Empowering leaders

Christian Century, Nov 15, 2003 by Wayne Miller

MY THANKS for the article by Anthony Robinson ("Power outage," Oct. 18). It took more than ten years of parish ministry for me to begin to identify power as a positive leadership attribute. "Power" is too large and too generic a concept to allow us to distinguish its various faces. Power as "'autonomy" is the God-given ability of all individuals to act, to decide and to take responsibility for their own lives. Although it is certainly a power with boundaries, it is the healthy and necessary antidote for the poisonous victim identity that Robinson describes so well.

"Domination" is the face of power that most of us flied both frightening and repulsive. It is a theft of the autonomy of another in order to gratify the appetites or ego needs of the one who dominates. Domination is always demonic, though there may be certain crisis situations in which one temporarily entrusts the stewardship of some decision-making to a reliable helper. The helper must then remain focused on looking for opportunity to return that power to its rightful "owner" as quickly as possible.

The third face of power is what I think the Gospels refer to as "authority." Authority is the power to take ill-gotten power away from dominators and return it as autonomy to those from whom it has been stolen. Authority is the power invoked for advocacy and justice work. It is most definitely a sacred power, and church leaders still have much to learn about claiming it and using it wisely.

In a time when so many reactionary and fundamentalist groups are dancing with the demon of domination, more progressive or liberal religious communities would be well served by using Robinson's insights as the starting place for a more developed conversation.

Wayne Miller St. Mark's Lutheran Church (ELCA), Aurora, Ill.