Leadership Lessons: Difficult Decisions in Today’s Culture, Part 1: Power/Control or Godliness

I’m sharing these thoughts just before the celebration of James the Just, and this leads me to consider what is, in essence, the “Inside Baseball” story, which is about the tension between James, in essence, putting forth an answer to the riddle of what happened in the Jerusalem Council, and the continuing work of the church in taking the gospel to the nations.  

Power Dynamics

It seems to me the heartbeat is right here, inside both of them, that takes into account both internal Spirit-inspired order and missionary adventure that actually sees men and women come to faith in Jesus Christ. And whenever a decision is made within the councils of the church that favors one out of balance with the other, there is always a certain level of chaotic, unintended consequences that wind up happening. 

But still, sometimes we make decisions: We do the best we can, we pray hard and still, unintended consequences happen. And you just pray that God will cleanse and forgive and keep you on the right track, because you never know who’s going to be offended, or the thing that you didn’t expect to happen actually will. Entropy is always among us. And we’re constantly wrestling with an organization that is broken, and yet it’s the organization God has chosen to use to be a light to the nations.

So here we are, brothers and sisters, we’re who we’ve got. First of all, I continue to wrestle about the power dynamics that are going on inside of our church and how, in my opinion, it’s extraordinarily detrimental to the gospel. I found a quote from a woman named Jackie Hill Perry, who says, “Have you ever been around a group of bored teenagers? They always end up bickering about something silly, like who controls the remote.” She says, “I think American Christians are like that, and it actually speaks to our privilege.”

 And what she means by that is that given that we live in the remaining vestiges of Christendom, we spend a lot of time around in-house arguments and not thinking particularly about their evangelistic implications. That was certainly my experience at the last General Convention and our conversations about Prayer Book revision, that somehow if we just got the words differently, people would flock to us. You may laugh, but there really are bishops who actually really believe that all we have to do is tweak it, and they’re just going to come running. 

It is totally ludicrous, if you’ve spent any time at all with people who are on the outside of the church. And that kind of trivia can give the impression that we are, in fact, very busy for the sake of the kingdom—that’s its deception. But there is actually a world that profoundly needs the miraculous power of God.

E.M Bounds, a Protestant devotional author and perhaps Jackie Hill Perry’s total opposite, wrote this: “The past has not exalted the possibilities, nor the demands of being available for great things for God. The church that is dependent on its past for its miracles of power and grace is indeed a fallen church.”

Godly Decisions

So in the midst of the culture that we find ourselves in where everything has a trigger, where people are incredibly wary about who’s going to offend whom, where the loudest voice claims the marketplace, where morals and language are being amended—not just morals by any stretch of the imagination, how shall we now live? 

In the midst of the craziness of our culture, there is room for men and women who are willing to “live the words they pray” to quote the hymn. In Acts 15, when they’re debating about what to do with Gentile believers, Peter stands up and says, “You chose me. In fact, God made a choice that I should be the one through whom the Gentiles would hear the message of the good news” (see Acts 15:7). In Acts 13, he quoted the verse that says, “I have made you a light to the Gentiles” (see Acts 13:47, Isa. 49:6). And here in Acts 15:8, he adds, “And God, who knows the human heart, testifies to them by giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did us.”  

So in other words, what are we going to do with that? Because after all, we believe that we will be saved through the grace of our Lord Jesus; it’s not about the adherence to the Law. And everybody got quiet because they knew that Peter told the truth. 

And then of all things, James stood up. This is remarkable to me. It causes me to ask questions for which I have no answers, which is “What was going on in God working through James? What was happening in James’ life, that he would be so prepared in that moment to stand up and offer literally the whole basis, even throughout history, of how we deal with questions as we try to work out mission together?” 

It wasn’t just the Jerusalem Council compromise. What happened here was the setting of a precedent that we’re still wrestling with and reflecting on, particularly when we’re in missionary situations for which we have no easy answers.

This is the capacity to think and wrestle together in a way that allows us to come out and say, “It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” (Acts 15:28a) and out of that to be able to make a decision that actually causes the object of those decisions to be glad. Because that’s the end of the chapter. The end of the chapter is when the decision was made: “We would encourage you to do these things and not those, and we’re going to live together.” It says, “They rejoiced” (Acts 15:31b). 

That’s the difference between a godly decision and a power/control decision. Because the power/control decision is committed to strictly maintaining the status quo in a way that actually penalizes the innovators. 

That didn’t happen here. They rejoiced, and they rejoiced because they knew that tremendous generosity for which they did not deserve, had been opened up for them in the willingness to allow them to, in fact, begin to walk away from the regimental call to behave according to the law of Moses.

I don’t know about you, but I just want to sit down and ponder that for a while, because it is, in fact, an extraordinary development. So I want to talk a little bit about the meaning of that decision and what that might mean for us today. We’ll do that in the next post of this series.

Where have you seen the church making what you believe to be power/control decisions? Where have you seen the church making godly decisions? Share this blog and your response on Twitter. Please include my username, @revgregbrewer. 

(This post is an adaption of Bishop Brewer’s sermon on Oct. 22, 2019, at the Clergy Conference, Canterbury Retreat & Conference Center, Oviedo, Florida.)

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

PHOTO BY ERICK PEREZ