Kyle Strobel and Jamin Goggin, Part 1: Why the Church’s Problem With Power Is Not ‘Over There’

“The language in Scripture about the demonic is tied to this ‘for the self and from the self’ language.”

“In James 3 we see the things of man, the things of Satan, and the things of this world are bound together in a single system of power that are defined by selfish ambition and jealousy.”

Key Quotes From Jamin Goggin

“The Lord was inviting us to pay attention to our own hearts and [to see] that perhaps we might gain the whole world, but we might lose something really important in the process, as Jesus would say.”

“One of the real prevailing temptations throughout my vocation as a pastor, particularly in the early years of ministry, has been to look at the big, to look at the successful in worldly terms, and to say, ‘Yeah, the problem of power is over there.'”

“The truth was this temptation of power that is worldly, which for us is power from the self and for the sake of the self, power leveraging my own talents and abilities to achieve a certain ends for myself and success and adoration…that temptation was just as much there for me in those days of serving as a youth pastor in a fairly small church, as it was in the days I worked at a megachurch.”

“I could have spent all those years as a youth pastor wielding my gifts, talents and abilities to achieve a kind of affirmation and success, to climb up the ministry ladder. And that would have been no less problematic than some of the toxic forms of power I saw, maybe in more obvious and kind of extreme forms.”

“I think there is a real vacuum of ecclesiology in my experience, broadly speaking, within non-denominational evangelicalism.”

“What is the church? And therefore downstream of that, what is a pastor? And then downstream of that, what kind of governance or polity makes sense, given what a church is and what this vocation of elder-pastor is?”

“I still very much want to know things like, how many people did we baptize? What is our attendance on a Sunday morning? Did people participate in our classes? But I think where I want to kind of push us is to say, the question is, why are we asking those things? Are those assessments, in and of themselves, sufficient for us to discern the work of the Lord?”