The Temptation to be Powerful

The third temptation of Jesus in the desert was the temptation to be powerful. Jesus, fully human and fully God, was weary in his human flesh after forty days of fasting. The devil came to him and tempted him to be relevant, popular, and finally, powerful.

Satan promised him in Matthew 4, “I will give you all the kingdoms of this world in their splendor.” It was the temptation to have all the kingdoms of this world, the temptation to possess all the power anyone could ever want.

This temptation, more than any other, has been the ruin of countless ministers of the gospel and a seemingly endless sea of churches. The rupture we see in churches and denominations is almost always due to “the power exercised by those who claim to be followers of the powerful and powerless Jesus.”

Henri Nouwen states this truth pointedly in his powerful book In the Name of Jesus.

“What makes the temptation of power so seemingly irresistible? Maybe it is that 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.”

This is it. Nearly every fissure I have experienced in churches or homes has been the result of a leader who would rather be in control than love those they lead. Leaders feel that they must lead, so they say, “Follow me.” They forget that Paul was a leader who was led. Paul says, “Follow me as I follow Christ.” It was not his grand vision or strong leadership ability that drew people to him. It was his ability to follow that inspired others to do the same.

The modern church has borrowed far too much from the leadership gurus of the marketplace, and we think that to be an undershepherd of the Great Shepherd, you have to be a successful CEO. There was even a book written a couple of decades ago titled Jesus CEO. To be fair to the author, I did not read the book because I could not get past the cover. Jesus was no CEO. He was a shepherd who laid down his life for his sheep. CEOs create value for themselves and for their investors, often at the expense of the people they lead.

“The long, painful history of the church is the history of people ever and again tempted to choose power over love, control over the cross, being a leader over being led. Those who resisted this temptation to the end and thereby give us hope are the true saints.”

Pastors are often told that leadership is lonely, that you cannot have real friendship with those you are called to lead. Nouwen saw this years ago, and it is still a problem.

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“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 receive love.”

That gets to the heart of it. When leaders cannot build healthy relationships, they often reach for power and control instead. Jesus calls us to be poor in spirit, people who know their need of him and therefore do not need to dominate others. Nearly every scandal in the church I have witnessed has involved power, control, and wealth being used to protect a leader’s platform, legacy, or influence.

“The Christian leader of the future needs to be radically poor, journeying with nothing except a staff—no bread, no haversack, no money, no spare tunic” (Mark 6:8). “What is good about being poor? Nothing, except that it offers us the possibility of giving leadership by allowing ourselves to be led. We will become dependent on the positive or negative responses of those to whom we go and thus be truly led where the Spirit of Jesus wants to lead us. Wealth and riches prevent us from truly discerning the way of Jesus.”

The wealth so common in the Western church has often kept her from hearing the voice of her Beloved. Churches split over money. Pastors divide people through control. Boards take sides.

So what keeps us from this seemingly inevitable drift toward power? Discernment. We need leaders who can discern between what is right and what is almost right. We need leaders who are formed by the historic faith handed down to them, not by metrics of success invented by the restless human heart or by the seeker-sensitive playbook of Bill Hybels.

“The Christian leaders of the future have to be theologians, persons who know the heart of God and are trained— through prayer, study, and careful analysis —to manifest the divine even of God’s saving work in the midst of the many seemingly random events of their time…A Christian leader is called to help people to hear that voice and so be comforted and consoled.”

Theology is not ammo for argumentation. It is fuel for accurate, Scripture-saturated, historically informed theological reflection.

Henri Nouwen argues that the future of Christianity depends not on leaders driven by power, control, and appetite, but on a renewal of theological reflection. He does not mean a kind of leadership elevated by the weight of its arguments or the height of its theological acumen.

We need our seminaries to be centers of godliness that form theological discernment in future leaders. That discernment comes from a right understanding of Scripture, but it cannot stop at the accumulation of knowledge. True spiritual knowledge allows the truth of God’s Word to shape our loves and our desires.

Our seminaries must become centers of revival. Not revival in the sense of experience without biblical discernment, but revival that recenters and refocuses present and future leaders on modeling discernment, love, and being led more than leading effectively.

We need more pastors who are efficient with problems but patient with people. The only way that happens is through theological reflection that produces spiritual discernment in the actions you take, the people you invest in, and the disciples you make. We need more theology, not less, because the days we are living in are evil.

God help us resist the temptations of power and grow in our ability to discern the days and the times in which we lead and are led.