Episode 007 – Leaders & Leadership (Part 1)
24 April 2021
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
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T: Gidday everyone, and welcome to Episode 7 of I was a Teenage Fundamentalist. Today, B, we’re going to talk about…
B: Leaders and Leadership.
T: Leaders and Leadership, which is going to be a very important topic I think, because there’s so much to say that I daresay this may be another part 1.
B: Oh I think it will be. There’s so much in it that it will be good to get stuck into it and see where it leads us, because as we do on these episodes, we think of a couple of things and then we just talk. So there’s not really a great deal of pre-planning.
T: Yeah agreed. And you mentioned to me that you were feeling a little bit unsettled in the aftermath of talking about some of this stuff.
B: Yeah, look it brought up stuff I didn’t know was there which was interesting. Particularly after week 1 and 2, I sat down and spoke with you a week or so after and I felt really unsettled. It brought up stuff that I thought I’d dealt with, but obviously there’s baggage there.
T: Same, 100%. My wife said to me maybe you need to not do this, and I’m like nah I think it’s too important, but 100% I have been feeling rocked by this as well. And a couple of people have reached out via some of our communication channels and they’ve been saying the same thing, they’ve been listening and it’s making them angry or making them upset, they said very much what you said, I obviously still have baggage – I thought I was over all this but obviously not.
B: It’s interesting though, we’ve spoken many times about how we maintain some positivity about some of this stuff, because I’m a firm believer that everything we go through there’s a silver lining, there’s a flip side to it that there is positive, there’s stuff we can learn that we can bring forward and apply throughout our life, so I think that’s how I’ve deal with some of this stuff, and some of the experiences previously is making sure I learn from it and translate it to something positive, so I think it’s important that we embed that and reflect on it as we go through.
T: Yeah sure. I think another thing to point out is we do have the Facebook group – people have started to engage. You are welcome to come in there and engage, and if you feel you want to share, or you want to share resources with others that helped you get through, or helped you leave the groups, or your involvement in the groups, that’s fine, go in there and do that. I was thinking what kind of books or websites could we share, so if you know anything that has been useful or purposeful for you in this process, please go into our Facebook group and share it. That would be really good, and if I think of anything I’ll put this up as well.
B: Yep.
T: One thing I did put in the Facebook group, I don’t know if you saw, was that Scott Morrison, the Prime Minister of Australia, was at the ACC, the Australian Christian Churches, which we knew as the AOG, they had a name change. As I said to you before, isn’t that great, what an inclusive name. They ARE the Australian Christian Churches you know, screw the Anglicans, screw the Catholics, screw everybody else – actually then I was thinking Catholics call themselves the Universal church so they’ve even got a more broad –
B: Do they?
T: Oh yeah, that’s what Catholicism is, it means universal, but I just thought that was a bit of hubris there to say we are the Australian Christian Churches.
B: And unfortunately based on my experience, that is completely to form.
T: Yeah totally, and next week we’re going to talk about organisations, so we can start to unpack that in there. So please jump into the Facebook discussion. Anyway, talking today about leaders and leadership.
B: So for me, the whole leader thing was coming into something that was new that I had no idea about, your attention goes to leaders straight away, you’re looking for guidance. For me as I said back in Episode 1 it was my brothers that brought me into this space, I looked to them, but they were in another state so for me connecting back to a local church back in home town, I got straight in there and the people I connected with straight away was leaders so they were very influential in my life.
T: And they’re right up the front too, aren’t they. They’re leading the songs they’re giving the sermons, they’re taking the offerings, the leaders are front and centre.
B: Yeah absolutely, and for me they’re the ones that had all the answers, that held all the wisdom and could guide me as I was trying to explore and unpack what this new world meant for me.
T: How long do you think it took for you to trust them? You’ve turned up there, you’ve marched in, how long before you were letting them give you advice, and actually taking it?
B: I was a bit of a sponge at the start, I probably took a lot of stuff on board naively and ran with it. Probably six months in where I went oh my god, some of this stuff I’m soaking up I need to question a bit and need to process it.
T: So how long did it take you to do that?
B: About six months.
T: Okay, I think it took me about six years to be honest, but anyway here we are again. You the sceptic – you call yourself a sponge, dude no.
B: I think I was at the start and for me, I wanted to give it a shot, my life was a little bit of a mess at that time, I was about 17 years old. I had a good job and everything but I was a little bit lost in life and I was sort of bouncing from here there to everywhere and not anchored in anything, and this gave me something to anchor in. That first one or two churches I was involved in was relatively quick, so leaders didn’t have an enormous amount of influence on me, but I certainly soaked up what they had to say, tried all the different things I should be doing to be involved, hanging out with the people there, going to a study group or whatever, so I did that. It was probably the next one I went to that I got quite involved with, it was probably a couple of years later, I was about 19.
T: So this was before Great Big AOG.
B: This was before Great Big AOG, and for me this place was pretty influential in my life. Some of it was for me – I had a really good experience with leaders in this place, they were genuinely caring, not just because you were there as part of their church or whatever, they actually cared about you as a person. They weren’t as precious about you being involved in every part of the organisation.
T: So they weren’t part of the AOG or what later became the Australian Christian Churches.
B: No, they were fairly independent.
T: But they were still Pentecostal?
B: They were still Pentecostal, but I can’t remember the roots of where they came from. I can’t remember them having a connection to any other site or whatever, they were quite independent. They were a good bunch of people and I actually still connect to quite a few people from that space.
T: Are they still in it?
B: A couple are, mostly not. The couple that are have become – if we were to cast them back in time to that scene, they would be considered quite liberal, as in very loose with their thinking. I know liberal has different applications.
T: So small l liberal, not as in party.
B: Yes, I think that would be quite different. But that was a really good experience for me. It’s interesting though how you put them up on a pedestal. For me, if I look back at it they still had the answers, they were the people you really needed to connect in with to make sure you were still on the right track, but all in all I think that was positive for me. So that was my introduction to the space, which I think yours was quite different.
T: Very different. Yeah, contrasting that, the Revival Centres that I was in was started by Lloyd Longfield. He’s now passed away, and he had come out of the Christian Revival Crusade, which nowadays called the CRC church, which is another Pentecostal one, and they had come out of the AOG. So it’s a common ancestor.
B: Like a babushka doll.
T: Yes, like a babushka doll, but with cults. And so he was very much this central personality, some might say psychopath – some might say. He’s dead so I probably don’t have to worry too much about being sued, but he was a pretty intense character. So the Revival Centres was him and he was the Revival Centres, but I was in another city so he was kind of seen as oooh, this guy. The leaders in my local city where I was involved were also held up quite high, but in the Revival Centres – we’ve talked about it being a cult, they used to say the leaders are just men, and by the way they were all men, there was no women, which is different for the Australian Christian Churches, there were at least some women that could be pastors, they would anoint women. But they had no women, and they used to say these pastors, they’re just men – but they’re not. They’re a completely different breed. They were the ones who could tell you where to live, what kind of job you could have, who you can date – quite literally if you went to them and said I’m going to date this person they could say I’m sorry no you’re not.
B: That’s frightening.
T: Yeah that’s the sort of control they had. If you were on their good side, they were great but if you weren’t….I can remember when I was 16 or 17 I’d moved to another city, it was a very big Revival Centre and one day the pastor asked to see me. I was like ok, I loved the pastors, I was in their good books. He pulled me to the side and took me into this room, it was all musty – Revival Centres liked to meet in old theatres, I don’t know why it became like this fad, they’d all rent out or buy these old theatres. So he took me into this musty old room with this great big leather backed chair, sat there and looked at me, then started to talk to me about my behaviour and where I’d been the week before and all kinds of stuff, and I saw this look of contempt in his eyes for me. He could see that I was trembling and afraid, and he was fine with that. I’m not saying he was relishing it, but he was fine with making me feel really small.
B: No caring and grace?
T: Oh no, zero. Well I shouldn’t say zero, but very, very little. So that was my experience with leaders, and I told you some weeks back when we did the story about when Pastor J came and got me and took me for a drive, I was shit scared – the pastor wants to see me – and this was why. The pastors in the Revival Centre, they could quite literally determine your eternal fate. While I was thinking about this, I thought actually that’s what the Catholics and Orthodox have done throughout history, so in one sense it’s very similar to what a lot of Christian groups do, but they could tell you you are now excluded from this church, we are the one true church, you are now not going to meet Jesus at the resurrection, goodbye. That was the kind of power they had and the kind of things they could pronounce over you, so my experience was 100% different from your experience.
B: Yeah, and that sets the foundation going forward.
T: Yes, I think I said to you once before, because we had those different experiences initially, our experiences of Great Big AOG were coloured by that, so I think you were a lot more ready to question and challenge, whereas I was conditioned to go oh no, whatever you say, yes sir no sir.
B: I guess that first experience I’d had, the one I just referred to, questioning wasn’t seen as something bad. It was let’s have a conversation about it, let’s be real about it, so I came in with that headspace, but when I did come in to Great Big AOG it was a very different experience. I found it a bit of an exclusive club. An example was – and I certainly didn’t question this at the time because I saw it as a right of theirs, but there was thrones on the stage. Everything was elevated so you could see the band, the speakers, and at the back of the stage where the speaker was, was set up probably eight or ten chairs.
T: They were big ornate chairs weren’t they – the Revival Centre had those too.
B: They were very throne-ish. There would be different elders or pastors, or whoever was up there that week, but the reality was it was saying you are you and we are we, and we are different, we’re not part of the same thing.
T: Some of the smaller AOGs could be a little bit more agile, more progressive. I stress a little bit more, and they may not have had those thrones and things like that, but there was still a demarcation, there was still a chasm between pastors and everyone else.
B: Oh most certainly, and it was very different. But interestingly, it became quite attractive because you were set apart, so probably over time even though I did question a lot of things, I probably accepted a lot too. I’ve always been recognised in whatever jobs I’ve had as having a fairly natural leadership style, so I’ll usually become a manager or team leader or whatever a space I’m in, and I think that was recognised in the AOG too, so I was being groomed as a leader there. And I saw that as incredibly flattering. It really stroked my ego, I think I wanted to become one of those that was set apart, one that people looked up to as wise and knowing. For me I don’t think it was about control, it was probably about recognition.
T: So status.
B: Absolutely about status. Whereas some of my experiences – I remember it was your friend Pastor J, one day he called me, I was around the church and he said go to my office and wait outside and I remember being frightened, thinking what the hell have I done. Anyway he went into his office, he poked his head out and goes I want you to stay there, I don’t want you to go anywhere. I’m wracking myself thinking what have I done? About 15 minutes later of sweating on it going I haven’t done anything, he pulls me in and goes I want you to sell my motorbike. I went what? He goes I want you to sell my motorbike – it was just a complete power trip. There was people that had seen the way he treated me outside his office.
T: So there’d been an audience when he’d done this.
B: Oh there were several people, probably a dozen people that had seen that, and I remember at the time saying to him what the hell was that about? You could have just asked me, and he had absolutely zero self-reflection about the way he’d approached it, how I would actually see it, and any effect it had on me. That’s one thing that stuck with me – I know it was one small event, but I just thought what the hell. Then there was several other events with other leaders there that were similar, it was very much about being told I should be in leadership, I should be doing this. I was definitely part of that for a year or two of wanting to be that leader, but it got to a stage where I thought I just don’t actually think that’s what I want. I went to bible college for a year or a bit over, and it was probably at the end of one of those years where I went I don’t think this is what I want. This is what I’ve been told I should be doing.
T: This is the track.
B: It was the track, yeah. I wanted to be a career pastor – and it was seen as a career. There were a lot of pastors on staff at Great Big AOG and I think it was seen as something to aspire to, for me it wasn’t what I wanted, and I guess it was one of the things at the time of the Toronto Blessing where everybody was uncontrolled laughing…
T: So that would have been mid 90s.
B: Yeah I think it was 96, 97 maybe, I can’t remember, somewhere around there but that was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me, and I left. There was also that push to be a leader, I was actually referred to as a pew warmer if I wasn’t. Which was interesting, because it was saying that you had to be the type of leader that they wanted, the type of leader that stood out and sat on the throne, rather than one that’s embedded and influential with people.
T: I hear you. I think that the leadership of Great Big AOG and actually of the Australian Christian Churches as a whole is very hierarchical.
B: Yes.
T: So as much as we’re saying there’s us and them, meaning that there’s pastors and pew warmers, within the leadership themselves it was very hierarchical, so they had levels. So you had Youth Pastors, and Assistant Pastors, and you go all the way up to become the Senior Pastor of your local organisation or church, and then you could become a member of the AOG/Australian Christian Churches State Executive, then the National Executive, and all that, so there was definitely levels to jump up and up. Like Amway, once you get in there, until you get to the very top there’s always somewhere to go next. There’s always that carrot.
B: I think any large organisation, regardless of what it is, needs some sort of corporate structure to manage it and governance and that’s absolutely got to happen, but I think there’s ways of doing it…
T: Well yes there’s healthy organisations and there’s toxic organisations. You and I can’t really speak for what the Australian Christian Churches is like now, but the AOG when we were in it, I have no qualms in saying it was a toxic organisation.
B: Oh 100%. So, your experience?
T: Yeah well, I remember, because having left the Revival Centre and coming into the AOG, there was a gap of a couple of years where I said before I was clubbing and partying and basically being normal really. So when I came in, I was like, no one is ever going to tell me what to do again, and I think they could probably sense that in me at first. So the wooing of me into some sort of submission was the world they used – we might call it control – but submission, was very gradual. Probably for someone on the outside it was very quick, but for me it was much more gradual than just you stand there – like your story. But I remember they had two youth groups, they had a 20s and 30s group, and they had a teenyboppers youth group. I’d been clubbing, I was in my 20s, a lot of my friends were in their 20s and 30s, so I joined that group. Then at the end of the first meeting for the year, I think it was in 91 and it started with the school year so it would have been somewhere in February, Pastor J came up to me and said hey I didn’t see you at my teenybopper meeting, whatever it was called back then, and I was like nah, I’m going to go to this one. I remember he looked at me and goes mate, you don’t understand. And I was like oh. And he goes you need to come to mine.
B: Yep.
T: And I looked at him and I remember thinking to myself at the time oh I don’t understand. There’s something to this, there’s a reason why he wants me there – now retrospectively he just wanted the numbers, he wanted more people in his group, he was competing within Great Big AOG to have the number of kids in his group. I had no desire to go to his teenybopper group, and he sat there and convinced me, and told me all the reasons. The thing that keeps standing out to me was the mate you don’t understand. What that was basically saying to me, which is also what we were told in the Revival Centre all the time is I’m the leader, I understand, you don’t. Defer to my ability to choose for you, defer to my knowledge, my wisdom, my this, my that. And I did. And I was in that teenybopper group as a 20 something for absolutely years, and miserable. I used to look at the folks in the 20s and 30s group and just think oh that must be awesome, because they weren’t treated like kids. When I eventually made the decision to leave the teenybopper group and go to the older one, I was afraid to tell him. I was really shit scared, and I can remember another time I wanted to do some volunteer work, and you know you were talking about “you stand here”, I went in and told him I wanted to do some volunteer work, and he gave me a whole lot of newspaper cuttings and told me he wanted me to glue them onto pieces of paper, and that was my job. I realised later on that what he was attempting to do was to test me to see if I was going to do the shit kicker jobs, but that’s all I ever did for him, because he took all the glory. That was my experience with him, I went to bible college too, and I’ve got friends who tell very similar stories with very different people in very different Great Big AOGs and smaller AOGs and country AOGs – it’s the culture of the organisation.
B: It’s interesting – I haven’t told you this but I had exactly the same thing happen. When I went there I went to the older group, we’re a similar age, I think we’re only 18 months apart, and I went to the 20s group as well, and I had the same conversation – you need to come to this one it’s more exciting, this one’s boring. So I did, I went to the teenyboppers because it was more fun and exciting – and it was the same thing every week, that’s the reality. But it was very much a competition.
T: I wonder how the other pastors would have responded if they’d known he was running around telling people don’t go to their group, come to mine, theirs is boring.
B: It would have been interesting to see if that did come out. You gotta remember this youth group, I can’t remember how many hundred it was, but it was 3-400 at one stage, it was enormous, double the size of a lot of small churches, so it was an enormous beast within itself within this larger organisation of a couple of thousand people.
T: And there were a lot of aspiring leaders. Pastor B, another pastor came to me and said I think one day you could be the youth pastor of our group. Again that’s sort of flattering, but also giving me that sense of wow, they’re actually seeing me as a potential leader, and remembering he was the bigwig of that group, and he was saying I could one day be him. For you and I – control was not so much a big thing for me as well, I joke about it but really it was the status. We used to joke it was the girls, the gold and the glory, and for me it was the glory. That’s what they appealed to in me to drag me into that space, but I remember one day you telling me he’d had the same conversation with you – he was grooming you, now there’s only one spot.
B: That’s right – cast your net wide, you’re going to get one of them.
T: But that’s crazy. No wonder we were all competing with each other, because they were setting us up to compete with each other.
B: Post that conversation, it was around that time I’d broken away, it was with my wife at the time and the whole laughing thing that was happening, the straw that broke the camel’s back –
T: That can be another episode, the laughing thing.
B: I think it needs to be because God forbid.
T: Because that was pretty fucking funny.
B: Oooh yeah.
T: Laughing now brother, laughing now!
B: A confusing time too, we’d made the decision we were going to go to a Baptist church which was seen as a step down in the Pentecostal space, it was like ooh, you’re going there?
T: They don’t have the baptism of the Spirit, they’ve just got the baptism of the water. They’re in, but only just.
B: You reckon they’re in?
T: I think that was the mentality. The Baptists were in, but they weren’t as in as we were.
B: Well they’d be right in if they became part of the Australian Christian Churches, of course.
T: Like Scott Morrison.
B: Like Scotty. But I remember him calling me and saying I want to have you over for dinner.
T: This was Pastor B.
B: Pastor B – saying we need to have a chat. He sat us down, and this is where we had the conversation about being a pew warmer. He said is this really what you want for your life, and I said yeah, actually it is, I’m happy with that. He talked again about the aspiration if I wanted it, it was there, I could have that glory that was sitting there ready for the taking.
T: Little did you know that was MY gig, he’d told me it was my gig and he’d told Fred it was his gig, and he’d told Barney it was his gig.
B: I think it would have been one of the early job shares.
T: I don’t know if you remember but other people got gigs before we did.
B: They did.
T: That’s another conversation.
B: So we had that conversation, and he was pissed that we were leaving. I have tried to reconnect with him ten years after this, and his attitude towards me was just cold. Whether it was based on that and that decision I’d made, I was no longer in that fold, or whether it was based on the fact that he’d moved on and the current set of people and influence that he had in his life were his focus, but he wanted nothing to do with me – as a human I actually liked him. I connected with him.
T: Yeah he was a nice guy.
B: He was.
T: It’s funny that they call themselves pastors and shepherds – there are other denominations out there where the shepherding and pastoring is certainly superior to what’s going on in the AOG. Before we finish, because we’re running out of time, I just wanted to make a statement and throw it your way and get you to respond – that leadership was a reward for conformity in Great Big AOG.
B: I think you’re right. If you accepted that reward, then your job was to get everyone else to conform. I think you’re right – it definitely was about conformity, because being different wasn’t accepted. Both of us have many examples of people being cast aside because they were different, they were too hard, they would have been too difficult to mould. I think you’re right.
T: I was thinking, we certainly did have a handful of people of different ethnic minorities in Great Big AOG but it wasn’t a lot, and it certainly didn’t reflect the percentage of Australian culture even then, but what was interesting they had their own churches.
B: Yes that’s right, they do.
T: They had the Chinese church, the Greek church, the Italian church. And I get it, it’s ok, they can do that and make it a cultural centre and all that, but I still think they didn’t fit in Great Big Anglicised AOG, if you know what I mean.
B: No. And you think about this – this is for another episode, but you think about how far people travelled to access this Great Big AOG.
T: From all over the city.
B: Over an hour drive for some people, which sort of flies in the face of your local church.
T: Yeah that’s right.
B: But that is for another episode.
T: Yeah that is indeed. Yeah look, I think it was all about conformity, and if you started to think for yourself – when we do episodes on our leaving we can talk about this more, but when I started to think for myself, and started to have opinions and started to verbalise my opinions, that was the end of my pastor career track in the AOG. I was actually getting my accreditation, I’d submitted it to the hierarchy, the whole process was in, then I started to look at things and go hold on, then I started to say it out loud, and that was the end for me. So the leadership – it’s not just about conforming to the leaders, the leaders have to conform to be there.
B: Which comes back to that toxic organisation conversation we had before
T: That we’re going to have next week.
B: We are. Let’s talk about that next week.
T: Okay, sounds really good. So, just reminding people that we do have the Facebook page so come and engage, we’d really like people to get in there and start to share resources and other bits and pieces as I said before, to help one another. And if you have things to say, jump in there and say them.
B: All right. See you next week.
T: See you next week, B.