There is a popular show called Yellowstone that has captured a viewing audience across America. Who isn’t fan of the leading actor Kevin Costner?!? The best way to describe Yellowstone is that it’s a series about a modern-day Mafia family, similar to The Godfather, except with cowboys. As I am writing this, I can hear the iconic theme of the Godfather in my head…datum a dada datum dada datum da…something like that. It is brilliant how screenwriters create tension in these plots with the express purpose of making viewers identify with its characters. Before you know it, you’re cheering for characters who are actually terrible people. We buy into their characters and just accept their narcissistic and murderous behaviors. Viewers of Yellowstone find themselves identifying with the Duttons as their own family and cheering against anyone who is not loyal to them. For example, ranchers who work for this family must be branded with the Yellowstone logo to prove their loyalty. Workers who do not show their loyalty, are taken to the “train station.” This is a place disloyal family members are taken to be killed. The train station is an obscure place where few care to look, somewhere you might get away with murder. Perhaps you have heard the trendy saying, “In a world full of Karens, be a Beth.” This saying is based on a character from Yellowstone. Beth is ruthless and says what she wants to say, acts how she wants to act, and offers no apologies. I have concluded that we love narcissistic people. We applaud them in shows and we love them leading our churches. The church of Yellowstone is a place where you can feel like you belong to something bigger than you, you can identify with charismatic leaders, and you can cheer for them no matter how much they lie, steal, sexually exploit, or slander. It's almost like buying a product produced by forced child labor but everyone puts that detail out of their mind and are happy just paying less for it.
Recently, because of Honest Conversations and podcasts like The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, I have been contacted by courageous leaders that are living and experiencing everything that the church of Yellowstone has to offer. For them the train station really does exist. Pointing out injustice or deciding to leave the church of Yellowstone might mean your pastoral career will come to an abrupt end. So many leaders that are not senior pastors are at the mercy of what their bosses say about them. For Christy and I our season as pastors is over, and I don’t care what people might say about me or my reputation. We have been slandered and lied about and we have proof of it. We may choose to discuss that on another day but for now my concern is to address the sober reality that the church of Yellowstone really does exist. It does not matter to me if people believe this to be true, nor am I concerned about whether or not people are still attending churches with this unhealthy culture. The passion that drives me to write and share this is that when we all wake up from this particular era of church excess, we will not have the excuse that we did not know about it. Also, I want to give hope to those that are starting to recognize that they themselves are in the church of Yellowstone; you can get out and there is something better out there. I am sober enough to understand that there have been pastors who have been caught in multiple adulterous affairs and all they had to do was to start new churches somewhere else… and the people followed. How many current pastors remain in positions of leadership regardless of having kissed their assistant, abused their spouse, stolen money, sexually harassed and still at the church of Yellowstone they are applauded. Just like instances discussed in The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, anyone who says anything about these misdeeds will find themselves immediately being ostracized with the understanding that the train station is next.
Outside the church, there are systems in place to hold people in powerful positions accountable. For example, when a lawyer acts inappropriately for unethical or criminal conduct they may get disbarred. Disbarment is when a lawyer is removed from a bar association and no longer can practice law. This is not the case for most lead pastors or for upper echelon church leaders. It’s quite the opposite. A talented lead pastor can control the narrative of whatever happens at his church and is empowered by the bully pulpit. For me and my family, when we brought our concerns to the lead pastor and confronted him about lying about us, he denied us the opportunity to speak to the board/council, and to present our story to the church body. Our lead pastor decided on a final date for our employment at the church and we agreed to the date, a few weeks away. The following week we took a family vacation for an aunt’s 80th birthday party, the time off had been approved and planned months earlier. During this vacation, to my surprise, my daughter was logged in watching the livestream of our church service and listened as the pastor she grew up with announced that that very day would be our last weekend at the church. This was a very traumatic way for my daughter to take in this news, we were out of town, there would be no last goodbyes to wrap up our 15 years at the church, and it seemed that everyone was good with that plan. My children were so disheartened to find that after growing up in this church and looking up to these lead pastors, in an instant he and his wife held the power and made the choice to simply discard us. No questions asked. Fifteen years of sincere service was simply wiped away, erased. Many people that my children loved and admired never even reached out with a simple goodbye. There is nothing we as a family can look back on fondly or go back to visit, simply because this pastor and his wife made the decision for it to be that way. This couple has done this to so many before us, we always knew this kind of painful ending was a possibility for us when we decided to leave… we were taken to the train station. Sadly, some of the lies that were told about us after we left were designed to lay all the blame for the high turnover rate of church employees on me. If you are interested in the truth about these situations, ask each person who left the church. The day Christy and I resigned from our jobs, we sat in the office with the lead pastor and his wife, we told them that we had no jobs lined up, had no idea what was next for our family, and that this was a step of faith. I went on to say to them; I do not come from a wealthy family, I don’t have anything to fall back on, but what I do have is my good name, Bartolome. All I asked of them as we left was that they honor our name and not disparage it. But this was asking too much of a narcissistic couple who has all the power to do and say whatever they want with zero accountability. I quickly realized how easily people believed all the lies and slander that was directed at us, it was all accepted even by the very people that we had helped throughout the years. It was believed by those whom I considered to be friends but in the end I was just a stepping stone to what they wanted for their ministry career. Just like the stories in The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, I experienced the cold freeze from so many that I thought were my friends. We as a family learned a painful and valuable lesson in that season, we found out who our true friends and family are. The email I received about my severance was a mirror image to what is talked about in the Mars Hill podcast. The severance would be released weekly from October 2020 through January 2021, as long as we didn’t show disrespect, discord, or drama toward the lead pastors or to the church. That’s an email worth posting on our blog someday, along with the “letter of recommendation” that followed a few weeks later. Why would we want a recommendation from this couple? Maybe this couple realized (after council/board member(s) brought it to their attention) that they had slandered us so badly that it would be impossible for us to find ministry jobs elsewhere. Remember, we resigned without knowing our next steps, so they simply dropped us at the train station.
Have you ever wondered why our society applauds narcissistic leaders and why they have such cultural appeal? These leaders can commit fraud in companies, they can allow the exploitation and suffering of their people, some are even known pedophiles and yet audiences applaud them. The same could be said of some lead pastors. I have heard upper echelon church leaders count the many narcissistic pastors they know. Their excuse for doing nothing about it is that they do not know how to give consequences to their misdeeds. I do not know how much more direction we need than what the Bible already prescribes to be an elder. The real issue is that if we do decide to pull that loose string of accountability it will most likely affect the pastors that have been allowed to behave so badly, including those that are supposed to be in positions of authority over those pastors.
Harvard Business Review wrote a great article called, Why We Love Narcissists by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic. After decades of scientific research here are some reasons why we fall in love with their seductive power:
1. Narcissists are masterful impression managers:
Because of their intense self-obsessions and self-adulation, narcissists excel at managing initial impressions
Narcissists’ desire to make a great initial impression enables them to disguise their arrogance as confidence, which they often achieve through humor and being entertaining or eccentric
2. Narcissists manipulate credit and blame in their favor:
They are quick to take credit for others’ achievements and blame colleagues and subordinates for their own failures
They lead with the main purpose of receiving personal credit or glory. They deny or distort information to rewrite history in order to avoid getting blamed
3. Narcissists fit conventional stereotypes of leadership:
Narcissists enjoy a prominent spot in laypeople’s view about leadership because of their ability to accumulate power and influence
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