a future.

The psalmist of Psalm 8, having considered the vastness of the cosmos and human beings’ smallness in the midst of it, then proclaims, Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas. (Psalm 8:5-8)

But this is not really what I mean by the vulnerability that leads to flourishing. Instead, think of it this way: exposure to meaningful risk.

True vulnerability involves risking something of real and even irreplaceable value. And like authority, true vulnerability involves a story—a history that shapes why we are choosing to risk and a future that makes the risk worthwhile but also holds the potential of loss coming to pass.

Nakedness is a funny thing. Of all the creatures in the world, only human beings can be naked.

The unsettling truth is that just as human beings have more authority than any other creature, we also have more vulnerability than any other creature.

Bones—hard, rigid, strong. Flesh—soft, pliable, vulnerable. We image bearers are bone and flesh—strength and weakness, authority and vulnerability, together.

We even suffer in ambition, having sent off an application for a job or a place at university, all the documentation we could muster of our authority—but then having to wait weeks or months for a decision.

Every one of us is a neighbor to communities in suffering.

As Gary Haugen and Victor Boutros point out in their compelling book The Locust Effect, half a century’s worth of financial investment in the materially poor world has had surprisingly little effect. Introducing material resources alone into a system of exploitation—treating the symptoms of Suffering without addressing the disease of Exploiting and Withdrawing—actually can increase the vulnerability of the poor.

There is nothing wrong with reducing meaningless risk in people’s lives—their vulnerability to hunger or disease. But the best interventions in situations of persistent poverty increase authority as well.

“The Lord Jesus is teaching me that we are all immigrants,” she told me, “and our real home is with him.

A healthy childhood is one where both capacity for action and exposure to meaningful risk are meted out in measured doses, gradually increasing as the child matures.

We are meant for more than leisure. This is true for our own sakes, but it is also true because, like the diminished human beings aboard the Axiom, we are still responsible for a world gone wrong.

In social media, you can engage in nearly friction-free experiences of activism, expressing enthusiasm, solidarity or outrage (all powerful sensations of authority) for your chosen cause with the click of a few buttons.

Before the current era, almost no one could stay in Withdrawing beyond the early years of childhood. The world was too harsh and human cultures too demanding of real maturity.

The next time you travel, decide not to be a tourist, who uses material wealth to purchase experiences of vicarious significance—being in places that make us feel grand and worth noticing. Instead, travel like a pilgrim, who travels to encounter people who have been sanctified by suffering. Seek out people who live on the cruel edges of the world. Accompany them in person, at least for short seasons, in their authority and vulnerability.

Tyranny and suffering, exploiting and poverty, always are found together.

for the very essence of control is authority without vulnerability, the ability to act without the possibility of loss.

I am not sure there is a “law of conservation of vulnerability” in the same strict sense, but it is still a general rule: vulnerability shed by one group of people is inevitably borne by others’ suffering.

The first things any idol takes from its worshipers are their relationships. Idols know and care nothing for the exchange of authority and vulnerability that happens in the context of love—and the demonic powers that lurk behind them, and lure us to them, despise love.

Leadership does not begin with a title or a position. It begins the moment you are concerned more about others’ flourishing than you are about your own. It begins when you start to ask how you might help create and sustain the conditions for others to increase their authority and vulnerability together.

There are two kinds of vulnerability that must remain hidden if we are to lead others toward Flourishing. First, the leader’s own personal exposure to risk must often remain unspoken, unseen and indeed unimagined by others. And second, the leader must bear the shared vulnerabilities that the community does not currently have the authority to address. Revealing either of these kinds of vulnerability will at best distract, and at worst paralyze, the community we are responsible for, robbing them of the opportunity for real flourishing. Because the community does not have the authority—the capacity for meaningful action—to deal with these vulnerabilities, asking the community to bear them will only plunge the community more deeply into Suffering.

This is one sense in which leadership is always servanthood—it is always about others’ flourishing, not our own, and it is always directed toward others’ authority, not our own.

Make no mistake: transformational leadership helps people see and address real vulnerability. But leaders exist to match that vulnerability, as much as possible, with commensurate authority. So our job is often to increase others’ authority while gradually, in a measured and intentional way, alerting them to vulnerabilities (including our own limitations, foibles and blindness).

In a healthy world, every increase in authority, every move upward, would be matched by an increase in risk, a move to the right.

Something is warped in the grain of the universe, something that prevents us from turning authority into flourishing—we are bent in the direction of exploitation, privilege and safety. Such is the power of the lies that have insinuated themselves into the human story from the very beginning.

Relinquishing power. Like Nelson Mandela, every leader needs a plan for how to lay down their authority once and for all. As with Mandela, many leaders need to plan to lay that power aside before their own communities would expect or demand it.

When leaders do not actively plan for the end of their power, and when we who are led by them allow them to indulge fantasies of unending influence, they are idols, no matter how well disguised.

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

But if 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.

The ones who succeeded were the ones who failed loudly, quickly and boldly—rather than softly, slowly and timidly.

Like Paul Farmer, I want to be a saint—to become part of the ultimate meaningful story, taking hold of the life that really is life. The great news is that it is possible. Do your homework—prepare for authority. Love your neighbor, enough to need them, enough to know what they need—open yourself to vulnerability. And then be yourself—show up with all that you have and all that you are and all the truth of what you will never be.

The more we grasp how truly we lost hold of our true calling, how completely we were in the grip of injustice, safety and poverty, the more we realize how great the rescue has been, how little we ourselves can claim for our own credit.