Unhealthy Leadership: Alone on an Island of Recognition with Flatterers and no Frank Friends

From Katelyn  Beaty's book: Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits are Hurting the Church. Celebrity--defined as social power without proximity--has led to abuses of power, the cultivation of persona, and a fixation on profits and numbers.

A top leader creates a spirit of fear around them. They demand and require – sign an NDA up front [explicitly or implicitly] – not to talk in public about what happens inside. The dynamics of the demand reveal a contrast between what's seen on the outside--during Sunday worship services and major conference retreats--and the reality behind closed doors. This elevates the persona of the leader in the church's culture. Worse yet, it stunts the leader's growth.

Such leaders attract others who gain identity by proximity to the persona/person, and who gain glory by that association. So they love taking pictures with the leader, for that elevates the person. Which means the persona intoxicates others into the inner circle – it becomes a culture of propping up the persona.

Such leadership turns a person into a persona without close relationships. Plutarch wrote an important essay on this that contrasted flatterers with frankness, the latter being what those top leaders need the most – BUT those leaders have personalities that push away frankness. Personas like this "feel love" in the adoration of the crowds, but adoration is not love. What they need are frank friends. Most of these persona types push frank friends off the stage, they discredit them, they gossip about them to others, they manipulate others to discredit them and before long the person they needed — a frank friend — is gone.

Such leaders are alone on an "island of recognition." experience the paradox of loneliness. That is, surrounded by people but no one to love or who loves them because they have become isolated from others. They "The more that people know of you, the less that people can know you."

"Character splitting" means one person in church and another in real life. In some ways this is inevitable; in another sense it becomes dangerous to personal formation. The deeper the persona becomes the more exhausting it becomes to live up to those expectations. And right here is where burnout happens. It is emotionally and psychologically exhausting to maintain one's persona when it is at a distance from one's true self.

Becoming dangerously narcissistic. "Dangerous" because narcissism and gospel Christoformity are polar opposites. Good brief sketches of narcissism are grandiosity, lack of empathy, yearning for adoration, and broken relationships. "The narcissist doesn't know who they are apart from what others reflect back to them" [which is why they are unable to take any frank criticism] and they are "terrified to step away."

Ecclesiastical loners. Local church autonomy is the magnet that attracts them because they can be "their own man" and "do their own thing" and "do what they want." They cannot be challenged or questioned. It becomes "their way or the highway." So, "if you don't like it, you can leave."