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

We must meet hate with love. We must meet physical force with soul force. There is still a voice crying out through the vista of time, saying: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you.” Then, and only then, can you matriculate into the university of eternal life. That same voice cries out in terms lifted to cosmic proportions: “He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword.”15

Dr. King’s vision provides a tangible example of how we might stand against the powers.

Before he answered, John finally took a sip of the cold cola that had made a sizable water ring on the glass table. “The question we have to ask is, ‘Does the gospel, as we currently preach it, have the power to deal with racism?’ The evangelical church, whose basic theology is the same as mine, had not continued to preach the whole gospel. But I was convinced that we ought to preach the fullness of the truth and expect the power of the gospel. Reconciliation is an ongoing process, but it comes out of the gospel; it should not be taken out and dissected, but believed. That is the effect of the full truth of the gospel, that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself,21 and has given us this ongoing proclamation of the gospel. That’s the story. That’s the longing. That God would come and live among us—Immanuel. Reconciliation is the display of that power that is really at work.”

What we receive from these Christians is a unified witness calling us to peace and love in the face of dehumanizing powers. And yet, in the face of an evil much milder, I often turn to anger and my own self-assertion as a way to bolster myself against what I perceive as an injustice.

We can love our enemies because we first were enemies of God, and we can forgive because Christ forgave us. It is important that it was in our sin that we were forgiven (Rom. 5:8), and that Christ teaches us to pray, “Forgive us our sins, as we have forgiven those who sin against us” (Matt. 6:12 NLT).

As we seek to stand against these powers, we must heed the example of Perkins and King: People are not our enemies; our enemies are the powers of evil themselves. We are called in Christ to love all—to hope that God can save even those embracing evil—and

the greatest temptation in our stand against the powers is to respond in kind.

only love has the power to undermine hate.

The heart of the message of Jesus is: Be compassionate as my Father is compassionate, do not judge so you won’t be judged, do not condemn so you won’t be condemned, forgive such as we have been forgiven. The heart of this is: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, speak well of those who speak badly of you, pray for those who persecute you. We think that you have to be strong, you have to win, you have to be the best. So we believe that we should all be winners, but we are not all winners. So our experience of being loved and accepted in community allows us to accept ourselves as we are. We are broken, but we are loved.”

And to love them is not to do things for them, but to reveal to them by the way we listen that they are important, and that they have value. To love, which is their cry, is a cry for recognition. Does somebody really love me? The heart of vulnerability is a cry for help.

“We are born to live and we are born to die. We are born to grow and we are born to get weaker. We are necessarily vulnerable people. We are frightened. So, it is not a question of why is it like that. It is like that!”

The way of Jesus pushes against our assumptions. It isn’t easy to accept that the way of Jesus undermines our assumptions about life,

How do we reveal to people that they are precious? We are in a society that says you are precious if you succeed. This is our reality. If we are in a group that is successful and powerful, then we feel secure.

In the words of Bonhoeffer, “What may appear weak and trifling to us may be great and glorious to God.”5

For those of us who do lean into community, we can easily be tempted to do so through the way from below. We step into relationships seeking control, rather than pursuing love.

In the words of 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.7

Groups are loosely held together by a common vision, but real Christian community is bound together in love.

Jesus’ mission entails self-giving to undeserving people, and we are those undeserving people. As we receive his gift of himself, we find that we are not simply called to follow him, but to live within his life. This is why Paul’s letters are riddled with the phrase “in Christ.”

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.

It is not our effort that is the problem, but the source of our action.

This shift in mind-set has changed my understanding of ministry from the building of a career to the continual embrace of my calling.

When I am tempted by the way from below, the only solution is to abide in the One who called me and open my heart to his way.

One of the unexpected challenges of accepting the invitation to minister in the way of Jesus is how lonely it has been.

American pastors are abandoning their posts, left and right, and at an alarming rate. They are not leaving their churches and getting other jobs. Congregations still pay their salaries. Their names remain on the church stationery and they continue to appear in pulpits on Sundays. But they are abandoning their posts, their calling. They have gone whoring after other gods. What they do with their time under the guise of pastoral ministry hasn’t the remotest connection with what the church’s pastors have done for most of twenty centuries.

We are not all called to pastor, but we are all called into faithfulness in the way of Jesus.

I’m sorry to say this, but much of what we call Christian is not a manifestation of the supernatural life of God in our souls; much of what we call Christian is really just human.

Ministry is bringing the life of God, as it would be understood in terms of Jesus and his kingdom, into the lives of other people. That’s ministry. We minister the kingdom of God. That gives you a new way of thinking about ministry because now you are a carrier of the kingdom of God, which is how Jesus trained his first disciples. You are a carrier of the power of God, the kingdom of God, and the grace of God; and so you watch that work with people and try not to get in its way. But that is the secret of ministry. You bring the power of God, the truth of God, and the presence of Jesus into the lives of other people and you watch it work.”

The word that came to Jeremiah’s secretary was, ‘Seekest thou great things for thyself? Seek them not.’7 And then he goes on to promise that God will take care of him. We should just get out of the business of seeking great things. Now, if we do that, then we will be more observant of the small things; we will, for example, have time and energy because we are resting in God to really do justice to the small things. And that will be to approach them as one who lives in the kingdom of God who actually cares about the people who are closest to them.

is so extremely hard to get meaningful programs on spiritual formation integrated into the course of studies in seminaries. It is always regarded as something like, ‘Oh well, if you are interested in that . . . but you don’t have to be. What you really need to be up on are your languages and your history and your knowledge of the Bible and so on, and then perhaps you learn something about preparing sermons and counseling. That’s what you really need to know.’ No no no. That’s not what you need to know. You need to know how to abandon yourself to God. Methods are often temporary, but what God is looking for is a life.”

Christian wisdom, therefore, is not living according to how the world is, but how it should be.

Counterfeit wisdom is fast food for the soul.

It is not arrogance to know what the way of evil looks like in the world and to name it. It is deceptive, however, to name it everywhere other than in your own heart. Dallas helps to focus our attention: “The issue, so far as the gospel in the Gospels is concerned, is whether we are alive to God or dead to him. Do we walk in an interactive relationship with him that constitutes a new kind of life, life ‘from above’?”

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.

Dallas claims, “According to the wisdom of Jesus, then, every event takes on a different reality and meaning, depending on whether it is seen only in the context of the visible or also in the context of God’s full world, where we all as a matter of fact live.”

Paul tells us to “look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Cor. 4:18).

James warns, “Whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God” (James 4:4).

There is only wisdom in love through abiding in Christ. This wisdom in love is by faith, and as such, it is an embrace of our weakness and Christ’s strength.

The call to wisdom for leadership will necessarily require the church to change her view of what it means to succeed. Toxic leaders thrive in toxic cultures. If our desperation for meaning and significance drives us toward worldly leaders, we will overlook their toxicity in lieu of the payoff they provide.

While the evangelical church culture promotes young leaders, Dallas reminds us that youth and wisdom don’t usually go hand in hand. Our focus on youth reveals how little concern we have for wisdom, which comes from decades of faithfulness.