Topic: Leadership

To name Christ as King is to identify ourselves as dissenters to the claims of any other authority and to critique all power-mongering.

Jesus’s agenda, which we are called to follow, is about healing, liberating and gathering in the excluded, not purifying the community by excluding anyone.

Serving Christ as king challenges our use of power and politics and questions where our ultimate loyalty and security lie.

Despite our almost idolatrous attachment to social structures like traditional family and monarchy, God wants us to live up to our calling to be a radically egalitarian community of prayerful shared responsibility.

Following Jesus in ministering among the needs around us is not a call to do everything ourselves.

Jesus comes to break us free from oppressive understandings of God and of God’s expectations of us.

Our unwitting abusive treatment of the Royal family is a symptom of our entanglement in systemic persecution.

In baptism we are anointed to reign with Christ over a new creation, but it is a reign of suffering servanthood, not of reckless force.

If you’re looking for wisdom, healing, practical solutions, look to Jesus, because church leaders constantly fail when they do any more than point to Jesus.

In a world dominated by arrogant and exploitative leaders, Jesus models a gentle shepherding leadership that prioritises the reintegration of the broken over the drive for “success” and “efficiency”.

Self-interested leaders will frequently manufacture frightening images of an angry dangerous God to silence opposition and maintain their grip on power, but Jesus opens our eyes to these abuses and to the reality of a God of incorruptible love.

The abusive use of anger to manipulate other people’s behaviour is, Jesus says, on the same spectrum as physical violence, and Jesus calls this preacher to repent of it.