Empowering Others: The Holy Spirit, Power, and Resources

Acts 1:8 and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost makes for great reflections on the leadership capacity of empowering others. Empowering is primarily a leader trait, but followers can engage in empowering behaviors also. Primarily, the ability to “empower” comes from access to power.

Power is sometimes seen as a negative word within church leadership contexts. However, every human social dynamic contains a negotiation of power and influence. Even the text from Acts 1:8 speaks of God giving us (the Church) power in and through and by the Holy Spirit. Power could be simply defined as the ability to succeed in a task.

This is helpful for leadership. Primarily, leaders have power because leaders have resources—and resources allow us to succeed in a task. However, followers can also have power. When we think of power as broadly understood in the leadership literature, we can name at least four types of power identified by French and Raven (1959/2016): coercive power, legitimate power, expert power, and referent power. Raven (2008) also identified informational power. It’s easy to understand how a follower can have expert power, referent power, or informational power (and sometimes have more power in these areas than the positional leader).

However, predominantly, leaders have more power simply because they have more organizational resources. But this is precisely where a leader can engage in positive, healthy forms of leadership empowerment. Namely, the capacity to empower revolves around a person’s ability to resource others with the tools they need to succeed.

This is exactly how Jesus empowered His followers, the Church in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Indeed, 2 Peter 1:3 shows how God gives us power:

“His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence.” — NASB

God rightly supplies us with everything we need to succeed. Similarly, successful empowerment relies on supplying others with the resources they need to succeed.

Boa et al. (2007) advocated,

“Delegating authority without resources does not automatically empower others. Leaders can, however, supply the resources and create the conditions that allow people to develop the power they need to do their jobs. Effective leaders think in terms of ‘enablement’ and ‘freedom' in order to empower their followers” (p. 280).

What about Followers?

Followers can play an important role in empowering behaviors also, even though followers often have less resources. Specifically, followers can often have more expert power, informational power, or even more referent power than the positional leader. Toxic followers can choose to reject the capacity of empowering and can create harmful dynamics within a team or relationship.

For instance, a narcissistic follower who does not have positional power or assigned authority within the organization but does have access to other forms of power and resources can easily begin undermining the assigned leader. Bad followers can choose to withhold information. Followers can also refrain from sharing their area of expertise or choose to influence others through their expert power outside of the positional leader’s authority. Narcissistic followers who already have referent power and become opposed to their positional leader can easily amass a following of their own and effectively undermine the established leader. Absalom acted in this way toward his father David in 2 Samuel 13-18.

But what about healthy followers who happen to be following unhealthy leaders?

Healthy followers have additional responsibility in the leadership capacity of empowering and empowerment when their assigned positional leader is unhealthy or is leading in toxic ways. Even though followers in this situation may feel tempted to undermine the leader and begin amassing power of their own, the God-honoring approach would be to choose humility just as Jesus (Phil. 2).

Healthy followers who maintain consistent Christian character even amid bad leaders are especially pleasing to God (Matt. 5:11-13). Also, emerging leaders can grow tremendously in their capacity to empower by understanding the dynamics of empowerment from a follower’s perspective during a strained time, such as a bad leader scenario.

For instance, followers with information can choose to empower their leaders with that information, praying for the leader’s success. Followers with expert power can continue offering their skills to the service of the leader’s vision (so long as the vision remains ethical). Even if the leader dismisses the offer of the follower, the follower can still choose to continue growing in their ability to contribute positively to the team and the organization. Followers with referent power can make the conscious choice to humble themselves and choose a path of love rather than usurping revenge. These followers may even choose to publicly submit to the leader (in appropriate and honest ways) so that others can see unity (as much as possible).

Ultimately, God is the master at empowering. It should regularly amaze us that God chose to empower us, the Church through the Holy Spirit with all the resources we need to succeed in the Missio Dei. It should amaze us that Jesus gave more attention to developing His followers than to developing the masses. It should compel us to seek God for grace to imitate the image of God and grow in this capacity to empower.

References

Boa, K. (2020). Conformed to his image: Biblical, practical approaches to spiritual formation (Revised edition). Zondervan Academic.

French, J. R. P., & Raven, B. (2016). The bases of social power. In J. M. Shafritz, J. S. Ott, & Y. S. Jang (Eds.), Classics of organization theory (Eighth edition, pp. 251–260). Cengage Learning. (Original work published 1959).

Raven, B. H. (2008). The bases of power and the power/interaction model of interpersonal influence. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 8(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1530-2415.2008.00159.x