A new title or platform tends to come with two bad instincts at once. One says grab it, protect it, and make sure everyone can see you have it. The other says apologize for it, shrink it, and act as if you never wanted it. Both miss what power is for. Power is a God-given capacity held in trust. You measure it by what it does for other people, and the main danger is copying the only version of power you have ever watched up close.
A group of Christian leaders who took up this exact question kept arriving at a warning aimed at people with good intentions. The model of power most of us absorbed is different from the one Jesus used, and good motives will not keep it out.
Why does new power feel like a trap either way?
Mike Kelsey, lead pastor at McLean Bible Church, names a gap that explains a lot of the confusion. Growing up in the African American church, most of what he heard about power came from the standpoint of not having it. That teaching did real good. It told people they had dignity as image bearers of God in a society that denied them power. It also left something out.
“I think the problem with only preaching about power from beneath is that we don’t equip people for what happens to you when you have power from above,” Kelsey said. He put the moment in plain terms: “Started from the bottom. Now I’m here. What do I do now that I’m here?”
That question sits behind both bad instincts. If your only theology of power is a theology of surviving other people’s power, gaining some of your own feels like either a betrayal or a prize. You feel guilty about it, or you start acting like the people who held it over you. Scripture formed neither reaction. Missing teaching did. Kelsey’s warning is that people never discipled for power will reproduce whatever power they experienced, even over a handful of people.
So the first step is admitting you need a different picture of what power is.
What is power, if it isn’t just domination?
Kelsey refused to start with oppression. He described power as the ability to “turn your will into reality,” a capacity every person has to some degree because every person bears God’s image. Looking at the history of Black Americans, he saw a power that “was not given to us” by anyone with permission to grant it. It came from the Creator. Oppression, on his account, is what happens when systems block people from that agency, and he called that a problem “first and foremost for God himself.”
That settles the urge to apologize. If power belongs to being made in God’s image, having some is not a moral failure. A manager setting a schedule, a parent setting a curfew, a pastor assigning a staff member: each is turning will into reality. The live questions are whose power it is and what you are doing with it.
Latasha Morrison, founder and CEO of Be the Bridge, answered the first one directly: “power belongs to God.” Whether it does good or harm, she said, depends on whether it is submitted to God. In her own leadership she named the temptation to think she is in control, and named surrender as the thing that keeps her from it.
Bishop Charlie Haynes Jr. grounded the same idea in Psalm 24:1: “The earth is the LORD’s, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.” The psalm is a worship song, and it makes no leadership rules. Its claim still reaches far. If the earth and its people belong to the Lord, no human holds power as an owner. Haynes drew the practical conclusion: “one of the things that you have to do as a leader is to see yourself as an agent for the community and not for yourself.”
Where does the borrowed model come from?
The author Rahel Tesfamariam pressed hardest on the reader’s real risk. People of African descent, she argued, “have had a proximity to power, not necessarily had power.” They watched it for centuries in other people’s hands, and what they watched was dehumanizing, self-centered and rooted in capitalism. So much of what people know about power has to be unlearned, she said, and “black people have to be able to imagine a power they have never seen before” in homes, relationships and workplaces.
Her most concrete target was the American dream, now often sold as Black excellence and measured in millionaire status. She described her own early ambition as innocent; she just wanted a job that let her do what she loved. Still, she warned that “there’s a thin line between pursuing your dreams and then being pushed into this labor force day in and day out to fulfill the dreams of the American empire.” The ancestors’ wildest dreams, in her reading, were simplicity, joy, love and intimacy, and endless grinding was never part of them.
She also named the assumption underneath: that power and luxury must live together, so a rise in position should show up in your lifestyle. Her correction was direct. “But the problem with that is power is not about what your position does for you. It’s about what your position does for others.” Haynes supplied the cautionary end of that road, describing aging pastors unable to retire because their money had gone to custom suits and alligator shoes.
David Bailey, who moderated the conversation, tied this to Romans 12:2: “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” The word the KJV renders as world can also be translated age, as some modern versions do. Bailey’s point came from the letter’s setting. Paul wrote to believers living at the center of the greatest empire of their time, so conformity had a specific shape for them. Bailey suggested hearing the verse as resisting “the ways of the empire,” and warned that a church with cultural power “can kind of baptize empire thinking” and call it Christian.
The verse that follows supports his reading. Paul’s first application of a renewed mind concerns how believers think about themselves and their place among others. He tells each one “not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly” (Romans 12:3), and then describes gifts given for the good of the whole body. In Paul’s own argument, then, refusing to be conformed starts with a person’s self-estimate and the use of what has been given. Haynes called Romans 12:3 one of his favorite passages for exactly this reason: a sober view of yourself keeps the work from becoming about you.
The borrowed model rarely feels borrowed. It feels like normal ambition, which is why Paul locates the change in the mind.
Can a good person still absorb the wrong model?
Morrison offered the most surprising example in the discussion. Most readers remember Joseph as the hero of Genesis who rose to power and saved his family and Egypt from famine. Morrison said she had always read it that way. Then she noticed what she had missed: as the famine deepened, “Joseph also had the people enslaved.”
Genesis 47 does describe the Egyptians selling their livestock, then their land, then themselves to Pharaoh for grain, with Joseph administering it all. Morrison read this as Joseph ingesting the misuse of power around him even while he used power for good. She also suggested it may help explain why Exodus 1:8 speaks of a new king who did not know Joseph. That connection is her proposal; the text does not make it.
The passage is debated. Genesis is narrative, and narrative often describes without approving. Some interpreters see a reasonable famine policy the people requested, since they tell Joseph he has saved their lives. Others see the first steps toward the bondage Israel would later suffer. The text gives no verdict.
Morrison’s point survives either reading. The story clearly shows a faithful man, placed in power inside an empire, running that empire’s machinery. Her application was pointed: people with new influence have to make sure “that we are excavating everything that we’ve ingested.” What you absorbed while watching other people lead comes with you into the office.
What does a different kind of power look like?
Kelsey put it most simply: “And very simply, power looks like love.” When Jesus cast out demons, he said, “it wasn’t a flex.” He acted for people under oppression. When Jesus overturned tables in the temple, Kelsey argued, it was because a market had been set up in the court where Gentiles had access to worship. Even his most forceful act protected someone else’s access to God.
Kelsey’s favorite passage was John 13. The text says Jesus, “knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he was come from God, and went to God; He riseth from supper, and laid aside his garments; and took a towel, and girded himself” (John 13:3-4). Kelsey noticed the order. Someone who knows that much about his own status might be expected to ask to be served. Jesus knows his full authority, and the next thing he does is wash feet.
That detail answers the reader’s question better than any principle. Jesus keeps his authority in full view, and he spends it on the people in front of him. He neither shrinks it to stay humble nor displays it to be seen.
Tesfamariam added a harder edge. She asked anyone seeking power what they have sacrificed, whom they have served, and who has mentored them, warning that “a lot of us wanna jump to the resurrection and never deal with the crucifixion.” Morrison, for her part, pointed to 2 Timothy 1:7, “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind,” noting that her grandmothers, none of whom finished high school, had real power because they had love.
Isn’t this a holy way of telling people to stay small?
It is a fair worry. If you spent years being told to wait your turn, a sermon about surrender can sound like one more instruction to give up what you finally earned: turn down the promotion, avoid money, call passivity humility.
The speakers argued the opposite. Kelsey said the church should expect that, by God’s grace, its people will gain responsibility, access and wealth, and should disciple them for it ahead of time. His questions were about conduct after arrival: “Are you still communal?” Are you still committed to the values of Jesus? Haynes told people entering rooms where they feel out of place to leave impostor syndrome at the door. Different exposure or tools, he said, do not mean you do not belong, and access is meant to be widened for others.
Kelsey also took on the deeper version of the objection: does trusting God mean doing nothing about injustice? He recalled Fannie Lou Hamer confronting an officer who had beaten her by asking whether he ever thought about the day he would meet God. She spent the rest of her life advocating for the oppressed. Kelsey’s reading was that her hope in God’s final judgment freed her to “do what is ours to do, but not try to take control of what is only god’s.” Trusting that vengeance belonged to God let her fight hard without becoming the kind of power she opposed.
Surrender, on this account, makes bold action possible, because you stop carrying the job of being God.
What does holding it well look like in practice?
Haynes gave the most practical picture because he described doing it. As a bishop, he can move a pastor from one part of the country to another. The first time he moved an underperforming pastor, he said, “it felt like I had shot somebody.” He had to absorb the insults that came with the decision. What steadied him was surrendering to God, remembering his own identity, and treating the moment as an opportunity to steward rather than a person to control.
That story refuses both bad instincts. Haynes neither dodged the hard decision to keep his hands clean nor enjoyed it. He made it and felt its weight. Then he said something every newly promoted person should hear: “some people who have power should never have power. And those who understand how to use power, never try to hold onto it.”
Not holding on has concrete forms. Haynes urged leaders in middle age to begin mentoring the person who will carry the work after them, summing up the posture this way: “I don’t make myself great, but I become great by taking others along with me.” Kelsey, who values cultures of honor as biblical, warned that “there’s a fine line between honor and hero worship.” A leader who cannot be questioned has already started holding on.
Haynes added one more limit. In any setting, he said, the only things you control are your intention and your posture. A new title enlarges what you steward. It gives you no control over anyone’s heart, and it was never meant to. Your intention and your posture are the two things fully in your hands, which is why the towel is the right picture. Jesus could not make Judas stay or Peter understand. He could choose what to do with his hands, and he knelt.