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

The way from below often hides in attitudes and actions that seem too small to matter, but with time and community, they blossom into deep hatred.

We must stand against the power to control in all forms, from racism to ageism, from issues like our idolatry of leaders (Christian celebrity) to the call to respond to violence by taking up the sword (guns), from issues of competition between churches to our systemic marginalization of people with disabilities.

We want love, but we want to achieve it through a method that is foreign and antithetical to it. But love is not the fruit of power to control. Love presses us into vulnerability.

Love is a power that simultaneously calls us into our weakness and brings evil out of the darkness and into the light. Love demands courage and greatness, but it does so in the very places we are afraid of. Perkins offers us a picture of this greatness, and he highlights our calling to give ourselves to love in the face of evil.

The way from below forces pastoral ministry into professional categories where the focus is on what I can get done and make happen.

This shift in mindset has changed my understanding of ministry from the building of a career to the continual embrace of my calling. This has made a major difference in my posture as a pastor. There are, of course, moments when I digress into grasping for control. There are moments when I want “real power,” and I begin plotting how I can get it. (It’s amazing how easy it is to equate worldly power with “real power” in my heart.) The way from below is always wooing us, and our hearts are never fully immune to its seduction. 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.

I can distinctly remember being at a crossroads in ministry. I felt God was calling me to move into a new role, and at the time I had two different jobs open to me. One was at a big, influential church, and the other was at a small, unknown church. God’s calling at this moment in my vocational journey could not have been clearer. He had called me to the small church. I remember wrestling with him. Yet, he made it known he was calling me into a season of hiddenness. Just when I felt it was my time to make a name for myself, God invited me to hide. As frustrating as this season was, it was during this time that I learned all the ways I had sought out power and rejected weakness, and it was there that the Lord taught me what it truly means to be a pastor.

He spoke to us as friends. “Jamin and Kyle, the great temptation of power is control, and the great consequence of control is lack of relationship. The reason that intimacy is so difficult in ministry is you’re not in control—you’re in relationship. You have to enter a person’s life and they have to enter yours. 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.

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.

The dragon represents the devil and his way of power against Christ, the lamb of God. I could not let this passage go. I kept returning to it. In using this imagery Eugene painted in bright colors the nature of the spiritual battle of power. Where will we place our faith: the way of the dragon or the way of the lamb of God? We march in the procession of one kingdom or the other (Col. 1:13). The way of the dragon is fixated on the spectacular, obsessed with recognition and validation, intoxicated by fame and power. The way of the lamb is committed to worship, pursues God in the ordinary, and is faithful in hiddenness. The dragon devours and dominates, while the lamb humbly and sacrificially serves.

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

Wisdom and talent are not synonyms. Arrogance and pride never reside alone; they are woven within a faithfulness to the way from below that produces death.

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.”

And again, you see, you’re going to have to break a lot of habits, because your whole life has been devoted to something else. Probably how you’ve experienced church and then perhaps how you’ve experienced your theological education, is not in that direction. That is why, for example, it 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.”

But this will always be the way of death, and its fruit will always be dehumanization.

In my self-deception I separate Jesus from the example of his life, and think I can have one without the other.

We can try to use Jesus to obtain power, but we are often less interested in the cross he bears.

The power of Christianity is found not in these things but in Christ, who walked the way of the cross. We have focused on the visible when we are called to set our minds on the invisible. Power is choosing the way of love, which is the way of wisdom and faith, against the way of the world, the flesh, and the demonic seeking to seduce us. 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.

If we don’t draw near to God in the truth of our hearts, such emotions either calcify into deposits of anger and despair, or they leak out of the heart in ways that can be destructive to our relationships and harmful to others.

Leaders rarely advance in worldly power without the aid of a community’s warped values fueling their misguided quest for grandiosity. A reformation of power is not merely about better leadership, but an embrace of a truly Christian vision of power in every segment of the church.

When church cultures assume the way from below is true power, evil is already at the door and is, in fact, already within the gates. We are besieged on all sides by this evil. To ignore this reality is a failure to remember what age we are in.

For James, the one who is wise uses speech to ask God for wisdom (James 1:5). The mature person is one who is slow to speak (James 1:19), who confesses sin to others (James 5:16), and who speaks out in prayer (James 5:13–18). James calls for speech that is truthful and intent on redemption for those who have failed (James 5:19–20), and speech that is humble and submissive to God’s providence (James 4:15). James looks for speech that sings praise to God (James 5:13).

We want to suggest that being part of the solution, participating in God’s reformation of power in the church, is primarily about the small and the hidden.

the answer is to commit ourselves to the slow and steady journey of the way of the lamb in our context, relationships, and our given church family.

Christian community is the incubator for God’s power in weakness for love; it is where we learn that vulnerability is how we are called to stand against evil.

Real power is found in the simple and ordinary practice of loving one another in the truth of our weakness. It may not look powerful, but the embrace of vulnerability in community is the path of power in the kingdom. In the words of Bonhoeffer, from his astounding book on community life, “What may appear weak and trifling to us may be great and glorious to God.”

Committing ourselves to the small, simple, and hidden works of love in our church communities is the path to bear witness to the way of the lamb.

People reject the church because they have failed to grasp what it is.

The church was first known as the people of the Way (Acts 9:2). The “Way” these people embraced was the way of Jesus—the way of power in weakness for the sake of love. This was not a loosely connected group of individuals, a social club of sorts, but a family united in Christ (Eph. 2:19). It is this ancient family that we now are a part of in Christ by the Spirit. We are bound together as those who live in, through, and for the way. We are the family of the way, called to walk not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit (Rom. 8:1–8), called to walk the path of Jesus to the cross (Matt. 16:24), and called into his death and resurrection.

Israel’s own impatience with God’s way led them to create and worship a golden calf, and our own impatience tends to bear similar kinds of fruit. As we are being delivered from our flesh and desire for worldly power, we grow impatient and grumble with God, longing for practices of power rather than weakness.

The wilderness was supposed to be a time of “putting off” the way from below and “putting on” the way from above.

We are now in a different sort of wilderness—led out of the world and into the kingdom of Christ—awaiting the promised land that will come when Christ returns. We journey in this wilderness daily, knowing God’s presence is with us but also longing for the day when he will be present in full.

we see that reconciliation is not simply an act of love, but an act of love against the powers and principalities of the world. Communion is the meal of those who are enemies of the way from below; believers who trust in the bread from heaven rather than the bread of Egypt.

The way from above is proclaimed through Christ-centered, cross-focused preaching, both in its heralding and in its reception.

This means that the corollary practice of reading Scripture and preaching is listening.

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

The cross-shaped nature of the rituals unveils our continued desires for control and domination. In short, the rituals reveal where we truly believe power is found.

Like the Israelites, we, too, are confronted with the unusual way of power that God presents to us, as he calls us out of the world and into the way of his kingdom more and more. We, too, feel like a fragile people wandering in the wilderness, and we, too, receive commands that seem odd—to organize our week around rest (Sabbath), to care for our neighbor, and to place God above all else.8 These ways may not seem like the path of power, but they are the ways of the kingdom.

The world we journey in now is the wilderness of the Christian. The challenge of living in this particular wilderness is not merely external, in which we fight opposing forces from without. There is an internal reality to this wilderness, in which we must navigate the depths of our souls, souls that still long for the things of this world. As we are delivered from our enslavement, we must not only engage in practices with the body, but also open in the freedom of the Spirit to have our hearts move in harmony with the kingdom.

Recollection is a dwelling within ourselves; a being abstracted from the creature, and turned towards God. Recollection is both outward and inward. Outward recollection consists in silence from all idle and superfluous words: and in solitude, or a wise disentanglement from the world, keeping to our own business, observing and following the order of God for ourselves, and shutting the ear against all curious and unprofitable matters. Inward recollection consists in shutting the door of the senses, in a deep attention to the presence of God, and in a continual care of entertaining holy thoughts for fear of spiritual idleness.

Giving ourselves to times of silence and solitude helps to expose the ways in which our lives are truly oriented by distraction, achievement, and escapism. Silence and solitude reveal the ways in which we are swimming in the stream of worldly power and we aren’t even aware of it. We do not practice silence and solitude as a means of self-help, or to feel better about ourselves, but to be with God in the truth of ourselves and open to his movement of love. The formation of a person who is prayerfully abiding in Christ leads to maturity, and Christian maturity is defined by discernment and wisdom. Prayerfulness, silence, and recollection allow us to stand under the Word in truth, not dulling our hearing but becoming “those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil” (Heb. 5:14).

When Paul calls Christians to love one another and outdo one another in showing honor (Rom. 12:10), or when he tells us that we should count others as more significant than ourselves (Phil. 2:3), he is narrating the call to generosity. The generous person considers the interests of others (Phil. 2:4) and is called to submit “to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Eph. 5:21). Furthermore, this person receives the call to “be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you” (Eph. 4:32).

When we give of our money, time, and security, the very things that prop up our own power, we reject the quest for control and instead choose the way of love.

Whereas control leads to unity by demolishing diversity, reconciliation leads to unity within diversity—which requires us to lay down our own control.

Unfortunately, we can neglect to consider how modern life and technology might hurt our ability to be listeners to the Word. We fail to consider how ways of living could hurt our ability to attend patiently to God’s calling on our lives. 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.

Power in weakness for love is power that bears fruit for the kingdom. Power in strength for control, used to achieve kingdom ends, will ultimately deceive us into thinking we’re living in the way of Jesus, when in fact we are living in the way from below. This power is the power of straw; it is the power that seems invincible, and then one day just disappears. Power in weakness works the opposite way. Power in weakness appears to be powerless in the face of this world and it may even be denounced as foolish within the church itself.

Those who are unfit to be an elder are “insubordinate, empty talkers and deceivers,” and they teach for “shameful gain” (Titus 1:10–11). These are not mere actions but postures and movements of the heart.

But at the core of Jesus’ action we see how detached he remained from the power systems of the world and how attached he was to the Father and his way of power. Jesus was grounded in an unhurried existence that allowed him to be present; to listen carefully and faithfully; to overflow in mercy, grace, and love; and to know his calling (and refuse to be seduced by callings that were not his, or callings not done according to his way). Jesus’ heart was formed in abiding with his Father, in his times of silence and solitude seeking the Father’s will, in his continued dependence and obedience, and, counterintuitively, in his suffering.

Power in weakness is freedom because it is a call to find our all in God, and in so doing, to discover our true mission in the world in Christ. It is in Christ, and in him alone, that we find life. Therefore it is in Christ, and in him alone, that we come to understand the Christian nature of power. So now, we do not live by sight, but we live by faith, trusting that this path is the weighty way of the kingdom.