A Preacher Kid’s Tale of Amipotence
By Johan Tredoux
Amipotence not only describes God’s action but is the model for us when we encounter personal, institutional, and national trauma.
In the foothills of beautiful mountains lies a sleepy town called Rustenburg, 60 miles from Johannesburg in the Rep. of South Africa. In Afrikaans, Rustenburg means “town of rest.” I have fond memories of my growing-up years in this town. This is where I learned to swim in the cold mountain streams called “the cliff.” I ran track, played rugby, and, wearing a school uniform, walked barefoot to school every day. My dad was the pastor of a small Nazarene church plant. We lived in the parsonage right next door to the church, and the street name of my home address was Church Street. A block away was a prominent Dutch Reformed church. Life in Rustenburg was outdoors with “Braai’s” (barbeques) and Rugby and Cricket competitions every weekend. Food from the Malayan, Indian, and British cultures blended with Dutch cuisine to bring multiple flavors to the plate. I still remember the avocado, guava, orange, and lemon trees lining the backyard and passion fruit growing wild on the fence, marking the perimeters of our fenced-in property.
And yet, for all the good going on in this town, this town had a dark side. It was an aspect shared with every other city in South Africa. When you drove into town during the daytime, it was not so obvious. Everyone was getting on with their routines, and life seemed normal. That is until the clock struck 9 p.m. It was one of the most predictable occurrences in this small town. Every night, right at 9 pm, a siren went off. The tornado warning-like siren was the scream of apartheid. This siren signaled that all those whose skin color was black had to leave the white areas and go to the locations outside of town, known as “townships.” If caught, those without a “pass” (an identity card needed to be in a white area after 9 pm) were jailed and sometimes had to wait two weeks to get a hearing. If you were not a white Caucasian, the anticipation of the clock ticking up to 9 pm must have been a dreaded experience.
What made this night traumatic and especially memorable was the sound of screeching tires and a corresponding thump sound coinciding with the piercing siren, all happening precisely at 9 pm in front of our house. I soon learned that the thump was the sound of a car hitting our dog “Voetjies,” right as the siren of apartheid blared through the town. Voetjies was instantly killed, and the fact that it happened at the same time as the siren burned into my nine-year-old psyche the dark side of this apparently “normal” town.
The siren was not unique to my youth. It also regularly blared every night at 9 pm through Malmesbury (60 miles from Cape Town) when my dad grew up 25 years prior. What was different for my dad was that his parents belonged to a political party that sided with Hitler during WWII. This party was called in Afrikaans the “Ossewa Brandwag,” literally the “Ox Guard,” who, besides their zealous political posture, also sponsored a young men’s drill team (very similar to what Hitler participated in during his youth). This drill team had to dress in khaki-colored uniforms and make the Hitler salute weekly during their drill exercises. The Hitler salute signaled this political party’s attempt to indoctrinate young Afrikaans-speaking men to hate those who were non-white. I still can’t get out of my mind the image of my dad as a young man making the Hitler salute on the drill grounds of Malmesbury, all with the encouragement of his parents. Here, we touch the very nerve center of the apartheid system … the brainwashing of the youth of South Africa to label and depersonalize those who were non-white.
Drill parades happened on Saturday, and then on Sunday, the whole family took their place in the Dutch Reformed Church, where apartheid and racism were biblically enforced by referring to the black people as the cursed offspring of Noah’s son Ham. In the providence of God, via the Noah story, the all-powerful God ordained the servanthood of black people, and those of Caucasian descent saw themselves as God’s agents to make sure that this supposedly biblical curse remained intact. Of course, the church conveniently overlooked that God promised in Genesis 12 to bless all people through Abraham. Stuck in an old world of prejudice and racism, every Sunday, my dad and grandparents were religiously brainwashed with mantras coming from the pulpit… “God is in control,” and the familiar phrase: “Everything happens for a reason.”
As my dad grew up in the church, he was assured he was part of the elect. The God presented to him was Omnipotent, a God who is all-powerful and decreed outcomes from a distance. It kept things sterile, where people merely fulfilled certain “religious” functions in an impersonal way. Labeling people and writing them off was easy in this atmosphere. The message was clear: this is how things are… why mess with how God ordained society? The Afrikaans word describing this dark secret of prejudice and racism was the word “apartheid.” An Afrikaans word meaning “separate development.”
The trauma of my puppy being killed right at 9 pm as the siren blared had no moral equivalency to the suffering of my black African neighbors under the oppressive system of apartheid. The pressure of apartheid placed tremendous pressure on us as a Nazarene parsonage family to live out the Wesleyan message of Christlike love. As beneficiaries of the apartheid system, with black servants keeping our yard and cleaning our home, we were caught in the tug of-war of institutional racism. Thomas Jay Oord describes the harm that can come when societies are structured with the authority of an Omnipotent God. He wrote:
Worshipping God as omnipotent confuses, disempowers, and harms. This injury is clearest when believers struggle to make sense of pain and suffering, whether they experienced it themselves or witnessed it in family, friends, or the most vulnerable. Omnipotence directly or indirectly supports political leaders and policies, no matter how oppressive. It stands to reason that an all-powerful God installs or permits the actions of every ruler and authoritarian system.[1]
I am sobered by the realization that our worship of God as omnipotent indirectly caused us to contribute to the political system of apartheid. The emotional process of my life as an Afrikaner in an apartheid society, inside a Nazarene subculture, with yet another layer added as a pastor’s kid, brought many social expectations about race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. Much of it was conditional love saturated with prejudice. As the second-born, I had a restless spirit, constantly fluctuating between head and heart. These polarities were evident as I had trouble integrating the two information streams at the different levels. The sociological experiment of apartheid and propositional Christianity created polarizing extremes, which made it hard for me to incorporate the middle and make sense of my world. The polarities were evident as our parsonage family’s explicit and implicit rules did not always align. Emotions were spiritualized and encouraged in the context of worship, but at home, the emphasis was on correct thinking and correct doctrine.
However, shifts were on the way as my dad gradually moved away from the God of will to a God of love. Because of financial pressure, my dad had to let the servants go. My dad completed a B.Th. in Wesleyan theology, which broadened his worldview and increased his emphasis on Christlike love. Unfortunately, this brought resistance in the congregation as my dad started to speak against the apartheid system.
I recall our parsonage backyard; there was no grass, only sand. The camel-colored hot sand lured me to come and lie on my stomach with my chin on my hands interlocked in a giant fist. The sand was like a clean slate, with my right finger becoming chalk, beckoning me to create and express what was going on in my 10-year-old mind. I vividly remember the sensation of the sand between my toes and maneuvering my body to experience the hot sand as I drew imaginary figures in the sand. If I didn’t like my drawing, I just wiped my hand over it and started all over again. The warmth of the hot sand made me feel very grounded. My toes and fingers in the sand were primal to me. It was my body’s way of resetting and stabilizing my equilibrium when my anxiety got the best of me. This was before I knew that if I added three deep breaths to my grounded feet, I could experience my core emotions or calm my anxiety.
I remember this ritual in the sand because I experienced what I would call a moral injury. This injury came at this young age as I heard my mom cry the night before, early in the morning. I recall feeling unsafe and anxious. I later gathered it was over church conflict and my mom and dad being forced to leave after ten years of ministry at this local parish. I did not know it then, but my folks were scapegoated for loving the wrong people. The shift from an omnipotent God to a God of love caused my dad to lose his job.
This was a very traumatic time for me. My assumptions about the world were broken. I assumed that I could trust people who said they loved me. My comforting old assumptive world was gone, and a new one had to be constructed. I recall a feeling of betrayal that stayed with me. It struck at my sense of self and the world as a place capable of goodness. The theological assumptions of my religious world at that time used simple phrases to explain away my very complex emotional and spiritual world. To wash their hands over the consequences, their belief in an omnipotent God caused them to believe that God ordained the forced separation from my parents.
Needless to say, phrases like “God is in control,” “everything happens for a reason,” or “maybe God is teaching us a lesson” do not sit well with me. It has become trigger words for me, bringing old hurts to the surface. Maybe it is because of the trauma and moral injuries hardwired in my body over so many years of being a pastor. Behind my 35 years of pastoring lies a trail of harm, tears, loss, and anger brought on by congregants’ belief in an all-powerful God.
In his new work, The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence, Thomas Jay Oord reminds us that God is not into control but approaches, awakens, or woos us through uncontrolling love. Against the conventional idea of an Omnipotent God, Oord postulates a new alternative view of an Amipotent God.[2] This concept affirms the logical priority of love over power in God’s nature.[3] Amipotence tells the story of a God who is not coercive but woes with love and consent. This God does not operate single-handedly to create specific outcomes but invites us to birth new relational possibilities moment by moment co-operatively. What has helped me heal is anchoring my values in this Amipotent God. A God who doesn’t decree a fixed future already planned but instead takes us seriously in the present and relationally invites us to co-create our future with him, moment by moment, with love and care.
It has also helped me to understand that God couldn’t have single-handedly stopped apartheid. He couldn’t have stopped the siren going off at 9 pm or the trauma I suffered because of the unfair treatment of my parents. Oord wrote,
Whatever is sinful, evil, and promotes ill-being derives from the failure of creatures to cooperate with God. Denying that God is all-powerful also helps us understand why the spirit cannot single-handedly rescue the hurting and harmed. God always works for good, but creatures and creation can frustrate God’s efforts. Creatures may not cooperate.[4]
However, the opposite is also true. When we cooperate with the universal loving Spirit, much good can result. This is profoundly evident in the Dutch Reformed Church’s reversal of its apartheid stance. In 1994, the Dutch Reformed Church (NGK) in South Africa made a public confession that they abused scripture to justify apartheid and that they were wrong. The price paid for this confession was that the moderator of the Synod of the DRC was assassinated four days after this confession by a group called the White Wolfs. It was only after 1994 and the dawning of democracy in South Africa that all South Africans were truly emancipated from slavery. I still have the image of “purple thumbs” being held up to the camera, signaling that fantastic day when thousands of black South Africans voted for the first time.
The Amipotent God is the sand giving way under the pressure of Jesus’ finger as a new story unfolds moment by moment, preventing the stoning of a woman caught in adultery—not death predestined, but love’s power creating new possibilities of justice. It is the story of Moses standing with his toes in the sand before a burning bush, hearing God say, “I am that I am.” It is a picture of the burning bush Amipotent God.
This article is emerging as a reflection of the author’s limbic system being reset and reconnected through self-compassion and mindfulness because of a universal loving Spirit. Toes and fingers in the sand… may the visual image of the Amipotent God ground you as you take three deep breaths… hold it, and then write your own story in the sand.
Bio: Johan Tredoux is a Board-Certified Chaplain (APC), serving as a clinical chaplain for St. Croix Hospice in Overland Park, KS. Johan earned his MDiv. from Nazarene Theological Seminary, KC., MO., and his Ph.D. from the University of Manchester, UK (2015) in Wesleyan Theology. Tredoux is the author of Mildred Bangs Wynkoop: Her Life & Thought (The Foundry Publishing, 2017). He blogs at Uncommon Community (www.uncommoncommunity.info) and loves to fish in the Rocky Mountains.
OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE
Johan Tredoux shares a powerful personal story to illuminate the core ideas of amipotence. His narrative is compelling and exposes the harmful theology often offered in response to trauma—phrases like “God is in control” or “everything happens for a reason.” Johan’s connection between belief in an omnipotent God and apartheid is fitting, as such a God either caused or permitted that evil. In contrast, an amipotent God is never in control in that way and is never responsible for atrocities like apartheid. Amipotence offers a vision of God whose love is always uncontrolling, making far better sense of suffering.
For more on Oord’s view on making sense of God and evil, see this article.
* A drabble is an essay exactly 100 words in length.
[1]. Thomas Jay Oord, The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence (Grasmere, Id.: SacraSage, 2023), 6.
[2]. Amipotent combines two Latin words, ami and potens. The first means “love,” and the second means “power.”
[3]. Oord, The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence, 140.
[4]. Ibid., 142.