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

People will say ‘in praise of God’ and ‘for the glory of God,’ but it’s external. I think that in contemporary evangelical worship there is often an element of showing off, which is external. Pride is the disposition controlling the heart, but externally it looks like, it believes itself to be, the praise of God.”

Significance, unlike wisdom, does not take patience. I saw what these professors had, and I wanted to embody it without the trials, suffering, and time it took them. I wanted long-term fruit through short-term effort.

It is easy, for instance, to define “kingdom power” in terms of what we find beautiful and unique, such that we assume that our creativity, by the very nature of its being creative, must be faithful to the way of Jesus. Furthermore, it is easy to embrace greatness without discernment, believing that greatness will always be characteristic of the kingdom.

Jesus champions not the great but the seemingly insignificant and irrelevant.

As we see kingdom power in the church today, our starting question should not be “How can we be great?” but “What role do the weak, disabled, and elderly have in our midst?” When those who are obviously weak have no place in the church, we know that we have rejected t...

First, the way of the dragon . . . The pastor uses the church as a platform for personal fame, fortune, and influence.8 The pastor views ministry as an arena of performance, where some win and some lose. The pastor uses the people of the church as tools to accomplish their big dreams. The pastor relegates prayer and care, the heart of pastoral work, to “lower-level” staff because they don’t have time to waste. The pastor views other pastors primarily as competition. Second, the way of the lamb . . . 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.

Too often what congregations look for in a pastor has nothing to do with being a pastor. We want someone who can wow us. We want someone who exudes confidence. We want someone who can “get things done” and “make things happen.”11 We are looking more for a proven professional than someone humbly called. We are looking more for a polished businessman than a seasoned shepherd. We are looking for someone who is powerful and in control. We are looking more for a dragon than a lamb.

“Well, I wouldn’t really consider myself a shepherd, but more of a leader or a teacher. That’s not really my gifting.” But shepherding isn’t one option among many for the pastor. It is the heart of the vocation. The primary tasks of the pastor are not determined by personal interests or affinities. We can’t reduce the vocation to what excites us most or what we feel we excel in. The pastoral vocation is a call to embrace our weakness, not to actualize our abilities.

When pastoral ministry is something the pastor gets to define, the task of shepherding quickly digresses into a ministry of power. But pastoring was never this kind of a thing. It always carried with it images of care, provision, and protection. 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.

There is no shortage of talk about leadership today. It is something of a cultural obsession, and it is perhaps even more alive in the confines of the church. With the decreasing emphasis on the “pastor-shepherd,” we have seen the rise of “the leader.” When we talk about leaders we often assume they should have strong personalities, be able to make difficult decisions, and gather people aroud them and wield influence over them.

wholesale. 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.”4 We want a sense of safety, significance, and belonging, and they are offering it in exchange for loyalty.

Toxic leaders are the products of toxic cultures. So we don’t seek out shepherds, but gurus. We don’t desire servants, but kings. We don’t long for pastors, but celebrities. Such a leader is not known by his or her congregation, not personally, but serves more as the logo of an organization. But this is what we ask for, and, unsurprisingly, this is what it takes to be considered “successful” in much of evangelicalism today.

“The real issue for the evangelical church today,” he said, “is what counts as success in ministry? If you go back several decades, you will see that people didn’t think about ministers in the same way. They didn’t really think in terms of success. The whole idea of being a success was more in terms of being faithful to a calling. For example, you could be a minister who wasn’t a very good speaker and be regarded as someone who was faithful to their calling, someone of character. So the problem is how you think about success, and today it is very difficult to think about success except in terms of a great deal of money and a lot of accoutrements—like buildings and programs.

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.

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.”

Dallas paused to consider Jamin’s question. “The underlying assumption of this way of doing our church services is that you are putting on a performance, and if you are going to put on a performance, then you want people who are stellar. This is in terms that are understood by the consumers of the performance, and a humble man or woman who has simply been faithful in serving the Lord is not stellar. It is a great temptation to put on a performance. 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 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. Those people are the ‘neighbors’ in Scripture, they are the ones who are close to us, and we care about them. But you know, you can’t do that if you are in a hurry.”

Whereas Christian wisdom is a long process of growth into maturity, counterfeit wisdom is always easier to come by. Counterfeit wisdom is fast food for the soul. It is easy to find, cheap to get, and never fulfills its promise to satisfy you. We are all tempted by counterfeit wisdom.

Because of the dehumanizing nature of the organization, there was constant turnover of employees. But no matter how many stories like this surfaced, they were always drowned out by the praise of all the “big” things going on. When people were neglected, someone reminded them how lucky they were to be a part of the bigness of the place. I was there long enough to see its fruit and really taste it. It was bitter and rotten. The system was driven by power structures of fear and manipulation.

Everything about the place exuded worldly forms of power, success, and strength, and the way it got there was by employing the way from below (and hiding its methods beneath its doctrinal statement). The structures of this institution tapped into worldliness in an attempt to baptize it for Christian gain. But this will always be the way of death, and its fruit will always be dehumanization.

When things don’t go my way, I can turn to strategies and techniques to win before I turn to abiding and trusting.

there is no silver-bullet leadership strategy in the kingdom of God. There is only wisdom in love through abiding in Christ.

In these places, somehow, the ways of below are marketed as virtues, and power is given to those who grasp for it. In these environments, choosing the way from above is incredibly challenging. It is easy to get caught up in the excitement and the vision for success. It is easy to see such a place as a vehicle to succeed.

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.

We too must realize that the most ardent opposition to the way from above—the way of Jesus—may come from within the church.

Leaders in the church are to be the watchmen steering us away from the evil that so easily entangles us, pointing instead to the life God has for us.

Jim, Marva, James, John, Eugene, and Dallas, it was clear that these people bore fruit of the kingdom. In their final seasons, all of them were living lives of profound love and wisdom: They were gracious, kind, gentle, loving, and encouraging.

We must name the truth without being simplistic and without only finding the information we are looking for. This means that we must become what our world despises—careful thinkers, clear and articulate voices of reason in an age of delusion and misinformation.

Baptism can be used as a means of control and self-congratulatory growth for the church, where baptisms are tallied because they look nice on our ministry scorecard, and individual members bask in the feeling that big things are happening.

Cross-shaped endeavors are not merely to be done, but to be done Jesus’ way.

The warning that echoes forth ominously through the ages is that if we fail to repent, he may remove our lampstand. The question we have to wrestle with is: If he does, would we even notice?