Listening authority

Brock notes that the root of worship is the church’s common trust in the Word that calls them. Worship is a school in trust, where the church listens for God’s word to them. Worship develops a taste for trust in communication, and thus subverts the subversive suspicions of our culture.

In good Lutheran fashion, Brock insists that the church is not divided into a teaching clergy and a listening laity. The whole community exists to listen, is constituted by listening, and even the authorities of the church are listening authorities. He notes that “Christian faith promotes governance with a taste for the personal contact of discipleship, listening, and rethinking, and exists as a public body that has learned these skills and can model them in political life.”

Such listening authority runs against the grain of modern political life. It especially bumps against “authority conceived as strategic planning” that “seeks a panoptic view from which every resource can be seen, digitized, and efficiently deployed.” In short, “Strategy turns humans into inanimate tools of a few decision makers who must assume there need by no hearing of those they will set in motion. Hearing as a political skill will become an increasingly difficult task as the judgment and listening of old-style authorities are displaced in an age of strategy.” Brock thinks that the church’s adoption of strategic modes of leadership are a sell-out to the world.