The size of the audience, whether online or in person, is not an accurate measure of actual impact, value, or permanence.
Celebrity, as defined by Katelyn Beaty in Celebrities for Jesus, is “social power without proximity.”
This is a helpful definition. And it clearly places celebrity at odds with the gospel. The gospel is all about laying down power, and the life of the church should create greater proximity—of us to God and to each other. Instead, as Beaty plainly states it, “To have immense social power and little proximity is a spiritually dangerous place to be.”
(This is an excerpt from my new book, De-Sizing the Church: How Church Growth Became a Science, Then an Obsession, and What’s Next, Chapter 7: Inevitable: Why the Christian Celebrity Culture Guarantees Moral Failure, available now. Look for my interview with Katelyn Beaty, author of Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits Are Hurting the Church, on The Church Lobby podcast, April 11.)
The core of the word “celebrity” is “celebrate.” And we imitate what we celebrate.
It’s inevitable that there will be moral failings within any group of people. But when we elevate leaders through their ability to become celebrities, giving them power over our feelings and decisions while having no genuine proximity in our lives, that celebrity culture always elevates, alienates, then devastates its prey.
When you have power, but no proximity, you have little to no accountability. And power without accountability always – absolutely always – leads to an us/them, have/have-not, rich/poor dynamic that ruins everything it touches.
Dangerous Calling
“Pastoral-ministry celebrity is simply a dangerous thing,” wrote David Tripp in Dangerous Calling. “Public acclaim is often the seedbed for spiritual pride.”
The parasite of size and celebrity always poisons its host. “[Carl Lentz] became his own celebrity,” said The Secrets of Hillsong docuseries director Stacey Lee. “There was so much murkiness in the mission that the original goals of the church somehow got lost. The goal of this church from the very outset was reaching as many people as possible and, as our religious historian says in the documentary, in their desire to grow, they never stopped to think if they should.” Instead, “rapacious growth had become an end in itself.”
Unfettered growth, combined with stratospheric celebrity is a deadly combination, no matter what your original intentions were.
You cannot build your brand and develop your spiritual maturity at the same time. They are heading in different directions.
That doesn’t mean you can’t promote your church, an event, or a ministry. But promoting ministry for the betterment of others is very different from promoting your identity for the glorification of self.
The Upside Of Fame
On the opposite end of this experience, author Daniel Darling relates how he was grateful for the fame of Timothy Keller.
We often (rightly) critique a relentless pursuit of “platform.” But I’m glad there have been faithful Christians with a wide audience because they’ve made their way to me. If [Tim] Keller isn’t published by a mainstream publisher, I don’t get to read his works. And I think this about so many other men and women whose words have helped to shape me. If they were not published in books, or on Christian radio, or in a podcast, or in a magazine article, I’d never would have had access to their wisdom. There are so many ways fame can be perverted and can destroy and can be tribal. But there are also so many ways a wide audience can be used for God’s glory.
(Look for my interview with Dan Darling on The Church Lobby, May 16, 2024)
It’s okay to accept a bigger platform when it develops naturally, but do not pursue bigness. We must reject celebrity and excess, refusing to accommodate or platform those who embrace them. A larger audience can be helpful when it is a necessary tool toward a higher goal, but we can’t pursue it for its own sake.
Fame is not evil, but it is dangerous.
As Chris Galanos noted, there are consequences when Christians choose a church based on the talent of the pastor.: This has contributed to a “celebrity preacher” culture in America. And, unfortunately, we’re seeing celebrity preachers fall left and right, leaving many people disillusioned. A very famous preacher I’ve looked up to for years fell into sin and had to step down. It just keeps happening.
Starter Steps To Resist The Lure Of Celebrity
To resist the relentless pull toward celebrity, I suggest four starter steps:
- Lower the platform
- Share the platform
- Leave the platform
- Remove the platform
First, we need to lower the platform
There are times when one person needs to talk to many people, and we need stages, mics, cameras, and lights to do that. But we must do whatever we can to guard against abuse.
Not long ago I was in a discussion with a group of ministers sharing new ideas when something odd occurred to me. If you took the religious language out of our conversation, I wondered if you’d be able to tell whether we were a group of ministers talking about church or a local theater group talking about the upcoming show season. Much of our discussion focused on issues like stage lighting, how much video or drama to use, the quality and volume of the music, advertising, signage, seating, transitions between segments of the service, and so on. The other voices faded into the background for me, as I realized something about myself: I’ve spent decades tweaking lights, buying audio equipment, setting up chairs, and all the other work it takes to put on church services. I’m tired of the show.
And it’s not just me. This is the message from newer generations, loud and clear, as Skye Jethani writes: “My generation (Generation X) and Millennials (those born after 1980) have a strong aversion to institutions, and the bigger the institutions, the more distrustful we are. . . . For Boomers large meant legitimate. If a church is big, they reasoned, it must be doing something right, [but] for younger Americans, big doesn’t mean legitimate; big means corrupt.”
Previous generations were impressed by the big church stage. The higher, the better, both physically and metaphorically. Upcoming generations see the forced distance created by higher platforms as a negative, not a positive.
We need to lower the platforms physically, but even more importantly, we need to de-elevate them by removing the relational distance between those who serve onstage and those who serve behind the scenes. As K.J. Ramsey reminds us, “Our real Good Shepherd doesn’t stand apart on stages. Our true Good Shepherd holds dirty feet in his God-hands and asks us to let him love us down to the dirt under our toenails.”
Second, we should always share the platform
Two of today’s healthiest trends are the preaching team and rotating worship leaders.
When a congregation rotates the speakers from Sunday to Sunday, and the worship team allows two or three different singers to take the lead in a worship set, it widens the spotlight and reduces (but does not eliminate) the likelihood that one leader will rise to celebrity status.
The same thing happens in small churches when they have different members read the scripture of the day, lead in the serving of communion, and so on.
Third, we need to leave the platform regularly
In the leadership classic, In Search of Excellence, Tom Peters introduced MBWA, or Management By Walking Around. Peters explained that too many managers spend all their time in ivory tower offices where they can quickly lose the sense of what’s happening on the factory floor.
Pastors lose touch when we spend most of our pre- and post-service time in our office or green room instead of walking through the seats and hanging out in the church lobby.
Finally, some platforms need to be removed entirely
Strip them down and burn them, leaving nothing but a smoldering crater where they once stood.
Platforms that have been built on celebrity, that have enabled predators, that have abandoned core theology, or that have diverted our attention from the toxic cultures they’ve been hiding cannot be fixed. They must be destroyed.
Les McKeown calls the last phase of a dying organization the Death Rattle. This is when a church or organization knows they’re as good as dead. Right before the Death Rattle is a point of no return that McKeown calls the Big Rut, which is the last desperate chance to salvage anything of value.
“You cannot fix an organization in the Big Rut. You can’t. What you can do is break the organization up into many, many small pieces,” says McKeown. “So long as the senior management all go, that gives the opportunity to restart the other side of the life cycle.”
Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast. CNLP 112: Les McKeown on Getting Your Church or Organization into a Place of Predictable Success.
Some organizations are so toxic, so dangerous, and have caused so much damage that there is no way to turn them around, no matter how hard you try. Maybe they’re in the Big Rut, where they can be sold off for parts using some assets in another organization for God’s glory and the healing of the victims. But many are in the Death Rattle. In that final phase, the rot is so embedded that any attempts at salvage will only spread the sickness to another organization.
The Christian celebrity culture is in its death rattle.
Sure, it will keep rattling. But it cannot be rescued.
“Power has a way of ruining people,” wrote Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer in A Church Called Tov. “Success has a way of turning ministers into celebrities. Therefore, pastors must resist the pull toward celebrity.” (Look for my interview with Scot McKnight on The Church Lobby, May 2, 2024.)
(This is an excerpt from my new book, De-Sizing the Church: How Church Growth Became a Science, Then an Obsession, and What’s Next, Chapter 7: Inevitable: Why the Christian Celebrity Culture Guarantees Moral Failure, available now.)
The Beth Moore quote in the subtitle is cited from her X (Twitter) account.
