Disciplecy

    Monarchy, democracy, autocracy, bureaucracy, meritocracy. All of these words end in the letters “c-r-a-c-y,” which are based on the Greek word “kratos,” which means “rule.” Monarchy is rule by one person. Democracy is rule by the people. Autocracy is rule by oneself (the person on top). Bureaucracy is rule by a committee. Meritocracy is rule by the deserving.

    The problem is the word “rule.” To rule means to tell other people what to do.  Democracy means that the people can tell you what to do. Eventually, in a democracy, what the people tell you to do can feel pretty much the same as what the monarch would tell you to do.

    Pardon my christianity, but Jesus said “You have only one teacher. All of you are learners.” The word “disciple” comes from the Latin word “to learn.” To learn is to change your mind. Jesus’s last words in the gospel of Matthew were “Go and make disciples of all nations.” He didn’t say “Go and rule all nations.”  He said, “Go and make learners of all nations.” Make learners of all people. Make all people open to changing their minds. Don’t rule them.

    So, I suggest the word “disciplecy,” pronounced di-si-ple-see. Take away the word “rule.” Disciplecy means learning how to live with other people. Learning how to live with other people means being ready to change your mind. The purpose of a disciplecy is not to tell people who should rule over them. It is to help people live together without killing each other.

The Roman Catholic Church

    I was born into a Roman Catholic family, so the story of the Roman Catholic Church has been a lifelong interest for me. Roman Catholic traditions have been too much shaped by Roman Empire traditions—canon law has the last word about everything. Popes down through the years have looked more like emperors than learners.

    The Catholic Church under the recently deceased Pope Francis engaged in a group process labeled “synodality.” The word “synod” is an ancient term for a gathering of church people to discuss things. The purpose of synodality is to get church people to learn from one another, starting with the pope. It is to get people to change their minds about what God wants, starting with the pope.

    The most recent synod was a three-year process beginning with getting people’s opinions on the grass-root level, letting the opinions migrate toward some kind of consensus, and ending with month-long meetings of representatives from all over the world. They met in a hall with round tables at which all the participants sat as equals, listening to each other, with electronic devices to deal with the variety of languages. Even Pope Francis sat at one of the round tables. They were there to learn from one another.

    When democracy really works, it is more like a disciplecy, people meeting to figure out how to live together in some kind of peace. They make rules, but the rules are hammered out by people changing their minds about what is a good way to get something done.  

    One problem we have is that our democratic gatherings tend to evolve into techniques for telling other people what they should do. They become “cratic,” focused on rule, rather than on how to live together. They get involved in collecting and distributing money taken from other people, which can be used to tell those people what to do. They become empires focused on amassing power rather than tools for living together.

    The same thing happens with our business organizations. In the capitalist dream, an entrepreneur comes up with a new way of doing something, struggles competitively with other people trying to do the same thing, and the result benefits everybody. In our world, the entrepreneur gets bought out by a bigger competitor, who gets bought out by a still bigger competitor, until we have a capitalist empire where the emperor tells everybody else what to do.

    Our country has become an empire ruled by emperors, both political and economic. Some emperors are not bad, like Caesar Augustus. Others, like Nero, are not so good.

    Democracy is not the best word for what we want, both in religion and in politics. We would do better to call it disciplecy.

 

 

Respect

    In sociology, which I used to teach, you need operational definitions. You need to be able to observe things, and even to put a number on what you are observing. If you want to study poverty, you have to have an operational definition of poverty, something you can measure.

    For years I looked for an operational definition of love. We really need that. How can men and women who call themselves followers of Jesus treat other men and women with disrespect and violence? They say, “Any talk about love is just romantic dreaming.”

    I finally found an operational definition of love. It has three or four terms, but I will just focus on one: respect. The first part of love is respect.

    Respect is observable. With a little work you could measure it.  

    Roy Webb, in his recently published book “How to Lead a School District through a Pandemic,” was describing how he did his job as superintendent of Quincy Public Schools. On page 140 he writes: “Respect is key. In the military we salute when we see others in the military out of respect. Respect is 360 degrees. You respect your boss, your peers, and your subordinates.”

    Dennis Williams, one of the founders of Bella Ease, used to tell young people not to use the N-word. When a white person uses the word addressing a black person, you have disrespect, and he did not want young people to use the word on anybody, white or black. Using it can make it easier to treat people with disrespect.  

    The F-word is a word of disrespect. The fact that it has become so common is a sign that we are getting used to treating each other disrespectfully.

    Without respect we cannot even begin to love.

    Every single human being, young, old, male, female, criminal or innocent, deserves respect, needs respect, because every single human being has dignity and needs love.

    Any form of violence is disrespectful. We cannot show love by intentionally hurting someone else. There are times when we have to cause pain—for example, when we have to struggle with someone dear to us over behavior that could destroy our relationship. But the pain is not the purpose. When you start out wanting to hurt, you diminish the dignity of the other person.

    We christians often hear the gospel admonition that we should love one another. We should love one another as Jesus loved us. Jesus never used violence against another person. Even when he was driving money changers out of the temple, he was not hitting the money changers.

    We can measure the extent to which we are a christian society by measuring the extent to which we treat every one of our neighbors with respect.

 [published in Muddy River News, January 18, 2026]