Boersma's Insights on Hierarchy & Modern Authoritarianism - Robin Mark Phillips

Discipleship is the path to true spiritual authority.

Today’s tastes may run to egalitarianism, but across history and cultures the only way to organize humanity, and get things done, has been through some level of command and control within a formal hierarchy. We are probably hard-wired to respond to this pattern. The pyramid can be made flatter or steeper, and a matrix of informal networks is invari

Local churches need to think through how they can develop a philosophy of ministry that will do just that. Depth with God is the way of holistic discipleship.

church and its leadership need to speed up and create “disruptive innovation,” a view that the “best” change comes from radically shifting the ways we act in the world by inventing something new (like products, programs, practices). Such a claim about disruptive innovation can be made only by narrowing one’s vision and not examining the effects of

hierarchy? In Baptistic fellowships, in theory (though often not in practice), the congregation holds the final authority. Would this mean that complementarians should make sure that men are always in a majority among the voting membership but that women could be pastors?

Without realizing it, too many leaders assume that the role of leadership is to control. They espouse Plato’s “division of labor,” which, according to social thinker Hannah Arendt, has influenced government and military structures for thousands of years.