As you may or may not have noticed, I have been gone for a
number of weeks on a sabbatical focusing on reframing how we go about
exercising the gift of leading in the church.
My working title is: Undoing the
violence of leadership in the church.
I am asking the following question in my exploration: When the way we
lead is shaped by the culture in which we live, and that culture is shaped
largely by violence (which is a growing understanding of our Western culture), does
not then a culture of violence (control, coercion, power, etc.) shape the way
we lead in the church? If we are to lead
in light of the Gospel, in light of God’s reign, which is foundationally
nonviolent, then we need to examine the way we have been leading and are
leading so as to reframe the way we lead.
For many of us raised in evangelical circles, nonviolence has
almost never been a tenet of faith. Yet,
in being an Anabaptist for the past seven years or so, I have developed the
conviction that nonviolence is foundational to understanding God’s reign, to
understanding the Gospel, to understanding Jesus and his ministry, to
understanding my discipleship, and to understanding God and God’s mission, and
God’s call to the church to participate with God in God’s mission in the power
of the Holy Spirit.
Nonviolence is not an option in being missional, a mere nonessential. No, nonviolence is an essential tenet of
being the people of God (which understands God to be nonviolent, even in the
Old Testament because Jesus in his way of nonviolence is an exact image of the invisible
God – cf. Colossians 1: 15, also John 14:9.
This requires us to come to a fresh interpretation of the relationship
between God and violence in the Old Testament – which some contemporary biblical
scholars are indeed showing).
We have been under the Constantinian paradigm for so long,
we do not question violence as something contrary to the purposes of God – it is
time we do so and embrace a nonviolent understanding of God and God’s
ways. Therefore I confess that to
support violence as a means to bring about peace and justice, to align
ourselves with the state’s use of power and violence to resolve conflict, is
not to be about God’s mission in the world.
To be a disciple of Jesus requires embracing a life of nonviolence; to
be missional, to participate with God in God’s mission requires the practice of
nonviolence.
I do not see how we can be followers of Christ and practice
violence or condone the practice of violence and military power – except perhaps
if we are comfortable with the Constantinian compromise in which the church
aligned itself with the powers of the State and sanctified the State’s use of
force for accomplishing its ends.
Engagement in the practice of violence can only lead to us fostering the
non-reign of God (a phrasing J. Denny
Weaver uses to express the kingdom of the world). To foster God’s mission and God’s reign calls
us to embrace the practice of nonviolence.
As we seek to be, in Lesslie Newbigin’s words, a community
of faith which is a sign, foretaste and instrument of God’s present and coming
reign, we need to give serious thought to our stance towards nonviolence and
violence. If the way of Jesus is the way
of nonviolence, we cannot continue the ministry of Jesus, nor participate with
God in God’s mission if we are not about embracing the way of Jesus, which includes
Jesus’ practice of nonviolence.
I admit growing up in an evangelical context, being equipped
for ministry in an evangelical seminary, that I did not give serious thought to
nor was I led to seriously engage the practice of nonviolence, until I was
introduced to Anabaptism. That being the
case, as evangelicals, yet even as Protestants, and Roman Catholics, I believe
we need to examine all our practices as pastors and leaders in order to see in
what ways we may be more influenced by our culture of violence, than influenced
by the nonviolent ways of God’s reign.
Our practice of leadership is one of these areas and I believe it is
time we sought to undo the violence of leadership that continues to guide the
church to live within a Constantinian construct, rather than being a community
of God’s reign – indeed being a sign, foretaste, and instrument of God’s
present and coming reign.
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