Power Struggles

Put them in mind to be subject to principalities and powers, to obey magistrates, to be ready to every good work, (Titus 3:1)

Today I want us to look at conflicts that come from two people or structures that have to interact to be able to achieve something and God’s take on this.

In Kenya we are having conflicts between the two centres of power, the central government and the county governments, mainly because we have not learnt the intricacies of a devolved system of government.

Governors have become comical in the way they run their affairs as they try to outshine the president. Many have become pseudo kings in those small enclaves of theirs, even using titles that can never fit their small frames to make them feel important. Some have consolidated all major contracts and given them to friends and family and some have made corruption a comedy in the way they do it.

But I write this not for political purposes as you know I am a minister of the Gospel of Christ. I just want to give us a background of this topic at hand because it is in the spiritual where such conflicts are most destructive. I will therefore look at the spiritual and marital realm.

Who is a pastor? Who is a ministry leader?

It is sad that many pastors today want to be treated as and even call themselves CEOs of the church. Is the church a corporate entity? And it is no wonder that many of their churches run as secular entities, some even looking for secular certification of quality.

In their pursuit of that secular relevance many have killed the divine distinctions and have become just another secular company, albeit with a spiritual name. Some have retrenched pastors as a cost cutting measure. Others have injured spirits of their members when they procure or change contracts or recruit staff as they behave much worse than secular entities – simply because they are living outside their calling. In fact for most ministry eventually dies out as there is no secular equivalent or certification for the same.

But we are looking at power conflicts. I have mentioned this because a secularly run church MUST have such conflicts. And the primary source of those conflicts is their lack of connectedness to their divine order book and self seeking agenda.

But I do not want us to look at these impostors or thoroughly deceived persons or entities. I want us to look at a genuine church and members who are doing their best to pursue God’s calling for their lives and structures. I am therefore not addressing a church like yours if you have a superstar for a pastor or you choose the rich and influential when you need leaders.

A church is composed of ministers; each and every member of the church of Christ is a minister according to the scriptures.

And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ: (Ephesians 4: 11 – 13)

A pastor is therefore not the sole minister with his clique of aides. His is not the only calling in the congregation. He will therefore be in extreme disobedience should he believe or behave as if his is the highest or only calling in that structure he leads. Trying to put all the callings under his subjection will not only subject these ministers to spiritual oppression but will also leave many souls frustrated as he keeps on clipping whichever spiritual wings that may cause any of them to fly.

‘There are people who are called (or call themselves) pastors who are not pastors’. How many times have you heard a church give such clarification so that their members are not misled into being pastored by these ‘spurious’ pastors? The impression being given is that only the pastors who are in the employ of the church are pastors.

Yet who is a pastor? Who calls a pastor? Who determines the validity of a pastoral calling? Where are pastors needed?

A pastor is Christ’s under shepherd. It goes without say that only Christ has the mandate to call someone into the pastoral ministry. It is also important to note that the pastoral call is not limited to the local church as we know it but the universal church of Christ. There are pastors who are therefore sent into the weirdest of places according to our convention. In fact many that we call pastors do not qualify to be if we followed the Biblical definition.

What do we think of a pastor who has been sent to minster to the gangs or prostitutes? What about the one sent to minister to the mariners or truck drivers? What about the one sent to pastor the broken and fallen pastors? What about the one sent to heal the injuries caused by pastors?

Are these pastors if their calling and ministry is outside our narrow local church definitions?

And that is where power struggles begin if we even for a moment lose our vital connection to the Head through commonsense or denominational structural fidelity. Or we may shift ever so slightly from the Bible and use our traditions to gauge ministry positioning and effect.

Let me give us a Biblical example.

Paul was custom made to take the Gospel to the gentiles. But he was rejected because his conversion went contrary to convention. It took someone with a different calling to receive him. Barnabas was also custom made for that kind of ministry. He not only convinced the church about Paul’s conversion but went all the way to Tarsus to look for him.

In a short time, or long, the same Paul is able to become what God intended him to be. He starts as an assistant to Barnabas but eventually takes over as the leader since that is what Barnabas was called for.

Then another ministry opportunity opens up for him. Mark wants to get into ministry and Barnabas knows that he is ready for the kind of discipleship and mentoring he had offered Paul. But Paul as the new team leader will have none of it. Like the other disciples he will not minister with failures and so rejects the kind of ministry that made him who he was.

They therefore had to part ways as Barnabas had to continue doing what God called him for.

That is the kind of power struggle I am talking about.

Supposing Barnabas was like some of us! He could have put Paul to his place by reminding him the role he played in his call and ministry and the fact that even God’s call for them started with Barnabas’ name. Then a disaster could have been the result requiring the apostles to be called to resolve the dispute.

But Barnabas was secure in his relationship with Christ and calling. He did not look for his certification from works but from keeping his focus on God and His assignment for him. He knew that God needed him to restore and develop Mark. Whether Paul would be a partner was not a requirement. Remember he sold his land and gave the proceeds to the church in Jerusalem and left to take the Gospel far away without seeking to eat any of his offering. He never complained when he suffered deprivation and persecution even after coming from such privilege because God and His call were sufficient.

That is the reason he left Paul and started discipling Mark. And that is the same Mark who wrote the Gospel we now read, the same Mark Paul later requested for ministry.

Only Luke is with me. Take Mark, and bring him with thee: for he is profitable to me for the ministry. (2Timothy 4:11)

He could have aborted that ministry had he insisted on his seniority, a seniority that was recognized by the church from Jerusalem to Antioch, headquarters of Jewish and gentile apostolic outreaches. But he knew who he was and was content in doing what God had called him for, developing ministers.

Is your Christian leadership like his or must people know who you are when things become tough? What about your discipleship? Can you leave success for another tough assignment or must you eat the fruit of your ministry sweat first?

Conflict occurs when God’s call is not the defining aspect of ministry, and especially when one person thinks his call or ministry determines or defines another minister’s calling or ministry. This will cause them to apply the pressure of his authority (according to his position in the structure) to make sure that everybody ministers according to the narrow definition his calling has. Of course he will emasculate, even kill some ministry or minister simply because they do not submit to his infantile obsession with his narrow understanding because their call is outside or beyond anything he can conceive or understand. And I am speaking this from a few bitter experiences in ministry. There was this one time I was confronted for having backslidden because God gave me an assignment in a church that was off limits. Another time a ministry I had been called to initiate was killed and my support removed without notice because it was not running at the whims of the big men of the structure. It was completely inhuman as I was literally thrown to the streets yet I had a family to support. All because I had decided to follow God’s clear orders, orders that did not promote the visibility of the big men of the ministry.

That is something being replicated all over even as ministers are falling over each other to be recognized for their ministry and calling prowess so that they forget the One who has called them (if indeed they are called). As we seek greater visibility for our ministry to the world, especially through the media, we have many times sought to obliterate those who appear not too keen on adding the shine to our glory even as we pamper those who seem to recognize how big we are though they be walking in open sin. We offer sinners ministry opportunities and discard the ones whose ministry does not affirm or add any shine to ours.

On the marital front the opposite seems to be happening.  We seem to be trashing our divine order book for commonsense. And I will not dwell on this for long as I have addressed this in many other posts. I will just give us a few passages and verses to consider.

Numbers 30 addresses vows in the family context.

1 Kings 21 talks about accountability in a marriage for decisions and actions. Basically it answers the question where does the buck stop? Who is answerable to God for what decision or action?

Ephesians 5: 22 – 33 again talks about order in a marriage as does 1 Peter 3 and many other passages.

Study the totality of the scriptures before you accuse me of focusing on passages that seem to be against your feminist leanings because it is important to know that feminism is a worldly movement, meaning that it is orchestrated from the enemy of our souls to kill the divine order. And killing that order brings about a disorder that is destructive to everything spiritual like cancer to a living cell.

The greatest problem in marriages is that many men do not realize their spiritual responsibility as far as marriage and family is concerned, meaning that they abscond that responsibility or delegate it to their wives, thus bringing out spiritual and moral chaos since the head is sick. Many opt for peace at all costs and lose their spiritual heritage in the process.

But like I have mentioned earlier it I something I have written about several times and so will not repeat the same thing on this post.