Right hand, left hand

I an supervising a student as she works her way through training for ministry in the Methodist Church. She's jolly good on the public speaking thing - has really good ideas and delivers them well.

Tonight I let her loose on the Evening congregation for the first time; we did Schubert's Mass in G for the feast of Christ the King, and her theme was "what kind of King, and what kind of power?"

She talked about right and left-handed power. Right handed power, she said, is the kind of power that operates through rules and regulations; the kind of power that puts boundaries down, and places limits on people and communities. Left handed power is the kind of power that wins the heart, rules by love and inspiration, not by rules. We were all waiting for the punchline - she built it up so that we were expecting her to say "and of course, Jesus uses left-handed power and wins our hearts by the power of Love." But she called our bluff. The Kingdom of God works, she said, through both kinds of power. The one supports and tempers the other. Boundaries are needed for love to work its power; but boundaries without love bring terrible abuses of power.

It made me think of something Lesslie Newbigin used to talk about; how God's power was kind of like a garden; for all the flowers to grow there had to be some kind of order, some rules and some boundaries, otherwise everything just spilled out everywhere in a disordered mess. The right kind of boundaries and limits (such as doctrine and ecclesiology, for instance) create space for things to grow, spaces where they are not strangled by weeds. He was a wise man, Lesslie.