The Way of the Dragon or the Way of the Lamb: Searching for Jesus’ Path of Power in a Church that Has Abandoned It

by Jamin Goggin

Bonhoeffer: God did not make others as I would have made them. God did not give them to me so that I could dominate and control them, but so that I might find the Creator by means of them. Now other people, in the freedom with which they were created, become an occasion for me to rejoice, whereas before they were only a nuisance and trouble for me. God does not want me to mold others into the image that seems good to me, that is, into my own image.

To become a true community, we have to embrace the way of Jesus in the truth of our weakness and neediness.

Christian community is the incubator for God’s power in weakness for the sake of love.

But like Jesus, Jean wasn’t interested in how powerful his ministry seemed (Jesus, after all, particularly at the end, was left with only a small cadre of followers who ended up abandoning him). His interest gravitated to how profoundly loving an act was, more than how powerful it seemed.

Nothing about genuine community feels powerful. Part of the reason for this is because true community takes time, and there is no possible substitute for that. Like a tree that “yields its fruit in its season” (Ps. 1:3), it takes real patience for the fruit of community to come into season. It takes wisdom and love.

Often, we hear God’s call to embrace our weakness or move in sacrificial love and we imagine that ultimately this will result in our heroism—overcoming all odds and becoming powerful. In other words, we imagine that Jesus has just given us a more surprising and challenging way to achieve power and success. We still believe we will get what others want, but the difference is that we will go about it “in the right way.” This is simply not what Jesus tells us. Embracing the way from above is often a hard and lonely road, but it is the true path of

In this world, love is marked by suffering, crying out, and a deep and abiding longing for the day when God “will wipe away every tear” (Rev. 21:4). While being a witness to the invisible way of Christ won’t often feel like the path of life, it is the calling of faith to embrace this way regardless. This is the way against evil, and as such, it is the way of Christ.

This changes everything. Now, ministry is not primarily a profession, but a vocation. A vocation is a calling—a gift, a grace, and an invitation. My calling is not based on my résumé, my abilities, or my power. It is based solely upon the résumé, ability, and power of the One who calls me. This is not something I control, but something I receive. Success is not determined by what I accomplish, but rather by my faithfulness—faithfulness to the One who called me and to his gracious invitation. This still requires work, because faithfulness is not sitting around and waiting for God to do something. But the work is sowing to the Spirit in the way of Christ. It is not our effort that is the problem, but the source of our action.

The minute you start becoming obsessed with control, you lose the relationship. Sadly, pastors can get really good at seeming relational, but they are just being manipulative. They know how to play the emotional angles. I think that probably the leading characteristic of successful pastors today is their control. Is that part of your experience?”

We choose: we follow the dragon and his beasts along their parade route, conspicuous with the worship of splendid images, elaborated in mysterious symbols, fond of statistics, taking on whatever role is necessary to make a good show and get the applause of the crowd in order to get access to power and become self-important. Or we follow the Lamb along a farmyard route, worshiping the invisible, listening to the foolishness of preaching, practicing a holy life that involves heroically difficult acts that no one will ever notice, in order to become, simply, our eternal selves in an eternal city. It is the difference, politically, between wanting to use the people around us to become powerful (or, if unskilled, getting used by them), and entering into covenants with the people around us so that the power of salvation extends into every part of the neighborhood, the society, and the world that God loves.

The pastor gives their life for the sake of the church, regardless of what they gain. The pastor views ministry as an arena of love and service, not winning and losing. The pastor embraces their congregation as people to know and love, not tools to use for other ends. The pastor views prayer and care as the centerpiece of their work, rather than an interruption. The pastor views other pastors not as competition, but as fellow shepherds on the journey whom they need for encouragement and wisdom, and who they are called to encourage and love.

The shepherd was always one who sought the safety, well-being, and good of the sheep first and foremost. The sheep need to know their shepherd, and they need to be known by their shepherd.

If the pastor’s primary task is to care for the sheep, then this cannot be done from a distance; it is an up-close-and-personal endeavor. Peter gives us this kind of vision for pastoral ministry. So I exhort the elders among you, as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed: shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you; not for shameful gain, but eagerly; not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock. And when the chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crown of glory. (1 Peter 5:1–4)

We need to look for those who have embraced the way from above. We need to look for shepherds who seek to guide, care for, and protect the flock. We need to look for those who have embraced their weakness and depend upon God’s power. We need to look for those who sacrificially love. We need to look for those who have humbled themselves “under the mighty hand of God” (1 Peter 5:6).12

The reason we desire toxic leaders, according to Jean Lipman-Blumen, is because toxic leaders promise to “keep us safe, anoint us as special, and offer us a seat at the community table.”5 We want a sense of safety, significance, and belonging, and they are offering it in exchange for loyalty.

Power, ambition, jealousy, and pride are all bait for those who seek to influence the people of God.

By the way, this is one of the things that crushes pastors, the idea that every Sunday they have to put on a performance. God’s provision for us and for his work through us is adequate. We do not have to make it happen. We must stop shouldering the burdens of outcomes. These are safely in his hands.”

We want power. Christ claims that without him we can do nothing. We want to win. Christ offers the cross. We want to do big things. Christ waits for us to be faithful with little things. The whole enterprise runs contrary to our sensibilities. So what does it mean to lead and “succeed” in ministry? It means to serve. Dallas writes: “Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant” (Mark 10:44). By the way, it is dreadful to see this recommended as only another technique for succeeding in leadership. Jesus wasn’t giving techniques for successful leadership. He was telling us who the great person is. He or she is the one who is servant of all. Being a servant shifts one’s relationship to everyone. What do you think it would do to sexual temptation if you thought of yourself as a servant? What do you think it would do to covetousness? What do you think it would do to the feeling of resentment because you didn’t get what you thought you deserved? I’ll tell you. It will lift the burden.9

Ultimately, this is a call to the way of wisdom, which is precisely why there is no secret formula for success in God’s kingdom other than love, and love is often messier than we want to deal with.

But as we trust in the way of Jesus, we must not look around and ask if others are watching, if we are seen as important, or if we are doing something “meaningful.” Rather, we need to ask: If we are pierced, what do we bleed? Do we bleed forgiveness, love, and grace, or anger, hatred, and domination? If our church is confronted with the chaotic wind and waves of the world, what is its foundation? What reveals itself when struggles come? If the clothing I put on to project an image to the world is stripped away, what lies beneath?

Because of the dehumanizing nature of the organization, there was constant turnover of employees.

Do we walk in an interactive relationship with him that constitutes a new kind of life, life ‘from above’?”10 He goes on: What must be emphasized in all of this is the difference between trusting Christ, the real person Jesus, with all that that naturally involves, versus trusting some arrangement for sin-remission set up through him—trusting only his role as guilt remover. To trust the real person Jesus is to have confidence in him in every dimension of our real life, to believe that he is right about and adequate to everything.11

Many of us seem ready for Jesus to save us, as long as this saving has little to do with how we engage everyday life. We are tempted to tack Jesus onto things we are doing, while at the same time we are desperately afraid that he will undermine them. We can try to use Jesus to obtain power, but we are often less interested in the cross he bears.

To lead is to do exactly what these biblical figures did, to set our eyes on the invisible country, the New Jerusalem, which is driven by an economy of love. Wisdom is learning how to live in this way. Wisdom is trusting in the unseen

There is only wisdom in love through abiding in Christ.

It is easy to see such a place as a vehicle to succeed. It is in these places that setting our eyes on the invisible country is so difficult. Leading here will mean that we will always be seen as suspicious. Leading here will entail pushing so hard against the stream that we’re seen as a nuisance at best, and incompetent or insubordinate at worst. Your own desire for wisdom, holiness, and love will be seen as destructive to the quest for power, and therefore, it will be recast as laziness, elitism, or aloofness. Or, with Jesus, you may be rebuked and called demonic by those who have set themselves up as the experts of the Bible. When Jesus tells his followers that the world will hate them because of him, we have to remember that he had no context of a “secular world.” The “world” that Jesus was talking about included the people of God. We too must realize that the most ardent opposition to the way from above—the way of Jesus—may come from within the church.

When we come to think that the Christian life is about our own development rather than about our calling in Christ as a family of God, we inevitably confuse the church for a secular entity.

Through such singing we participate in Christ’s ongoing defeat of the powers and principalities. It may seem foolish and inconsequential, perhaps as effective as blowing trumpets while marching around the walls of an enemy city (Josh. 6), but the battle cry is the outpouring of a people of love who live and thrive in the kingdom of love. Our song is a hopeful longing to the day when every tear will be wiped away, and when we will be participants in the wedding feast of the Lamb.

As the Israelites journeyed through the wilderness, they were in a land bereft of basic human necessities: water and food. When the people “came to the wilderness of Sin” (Ex. 16:1), they grumbled against Moses because they were hungry. They longed for sustenance. God had rescued them from a land of slavery, but now they found themselves in a cruel, dry land, very hungry, and no doubt very weak. God provided for their need and rained down manna from heaven. Jesus again pulls this part of the exodus story into his own life and work, proclaiming, “Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. . . . I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst” (John 6:32–33, 35). In the wilderness of faith there is only one source of nourishment: Jesus. So we come to the Communion Table desperately in need of food and drink. We present ourselves to God as those who are weak. At the Communion Table we acknowledge that it is in Jesus’ death that we have life, and it is in weakness that we find power. We read in John 6:53–56: “Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. ...

The two rituals of the church that fulfill this aspect of Israel’s narrative are preaching and the public reading of Scripture. In both, the Word of God is proclaimed. Paul encourages Timothy, “Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching” (1 Tim. 4:13). In both rituals, the people of God are called to stand under the Word and be listeners. The centrality of the public reading of Scripture, and possibly the reason for its absence in so many churches, is that the Scriptures read aloud cannot be controlled or filtered to our liking. In the public reading of Scripture, we hear the raw proclamation of God through his Word and must receive it, in the Spirit, as a Word for us. A public proclamation of Scripture helps to keep the preacher accountable to the Word that was read. But while the public reading of Scripture is straightforward, preaching is less so.

In the public reading of Scripture, we hear the raw proclamation of God through his Word and must receive it, in the Spirit, as a Word for us. A public proclamation of Scripture helps to keep the preacher accountable to the Word that was read. But while the public reading of Scripture is straightforward, preaching is less so.

The proclamation of the Word of God in preaching is a Christ-centered and cruciform reality. As Paul says about his own preaching, I “preach Christ crucified” (1 Cor. 1:23). This kind of preaching calls for listeners with ears to hear, who have become attuned to the wisdom from above (1 Cor. 1:21). As such, this kind of preaching is a “stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles. . . . For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Cor...

The purpose of this Word is to lead God’s people in deliverance to the way of the kingdom. Likewise, the author of Hebrews admonishes, “Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it”; and “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion” (Heb. 2:1; 3:15). The Word comes to us “today” because, in the Spirit, God’s Word still speaks. The Word of God is not dead and lifeless, but alive and active; and it exposes the depth of the human heart before God (Heb. 4:12–13).

Hearts tuned to the grace of God in prayerful abiding and love will instinctively harmonize with three broad expressions of the way: generosity, reconciliation, and nondivisive resistance.

A heart that is formed by greed, pride, self-centeredness, and anger will very quickly adopt forms of living that affirm the power structures of the world, the flesh, and the devil (even within the church).

Ultimately, the heart given to the way from above will be inclined toward generosity and away from vices such as lying, greed, and selfishness. In

When we embrace reconciled diversity as the family of God, we bear witness to God’s way of power and stand against the world, the flesh, and the devil.

Only after we refuse to hate can we resist nonviolently, turning to ways of peace and love that will expose the evil systems working through broken people.

Like the police officer who beat John Perkins and his companions, abusers are caught up in an evil that is undermining their humanity. By

Love is not undermined by naming the truth; love abstracted from truth is not love at all. We don’t pass over truth for the sake of peace, but recognize that peace is found only in Christ, who is Truth.

We forget that influence and popularity are not intrinsically good. We do not notice that we are becoming like the idols in our lives, and that the rituals of God’s family are boring and lack meaning for us. But this kind of numbing will always be the fruit of idolatry.

As we seek to thrive in whatever position the Lord has called us to, we can still seek to be skilled at what we do, as long as that skill is grounded in our abiding in Christ, and our purpose is oriented to God’s calling to love.

In these moments we ought to pray with Augustine: “Let the strong and mighty laugh at us, then, but let us weak and needy folk confess to you.”1

In the wilderness, we discover that we too learn obedience through suffering, and that if we embrace the way from above and its movement of heart and life, we will suffer in the very place we don’t expect—in the church.

So now, we do not live by sight, but we live by faith, trusting that this path is the weighty way of the kingdom.

“What makes the temptation of power so seemingly irresistible? Maybe it is that power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of love. It seems easier to be God than to love God, easier to control people than to love people, easier to own life than to love life.” —HENRI NOUWEN

Keep in Step with the Spirit: Finding Fullness in Our Walk with God (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005).