I have heard a lot of sermons, and read a lot of books, articles, and blog posts, on imitating certain attributes of God and the incarnate Christ (e.g., compassion, love, goodness, mercy, humility). And I have heard a lot and read a lot about avoiding certain vices that are contrary to the kingdom (e.g., selfishness, envy, pride, lust). But I can\u2019t recall offhand hearing much of anything about power\u201d\u201deither as a gift to be redeemed or an idol to be rejected. You\u2019ve invested a significant amount of time now thinking about the redemption of power to promote flourishing for the common good. Why do you think the Church has neglected this topic in particular?<\/b><\/p>\n
That is what prompted me to write this book: a dawning awareness that I was almost never hearing Christians\u201d\u201despecially in the dominant culture\u201d\u201ddirectly address power as either a gift or an idol. Now, that is not at all the case in many minority-culture communities. I\u2019ve spent perhaps 50 Sunday mornings of my life, cumulatively, in African-American church settings, and I\u2019d bet that at least a third of sermons I\u2019ve heard in those settings have directly addressed power and powerlessness in the context of American society, and how Christians should respond to those realities.<\/p>\n
But of the couple thousand Sundays I\u2019ve spent in majority-culture church settings, I could count on one hand the times the teaching directly addressed those topics. But the privilege of being in a majority is you rarely have to examine your own power closely. You often are not even aware that you have it. Oddly, power is frequently most invisible to the powerful\u201d\u201despecially the form of power that I call privilege. So perhaps it is not surprising that majority-culture Christians rarely address it.<\/p>\n
Power is a truly tricky topic, and that\u2019s another reason you don\u2019t hear a lot about it directly….<\/p>\n