There is a moment most of us have witnessed at some point in a church, a ministry gathering, or a leadership meeting. Someone raises a genuine concern, carefully worded and offered in good faith. The response does not engage the concern. Instead, it redirects. “I really sense you need to examine your heart on this.” Or perhaps, “We need to be careful not to resist what God is doing among us.” Or the one that can feel impossible to refute: “The Lord has already spoken to me about this.”
The concern evaporates. The person who raised it is left wondering whether the problem was their attitude, their timing, or their faith. And the issue that prompted the question remains untouched.
I know this territory from the inside.
Early in my ministry, I sat in a boardroom and watched a leader belittle a board member. It was not the first time nor the only person. There had been a long pattern of intimidation, mockery, and dismissal toward people who didn’t align quickly enough or quietly enough. My gut told me something was wrong.
But I had also watched what happened to the people who spoke up. They were quietly moved to the outside of significant leadership circles. Meetings they used to attend. Conversations they used to be part of. Gone. And I wanted badly to stay on the inside.
So I said nothing.
Looking back, the diagnosis is not complicated. I valued safety more than I valued doing what was right. The power structure in that room had done exactly what unhealthy power does: it made the cost of truth-telling feel too high to pay. Speaking up felt ungodly.
That is how power gets abused in the church. Not always loudly. Often in the quiet calculation each person makes before deciding whether to speak.
The Disciples Clambered For Power
Jesus had just told his disciples, for the third time, that he was going to suffer and die. And while he was still speaking about the cross, James and John approached him with a request. They wanted the best seats in the coming kingdom, one on his right, one on his left.
Mark tells us the other ten heard about it and were indignant (Mark 10:41). Everyone wants power. Only some speak up. What follows is not a rebuke so much as a teaching. Jesus gathers them and says something that should still stop us in our tracks: “You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you” (Mark 10:42-43, ESV).
Not so among you. Not so among leaders. Not so among spouses. Not so among parents. Not so among churches. Not so among small groups.
Not so among you.
That phrase carries real weight. Jesus is not abolishing power or declaring hierarchy corrupt. He is holding up a mirror. The familiar patterns of the world, where those with power secure their position, protect their influence, and create distance from accountability, have no place among his people. Power in his community is measured not by how much a person can accumulate, but by how much they lay down.
Power Is Not The Problem
It would be too simple to conclude that power itself is dangerous. Churches that pretend power is not present do not become safer. They become places where power operates without being named, without being examined, and without being submitted.
Every community of faith carries dynamics of power. Teachers carry it. Authors carry it. Prophetic voices carry it. Those closest to a founding leader carry it. Those who control access to leadership carry it. Pretending power is not present does not make a community safer. It only makes power harder to name.
There can still be danger even when power is recognized. Authority structures and titles can be in place and we can still find ourselves wrestling with unhealthy uses of power in spiritual clothing. Those with power must examine their motives.
I led a large, complex, international congregation for many years. But influence is not automatically wisdom, and authority is not automatically discernment.
I remember a meeting with two church members who had been in serious conflict for a long time. The conversation became heated quickly. As the temperature in the room rose, something in me grew deeply uncomfortable. Not because I was concerned for them. Because of my own unresolved issues with conflict.
So I used my position to end the discomfort. I told them, as their pastor, to stop talking. I instructed them to forgive as they had been forgiven and to apologize to one another. Biblically framed. Pastorally packaged. And while true on the surface, mostly about me.
I was not leading them toward health. I was short-circuiting a process I did not have the patience or self-awareness to sit inside.
Power in the church must serve God and his purposes. It must not place a band-aid over the bullet holes of our own insecurities.
The KnowledgeWorkx Three Colors of Worldview framework offers a helpful lens here. The Power/Fear dimension helps us notice the ways communities are shaped by questions of control, influence, hierarchy, loyalty, safety, and protection. Power used well protects the vulnerable, creates genuine safety, and empowers people to grow into maturity. But power is only truly life-giving when it is also just and dignity-giving. Power that appears protective but quietly humiliates is not life-giving. Power that claims to serve the ministry while failing to do right by the people involved is not life-giving, regardless of how it is framed.
If we do not disciple power and fear, we will merely spiritualize them.
What Happens When Fear Goes Underground?
Many communities of faith are uncomfortable discussing fear. The go-to verse is 1 John 4:18: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” (ESV). It becomes a corporate principle: fear is immature, fear is the opposite of faith.
But the text says perfect love casts out fear. And love is not yet perfected in us. This side of heaven, the community of faith still needs reverence, sober warning, and the kind of holy discomfort that turns people back toward God. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 9:10). That is not incidental. It is foundational. (If you want to learn more about the fear of the Lord, read this article here)
When we treat all fear as negative, we do not eliminate it. We drive it underground. And underground fear is far more dangerous than named fear, because it tends to attach itself to leaders rather than to God. People begin to fear their leader more than their God when fear is spiritualized.
I am not writing about this from a distance.
I have been on the receiving end of spiritualized fear. The wounds went deep enough that I was not even fully aware of how afraid I truly was. That is part of what makes it so disorienting. It wraps itself around the things you care about most. What follower of Jesus does not want to please God, follow his Word, and remain sensitive to his voice? That longing is genuine and good. And it is precisely that longing that spiritualized fear exploits.
It almost feels like a sin to question the person doing the spiritualizing.
I had managed the weight of it the way many of us do. I reduced it. Told myself a phrase I repeated often enough that it started to feel true: “It’s not that big of a deal.” A brother in Christ heard me say it one day and looked at me with the kind of directness that only genuine friendship allows. “I don’t think you really believe that. I’m not even sure you know how big of a deal this actually is.”
He was right. I wasn’t.
Spiritualized fear quietly moves us from a healthy reverence of God’s might to a managed terror of human power. And it does it in the language of faith.
The Mirror Jesus Holds Up
It is worth returning to what Jesus actually offers in Mark 10. He does not call his disciples to powerlessness. He calls them to a different kind of power. “Whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all” (Mark 10:43-44, ESV). Then he points to himself: “For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45, ESV).
Jesus does not abolish power. He redeems it for the benefit of others.
His power heals. It restores. It confronts. It dignifies. It protects the forgotten. It lays itself down rather than defending its own position.
“Not so among you” is a mirror for every Christian leader, ministry, church, and community.
An Invitation Worth Sitting With
As we follow Jesus, we lay our false and feeble crowns of misplaced power at his feet and confess our misuse of power as we examine ourselves moving forward.
Does the power operating among us give life, do what is right, and protect dignity? Are the people in our care more afraid of disappointing leaders than of grieving God? Can truth travel upward without being punished?
These are not comfortable questions. I know because I have had to ask them of myself.
But they may be exactly the kind the Spirit is inviting all of us to sit with.
Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Published May 27, 2026
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