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Relational Power Over Coercive Power

Each month, we post a series of blogs around a common topic. This month, Jessica Tate is curating a series written by participants in the second Community Organizing and Congregational Leadership cohort offered by NEXT Church, Johnson C. Smith Theological Seminary, and Metro Industrial Areas Foundation. You’ll hear from various church and community leaders as they explore the key organizing concept of power. How can these reflections on power shape your own work and ministry? What is your reaction to their reflections? We invite you to join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter!

by Jim Honig

Twenty-five years ago, I was a young pastor in Naples, Florida, and got a hard lesson on power. Our congregation operated a preschool in a relatively small room in our church building and wanted to move it to a house that we owned next door to the church. The house had a wonderful open floor plan, a large backyard that would be perfect for a playground, and a circular drive out front to make drop off and pick up relatively simple. To move the preschool required a zoning variance. So, we hired an engineering firm and an attorney, and prepared to make our case. A few of the neighbors we enthusiastic supporters; most had no objections.

Most. One key neighbor was opposed to the notion, and he had friends on the city council. When we made our case before the city council, one of his friends actually got up and left the room during our testimony and came back just in time to vote no. And so did his other friends. I naively assumed that since we had good intentions, we were good neighbors, and the city needed more preschool spaces, we would get the zoning variance. I had my head in the world as it should be and neglected to pay attention to the world as it is.

Participants in the 2018 organizing cohort learn from a panel of clergy.

It’s not enough to have good intentions if we want to accomplish good things. In order to act, one has to have power. Broad based organizing is about organizing people and organizing money so that one can act. That’s the exercise of power, the ability to act. Since that difficult and expensive lesson, I have seen organized people and organized money get things done; it works.

A key distinction we make is the difference between coercive power and relational power, power over in contrast to power with. Coercive power operates from the place of position and privilege. Coercive power is like the manager who can make her employee do something unethical because she can threaten to fire him; the politician who can choose to make a decision that is good for his contributors rather than the ordinary citizens because his position and privilege allow him to. By contrast, the ability to act with rather than over is a way for ordinary citizens to push back against the coercive power that stems from position and privilege.

The exercise of relational power is countercultural and counter-intuitive. It is not the way we are taught or formed. “You can’t fight city hall,” we say, symptomatic of our willingness to give away our power and bow to the systems, structures, and powerful individuals. Building relational power is a way to take back the ability to act in the public realm.

The exercise of relational power is not demonstrated primarily through the big, dramatic public actions — although the public actions is where the hoped for change actually happens. The fundamental exercise of the relational power happens when we actually relate to others. The primary tool for building relational power is the one-on-one individual meeting. When we take the time and effort to relate to one another, we build a large and strong network of relationships and as a consequence have the ability to exercise that relational power.

Acts of resistance are also part of exercising this power, especially when resistance is undertaken in community. Part of our baptismal identity is to resist the structures and manifestations of evil, those forces that defy God. So, in this sense, it is also a subversive power, a countercultural means of throwing a wrench into the gears of the systems and structures that work against human thriving.

Though I am committed to doing the work of the kingdom by the arts and practices of organizing and exercising relational power, there are still points of tension for me. I still struggle with the paradox of exercising power vis-a-vis the theology of the cross. In the theology of the cross, power is exercised in the contrary — strength through weakness, wisdom through folly. The theology of the cross supposes that God acted most powerfully to reclaim, redeem, and reconcile the world through the humiliating and shameful crucifixion of Jesus. Paul builds on this notion in 1 Corinthians 1 when he says that God’s ultimate power is demonstrated through human weakness and God’s wisdom through human folly. God works not through coercion, but through love; inviting rather than coercing.

I believe God has intentions for the world and calls the church to work for the sake of enacting those intentions. In over 30 years of pastoral ministry, this exercise of relational power is the most effective means I’ve seen to get that work done.


Jim Honig is pastor with the people of Shepherd of the Bay Lutheran Church in northern Door County, Wisconsin. He is a writer, blogger, and the author of the novel, By Paths Untrodden. He is passionate about congregation based organizing and trying to figure out how that works in a new context after spending 15 years in the Chicago suburbs.

Confronting and Claiming Power for the Gospel’s Sake

Each month, we post a series of blogs around a common topic. This month, Jessica Tate is curating a series written by participants in the second Community Organizing and Congregational Leadership cohort offered by NEXT Church, Johnson C. Smith Theological Seminary, and Metro Industrial Areas Foundation. You’ll hear from various church and community leaders as they explore the key organizing concept of power. How can these reflections on power shape your own work and ministry? What is your reaction to their reflections? We invite you to join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter!

by Sarah Cooper Searight

Day one, in processing our very first activity together, those of us gathered for the week in Baltimore were told the truth: If we were serious about making change we would have to have power, and if we wanted power then we would have to “unlearn all of our clergy stuff.” That statement has been agitating something in me ever since. Somehow, in the midst of our best attempts as leaders to challenge the powers and principalities, we have inherently set up a dynamic whereby we’ve locked ourselves out of claiming power. We are supposed to confront power, aren’t we? Name it, shame it, reframe it, but certainly don’t claim it. So how can we claim what we also condemn?

Community organizing training participants gathered in worship

We begin with who God is. We know, based on Genesis 1:26 and John 1:1-2 (among many others), that God within Godself is in relationship. Father, Son and Holy Spirit; Mother-Sophia, Jesus-Sophia, and Spirit-Sophia, as Elizabeth Johnson points out: “The mutual coinherence, the dancing around together of Spirit, Wisdom, and Mother…this defines who God is as God. There is no divine nature as a fourth thing that grounds divine unity in difference apart from relationality. Rather, being in communion constitutes God’s very essence.”[1]

Further, we read throughout the biblical stories how God is not only in relationship within Godself but yearns for, makes way for, initiates again and again relationship with humanity and indeed with all creation. Though certainly God is capable on God’s own, God consistently transforms by raising up leaders who then raise up communities of power: God in Moses and Aaron with the Israelites, Jesus with his disciples and masses who were fed on the hillside, the Holy Spirit with Lydia who grew the church in Philippi, to name just a few. We learn, in knowing who God is and how God works, that power is generated through and used in relationship with others.

Of course we all know that relationship can be manipulated to generate power that wields the tools of violence and fear. Howard Thurman shares the story of a young German woman who escaped from the Nazis. Talking to Thurman, she describes just how thoroughly Adolf Hitler manipulated the isolation felt by German youth. “It is true,” Thurman reflects, “that in the hands of a man like Hitler, power is exploited and turned to ends which make for havoc and misery.”[2] Hitler convinced them that he was the only one who could love them, ensure their belonging and their safety. Of course, there are any number of stories we can tell of power built by manipulation and fear in relationship to others wreaking havoc on our communities.

God isn’t about any of that mess, never was and never will be. God cultivates relational power. Thurman contrasts the story of Nazi youth, pointing to how Jesus spoke of God’s care for humanity and all creation as that of a loving parent. God creates the conditions for belonging, and trust in belonging empowers both the individual and the community as a whole towards acts of transformation. “A [person’s] conviction that [they are] God’s child automatically tends to shift the basis of [their] relationship with all [their] fellows.”[3] [brackets are mine].

This is the same belonging that we preach and enact in the church through the sacrament of baptism. God does not manipulate us into it, but rather makes it the ground of our being. Thereby, if I am a child of God then you are a child of God. We, together, belong to God — we have a common identity and a common purpose. That common purpose is set out explicitly in Scripture and in the person of Jesus Christ — love God and love neighbor enough that we act upon these things now, not later.

As church and community leaders we can (I think we have to) both confront and claim power for the sake of the people we love and minister with and for the sake of any hope in real transformation of our communities. Confront that which is manipulative and abusive, and at the same time claim power that is more accurate to God who is the one who got us into this ministry-game in the first place.

[1]Johnson, Elizabeth A. (1992) She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse. New York, NY: Crossroad Publishing Company. p 227.
[2]Thurman, Howard. Jesus and the Disinherited.(Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1976), p. 40.
[3]Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited, 40.


Sarah Cooper Searight serves as Associate Pastor at Swarthmore Presbyterian Church in Swarthmore, PA. She delights in both her ministry life and her home life where she is partner to Bill (also PCUSA clergy) and mom to Maggie and Ella (PKs extraordinaire), and every so often in the midst of these two she gets in a good run.