Part 2 FOLLOWING THE THREAD

FOLLOWING THE THREAD — A SERIES ON AUTHORITY, PROPHECY & CHURCH LIFE

Article 2 of 9

What If Authority Looked Like This?

When I first started following this thread, one of the things I kept circling back to was a question that sounds simple but turns out to be surprisingly rich: what does authority actually look like in the New Testament? Not what we've assumed, or inherited, or gradually constructed around us, but what does it actually look like when you sit with the Bible texts slowly and let them breathe?

What I found was genuinely encouraging. Authority in the New Testament is real. It exists, it matters, and it's not a problem to be solved or a concept to be suspicious of. But it has a very particular shape. And that shape, once you see it, feels quite different from some of what we've experienced or imagined, and honestly, it seems far more liveable.

It all starts in the same place

Matthew 28:18. Jesus, risen, was standing with the people he loves and he said: "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me." So that's all of it. It's His. And that's the incontestable foundation and it's also the first point of clarification. If all authority belongs to Christ, then whatever authority operates in the church is, at best, a delegation. Something given for a purpose, bounded by that purpose, and always answerable to the One who gave it.

Paul picks this up in Ephesians 1, describing Christ as raised and seated far above every rule, authority, power and dominion and then given as head over all things to the church. So the authority structure of heaven has Christ at its centre. Everything else is underneath that, in service of it.

This isn't abstract theology. It's not a token acknowledgment or just something we say. It's actually the very architecture of everything else I hope we can ponder together.

When authority flows from Christ and looks like Christ, it can't be something to wield and it becomes a responsibility we're invited to steward.

What that means in practice

If all authority belongs to Christ, then none of us, whether we're leaders, apostles, prophets, or elders, hold authority in our own right. What we hold is responsibility. A bounded, accountable, relational responsibility for specific people in a specific context. That's not nothing. It is significant. But it's a different thing from possessing authority, or claiming it as though it was ours by virtue of gifting or title or anointing.

Paul is one of the most striking voices on this. He's an apostle, with possibly the strongest claim to apostolic authority in the New Testament, and he writes to the church in Corinth: "Not that we lord it over your faith, but we work with you for your joy." He's not being falsely modest here. He's describing what apostolic authority actually looks like when it's functioning as it should. It works with. For joy. Not over, not directing from above, but alongside, for the flourishing of others.

1 Peter 5:2–3  Be shepherds of God's flock... not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock.

Peter says something similar to elders. Not lording over but being examples. The authority of the shepherd isn't administrative power. It's the weight of a life lived well in front of others. It's earned through relationship and faithfulness, not asserted through position.

A word about sonship and identity

There's a thread of teaching that's become quite prominent in charismatic and prophetic-apostolic circles, and I want to address it here, because it connects directly to this question of what authority we actually carry as followers of Jesus.

The teaching centres on sonship. On the fact that through Christ we are adopted into God's family, that we are co-heirs with him, that the Spirit of the Son lives in us, and that this identity gives us a genuine spiritual authority on earth. And honestly, there is something genuinely beautiful and deeply biblical at the heart of all of that. We are beloved sons and daughters of God. We carry the presence and name of Jesus. We are sent as he was sent. We pray and speak with a real authority that comes from him.

I have experienced this. When I'm aligned and tuned to Holy Spirit, when I allow him to speak the heart and mind and word of God through me, there is a quality of faith and authority in that which I can't generate myself and wouldn't want to claim as my own. It's real. It's powerful. And it's a gift I feel entirely dependent on, not a capacity I possess.

I think that dependence is actually the key to understanding where the sonship teaching is true and beautiful, and where it can start to stretch too far.

The authority of a son sent by the Father is real. But it's the authority of a sent one, not the authority of the Sender. That distinction is everything.

The stretch happens at a particular step in the logic. It goes something like this: Jesus has all authority. I am in Christ. Therefore I have all authority, and by extension, authority over circumstances, over principalities, over this territory, over this situation, and sometimes, over other people. The dominion language that sometimes accompanies this teaching follows the same arc.

But the New Testament locates us somewhere more particular than that. We are ambassadors. Witnesses. Representatives. Sent ones. An ambassador speaks with genuine authority and carries real weight, because they represent someone far greater than themselves. But they are not the head of state. They act under authority, in the name of another, and they derive every bit of their standing from that relationship. The moment an ambassador starts acting as though they are the one they represent, something has gone seriously wrong.

Jesus himself is the clearest guide here. "The Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees the Father doing." If that was the operating posture of Jesus, the Son of God in the fullest sense, it's certainly the operating posture for us. The authority is real. It flows through relationship, through attentiveness, through dependence, through faith. What it isn't is a positional entitlement we carry independently of that living connection.

'Christ in me' does mean something extraordinary. But it means Christ living and moving through a surrendered, dependent, human person, not a human person who has absorbed his divine authority as their own. The partnership is real. The distinction between the partners still matters.

When sonship teaching stays close to that dependence, when it grounds our identity in belovedness and our authority in sent-ness, it's genuinely freeing and genuinely powerful. When it slides toward the idea that we possess divine authority as a right of our spiritual identity, it starts doing something quite different. And when it's used to justify authority over other people, it's moved a long way from where it started.

When gifts and roles come together

It's worth pausing here on something that can get genuinely muddled: the relationship between spiritual gifting and recognised leadership authority. Because these are different things, even when they show up in the same person.

Some people carry significant prophetic gifting and also hold recognised leadership roles in the church. Some carry apostolic gifting and have also been entrusted with genuine relational responsibility across a network or community. Some carry more than one gift expression alongside a formal leadership responsibility. None of that is unusual, and none of it is the problem. The New Testament itself gives us leaders who are also teachers, apostles who prophesy, elders who pastor and instruct.

The important distinction is this: the gifting and the authority are still two different things, even when they travel together. The prophetic gift doesn't confer leadership authority. The apostolic gifting doesn't automatically grant governance over others. What grants recognised authority in the New Testament is something else entirely, something slower and more communal.

The letters to Timothy and Titus give us the clearest picture of what that is. When Paul describes who should be recognised as an elder or overseer, the list is almost entirely about character and proven life: someone who is above reproach, faithful in their relationships, self-controlled, hospitable, not given to anger or dishonesty, managing their own household well, holding firmly to sound teaching, with a good reputation among those outside the community. These are qualities observed over time by the people around them. They are recognised, not asserted.

This matters enormously in practice. A person can carry extraordinary prophetic gifting and not yet carry the maturity of character that warrants recognised leadership authority. A person can be genuinely apostolically fruitful and still be in a season where the community around them is still discerning whether the relational trust and proven character are there. Gifting and authority mature at different rates, and wisdom in community holds both without confusing them.

The most sustainable and most biblically faithful communities are ones that honour the gifts freely while entrusting authority carefully, always through the slower, relational, community-discerned process the New Testament describes.

A word especially for leaders

Many of us in leadership have inherited a model that asks more than this. A model that can seem to place us at the top of a spiritual structure, that asks us to be the leading voice of God for our community, to project certainty and strength and spiritual weight in ways that leave little room for our own humanity. That ends up feeling pretty stressful, exhausting and hard.

The fact is, that even if we don't see it that way ourselves, some of the people we lead do, and a dynamic of picking up on projected expectations can develop. A dynamic where we're supposed to have all the answers, the keys, the strategies, the faith and the certainty to settle the community's anxiety in the face of life's complexities.

I want to gently ask: what if the exhaustion might not be a sign of inadequacy or failure, but a sign that the shape simply doesn't fit? That the expectations are not biblically realistic, but are instead shaped more by fear than by Scripture. We can end up trying to carry something the New Testament never asked any one person to carry. In Kingdom culture, leadership is distributed across a whole group of people, held together in mutual love and accountability, so that no one person has to hold it all.

When authority has the shape the New Testament describes, it's actually sustainable. It holds the leader as well as the community. That's the plan.

What if we could get a sense of that shape and leaned back into it? What might change for us, and for the people we lead?

Shape matters. It's where everything starts. And I think some of the tilt we feel in our communities begins right here, with a slightly skewed foundation in how we understand authority itself. Once that's a little off, everything built on top of it carries the lean. So let's look at one of the places where I think the language has drifted furthest, and where returning to the New Testament is most clarifying.

A thought to sit with:  Think about the leaders who've shaped you most healthily. How did they hold authority? What did it feel like to be near it? And how did they seem to carry it themselves?