We've Been Doing Power Wrong
I want to start with a Tuesday morning in Decatur, Georgia.
August 20th, 2013. A woman named Antoinette Tuff is sitting in the front office of an elementary school, doing what she always does — managing the rhythm of an ordinary school day. And then a 20-year-old man walks through the doors carrying an AK-47 and 500 rounds of ammunition. There are 800 students in that building. 100 staff members. And the only thing standing between them and catastrophe is Antoinette.
No badge. No weapon. No tactical training.
Just a woman who knew herself, knew her God, and knew something about power that most of us have spent our whole lives unlearning.
She didn't fight. She didn't freeze. She talked to him. She listened. She told him her husband had just left her after 33 years. That she was in the process of losing her car. That caring for her multiply disabled son was hard. She spoke to him not as a threat to be neutralized, but as a human being who needed to be loved.
"It's going to be all right, sweetie."
When he surrendered to the police, she was clear: "I just want you to know that I love you. I'm proud of you. That's a good thing that you're giving up, and don't worry about it. We all go through something in life."
Eight hundred children went home safely to their families that evening. And I keep coming back to this story because I think Antoinette Tuff understood something that most of us — if we're honest — have not yet fully grasped. She understood what power is actually for.
The Grammar We Inherited
Here's the thing about power: we all have a relationship with it, whether we know it or not. And for most of us, that relationship was shaped before we ever had a chance to question it.
The Western imagination has a very particular grammar of power. Sun Tzu tells us that to maintain order, a leader must be prepared to wage war. Robert Greene's The 48 Laws of Power — one of the most popular leadership books of the last 25 years — includes gems like: Never put too much trust in friends. Conceal your intentions. Get others to do the work for you, but always take the credit. Do not commit to anyone.
Some of y'all have bosses who have law number seven on lock.
This is the grammar we absorbed. It lives so deep in our consciousness that when we hear the word power, we either feel a kind of guilty desire for it or a reflexive suspicion of it. We chase it by the world's rules, or we give up on it entirely. Neither option is working.
Author Elizabeth Lesser offers a different framework, and I think she names something important: "Power has been so abused that it feels like a dirty word. But what is it exactly? Power is a natural force, and it's something we all want. The energy, the freedom, the authority to be who we are, to contribute, to create. Domination and control have become synonymous with power, but power does not have to come at the expense of others."
"There is a way to reveal one's shining self without diminishing the light of another. There is a way to do power differently than the way we have come to define it."
I believe that. And I think the scriptures show us exactly what that different way looks like.
The Question the Disciples Got Wrong
In Acts 1, we meet the disciples at the end of 40 days after the resurrection. If you know your Bible symbolism, you know that 40 is never an accident — 40 days of rain in Noah's time, 40 years in the wilderness, 40 days of fasting before Jesus began his ministry. Forty is always a threshold. A waiting room between what was and what will be.
And in this threshold moment, the disciples ask Jesus a direct question. It's the only recorded question in the passage, and it reveals everything about what they're still expecting: "Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?"
Translation: Is it finally time for us to have the kind of power we've been imagining? Military power. Political power. The kind that defeats empires and restores national glory.
These men had seen the resurrection. They had touched the body of Jesus. And still — still — they are asking for the old kind of power.
Jesus doesn't answer their question. He sidesteps it entirely and says something so simple it's easy to miss: Wait for the Spirit. She will give you power.
Now, I know that many of us have a complicated relationship with the Holy Spirit. We can picture God as loving parent. We can picture Jesus — flesh and bone, carpenter's hands. But the Spirit? The one some have called the "spook of the Trinity"? She's harder to wrap our minds around.
And maybe that's because the Spirit defies our understanding of power. The Spirit is associated with deep feeling, mystery, the terrain of our inner world. The Spirit always points away from herself. Not coincidentally, in scripture, the Spirit is most often rendered in the grammatical feminine. In many ways, the Spirit is the person of the Trinity who looks most like what the world calls weakness.
And yet Jesus says: She is the one who will give you power.
What Power Looks Like When the Spirit Shows Up
When Pentecost arrives in Acts 2, it is — to put it plainly — uncontrollable. Violent wind. Tongues of fire. And then the disciples begin to speak in languages they could not possibly have known. A crowd gathers, Jews from every corner of the world, and the text says each one heard them speaking in their own native language.
I've always loved languages. I've studied Spanish, French, Arabic, Hebrew — with what I can only describe as aspirational results. My three-year-old daughter, who is in Spanish immersion, will re-pronounce words back to me in the slowest possible way. The look in her eyes says: Mama, this is not your ministry. And she is not wrong.
But I keep trying because to know someone's language is to open up another world. Theologian Willie James Jennings says it best: to speak a language is to speak a people. Language isn't just communication. It's intimacy. It's the password to the interior life of a culture.
And here's what I don't want us to miss: the crowd says, "Are not all these who are speaking Galileans?" The disciples are speaking the languages of others — but with their own accents intact. They are still themselves. This is an intimacy that defies assimilation just as much as it defies appropriation. It's not about acquiring another person or culture as a trophy. It's about becoming close. Becoming known.
This is what Spirit-power looks like: it moves toward people. Not over them.
Peter stands up and explains what's happening, and he doesn't invent a new theology. He reaches back into the Hebrew Bible, into the prophet Joel, who said that God would pour out the Spirit on all flesh. Theologian Scott McKnight notes that Peter understood Pentecost as simultaneously two things: the Spirit for all and judgment on injustice. The new community born at Pentecost is, from its very first breath, a critique of the way power works in the world. It exists to embody an alternative.
The new community born at Pentecost is, from its very first breath, a critique of the way power works in the world. It exists to embody an alternative.
This was true in the upper room in Jerusalem. It was true again in 1906 at the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles — a church profoundly shaped by Black female domestic workers, janitors, and washerwomen whose religious imagination had been formed in the crucible of American slavery. Womanist theologian Carrie Day describes their leadership as creating "the very conditions of radical relationality at Azusa — making possible practices of connection, care, joy, and intimacy within this religious community."
That was Pentecost again. Radical relationality. Power to speak. Power for intimacy. Power for redistribution.
Three Commitments for Carrying Power Well
So what does this actually look like for us, in our ordinary lives? I think the texts give us three answers — three commitments that define what it looks like to steward power the way the Spirit intends.
The first is a commitment to speak. The power of Pentecost begins with a voice. The disciples opened their mouths and told the story — the story of resurrection, of a God who refuses to let death have the final word. And I think for many of us in this community, the closet that holds us most captive has nothing to do with gender or sexuality. The closet that challenges us most is the one that keeps us from telling the stories of our life with God. The downs, but also the ups. The moments of real encounter. When we steward power well, we use our voices to witness — not just to ideas, but to mystery.
The second is a commitment to intimacy. When the Spirit gave the disciples power at Pentecost, they weren't given power over the crowd. They were given power toward the crowd. To draw close. To enter in. To be known and to know. And for many of us, this means — at its most basic level — refusing to stay at the edges. Not just showing up, but sitting down. Deciding that for the next four months, I'm going to be here with some intention. Going out to lunch with people once a month. Choosing messiness over mastery. Connection over control.
The third is a commitment to redistribution. Acts 2 doesn't end with Peter's sermon. It ends with the community redistributing resources — holding things in common, selling what they have so that no one is in need. And later in Acts 6, when the Greek-speaking widows are being overlooked in the distribution of food, the community doesn't just expand its charity. It expands its leadership — redistributing power to the very people being marginalized. To steward power well is always to open our hands. To give away resources. To loosen our grasp.
We Were Made to Carry This
When I think about Antoinette Tuff, I think about the fact that she disarmed a man with 500 rounds of ammunition by simply being willing to be fully present to another human being. She spoke. She drew close. She loosened her grip enough to love somebody the world had already written off.
Eight hundred children went home safely that evening. That is the power Pentecost is talking about. That is the power we are called to steward.
And here is the word I most want you to receive: we were made to carry this. Not the 48 laws. Not the Art of War. But the power that leads us into revolutionary encounter — with others, with ourselves, and with our God. The power that tends and befriends when the world says fight or flee. The power that speaks even when the closet feels safer. The power that draws close even when mastery feels more comfortable. The power that opens its hands even when hoarding feels more secure.
The same Spirit that showed up in an upper room 2,000 years ago, the same Spirit that showed up on Azusa Street in 1906, the same Spirit that showed up in a school office in Decatur, Georgia in 2013 — she is here. She is still handing out power.
The only question is whether we'll receive it.
Reflect: Where in your life are you currently choosing control over connection? And what would it look like — just in one relationship, one context — to try power the other way?
What would it mean for you personally to take seriously one of the three commitments — to speak, to draw close, or to redistribute — in the next 30 days?
