ministry bullies and their enablers

It’s a classic bully move to take someone’s hand and use it to slap their own face, saying “Why do you keep hitting yourself? Why do you keep hitting yourself?” Bullies find great amusement and prowess in this.

It’s a classic enabler move to laugh and do nothing else.

It doesn’t take a playground filled with bullies to create chaos and hostility. It takes only one. But it also takes enablers to look the other way, to laugh along out of fear or their own sense of superiority.

In their book, The Politics of Ministry, Burns, Chapman, and Guthrie have this to say:

All of us in ministry need to grow in biblical wisdom and realistic awareness of human uses of power. Unjust and unloving power dynamics exist in every social system due to human sinfulness. If we refuse to face the facts of unequal power use in ourselves and our organizations, we will not be able to function responsibly or redemptively.

The Politics of Ministry, p 49

The way a person balks at the very idea, the very use of the word “power” is indicative of how much they have considered the way they use power. To scoff at the idea that they have power in their position of authority is willful ignorance and that will never develop on its own into a healthy use of power.

For many church/ ministry leaders this corrupted relationship with power blows up in time. It’s nearly inevitable. Ministry life is hard. It’s challenging when your eyes are wide open and you are well prepared for conflict and tenuous situations. So being under-prepared or intentionally discarding a helpful understanding of power dynamics can hardly lead to organizational health. This is the sin that crouches at every leader’s door.

Am I a bully?

If only we knew this about ourselves. If only we were willing to admit our tendencies to dominate and manipulate people and situations. If only every leader humbly submitted an answer to this question to those who are in the best position to hold them accountable and remove them if need be.

Do we have these gauges as a routine part of our ministry evaluation process? Do we leave room for asking these kinds of hard questions of all our leaders and -maybe more to the point- asking the people who report to them? A check yourself before you wreck… everyone around you.

It’s the courageous group of kids who take the bully’s hand off the hand of the victims and proclaim loudly, “This is not going to happen here!” The Church must have this courage. The Church led by the Spirit will.

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