This belief system runs in the background of all the surveys to determine how healthy your church is, all the reorganizational strategies, all the techniques for how to grow a church. Can God actually change reality?

Chris Boehm, an anthropologist at the University of Southern California, developed a broadly accepted explanation for the subsequent flattening of hierarchies in human society. He coined the somewhat clunky term reverse dominance hierarchy for the phenomenon, but the idea is simple.

When every congregant can act as an arbiter of a church’s mission and priorities, consensus and mobilization become harder to achieve. More important, an exaggerated and unaccountable individualism is at deep odds with the lordship of Jesus Christ, the one who claimed, “I am the way” (John 14:6) and who calls his disciples to “Come, follow me”

I don’t believe we modern Christians should always be comfortable with thinking of our God as an absolute monarch. It goes against important values I insist we should still cherish, even if those values have been given to us more by modern liberalism than by traditional religion, values such as equality, freedom, and democracy.

If all were equally redeemed by Christ, if all were equally beloved of God, then what of the hierarchies on which the functioning of even the humblest Roman household depended? Paul, in giving his answer, betrayed a certain ambivalence. Certainly, he refuted any notion that the divine justice promised to those baptised in the name of Christ might