by Andy Crouch
My last book was dedicated to our neighbor and friend David Sacks, a photographer, musician and father whose suffering and death from cancer at age forty-six became, against all odds, an extraordinary testimony to community, faithfulness and life in ways that indelibly touched thousands of people in our corner of Pennsylvania and beyond. And this book is dedicated to Steve Hayner, who was in the middle of an assignment as president of Columbia Theological Seminary when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Steve and his wife, Sharol, lived, as presidents do, in a house owned by the seminary. Shortly before Steve was selected as president, the seminary had had a first-floor bathroom and bedroom suite installed in the president’s house. The renovations were designed to accommodate some future president who might fall ill, Steve told friends, “but I never imagined I would be the president to die in this house.” Nine months after his initial diagnosis, he did die in that house. But before his death, Steve and Sharol wrote a series of short updates online, as well as countless personal notes to family and friends, that were unflinching in their honesty and hope. Steve descended to the dead, but not without leaving behind a testimony to God’s grace in the midst of suffering and loss and a house made holy by the grief and hope of his last days.
Relinquishing power. Like Nelson Mandela, every leader needs a plan for how to lay down their authority once and for all. As with Mandela, many leaders need to plan to lay that power aside before their own communities would expect or demand it. It is hard to think of many things that do more damage to an organization than leaders who have no plan for how they will hand over power. No leader lives forever, and few leaders can or should, like Steve, lead until the end of their natural lives. This responsibility is not just the leader’s own—it is the responsibility of the whole community to envision and plan for life beyond their current leader’s tenure. When leaders do not actively plan for the end of their power, and when we who are led by them allow them to indulge fantasies of unending influence, they are idols, no matter how well disguised.
Confessing sin. In one sense, confession is the routine task of every Christian. It should be as natural as breathing for us to admit fault and ask for forgiveness, part of the constant dance between authority and vulnerability that leads us all to flourishing. But there are also times to make a more dramatic confession, especially when vulnerability has been hidden and concealed for too long. In the last chapter I told the story of the party I desperately tried to avoid and the grace that was poured out in spite of my bitterness. That night, no one knew how hard I had tried to escape that gift of grace. But the next day, I knew I had to tell that community the whole, painful, humbling truth. There is something indescribably painful about having just been celebrated and affirmed and then having to reveal just how unworthy of celebration and affirmation you truly are—and yet to do so is also utterly right and safe and joyful. That next morning, after I had confessed my utter failure, I felt as known and loved as I ever have in my life. I would not trade that moment for anything—even the celebration the night before.
Dying, relinquishing power, confessing sin, receiving and offering forgiveness—these are all indispensable ways that we can descend to the dead. In doing so we not only break the grip of idols; we restore the kinds of relationships, especially with the most vulnerable, that the idols have destroyed.
But sometimes it is even simpler. Sometimes you just have to walk.
Los Gringos Que Caminan
In the 1990s a group of Peruvian lawyers founded an organization called Paz y Esperanza (known in English as Peace and Hope International) to address the countless injustices committed by both sides in the Shining Path insurgency. Over time, with painstaking effort and frequently slow progress, Paz y Esperanza has made significant contributions to flourishing and the rule of law in several Latin American countries.
Drew Jennings-Grisham is an American who joined Paz y Esperanza in 2001 to help expand the organization’s work in Bolivia. The gospel has been widely preached in Bolivia, but most indigenous communities had remained dependent initially on white missionaries, and then on missionaries from more empowered urban churches, and lacked their own leaders and pastors. Fresh out of college, Jennings-Grisham found that even a twenty-something American would be granted absurd amounts of authority. “They see a white guy with a Bible coming into their community, and they give me the visible and spiritual authority. They’ve never seen me before, don’t know me from Adam, but as soon as I step into that situation, I’m the one with the power, because that had been their experiences with the missionaries and even with the urban Bolivian churches.”
So Jennings-Grisham embraced ever more dramatic symbolic ways of sharing the vulnerability of his indigenous hosts, who also became his friends. He eschewed the usual trappings of Western-funded missionaries like hotel rooms and the air-conditioned white SUVs that are the mark of spiritual and secular NGOs around the world.
We would spend the night on the street as we traveled, sleeping on the sidewalk with a blanket. I wouldn’t bring any food with me except what I brought as my common contribution to the group. The Ayoreo people we were traveling with were destitute—they ate rice, one meal a day. One Ayoreo pastor told me, “When we saw you eating our rice, with maggots in it, we knew you were different.” All I was trying to do is, as a person with power, to say, I’m completely powerless right now. If you left me here I’d get lost and starve to death. If we get lost in this jungle, you guys will be fine, but I’ll be dead in twelve hours.
Just as representatives of highly vulnerable communities are right to clothe themselves in visible symbols of authority, so when representatives of unearned authority—say, “a white guy with a Bible”—enter into settings of historic oppression and injustice, we must go out of our way to clothe ourselves in visible symbols of vulnerability. Of course, Jennings-Grisham and other Westerners could simply decide never to visit Bolivia at all—never to risk the complications of facing, stewarding and giving away their power. But to do so would leave patterns of injustice untouched and unchallenged. Far more challenging, but far more fruitful, is to enter into relationships where we can learn what it means both to lead and to serve, where both the possessors of privilege and the putatively powerless can discover greater flourishing together.
So Jennings-Grisham also became known as the gringo who would walk out of meetings—not in frustration or anger, but so that his presence would not influence the decisions being made. “We started one meeting sitting at a table, in the way urban Bolivians and Westerners do,” one of his colleagues told me,
but at a certain point in the meeting, Drew stood up, asked all the Westerners and the urbanized Bolivians to unplug their laptops and leave the room with him. You can imagine that made the urbanized Bolivians a bit nervous! Drew said, “We’re going to get lunch for the group—you talk this over and make the decision.” When we came back a few hours later, the indigenous leaders had moved the table out of the way, sat down in a circle, and come to a conclusion. The result, a few months later, was a church conference, probably the first in the history of the country, that was planned and led by indigenous Bolivians.
Jennings-Grisham is back in the United States now, building relationships between the American and Bolivian church. Back in Bolivia, he and his wife are remembered with a simple phrase: los gringos que caminan—the gringos who walk.
8
Up and to the Right
Karl Johnson and I both graduated from Cornell University in 1990, though we never met during our undergraduate years. I moved away from Ithaca, New York, returning only to visit, but Karl stayed. There were two big things missing from his Cornell experience, and he wanted future students to have them. Amazingly enough, he’s managed to build them both.
In 2000 Karl founded a Christian study center called Chesterton House, an intellectual, spiritual and residential community now based in a sprawling house on fraternity row.
But before he started Chesterton House, Karl built the ot
her thing he thought Cornell was missing: a ropes course.
Tucked in the woods a ten-minute drive from the center of campus, there are trapeze bars high above the forest floor, balance beams fifty feet off the ground and a replica of Cornell’s iconic bell tower at one end of a four-hundred-foot double zip-line. Students, corporate groups and the occasional team of Olympic-level gymnasts use the course to test their limits and build their trust. It’s still Karl’s baby, as you can tell from the careful way he coils every rope, and though he no longer works for Cornell’s Outdoor Education program, he still has a key.
Late one summer afternoon, Karl’s family met mine at the gate for some of the most terrifying risk-free moments of our lives.
This is the inside joke about ropes courses: they are about as far from real risk as you can get. Strapped into the expert-tested, lawyer-approved, triple-checked, over-engineered systems of harnesses and ropes that secure every maneuver, I was probably safer than I have ever been in my life.
But that sure isn’t how it felt at the top of a thirty-foot pole, looking at a twelve-inch-square platform in front of my nose that I was supposed to somehow clamber onto and stand up on—and then jump. Jumping off seemed like the easy part. That would be an act of exhilarating authority, safeguarded by the harness around my chest. But getting even one foot onto that tiny platform—let alone both feet, let alone standing up, the pole swaying underneath me—that prospect created a perfect storm between my body’s primal fear of falling and my mind’s vivid anticipation of how embarrassing it would be to tumble off ignominiously in the attempt.
On the other hand, there was no way I was going to completely give up and slither back down the pole. I called down to Karl, holding the belay rope far below. “Maybe I’ll just jump off now,” I said.
“Well, you could do that,” he responded in a perfectly even tone of voice. “But when is the next time you’ll be on top of a pole like this? Why waste this chance? How about trying to just sit on the platform?”
I pondered my options—and, watching below, my wife. And my teenagers.
I pondered some more.
“I’ll try,” I said. My arms were trembling with adrenaline. Instructed by Karl, I managed to get halfway to a sitting position. Then he said, “You know, you’re really close to being able to stand up. How about trying to get one foot all the way on the platform?”
I maneuvered one foot, just barely, into position. Karl’s voice floated up again. “You’re really close. I bet you can get your other foot up there.” Sure enough, I could. Now, amazingly enough, I was squatting on the platform.
“I don’t know if I can stand up,” I said. I wished I had been keeping up on my squats and pistols, but on that high swaying pole, the issue was less strength than balance.
“You can,” Karl said in a perfectly steady voice.
Now my legs were trembling, too. But inch by inch, more slowly than I’ve ever stood up in my life, I gradually raised myself all the way. Finally, I was standing on top of the platform. Karl’s wife, Julie, took a picture. My wife and kids cheered. Then, with a roar of triumph and laughter, I leapt into thin air.
Our whole family made it to the top of the pole that day. Each one of us stopped where I had stopped, all but convinced we couldn’t go on. With each one, Karl found a way to coach us past our fears, gradually increasing our authority, discerning and addressing our vulnerability. He was our security, the belay rope threaded through pulleys and wrapped around his waist, but he was also the one calling us to more risk than we thought we could bear.
Karl is a good leader, and he is also a good friend. Good leaders, and friends, increase our authority and vulnerability, even while they carefully assess how much authority and how much vulnerability we can stand. That late afternoon on the ropes course, our family learned something about leadership—and about discipleship. We had to follow Karl, who had built the course, inspected it, trained on it. He asked us to try nothing he had not tried, and to trust nothing he had not made trustworthy. We needed his voice from the forest floor, coaching us further than we could have gone. We needed someone who had already gone where he was asking us to go.
Judging by the smiles on all of our faces, and the endless retelling of the stories of our triumphs, falls and failures over the weeks after our visit to the ropes course, what Karl led us into was flourishing.
We needed someone who had already gone where he was asking us to go.
Unlocking True Authority
The ropes course was just a game—a simulation of real life, not the real thing. Gymnasts and circus performers do everything we did and more, with no harness and no nets. But the triple-tested security of the ropes course makes visible the essential wager of the Christian life. Are we ultimately vulnerable? Is everything at risk in this life with no belays, no harnesses, no one holding the rope at the other end? Or is our very life held by one who has gone even to the dust of death and returned, who has conquered the ultimate source of vulnerability, and even now holds absolutely secure the tether of our life? If Christ is not raised from the dead, then everything is at stake and at risk, the gods of authority without vulnerability have won, and we are of all people the most to be pitied. But if in fact Christ has been raised—this is the wager of the Christian life—then no meaningful risk is too great for his capacity to rescue.
In the grip of idols, we believe that our problem is not enough authority. Life becomes a quest to acquire enough authority to manage and minimize our vulnerability. The risks are all around us, obvious and endless—the terror of nature, the hostility of others, the inexorable approach of death. To people who see the world this way, gaining authority without vulnerability is the pearl of great price, something you would sell everything to obtain. And in the grip of idolatry and injustice, that is exactly what we do.
But from the first page to the last, the story that has turned the world upside down says our situation is actually exactly the reverse. Our problem isn’t acquiring enough authority—not if we are truly made in the image of the world’s all-powerful Creator, blessed with memory, reason and skill, the rulers of creation. If that was true of our beginning, it is all the more true of our future: “Do you not know that we are to judge angels?” Paul asks the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 6:3). Their pursuit of false power betrayed their misunderstanding of their true authority: “Let no one boast about human leaders. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all belong to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God” (1 Corinthians 3:21-23).
Judging from Paul’s later correspondence with them, the Corinthians didn’t think much of this idea. They seem to have been easily infatuated with leaders who claimed spiritual power and backed it up with impressive personal appearances. Paul’s long-suffering and often beleaguered ministry was far too visibly vulnerable. When he writes them again a few years later, even more grieved and exasperated than before, Paul is driven to the very edge of claiming exactly the sort of spiritual exceptionalism the Corinthians prized. But he is so unwilling to boast about it that he pretends he is speaking about someone else:
I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows. And I know that such a person—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows—was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat. (2 Corinthians 12:2-4)
We have every reason to believe that Paul is in fact describing his own extraordinary spiritual experience here, exactly the sort of “visions and revelations from the Lord” that would have secured his spiritual authority in the fevered atmosphere of the Corinthian church. But something has happened to turn Paul’s understanding of authority and vulnerability upside down:
On behalf of such a one I will boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses. But if I wish to b
oast, I will not be a fool, for I will be speaking the truth. But I refrain from it, so that no one may think better of me than what is seen in me or heard from me, even considering the exceptional character of the revelations. Therefore, to keep me from being too elated, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Corinthians 12:5-10)
We do not know exactly what the “thorn in the flesh” was that tormented Paul. But his choice of words is striking. A thorn stuck in one’s flesh would be a constant source of, and reminder of, bodily weakness. But for someone who knew the story of Christ’s final passion, it would also be a constant reminder of the sign of authority that had been placed on the head of Jesus on the way to the cross, the thorns that pressed into his head as he risked everything to restore the world to true flourishing.
We do not lack for authority. In Christ we have all the authority that we need and more—“all things are yours” (1 Corinthians 3:21). But what unlocks that authority is the willingness to expose ourselves to meaningful loss—to become vulnerable, woundable in the world. For this, too, is what it means to bear the divine image—if the One through whom all things were made spoke into being a world where he himself could be betrayed, wounded and killed. What we are missing, to become like him, is not ultimately more authority—it is more vulnerability.
