Have been thinking about power... It is true that when you get a sizeable group of people together, the issue of politics will arise. (So I'm not so surprised when a guy recently told us about more than a dozen churches around Msia are having crisis with 'politics', even as we speak)When growth happens, we need some kind of 'form' or 'structure' to manage power. Won't solve all problems, but at least we consciously manage it.
A small house church of 15 may survive in a somewhat egalitarian, chit-chatty, no-leader-here structure... but once it grows to a hundred, we inevitably need to deal with the question of power.
I don't have a clear idea on church government. It's one of those topics I'd like to know more about but just so many other things have higher priority.
But right now, I believe and practise a plurality of leaders (team). Am so glad for people I can consult with to get different perspectives and to hold me accountable. Wonder if having ONE Senior leader all by himself up there is a wise thing to do?
On a different note, are truth claims nothing but a mask for power? On an intuitive level, it doesn't seem true. When I claim that Grace likes to eat cheese cake, I'm not trying to control her or anything.
Nietzche famously said
What then is truth ? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, an anthropomorphisms : in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions ; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.
But at least, he is being consistent here for if God is dead, truth, what corresponds to reality, dies. And ethics die. Nihilism follows. It's a package deal.
We can't say God is alive, and flirt around with the death of truth, ethics and meaning. Forgot to mention, beauty. We need extreme caution here.
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