The recent events surrounding the City Harvest Church and their fraudulent leader had many in a kind of religious schadenfreude, gleefully pointing out the 'farcical' faith of the church's almost 30,000 followers. Others skewered the church leader for misleading and exploiting his flock. Therein lies the Rosetta Stone answer to how this whole insanity came to be - we are dealing with sheep. More accurately, the intrinsically human desire to be sheep-like.
We are born into tribes - even in today's nuclear, fractured and fragmented families, we come into being within a tribe. Being tribal is the fundamental starting point of our psyche - we seek first and foremost to belong.
But are all tribes created equal? As it turns out, tribes can operate at different levels. In his intriguing book Tribal Leadership, David Logan writes about how there are 5 levels of tribes, each with it's basic outlook on life. At the lowest level (Stage 1), tribes consist of people who essentially believe that 'life sucks'. The tribes at the highest level (Stage 5) conversely believe that 'life is great'. This hierarchy mirrors Maslow's ideas on human needs and motivation. At the lowest level, people are consumed with meeting their physiological needs of food, water and shelter - the psyche of our homeless poor. As you progress, you get to the stage of self-actualisation - we become driven by our need for creativity, purpose and meaning in our lives. We now enter into the minds of the truly visionary like Nelson Mandela.
So we come back to the good folks at City Harvest Church. As a tribe, they probably sit comfortably at Stage 3 - their mantra would likely be "we are great, but you're not". What gels the tribe is the need for love, belonging and self-esteem (achievement and the respect of others). So what's wrong with that? Nothing except when we are blind to what drives us and it starts to divide us from other tribes. We become sheep when we fail to understand that its not the shepherd that's calling for us to follow but that we are driven by own own innate need to follow something, someone, somehow. For some, it's Pastor Kong Hee, for others, it's Anthony Robbins, for yet others, it's the Dalai Lama. It doesn't matter who the shepherd is, we are the sheep who insist on following.
Because choosing to be on your own takes guts. It takes courage to stand apart when everyone else is swimming in a sea of pseudo-love and acceptance whilst you don't belong to anything or anyone. You are the lone ranger who stepped off the precipice onto that invisible bridge. Only you can see that bridge leading you to a different awareness of life - a consciousness that sees no divide amongst tribes or individuals. That bridge is lonely and has only one lane - you have to traverse it on your own with only your inner compass and roadmap to guide you. In that starkness, it's between you and your maker, and no one else.
So it was that the one whistle-blower, brave Mr Roland Poon, listened to his own counsel and called out that the emperor was naked. The sheep, it seems morphed into the wolves and bayed for his blood. Do I have compassion for the followers of City Harvest Church? Of course I do, we are all human and we all want to belong to something greater than ourselves. But consider if we have been placed on this earth to reach beyond our human desires - not just the base ones but our desire to follow and be part of a herd. Can you brave standing alone?
