I serve in a variety of capacities as I live out my ministry. I am the founding pastor of a small faith community that meets in Denver on a weekday night and enacts justice work in the region at all sorts of times. I work as the Colorado regional organizer for a global NGO committed to the moral voice in issues of climate change and creation stewardship.
I represent my urban community in a statewide coalition of clergy and other faith leaders. I am a chaplain to the politically and civically engaged in a few American cities, including my own. Several atheists claim me as their priest, although I’m actually a Baptist preacher.
In short, I’m all about power.
“Um, what?” you might think at that. Nothing there seems very powerful, except for maybe the global thing. Well sure, I suppose. If your view of power is all about massive numbers, political clout and access, economic control, or ever necessitates a cult of personality or power-concentrated savior, then no. I am not engaged with power at all.
However, I reject this as the only view of power. These are symptoms of fallen powers, of twisted and oppressive systems that have been used to bind and control rather than empower and nurture. These are the heresies against the deep power of Spirit, and are fed by fear and scarcity, panic and hubris.
If your understanding of power can include the ability to act, the knowledge of who you are and what you truly wield, and a functional reliance on community-based actions (people having your back), then you may understand my take. This list represents a redeemed view of power.
This is an understanding of power as grounded in love in action, an embodied solidarity and commitment to a fundamental belief in the sacredness within all, and a continual recollection of a greater spiritual purpose within all systems. This sense of power wells up from increased deepening and accountability. It develops and nurtures trust, as it is based in mutual listening and humility.
20 years ago, I participated in a small group deep dive of Walter Wink’s Powers Trilogy: Naming the Powers, Unmasking the Powers, and Engaging The Powers. Together, we parsed through the 1,000 or some odd pages that make up these three books. It took about a year to do, if I remember right. Or maybe longer.
It was during this time that I began to see the scope of the problems in how we live. I began to suspect that the systems and institutions around me, the situations I had accepted as normative and simply issues to be negotiated and maybe fixed when possible were in fact structural pieces that could be dismantled. While I was still trying to use a system of great traditional power, The Episcopal Church, I began to seek out the ways in which that system itself upheld the fallen powers
I’d been brought up with a deep suspicion of all traditional powers that be, or as my late hippie father would occasionally say, The Man. This new understanding of Power itself was key to integrating my lived and embedded theologies with my desire to live a life of integrity and authenticity. It provided me a platform on which I could seek the good inherent and build upon it. It provided me a worldview that could seek out intersections and shared paths and alliances.
It put me on a spiritual journey that I’d seen in visions and not known how to start, but that forever colored my lenses moving forward. I believe nothing is without virtue or value, for at a very basic level, all can be redeemed. Will be. Is already.
And because I did all of this in community, albeit a small group, I knew from the beginning that I didn’t have to do this alone. I learned that I could talk these things out, and that I did not have to know what I meant or where I was going, because none of us knew anything.
The Powers That Be around us are broken and our own connection to divine power is blocked and yet it need not be so. We know that where are as a ‘society’ isn’t working. The effects of white supremacy, greed and control, the zero-sum games and battles for territory –they destroy us daily. And yet. And yet, we declare that it can be different. We seek a new world, and the Reign of God behind all things.
Rev. Jessica Abell