Power and Leadership

In light of the end of the semester, creating another blog post seems like a good way to procrastinate. Actually, I've been meaning to post the following paragraph for a while but forgot to do so. However, seemingly unrelated events, conversations, articles, books, classes, and websites have prompted me to share my thoughts. Like I've said before, I have no concrete idea how to live life, but I think that we devalue ourselves sometimes. We don't realize how significant we are to others.

Any form of power can be against the gospel. Christians cannot change anything through the current power structure. As Christians, we wield power, so we must challenge the current structure that equates social status and opinion over self-sacrificial love. The power that Christians wield is in the form of leadership. This leadership is not the typical definition of leadership. This leadership requires no campaigning, no nominations, no searching, and no formal recognition. As soon as we interact with another person, we lead others and permit others to lead us. We influence our peers, family members, group mates, friends, coworkers, employers, etc. simply by interacting with them. They can act based on our examples, comments, and actions. This leadership has transformative power in the lives of others, but we cannot see them as objects over which we exert our influence and ideas. By reducing our friends to objects, they are no longer friends, and power has corrupted us. Thus why any form of power can be used against the gospel. However, this is a conversation; dialogue, discourse, and influence flow both ways. Others influence us with their leadership. For Christians, these relationships make sense, both within the church and outside the church. We are a community of believers, so we should act like this is so within the church.