Questions of Authority

Sorry for not posting in a little while…I sort of missed my weekly slot last weekend because I filled in as worship leader at the church community where I used to lead, so the current worship leader could go off to the Telluride Bluegrass Festival and see Mumford and Sons play while it was snowing in June in the mountains and see the clouds part to reveal the snow-covered mountains just as they finished playing.

Lucky stiff. Anyhow.

In (slowly) working through The Artist’s Way (which I mentioned earlier), I’ve been doing some soul searching lately. I won’t go into a lot of details here about the artistic stuff I’m working through, but one thing that surfaced kind of surprised me.

I was surprised to discover how resistant I actually am to authority.

“DUH!” I can hear some of my regular readers saying. “Read your own blog, fella. Doesn’t that give you some sort of clue??” 🙂

Well, maybe it’s obvious to you…it wasn’t that obvious to me, perhaps partly because I used to BE an authority figure in the church–and partly because in my heart, I really don’t believe that I’m rebellious.

Not rebellious. Just hurt, I guess.

A lot of artists who have been shut down find that they have to deal with a lot of negative messages about the legitimacy of their talent.  I don’t seem to have that in my history; no one that I can remember has accused me of not being talented. What I DO have, though, is a looong history of repeated attempts by multiple authority figures (particularly in the church) to exploit, control and manipulate my talents to their own advantage–and consequently penalize me when I failed to meet their expectations in some way. That’s where the sore spot seems to be with me.

Just to give you an idea of what this has looked like:

• In college, I had one ministry leader invite me to spend the summer living with him so I could travel with him as his keyboardist; he then literally left me with no place to live when a church job offer came up in another state. (It sent a message that I was valuable only so long as I was convenient.)
• Another ministry leader began by giving me great liberty as a worship leader, then began capping my creativity out of jealousy when my efforts started getting too much attention. When I eventually left, he went to great lengths to ostracize me within his circle of ministry friends (and even within the church itself), to make sure I didn’t do any ministry near his buddies or maintain meaningful relationships with anyone under his care.
• Numerous times I’ve had pastors become impressed over my musical abilities, even to the point of wanting me to be their worship leader–only to lose interest when I wouldn’t bring my own ministry under their “umbrella.”

The bottom line message that I’ve derived from these and other instances is that my gifts are considered a valuable asset to ministry leaders when they can be controlled (by someone other than me, that is), but considered a threat otherwise. I think my response to this repeated abuse has been to shut down creatively–to take my gifts completely off the market, so to speak, so no one can use them unfairly. And my challenge now, as I regroup and recover, is to find a way to put my gifts back out there while reconciling with the possibility that someone might yet try to exploit them.  (After all, the world is not a sterile environment–there’s always going to be someone like that out there, both in and out of the church.)

I look back now, and I see that perhaps one reason why I started my own ministry work in the first place is that I did not want to be under the abusive control of other leaders anymore, and I wanted to see if I could model something different, something more healthy.  (Interesting that my quest for something “more healthy” eventually led to the dismantling of the very work I was leading.)

I don’t want to be jaded about this–I really don’t. I still believe in some sense of authority, at least theoretically.  It’s just that even now, I am hard pressed to find anyone in institutional church leadership who does not have some ulterior motive in how they lead.  Sometimes those ulterior motives are relatively harmless–but in many cases, those wrong motives have done me great harm personally, even as I now know that my ulterior motives in ministry (and I did have a few) also did harm to others.

It’s not that I want to be rebellious.  There just HAS to be a better way for authority to be expressed.  I just can’t believe that this is what a good, just and loving God had in mind.

I find it interesting (coincidental?) that just last weekend while I was guest-leading the worship at my friends’ congregation (you know, while the other worship guy was off doing the Mumford-and-Sons-in-the-mountains thing), the pastor taught on this very topic, and talked about the difference between positional authority and relational authority. He actually verbalized a lot of things I’ve been thinking for awhile but didn’t have the words to express. Pretty good, actually.

I know that there are those who have had experiences similar to mine, and have come to the conclusion that we should regard no human spiritual authority at all, that we should only have Jesus as our authority–even attempting to back this view up with Scripture. For me, I see too much in Scripture that says otherwise to draw that long of a line, and I respect the Scripture too much to ignore what I see in there. For me, like so many other things in the church, it is more a matter of practice than of principle. To say there should be no authority whatsoever is tantamount to anarchy, and I don’t think that works, ever. But that’s not to say I have the answers as to what that good, right and healthy human authority should look like in the church.  I’ve seen a few glimpses here and there of what it could be, but thus far I’ve seen more negative examples than positive ones.

So at this point in my journey, I guess I still have more questions than answers about authority, and my recent realization of my own resistance to authority underscores this point.  In the words of a famous song, in spite of all that I still believe… “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”