Access All Areas: Exhilarating Proximity in the Christian Bubble

One of the most telling admissions in Christian communities that have crashed and burned due to influential but unhealthy leadership is just how intoxicating it is to have high level access to that leader.

The proximity is exhilarating. Intoxicating. Lots of words with “x’s” in them! And that proximity is like crack cocaine. Once you get a taste for it, it’s very hard to wean yourself off it.

Having been involved in the spectacular flare out of a major leader in a UK and US network (it made the front page of Christianity Today), I have seen first hand what this  intoxication does to people.

And to be frank, I was almost there myself. And to be more frank, it’s extremely unhealthy and leads to all sorts of spiritual problems, while itself being the result of all sorts of spiritual problems.

For all of our talk about not finding our identity in the opinions of others, especially of others who we admire, the Christian church has been just as susceptible to this as the world has been.

This struck me whilst reading Evan Barker’s best-selling book, Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative, which details Evan’s life as a fund-raising guru in the US’s Democrat party.

Her documentation of what the private power behind the public politics looks like is a riveting read. And in the end she stepped away from it. Her decision to step away went viral on TikTok after the 2024 Democratic National Convention in the lead up to the last presidential election, when Kamala Harris was anointed the nominee.

It’s a thoroughly political book by a working class girl made good (it has some Hillbilly Elegy echoes). But it’s what she says about the proximity to the powerful and the famous that rings true for the C-list fame and power of the Christian world.

Here’s what Evan says after working with perpetual Presidential contestant, the famously curmudgeon socialist, Bernie Sanders:

It was also exhilarating to be inside the bubble for a day. The “bubble” is the name I made up for the energy vortex that surrounds someone with extreme power and fame. The feeling inside the bubble is unreal and can be totally intoxicating, even addictive. The world opens. Like life lived in the eye of the storm; a window into something otherworldly.

The energy vortex. The way YOU make me feel! She goes on:

The bubble imprints a feeling on your memory forever making every day outside the bubble dull and ordinary. It’s a blessing, but mostly a curse. I’ll never forget following Bernie in the rope line after his speech. The crowd was roaring … As we got near the end of the crowd, a woman I had known in college saw me standing there with her icon, and she let out a very loud, audible gasp, completely taken aback to see me in the entourage.

You can feel that in your bones, can’t you?

Of course very few Christian leaders are as famous as Bernie Sanders. Granted some are, but the C through to Q list celebrity culture of Christianity in the modern world does something similar.

I well remember how people jockeyed for position around the leader in the network I was involved with. I well remember the feeling of having favour bestowed, or watching the uncertainty of those who had had it withdrawn for some real or imagined sin.

And I well remember how people who found themselves in the inner circle – the bubble – would go as far as joining in the very “gospel-oriented slandering” of those who had fallen out of the bubble.

And boy, did I feel the lure of it. I could see what was happening, but the bubble, and the proximity and approval it elicits from someone who is a someone in the church scene, is alluring.

If we don’t admit to the fact that this could happen to us, we are in danger of having an untested virtue truly tested one day, and come up wanting.

In this church setting, and it’s true of all church settings which are curated by highly controlling, but persuasive personalities, here was a sense that one could maintain their own position two ways: First by being really, really good. And second, by pointing out how really really bad someone else was. Or at least affirming the leader’s viewpoint on that matter.

And all of this was not simply a matter of political alignment, but of gospel fidelity. That’s what makes church settings that have such bubbles around their charismatic leaders so toxic to people’s wellbeing. This is not just about politics in this age. This is about our eternal destinies.

And time and time again, having spoken to many people who have been crushed by terrible leaders in churches, leaders who garnered power and adulation from their followers, the pattern has been the same.

There is a sense that the approval of the leader of the church group that you belong to is almost, if not more, tangible and real than the approval of the Lord Jesus who has placed you in the church (and, incidentally, who you are in complete proximity with by the power of the Spirit joining you in union to Christ in heavenly places).

Evan Barker’s words hit me hard, not because they seem so unusual to the experience of too many wings of the modern evangelical church, but because they feel so familiar.

Once you get a taste for life in the bubble, as Evan Barker says, anything less is dull and ordinary. Yet what makes anything less much worse in a church setting is that so often the lesser is accompanied by a jettisoning from the Christian community in toto.

Our own experience of leaving the church setting in which this bubble existed, was devastating. Once you leave not only the bubble, but the ecosystem surrounding it, it is as if you – Titanic-like – have sunk beneath the quiet waves and been forgotten forever.

When the whole church system exploded, it was surprising and dismaying how many people contacted my wife and I, people we never knew, who had been in the same church system before us or after us, and none of us had heard of each other. That’s the standard routine.

The repair work required afterwards is often painful and revealing. It was for us. It was for me. One of the big questions I had to ask myself was why I was so susceptible to this lure, and to the allure of it all. What was it about me that seemed to require the approval of, and the proximity to, someone whose way of treating those who fell afoul of him was to cut them off completely?

Why would that be something I feared happening to me? While I saw that it was a less-than-godly response, it was the visceral feeling it emoted from me that most required answers. I am just glad that we were not in the setting long enough to test my own untested virtues.

Would I have treated others who were outside the bubble as shamefully as others did? Would my life has been as wrecked as the lives of those who, once jettisoned, found their lives and relationships shattered by what had happened?

Evan Barker’s brave decision to walk away was confirmed by the joy she found in her newborn son. She looked at the bubble once again and realised it was shallow and hollow:

Where there was once bitterness from my years in politics, I felt love for him. Where I was once hard and fierce in my handling of others, I became soft and more understanding. My son’s silky blond hair and sweet smile melted my heart each day; I honestly got lost in caring for him, finding pure joy in being his mom. It was so much more fulfilling that being yelled at by politicians all day, or hunting rich people, shaking them down of their money, caught in a never-ending game of status and power.

Barker is talking about what Puritan preacher Thomas Chalmers called,  the “expulsive power of a new affection” –  that memorable framing of what something more lovely does to something less lovely in your life: it pushes it out by love. What she had once held on to for fear of what she might lose – the intoxicating bubble – , was overcome by what she had gained – an intoxicating “bubba”!

If you’re a Christian in the same situation as Evan Barker was, or that I sailed close to the edge of, and you’re feeling life is dull and ordinary – or worse – completely wretched, let me encourage you that the expulsive power of a new affection is your hope.

When you come to realise – and it may be a long, painful realisation steeped in weepy prayers- , that the Lord Jesus had star power and fame beyond anything Bernie Sanders could come close to. The bubble around him in heaven was one of constant praise since eternity past.

Yet he gave that up and became despised, rejected forsaken. Why? In order that we might sit with him in heavenly places, high above all authorities. And we, fully accepted, never to be cast out our rejected, have an access and proximity to the Lord Jesus that even the angels will – like Evan Barker’s former college friend – utter loud, audible gasps about into eternity future.