From Leading to Being Led: Avoiding the temptation of Power

More Gathered wisdom from Henri J. M. Nouwen

You all know what the third temptation of Jesus was. It was the temptation of power. When I ask myself the main reason for so many people having left the Church during the past decades in France, Germany, Holland and also in Canada and America the word “power” easily comes to mind. One of the greatest ironies of the history of Christianity is that its leaders constantly gave in to the temptation of power – political power, military power, economic power, or moral and spiritual power – even though they continued to speak in the name of Jesus, who did not cling to his divine power but emptied himself and became as we are.

The temptation to consider power an apt instrument for the proclamation of the Gospel is the greatest of all. Every time we see a major crisis in the history of the Church, such as the Great Schism of the eleventh century, the Reformation of the sixteenth century, or the immense secularization of the twentieth century, we always see that a major cause of rupture is the power exercised by those who claim to be followers of the poor and powerless Jesus.

Power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of love. It seems easier to be God than to love God, easier to control people than to love people, easier to own life than to love life. We have been tempted to replace love with power. Tempted to choose power over love, control over the cross, being a leader over being led.

The temptation of power is greatest when intimacy is a threat. Much Christian leadership is exercised by people who do not know how to develop healthy, intimate relationships and have opted for power and control instead. Many Christian empire-builders have been people unable to give and received love.

Jesus has a different vision of maturity: It is the ability and willingness to be led where you would rather not go. The servant-leader is the leader who is being led to unknown, undesirable, and painful places. The way of the Christian leader is not the way of upward mobility in which our world has invested so much, but the way of downward mobility ending on the cross. The downward-moving way of Jesus is the way to the joy and the peace of God, a joy and peace that is not of this world.

It is not a leadership of power and control, but a leadership of powerlessness and humility in which the suffering servant of God, Jesus Christ, is made manifest. I am speaking of a leadership in which power is constantly abandoned in favor of love. It is a true spiritual leadership. They refer to people who are so deeply in love with Jesus that they are ready to follow him wherever he guides them, always trusting that, with him, they will find life and find it abundantly.

Excerpts from:
In the Name of Jesus
Reflections on Christian Leadership
By
Henri J. M. Nouwen
Crossroad Publishing Co.
1997