On Sunday, Trevor and I will teach the third session of our “Habits for Leaders: course at Yardley Wood Baptist Church. It’s the same session I taught the the group meeting at the Agape office on Dec 12th, and we have begun to talk of this session as the very centre and heartbeat of the course. One of the questions we ask in this session is “What is your view of God?” and it taps right into the question I left hanging in my previous blog entry. Contemporary British society has a tendency to swing between two poles. Either God is a powerful ruler (as he clearly was in the pre-modern era) or God is unnecessary and possibly even non-existent (as he became in the 19th and 20th centuries).  The question I posed in January was – is my wellbeing not wholly dependent on God’s choices?  Why did I say only “in part”?  The “wholly” idea fits well with God as powerful ruler.  It makes him the master and me the slave.  And yes, that language is used in the bible.  Yet why do many people – including us from time to time on our website rail against slavery as dehumanising.  True, slavery does have a high point, and there is something beautiful about a slave totally bonkers for his/her lord and master, willingly and eagerly obeying out of love and devotion.  But when it reaches this high point, it begins to subvert the institution itself.  It renders the idea of the powerful ruler with an iron grip unnecessary.  Indeed it is this slaveowner perception of God which so turned off the free thinkers of the enlightenment, for the church should have grown out of its iron grip mentality by then, and the world grew weary waiting.  Jesus in John 15 is seen to unpack the progression from slavery to friendship as it ought to run.  The question we leave our Habits participants with is this: how can I be truly myself yet remain deeply connected to another?  God does not want my personality , my choices, my longings, my dreams, my desires or the prayers which arise from deep in my soul to be squashed under his superior fatherly wisdom.  He wants us to grow up to be his friends and companions so that my wellbeing is also dependent on my choices, and dare I say it, his wellbeing is in part dependent on mine too.  I cannot see true relationship having it any other way.  He has already shown us his vulnerability publicly and plainly.  We may think he is daft to put his wellbeing in our hands.  We may think we really can’t be trusted that much.  But that’s what he did, and I find it hard to suppose that he has stopped.