You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and to the ends of the earth. Acts 1:8

Empowerment seems to be everywhere these days. You can empower your finances, emotions, leadership, psychic abilities, and inner goddess. You can empower your dog’s mindfulness and your empathetic employees.

Empowerment is widely used to refer to principles that contribute to the agency of individuals and communities to make choices for themselves and determine their own futures. Yet

Empowerment is a contested term. It has been a feature of development work in the Global South for decades.

Empowerment emerged as an approach to raise the self-awareness of women and their education as a key to development. Inspired by Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, empowerment rejected top-down approaches that sought simply to provide increased resources for the poor. If local people, especially women, are given awareness and education, they can be given the power to decide and action their own strategies for the betterment of their communities.

The term empowerment was soon adopted not only by organizations working in the Global South but by the United Nations, making it one of their eight Millennial Goals. The World Bank also embraced the term in structural adjustment programs. But as the definition of empowerment made its way through the global economic and social structures, it became less about power, social change, and communities, and more about western values related to individual freedoms and personal agency.

The key to empowerment is to recognize that it is about power – social and economic power structures. It is about the power of women and people in poverty to change how they see themselves, and also to change the social structures that keep them at the margins. If women in poverty are to be empowered, then they don’t only need external resources, but the support to engage in structural changes that will allow for them to exercise economic and political power in new ways.

Empowerment is a word that the Black church in North America have known for a very long time. In Nova Scotia, Baptist leaders of African descent saw the Church as their place of freedom, dignity, and liberation. William and Pearleen Oliver lobbied government to have the schools leave their heat and lights on into the evenings so that people could engage in night classes to improve their learning and widen opportunities. William worked with his brother Don Oliver to establish co-ops where people of African descent could access the means to purchase their own homes. Pearleen singlehandedly managed to convince nursing schools to take on Black women as students for the first time. Together they mentored a generation of political and educational leaders who have changed the economic and social situation for many African Nova Scotian descendants in the province. Many echo the empowering words that were passed on to them, “There is nothing you cannot do!”

This is empowerment. And it was so profoundly impactful because it wasn’t driven simply by a good social idea. It was transformative because people were taught to see who they were through God’s eyes. They knew Jesus. They had the Holy Spirit.

When Jesus told the disciples that they would receive power from the Holy Spirit and be sent out into the world with the Good News, they were being granted a new status. These largely uneducated, socially marginalized people were given the ability to see themselves in a new light. They were able to see how God saw them. Jesus befriended them, taught them, and encouraged them, so they were theologically educated leaders. But this was only the first step of external preparation for something greater to come.

Receiving the Holy Spirit changed them in their very nature. They were now vessels of the living God. There was no racist structure or unjust hierarchy that could marginalize them that they couldn’t challenge. They were in a new day of equal dignity and equal standing before God. There was no authority so great that they couldn’t stand confidently in the place where God called them to be under Christ’s lordship. There could be no division as there was one Spirit, who made them into a new community. Godself was in them. None were too poor, too crushed, too excluded to be entrusted with the shining treasure of the gospel. This is empowerment. And it changes everything. Every structure, every community, every person, is transformed.

As Canadian Baptists, how do we live into that transformation?

When we support Canadian Baptist Ministries, we do it knowing that we empower global communities with resources, trusting local people to discern the mind of Christ in their midst and to approach problems from that perspective. Leaders receive theological education, women and girls are given fresh opportunities. We support education and enterprise, with the expectation that the Holy Spirit who empowers God’s people will be a social and spiritual change agent in their midst.

For us in Canada, we also can grasp the significance of empowerment as the Holy Spirit indwells us and our communities. When the Kingdom of God is present empowerment is for everybody.

Historically, Canadian Baptists have been hesitant to actively challenge economic or social structures, unless it had a direct impact on our lives as Christians. I wonder if we have grown comfortable in this quietist frame, awakening from our social slumber only when the Church is experiencing a perceived threat at the door. Perhaps we ourselves are the threat, barricading the door against the world, and frustrating the work of the Spirit who longs to move us from the pulpit and pew to Tim’s and tent cities.

Today we are invited as the Church to not only provide resources for people who are in need, but to go about the work of tearing down dividing walls, as the Olivers did. This means not accepting the structures inside the Church that prevent people from meeting Jesus and flourishing in faith, nor external structures that keep people in poverty, without clean water or adequate shelter, unseen, and unreconciled. For if the Holy Spirit is truly indwelling us, then the power of resurrection is available to see the whole of life transformed.

I wonder if we dare to be empowered.