As you can tell by the title, Playing God is an apology for power while being honest about the dark side of power. According to Andy when power is lovingly used it is a creative force for human flourishing. And you really can't escape having power. You just have a choice in how you use it. Best to take honest inventory of your power and to use it for creative and loving purposes.
I agree with this, but there were times in Playing God where Andy's use of the label power is so vague and diluted that the insights can reduce to banalities. In Playing God power is often just a synonym for human activity, any and all human activity. For example, Andy describes playing a musical instrument as a form of power.
But if (just about) any human activity is an expression of power then the moral directive of the book gets a bit watered down: do good things rather than bad things when you act.
All that to say, I think the book would have been improved by a better analysis of power.
Reading Playing God I couldn't help but try to get specific and model some of these dynamics. What do we mean by power?
Thinking along with Andy in Playing God I kept coming back to two things--capacity/ability and opportunity/freedom. To have power is to have the ability or capacity to do something. But that's not all you need. You also need the freedom and opportunity to exercise that capacity.
Power, then, is the overlap between capacity and opportunity. If you have both you have power in that sphere.
A sketch of this:
With this model in hand we can think of empowerment as having three foci:
A second aspect of empowerment is increasing opportunity. For example, you might have some very capable and talented people but if they lack access or opportunity they will not be able to exercise power or influence. These people have been "shut out."
Generally, empowerment focused on capacities tends to be agent-based. We invest in people. By contrast, empowerment focused on opportunities tends to be structure-based. We reconfigure structures to create access.
To use some historical examples regarding the empowerment of women and African-Americans in the history of the US. Allowing women to go to college or eliminating racial school segregation to improve education is empowerment-via-capacities, investing in the person. Allowing women and African-Americans access to the vote is empowerment-via-structures, allowing people to have influence where they had been previously shut out.
A final aspect of empowerment is bringing capacities and opportunities into greater alignment. Mentoring and modeling is an example of this. Opportunities exist and the person is able, but he or she needs direction, encouragement and exemplars to follow to get everything lined up to maximum effect. You might not know you could do something until someone casts the vision or dream for you. "I believe in you, you can do this," is, perhaps, the greatest form of empowerment there is.
All told, then, when capacities and opportunities come into greater and greater alignment the person has more and more power, an increased ability to affect and influence the world. For good or ill.
Returning back to Playing God, one of Andy's key points is in how we should use our power to give others more power. We use our power to increase human flourishing. Mapping that notion onto the model I've sketched here is what Andy's idea might look like:
On the bottom is a more powerful person. Large capacities and large opportunities Incidentally, a large opportunity circle is a model of what we call "privilege." For example, being a white male I have opportunities and locations of influence that others don't have. My opportunity circle is large relative to, say, that of a woman of color.
With these large areas of capacity and opportunity you can see how the more powerful person is operating out of a large center of power.
Above is a less powerful person, a person with fewer capacities and opportunities and, thus, a smaller center of power.
(A note. For simplicity I've portrayed the circles of capacities and opportunities as the same size. That's rarely the case. One circle can be larger than the other. Consider, again, the issue of privilege. A woman of color might have a capacity circle as large as mine or larger. But compared to me--a white male--she has a much smaller opportunity circle, reducing her power despite her significant abilities.)
The loving use of power that Andy envisions it is, then, the powerful person using his or her greater power to empower the less powerful person via the three routes of empowerment. That is, using your power you can invest in the capacities of others, increase the opportunities of others, or work to bring these into greater alignment (to catalyze and actualize the power of the other).
To give an example using an issue I care about: empowering women in the church.
As I've argued before, when men in the church use their power to inhibit women from expanding their capacities and/or opportunities we have an example of disempowerment, what Jesus calls "lording over." By contrast, the empowerment of women comes when men use their power to increase both the capacities and opportunities of women in the church.
For example, you increase the teaching and preaching capacities of women in the church by providing young women teaching and preaching experiences so that they might become better teachers and preachers. You help women cultivate their Spirit-filled gifts.
Then, downstream, you give these women the opportunity to preach and teach.
In a similar way, I think Christian universities desiring to empower women should attend to opportunities as well as to capacities. I think a lot of Christian universities think it's sufficient to enroll and grant MDiv degrees to women without attending to the opportunities to preach (or lack thereof) that exist in the churches. To be sure, Christian universities can't tell churches what to do, but Christian universities can start conversations, begin initiatives, and shape the imaginations of the next generation of church planters. Christian universities can also create opportunities in allowing women to preach at events hosted by the school. This is one reason why in my own tradition I'm a strong supporter of the One Voice for Change initiative in asking our universities to invite women to deliver Keynote sermons at our Bible Lectureships.
In doing all this, in increasing both capacities and opportunities, you empower women in the church. An empowerment that leads, per Crouch's analysis, to the creative flourishing of women and the church. Where everyone is using their power to empower others.
