16 September 2014 A.D. Mars Hill & Mark Driscoll: Cautionary Tales from the Enron of American Churches
16 September 2014
A.D. Mars Hill & Mark Driscoll: Cautionary
Tales from the Enron of American Churches
Asghar, Rob. “Mars Hill: Cautionary Tales From The Enron Of American Churches.” Forbes. 16 Sept 2014. http://www.forbes.com/sites/robasghar/2014/09/16/mars-hill-cautionary-tales-from-the-enron-of-american-churches/. Accessed 20 Sept 2014.
Mars
Hill: Cautionary Tales From The Enron Of American Churches
In life, blowhards and
bullies will inevitably rise up and do their thing. In the field of management,
they tend to rise up and do it with extra frequency and impact. And in
religious organizations, they can often do it with maximum impact, because the
whole enterprise is usually founded on the notion of absolute authority.
Mark Driscoll, one of the
nation’s most prominent and celebrated pastors, may be the newest and best
example of this. He is the toxic leader du jour, though he has stepped away
from leadership temporarily to navigate massive waves of accusations that have
flowed into his Mars Mars Hill multi-campus megachurch based in Seattle.
The Seattle Times’
Craig Welch, in a major examination last weekend, detailed Mars Hill’s investigation into allegations
that Driscoll “bullied members, threatened opponents, lied and oversaw mismanagement
of church funds.” Oh, and he apparently plagiarized to boot.
A reading of Welch’s
expose and the remarkably thorough analyses of blogger Warren Throckmorton help explain the leader’s dramatic fall from grace.
My goal isn’t to offer a
finely balanced, objective assessment of Mars Hill that would satisfy both
Driscoll’s critics and his supporters. That’s not even possible, frankly.
Rather, my goal to explain some of the Enron-like dynamics that result in leaders becoming media darlings and being celebrated
widely as the “smartest” or “best” people in the room, even when there are
hints that a spectacular flameout is possible.
There are some insights
and lessons we can draw from this mess. It’s a reminder that, the bigger they
come, the harder they fall. Some organizations are more wired than others for
spectacular success or spectacular failure. Nondenominational
megachurches are one example. They often can be free-wheeling, Wild West-style
operations, unencumbered by national bureaucracies. That frees them to respond
to grow quickly … or to grow malignantly.
Gautaum Mukunda, author of
Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter, has noted that most leaders in most industries are “filtered” by a sorting-and-screening system specific to
their profession. But a few are “unfiltered,” and may get into a major
leadership job without first being scrutinized as closely. The latter,
unfiltered leaders are what he calls “extreme leaders”—the game changers, for
better and for worse. But in most cases, the nutjobs and the geniuses
are alike filtered out by the system.
Sure, narcissists do still
slip through the Byzantine bureaucratic nets of the traditional, vanilla-esque
mainline denominations. But the ones that slip through are like tunas, not
sharks or killer whales or Driscolls.
The Mars Hill case also
reminds us that Caesar-style leaders usually set their organizations up for
glory—and then for civil war. When Julius Caesar accumulated too much power,
the good-intentioned desire among some leaders to restore true republican rule
resulted instead in the end of republican rule and a few years of bloodshed.
You see that dynamic again and again, from Caesar’s own time, to Penn State in
the wake of Joe Paterno’s firing two seasons ago and Mars Hill today.
Personality cults end badly, because anyone objective finds themselves mauled
by loyalists trying to hold the cult together. (Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer remains a pivotal resource for understanding the
motivations of cult-type personalities, who often have their entire identities
fused into their nation, organization or holy cause.)
Cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do you no good/When the levee breaks,
mama, you got to move. –Led Zeppelin, When the Levee Breaks, 1971
With toxic leaders, there
are no happy endings, no matter how hard you pray. You just have to move on.
That may seem especially sad to those Mars Hill congregants who want Driscoll
to undergo a disciplinary process so that that a newly mature, repentant and
humbled version of himself might someday take the pulpit.
But a number of
psychologists have told me that the truly toxic leaders, the ones who manage to
cause trouble on the scale of a Driscoll, are tragically irredeemable as
managers. Oftentimes, the disciplining process only teaches them new ways to
exploit the system while pretending to obey it. (Bear in mind that Driscoll
himself has been claiming for years that he’s been making progress on his
shortcomings.)
Sure, there may be
redemption stories for toxic leaders, but those usually involve them learning
to relieve their stress through knitting, by adopting a rescue dog, or by
finding some way to be of productive service without being in charge of large
budgets and large communities.
I’ll close with a little
more on my own biases and agendas: I’m driven by a strong revulsion for the
bullying and sociopathy that happen far too often within the world of management,
even within noble religious and spiritual organizations—again, especially
for such organizations, because they’re founded on absolute authority models.
It’s not my foremost concern to figure out exactly what Mark Driscoll
“deserves”; rather my concern is to call attention to how these sorts of
dynamics keep popping up endlessly, as if they’d never happened before. (Oh,
and here I’m paraphrasing Willa Cather, in an effort to not get nailed for
plagiarism the way Driscoll did.)
Mars Hill’s story is far
from finished. It need not end up being another Enron. But it does face
enormous challenges to recover any sense of health and stability.
Rob Asghar is the author of the newly
released Leadership Is Hell, with
all proceeds supporting programs to increase college access for
under-served youth in the Los Angeles area.
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