POWER and privilege are the two strongest forces in any ministry. As Christian ministers, we need to be very aware of the power we have in the lives of the people whom we are called to serve. We possess this power through our orders and office. It is the power to transform lives and to point the way towards Christ, but it is also the power we have to harm and point people away from Christ.
Christians sometimes struggle with the concept of power. First, it’s not easy to define exactly what it is. Sarah Coakley, in her Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, philosophy and gender (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), notes how difficult it is to define the word “power”. Is power a force, a commodity, a hereditary deposit, a form of exchange, an authority, a means of “discipline”, sheer domination, or a more nebulous “circuit”? Must it necessarily involve intentionality, imply resistance, suppress freedom, or assume a “hierarchy”?
And where does it reside: in individuals, in institutions, in armies or police forces, in money, in political parties, or, more generally and democratically, in every sort of societal exchange? In short, how we define “power” will either be a charter of how we intend that it be used, or else a (more or less) despairing criticism of what we see as its abuse.
Coakley argues that “the apparently forced choice between dependent ‘vulnerability’ and liberative ‘power’ is a false one”: that is, theologically speaking, vulnerability and power are not necessarily at odds.
We can see this in Christ himself. When God enters the world to save us, God does so as an entirely vulnerable baby. In the newborn Christ, the all-powerful is all-vulnerable.
In his second letter to the Corinthians, St Paul also describes this relationship between vulnerability and power. He recounts how the Lord revealed to him that God’s grace is sufficient for him; for God’s power is made perfect in weakness. St Paul writes that he will therefore boast of his weaknesses, so that the power of Christ might rest on him (2 Corinthians 12.9).
What appears vulnerable in the world’s eyes can be an example of the power of God at work. We see this not only at the beginning of Christ’s earthly life, but at its ending, too. Just as Christ’s entry into the world as a newborn infant was an act of power as well as an act of utter dependency and vulnerability, so, too, we see Christ’s body on the cross as an act of submission and vulnerability — which, at the same time, is the means by which God continues to exercise God’s power to save us.
It is when Christ is at his most vulnerable as a bruised and broken body, powerless in the hands of his executors, that he is also exercising his power to save us by dying for us. It is through the vulnerability of this very life and death that God exercises the power to save.
This is important for us to notice. There is a tendency to suggest that Christians should avoid and be averse to power. Power is God’s, so we feel we should stay out of it: “For thine is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory”. We are encouraged to focus on metaphors that suggest that those who are marginalised and lack power in society should stay in their place. We hear sermons that encourage us to be servant leaders, or exercise “kenotic”, self-emptying leadership.
We often miss the importance of Coakley’s argument that vulnerability is not the opposite of power. As such, as Christians, we are often averse to thinking about how power operates in our lives. This aversion, though, can have serious consequences for our ability to hold earthly and ecclesial power to account. We can find ourselves thinking that we should adopt a false posture of weakness and vulnerability that can leave the patterns of power, and the abuses of power in the world and in the Church, unchecked.
Far from being averse to power, we should, as Christians and ministers, pay attention to the way it operates in the Church, in the world, in our own lives. In Christ, we see the example of one who does not avoid power or is averse to acting, but one through whom the pledge of God’s promise to bring down the proud and exalt the lowly is enacted. If we want to see Christ at work in the world, we cannot but pay attention to the dynamics of power.
Loosely defined, power is the capacity we have to act. As Christians, we believe that God is almighty, all-powerful — ”able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3.20). But God is all powerful, we are not. Jesus tells us, “For mortals, it is impossible, but not for God; for God, all things are possible” (Mark 10.27).
While we are not all-powerful, each of us does possess a degree of power. All of us have some capacity to act. We can do this or that, but we can’t do everything. We’re limited — by our bodies, by our abilities, by our skills and experiences, by what others will allow us to do.
Yet it is often the most powerful people, including clergy, who feel that they have the least power. I’ve lost count of the number of meetings I’ve been in with bishops who say that they have no power. Often, what they mean is that they don’t have the power to do what they would like, or they would like even more power than they already have.
While it’s true that all of us have the capacity to act, it is also true that others’ exercising their power can diminish our capacity to act. It is even more true (and possibly more likely) that the actions of those called to be priests and presbyters, or those holding positions of authority in our churches and communities, may diminish others’ capacity to act, unless we are very careful.
If priesthood is lifelong, and discernment lifelong, it is as much a lifelong task to pay attention to how we exercise the power we have in the lives of others. In other words, we need to be intentional about how we are exercising our capacity to act.
Attention and intention are the two tools we have to ensure that our power and privilege are being held in such a way that we are pointing those we serve towards Christ. We have to prevent our power and privilege from being stumbling blocks we put in others’ way, however unintentionally or well meaning our exercise of power might be.
IF POWER is the capacity to act, privilege is the ease with which others will accept our capacity to act, and affects the number of obstacles that are put in the way of exercising that power.
For some of us, our capacity to act will be taken for granted. When we speak, people will listen. When we present an idea, or a course of action, people will take it at face value. They may argue with us about our conclusions, but not our basic right to suggest a particular course of action. When we arrive at a church or a conference centre, people will usually assume we’re the speaker rather than an attendant or spouse of the person invited to speak.
In fact, for those of us who enjoy some element of privilege, this seems so normal to us that it’s hard for us to see it, or begin to believe that this isn’t the case for everyone. Whether we are aware of it or not, we’re enjoying the privilege of being perceived as the kind of person who can exercise their power, who can enjoy the capacity to act.
For others of us, we may feel we lack some of this privilege. We might be perceived as different because of our race, gender, class, age, sexuality, physical ability, or education. Any or all of these can interact to mean that, even when our capacity to act isn’t being diminished by another’s power over us, another’s capacity to act, our own capacity to act is being frustrated simply by virtue of being perceived as the people we are. It’s this that Azariah France-Williams describes in Ghost Ship: Institutional racism and the Church of England (London: SCM Press, 2020) as “mini-assaults on one’s personhood”, which is “death by a thousand paper cuts” for those who are racialised as Black. We sometimes find we are trying to act with one hand tied behind our backs.
What does this have to do with the particular calling to priesthood? First, we need to be aware of the ways in which we enjoy the privilege to act. As clergy in the Church of England, to some extent all of us will enjoy the privilege and power of office, even if the power to exercise that office is easier for those of us with other forms of privilege.
For those who lack such privilege we need to be aware of this, too, exercising self-care and building those relationships of solidarity that can prevent “death by a thousand paper cuts”.
To sum up, as ministers, we need to be attentive to the ways in which we wield the power to act, and to act intentionally to prevent the diminishment of others’ power to act.
It’s here that Jesus’s “unlikely” or “unexpected” priesthood . . . helps us in our exercise of priestly ministry. We have to recall the “impossibility” of his priestly ministry according to the conventions of his day. This alerts us to seeking out the work of the Spirit in the lives of those we are called to serve who might be perceived to be “unlikely” or “unexpected” — or even “impossible”. In other words, the people who don’t look or sound like us, or enjoy the particular characteristics our church or society or community esteems.
Far from being a distraction in ministry, attention to the dynamics of power and privilege are a means of paying renewed attention to being intentional about seeing Christ at work in the lives of those who, like him, are “unexpected’, or “unlikely” or “impossible’.
Attention to, and being intentional about, power and privilege are key to our exercise of priestly ministry. We have to pay attention to power and privilege just as Christ notices, and pays attention to, those who others do not see or privilege: the woman at the well, the man born blind, the haemorrhaging woman who touches his cloak, the attendants at the wedding at Cana.
Our capacity to act, and an awareness of how this capacity can either diminish others or enable them, will determine our faithfulness to our particular calling to serve as priests in God’s Church, according to Common Worship: Ordination services: “. . . to be messengers, watchers and stewards of the Lord; to teach and to admonish, to feed and provide for God’s family, to search for God’s children in the wilderness of this world’s temptations, and to guide them through its confusions, that they may be saved through Christ for ever . . . to call their hearers to repentance and to declare in Christ’s name the absolution and forgiveness of their sins . . . to tell the story of God’s love, to baptize new disciples in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, to walk with them in the way of Christ, nurturing them in the faith, to unfold the Scriptures, to preach the word in season and out of season, and to declare the mighty acts of God . . . to preside at the Lord’s table and lead his people in worship to bless the people in God’s name, to resist evil, support the weak, defend the poor, and intercede for all in need, to minister to the sick and prepare the dying for their death. Guided by the Spirit, to discern and foster the gifts of all God’s people, that the whole Church may be built up in unity and faith.”
THIS IS our priestly manifesto. This is what we are called to do, how we as priests are called to exercise our power to act, and in doing so enable others to act, and to be aware of how the capacity of others and the perceptions of privilege can diminish their capacity to share in and receive this ministry.
We should never forget what an awesome privilege the ministry to which we are being ordained is; to quote again from the ordinal: “the greatness of the trust that is now to be committed to your charge’.
There is an irony here though, a paradox. If we exercise our ministry in such a way that we simply utilise our capacity to act — in other words, we simply rest on our privilege — we end up diminishing our own ministry. Our power to act diminishes our capacity to minister according to the particular calling we have been given. We are called to share in Christ’s liberating priesthood, a priesthood that enables the action of others, that enlarges their capacity to act, that liberates them from the politics of priesthood. The more our own power and privilege play an unchecked part in the exercise of our ministry, the less we pay attention to (and are intentional about) the power we have, then the less we are sharing our own particular call to share in Christ’s ministry.
Christ’s ministry liberates those whose capacity to act is diminished, and Christ invites us to do the same. “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, (and) to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour” (Luke 4.18–19).
The Year of Jubilee, the restoration of relationships and power, draws our attention to the imbalances of debtor to indebted.
We see the same in the Magnificat: God’s entry into the world overcomes power imbalances and liberates the oppressed, restores their capacity to act: “The proud scattered, the mighty cast down, the humble lifted up, the hungry filled, the rich sent away empty.” The capacity of those who are used to exercising power is held to account, and, for those who are powerless, their capacity to act is restored. It is this restoration of relationships, this enabling of the capacity to act, that we are called to as ministers of the gospel. And having dignity and empathy are the two signs that we are on the right path.
A ministry that is intentional about power and privilege will be a ministry in which the inalienable dignity of every person created in the image and likeness of God is recognised and affirmed — a ministry in which the humanity of each and every person is privileged as if theirs is the very humanity God took to God’s very self in Christ.
This is one of the biggest challenges of ministry: to act so that the dignity of each and every person among whom we minister, and whom we serve, is resolutely respected, is front and centre in our service of them. It’s all too easy to forget the dignity of the person who can become instrumentalised in serving our ministry, meeting our need, enabling our capacity to act, funding our project, filling our gap on the rota, or becoming our churchwarden, simply to make us look impressive.
A ministry that truly recognises the dignity of those we serve, and enables their capacity to act, is a ministry that resists this instrumentalisation; instead, it is a ministry that is alongside, seeking to accompany that person in what God is genuinely calling them to do, exercising their capacity to act, recognising the dignity and particular call that God has placed on their life, rather than the pressing ministerial need, or gap, or task, or vision, or mission plan that we have devised for them and ourselves.
To do this, especially for those of us who, as individuals and as priests, enjoy any amount of privilege, we need to cultivate a radical empathy.
I remember a community organiser once reflecting on his awe at parish ministry, his realisation that parish ministry was, at root, the commitment to radical empathy to each and every one with whom the minister comes into contact.
We need to feel as those we serve feel, we need to understand their hopes and fears and joys and longings, and to make them our own. To quote from a famous document of the Roman Catholic Church, “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ,” according to the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World: Gaudium et Spes, issued by Pope Paul VI (7 December 1975).
To be empathetic is to feel these for ourselves, a theme St Paul returns to in various places. In 1 Corinthians 12.26, he says: “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together with it”; likewise, in Romans 12.15–16: “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are.”
If we do this, if we exercise our capacity to act in this way, if we share with Christ in overcoming the barriers of power and its misuse, of privilege and its effects, if we utilise our power and capacity to act to enable the capacity to act of those less privileged than ourselves, we are sharing in Christ’s work of restoration of relationship and reconciliation; this is a work that, as priests, we are privileged to share, a work that relies on the power of God to work in us, and through us, and despite us, in the lives of all those God has called into being.
You cannot bear the weight of this calling in your own strength, but only by the grace and power of God.
This is an extract from Waiting on the Lord: Reflections for a priestly life by the Revd Dr Simon Cuff, published by Canterbury Press at £12.99 (CT Bookshop £11.69); 9781786226556.
