Over the weekend, I was made aware that Mars Hill Church in Seattle is hosting a preaching contest tomorrow to determine who will fill in for lead pastor Mark Driscoll on weeks that he is not preaching. Like those who pointed me to the news, I was hoping it was a joke. But it's not. The description on the Facebook event page reads as follows:
Tuesday, November 15th from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., we'll be hosting our first ever Preaching Qualifying School (Q School) at Mars Hill Ballard. This event will be a pressure-cooker preaching competition a la American Idol between 3 Mars Hill elders with the prize of being part of our preaching rotation to fill the pulpit on weeks Pastor Mark is out of the pulpit.
The three candidates are: Pastor Thomas Hurst of Mars Hill Bellevue Pastor Scott Mitchell of Mars Hill Everett Pastor AJ Hamilton of Mars Hill Albuquerque Judging the candidates will be: Pastor Mark Driscoll (playing the part of Simon Cowell—minus the v-neck) Pastor Justin Holcomb Pastor Dave Bruskas Pastor Scott Thomas Emceeing and playing the part of Ryan Seacrest will be Pastor Tim Gaydos of Mars Hill Downtown Seattle. We're hoping to get a big crowd of folks to come cheer on these guys and make a event of it. So, come on by and cheer on your favorite contestant.
It's hard to know where to begin with this, but a few things immediately come to mind. First, the use of the phrase 'a la American Idol' is obviously not arbitrary because the aim of this exercise is to see who will preach the most like Mark Driscoll. He is really the standard against which these other preachers are being judged. If that were not the case, they'd simply put together a rotation of preachers to fill the slots.
Second, and more signifcantly, holding an event like this speaks volumes about the theology of preaching at work here. This is what concerns me most. For one, when you pit three preachers against each other like this and turn it into a spectacle, all the weight and responsibility of the task of preaching is removed. No longer is your concern to address the spiritual needs of the congregation and to apply the Word to the specific context you're ministering in, but it's to impress four men who are determining whether or not you'll get a chance to preach in the most prestigious pulpit in the Mars Hill world. Needless to say, the dynamics of preaching in such an environment will completely alter how these three guys preach.
What's more, the church is making a public declaration in judging between the 'contestants' that one preacher is better than the other two. What will happen as a result is that a very low view of preaching will be fostered among the members of the church because they are being taught that it is more worthwhile to listen to one preacher than another.
Quite frankly, this is disastrous for the ministry of the Word. Believers need to have the conviction that, when the Bible is expounded faithfully in the pulpit, God is speaking through the preacher, regardless of whether or not he is as animated, humourous, or gripping as another preacher. Without that conviction, they will not come before the preached Word with humility. They will approach preaching with the consumeristic mindset of our culture, only giving ear to the preacher who entertains and captivates them most.
There is much more that could be said about this, but for now, all I hope is that Mars Hill recognises these problems and cancels this event.
Preaching is not a game or a contest. It is serious business.
No medium is neutral. The medium shapes and reforms the message, transforming the message even as it purports to be delivering it. An entertainment culture tends to consume Christian worship. The sincerity and concern conveyed by the media preacher are only apparent. Among the media mogul's failings is an inadequate ecclesiology. The virtual church made through electronic media is less than church, where, to extend Paul's corporeal analogy, the eye has no opportunity ever to meet the foot. There is no flesh for incarnation. The fundamental form of the Christian church as a participatory body, the character of the pastor as one who knows the flock and is known by the flock, is changed by immersion into the modern 'entertainment culture.' The primary function of television is entertainment, whereas the purpose of the gospel is transformation. Furthermore, when we are holding the TV remote control, we are in control of what can be said and shown to us. There is thus little opportunity to be jumped from behind by grace.
One of the discussions that came up in a few places last week after the whole controversy with Rob Bell was about how we do theology. I was having coffee with a good friend last week and we were talking a bit about the continued influence of celebrity culture on the church, particularly on how theology is done in this context. Both of us, having gone through seminary, recalled that often young people would come to seminary and their bookshelves would be lined with the books from many of these evangelical celebrities. All their theological formation up to that point would be from the influence of these celebrities.
This is not all bad, of course. Many of these leaders say good, biblical things worth knowing and remembering. There are a number of points to consider, though, if the act of doing theology is limited to seeking answers from a few of the celebrities we consider worth listening to. With the Rob Bell controversy, this became especially poignant as many lashed out and condemned Bell before actually reading his book, following in the unwise footsteps (in this particular case) of their leaders. They were praising the theological insights of these leaders to a set of theological questions that the leaders had preempted or misconstrued, or in some cases were not even aware of.
So what of this celebrity theology, then? I think there are a few characteristics that make this problematic if it is your sole source for theological formation. In the first place, it often lacks historical consciousness. Many of the leaders who write theological books often do so without much consideration of what has been written in the past on the subject. Reference will be made to the theological heavyweights of the golden age of the church – Calvin, Edwards, maybe a passing mention of Augustine – but for the most part, there is a disconnect with the past.
Really, this is symptomatic of the evangelical church at large. I was looking at a book some time ago by one of the celebrity leaders and throughout the course of the book, almost every single one of the hundreds and hundreds of footnotes was a Scripture reference. It is rather clever to do this, of course, because it gives the appearance of biblical fidelity (and I'm sure that much of the time, it was). But the problem here is that the theology in the book is not particularly original. Nonetheless, the followers, because of the lack of references to theologians of the past, understand it as entirely novel. And so this leader gets celebrated all the more for his theological and biblical insight.
Connected to this is a lack of independent thinking, both on the part of the leaders and followers. In April of last year, Brett McCracken had a very interesting piece in Christianity Today comparing the Together for the Gospel Conference and the Wheaton Conference, which were held days apart not too far from each other. He made the point that at Wheaton, there was serious wrestling being done with big theological questions, while T4G seemed 'more like a club patting each other on the back for their mutual buttressing of the "unadjusted gospel" against threats from various corners.' Perhaps that conclusion is a bit unfair, but I think he makes an important point. It is right, I think, to be wary of theological inventiveness, especially if you are doing so just for the sake of being original, but if all you are doing is applauding the slogans of your own team are you really even doing theology?
Since their leaders are not thinking independently and originally, neither do the followers. I can't remember how many times I have been in conversation with people who have answered a theological question by saying, 'Well, Celebrity Pastor A says this,' or 'I disagree because Celebrity Leader B doesn't see it that way.' It may very well be that A and B have it right in response to the issue at hand, but the follower has merely ingested the thought of the leader instead of exploring the question himself, thoughtfully and biblically. There is certainly a case to be made for relying on the church as your guide as you do theology, but it is also of profound importance to explore these questions in Scripture.
Third, if a person's theological formation is limited to what is gleaned from the celebrity leaders, it often has a very limited scope of focus. In part, this is due to the limited focus of the leaders themselves. Since the leaders, due to their celebrity status, find themselves increasingly separated from the local church, they turn their focus to theological issues that they perceive to be major problems in the wider church. It is no secret which issues have occupied many of these leaders in recent years – justification, penal substitution, now universalism, and so on. While these issues are certainly worthy of attention, they become focused on so exclusively that the theological vision of the leaders and followers becomes increasingly narrow. I have been openly critical of the whole gospel tweeting phenomenon before, in part because I think it is representative of this narrow theological focus. There are a lot of other issues out there that need to be thought about theologically, but attention is often diverted from these because they are not understood as pressing theological matters.
My next post will turn to focus on the idea of doing theology locally, and understanding theological formation as something that happens in communally. For now I just wanted to lay these thoughts out there as a way of prefacing the forthcoming discussion. In the meantime, what do you think? What are your observations regarding the influence of celebrity leaders on theological formation?
Everyone has heroes. There are people in the world who we want to emulate, who have played major roles in shaping who we are, how we think, what we do. This is certainly a good thing – some people have much more wisdom than we do, some have a better understanding of how to live the Christian life than we do, and these are worth studying and learning from. But the line between hero and idol seems to blur rather easily in Western culture.
In many ways, the media has served to blur the distinction because of the false sense of reality it creates. James Davis Hunter observes in his recent book, To Change the World, that the way media is used in our culture
[fosters] a reality that exists primarily if not only within the surfaces of sensory awareness and understanding. This is a world constituted by image, representation, simulation, and illusion. This is, of course, a highly engineered reality that distances us from our natural surroundings and the immediacy of primary relationships. It is a simulated reality that, in many ways, supersedes lived reality (209).
The media creates the illusion that we have some sort of relationship with the people we see on television, a sense of familiarity and intimacy. For someone to be our hero, we need to have some personal knowledge of them. In the past this meant having a personal relationship with them, or finding out enough of them by other means (such as an objective, balanced biography) that we have some knowledge of their character. Modern media is selective, however, in its portrayal of celebrities, and thus we only know of them what the media shows us, creating the illusion that what we see on the screen is an honest representation of the individual. Yet we make heroes out of the people we see projected in this simulated reality. In point of fact, however, we turn them into idols.
In recent years, the church has made a lot of use of technology, which in many ways has benefited the community of believers. But the church has also not been immune from using media to create an illusion of reality that fosters a kind of idolatry. The cult of personality has arisen because of the way certain pastors and leaders with their exceptional gifts have been cast into the limelight. Again, Hunter warns of the problems that arise from our misuse of technology:
All of the faith-based work that comes through these technologies bends to fit the technology's requirements, fostering a reality that exists and operates primarily on the surfaces of sense perception... Reality becomes constituted by the ephemera of image, representation, and simulation. Pseudo-intimacy with well-known personalities provides the primary form and style of communication for a population hungry for significance. Here too the message is fragmented, creating a context in which the distinctions between simulated and lived realities are largely dissolved. And because these media are used as a sales media within the Christian marketplace, this material is packaged in the same way as any other consumer goods in the marketplace are promoted, offering sensational appeals but making no demands and providing no accountability. How much spiritual fruit actually comes from the frenetic symbolism created by these media is debatable, but there is no question that in all of these ways, these technologies unwittingly weaken the connective tissue "between word and world" (222-223).
You do not need to spend much time in Christian culture here in the West before you have become acquainted with the glut of pastors and leaders that have become celebrities. Their names are everywhere, their sermons and talks are on nearly every Christian's iPod, every one of their tweets are re-tweeted hundreds of times over, their books are constant bestsellers, their image and style is adopted by pastors all over the country. They have become idols.
The damage this does to the local church is not insignificant. It puts extraordinary pressure on the pastor to fit the mould of the celebrity leaders that many people in the pews idolise. When their pastor does not preach as dramatically as the celebrity pastor, they begin to take his preaching less seriously and get their fill throughout the week elsewhere. They begin to wonder what their pastor is doing wrong when he is not headlining national conferences or publishing books or drawing in lots of 'outsiders'. And for the church that is without a pastor, their search committees put together a list of qualifications that one wonders if Jesus himself could even meet. All the while, lots of seminary graduates who want nothing more than to preach the gospel and shepherd God's people find themselves working at Starbucks because they are deemed inadequate until they have had ten years of experience learning to model this or that celebrity preacher. Having just gone through three years of seminary, I personally know many godly and faithful men who have such a passion and desire to serve Christ's church but are not given the chance because of the unrealistic standards churches have for their pastoral staff.
In part, this is just another manifestation of Western culture's rampant individualism and unwillingness to submit to authority. Since you, as the parishioner, know what you need best, you take it upon yourself to find what you think you need. In some cases, this may be a legitimate quest, but often it is driven by the consumer mindset of this culture that has us constantly shopping for something better than what we currently have. It is no exception within the church. How many people do you know who have left your local church to go to a celebrity pastor's church across town because the preaching there is just 'so much better'?
Another damaging result of this trend, then, is that it breaks apart the community of the local church. Parishioners begin to find the community life of the church less important when they no longer see it as an integral whole. They get 'awesome' preaching daily on their iPod, they get 'awesome' worship from the live stream of the mega-church four hundred miles away, but really like the potluck dinners with the folks from their own church and so they will show up for those once a month. They begin to live a fragmented ecclesial life that erodes their commitment to the local church and to the ministry and ordinances Christ has entrusted to the church.
Not only is damage done to the local church, but celebrity leaders cannot minister faithfully if they are not fully connected a local church. Even those who have become celebrities and are still connected to a local church find their ministry to the congregation they have been called to hindered by the demands of the celebrity culture. Because they are suddenly a draw for consumers from all over, they find their buildings overflowing with people who might drive two hundred miles each Sunday to hear them. They are forever preaching to an audience they have no personal knowledge of, they cannot hold their listeners accountable (nor can they always be held accountable), and the temptation to become prideful and arrogant becomes an exceedingly easy trap to fall into. Yet because the demand is ever-present, the will power to resist stepping into this role is continually weakened.
The celebrity model of leadership is entirely alien to the biblical conception of leadership. It is driven by consumer culture and a misguided quest for significance. Hunter notes that faithful, Christian leaders practice their leadership 'in all spheres and all levels of life and activity. It represents a quality of commitment oriented to the fruitfulness, wholeness, and well-being of all.' He continues,
It is...the antithesis of celebrity, a model of leadership that many Christians in prominent positions have a very difficult time resisting. Celebrity is, in effect, based on an inflated brilliance, accomplishment, or spirituality generated and perpetuated by publicity. It is an artifice and, therefore, a type of fraud. Where it once served power and patrons, in our own day it mainly serves itself and its pecuniary interests. Celebrity must, of necessity, draw attention to itself. In American Christianity, the relentless pressure to raise funds within churches and para-church organizations reinforces the pressure toward celebrity, with an endless flow of direct mail, advertising, and ghost-written sermons, speeches, articles, editorials, and so on. These pressures are difficult to resist even for those who, by instinct, might find celebrity either tasteless or problematic. The reason is that celebrity is not just a certain kind of status one achieves but it is also a powerful institution the entire structure of which is oriented toward burnishing a leader's image and projecting his or her visibility. The justification one often hears is that more people are reached in this way, yet there are often financial interests at stake for the celebrity leader and his or her organization, and these can either obscure or undermine the ends of outreach.
And so, whether leadership is expressed within the dynamics of celebrity or outright arrogance rooted in a sense of superiority, such leadership is artificial, unbiblical, organizationally unhealthy, inherently corrupting, and all to common in the Christian world (260-261).
It would be easy to continue on about this, but I think Hunter's summary of the problems with the cult of personality is sufficient at this point. Celebrity culture erodes the church's faithful witness to the gospel and destroys the community God intended the church to be.
Local churches need to free themselves of the self-imposed burden to be more like the church down the road or the mega-church on the other side of the country that everyone is talking about. It is time to turn our focus to ministering to the people God has called together in this particular time and place, and ministering to the community he has placed us in. For pastors, this means faithfully preaching the Word and shepherding God's people, their primary concern being to love, serve, and disciple them. For the parishioners, it means recognising that God has called the pastor that serves them to do this task in this time and in this place, and submitting to the authority God has granted that pastor. It means a wholehearted commitment to the local church they belong to, and a willingness (indeed, a desire) to participate in all parts of its ministry.
You learn from your heroes, and seek to use what you have learned from them to benefit others or to live more fully to the glory of God. But you copy idols, and seek to adopt their style and image for your own benefit, under the guise of benefiting others, and to live more for the glory of yourself. It is one thing for pastors to have heroes who they seek to learn from in order to edify and build up the people of God in their congregation. It is another when pastors seek to imitate their idols for entirely self-serving purposes. The danger of the latter is all to real in the culture of the Western church. And the same goes for parishioners – you can have heroes who have played a major role in deepening your knowledge of God and your understanding of Christ's Lordship over all of life. But you can also have idols who you cling on to in order to meet your demands for dynamic preaching or your hunger for self-help tips that end up turning you into a clone of the celebrity instead of someone transformed by the gospel.
We need to keep the church free of the simulated reality than can so easily be created when we let our guard down. We need to focus on the objective, tangible reality that God has placed us in. Let's abandon the cult of personality, the culture of celebrity, and concentrate on being faithful in our own contexts for the building up of the people of God and for the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Craig Ferguson, of late night TV fame, offers his opinion on why everything sucks:
Ferguson is usually very funny, but I've found that when he engages in cultural analysis like this, he is often quite perceptive as well. Here he picks up on something I have increasingly come to realize, that adolescence is a social construct. And marketers in this culture have not only recognized that, but seized onto it and been at the forefront of propagating the idea that we ought to prolong our youth. We no longer prize 'experience and wisdom', as Ferguson points out.
After you're done laughing, discuss: is the glorification of 'youth and stupidity' a real problem in our culture? How should the church address this issue?
I remember reading the following, from Eugene Peterson's Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity, somewhere before, a few years ago. When I saw that John Barach had posted it, I copied and pasted it here because it is characteristic of Peterson's incisiveness and wisdom, and his ability to systematically expose the rampant consumerism at work in American evangelicalism. Here he laments the way the pastorate has become just another tool used to satisfy the wants of the consumers in the pew.
For a long time I have been convinced that I could take a person with a high school education, give him or her a six-month trade school training, and provide a pastor who would be satisfactory to any discriminating American congregation. The curriculum would consist of four courses. Course I: Creative Plagiarism. I would put you in touch with a wide range of excellent and inspirational talks, show you how to alter them just enough to obscure their origins, and get you a reputation for wit and wisdom. Course II: Voice Control for Prayer and Counseling. We would develop your own distinct style of Holy Joe intonation, acquiring the skill in resonance and modulation that conveys an unmistakable aura of sanctity. Course III: Efficient Office Management. There is nothing that parishioners admire more in their pastors than the capacity to run a tight ship administratively. If we return all telephone calls within twenty-four hours, answer all letters within a week, distributing enough carbons to key people so that they know we are on top of things, and have just the right amount of clutter on our desks — not too much or we appear inefficient, not too little or we appear underemployed — we quickly get the reputation for efficiency that is far more important than anything that we actually do. Course IV: Image Projection. Here we would master the half-dozen well-known and easily implemented devices that create the impression that we are terrifically busy and widely sought after for counsel by influential people in the community. A one-week refresher course each year would introduce new phrases that would convince our parishioners that we are bold innovators on the cutting edge of the megatrends and at the same time solidly rooted in all the traditional values of our sainted ancestors.
(I have been laughing for several years over this trade school training for pastors with which I plan to make my fortune. Recently, though, the joke has backfired on me. I keep seeing advertisements for institutes and workshops all over the country that invite pastors to sign up for this exact curriculum. The advertised course offerings are not quite as honestly labeled as mine, but the content appears to be identical — a curriculum that trains pastors to satisfy the current consumer tastes in religion. I’m not laughing anymore.) [7-8]
Pastoral ministry is not about giving people what they want. Instead, it is about giving people what they need. While at first we may, with Peterson, laugh a little about this, we too must come to the point where we are not laughing about this anymore. When it is all said and done, this is not just a matter of wants versus needs, or likes versus dislikes. The reality is that this a matter of life and death.
This post continues a series that will address many of the points on the list compiled by John Muether entitled, "Resisting Modernity: a How-to Guide." You can find the list in full here, and all the posts in this series here.
7. If you cannot [stop watching television], then refuse to use the remote control. Remove its batteries. Remember John's warning against the "lust of the eyes"—he's not referring to pornography. 8. For the same reasons described in #7, do not subscribe to cable television.Perhaps by now you've noticed a couple of significant themes running through this list that characterize modernity: consumerism and the autonomy of the individual. These two points again directly attack those cultural values. Throughout most of its existence, the television has served as a means to satisfy the "I want it now" mentality of our society. The addition of the remote control, as well as later developments like cable TV, satellite, and TiVo, have only served to bolster this sentiment so well expressed in the lyrics of Nirvana's 1991 smash hit, "Smells Like Teen Spirit"—here we are now, entertain us!Readers will know from the last post that I am not anti-television. But there are boundaries we need to draw, and I think Muether gives us some good suggestions to get started. He references 1 John 2:16, in which John speaks of the lusts or desires of our eyes. The context of that verse is verses 15-17, which read:
Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.
Television, in perhaps the most pointed way of all forms of media, makes plain the things of this world. Every time we watch television we are bombarded with the values, ideals, and underlying religious convictions that shape this culture. When we are subjected to that hour upon hour, it in turn begins to shape and mold us. The things of the world become the things we desire. One of the simplest ways to stand against that influence is to restrict the amount of time the television is on, and to limit the ease of access you have to it.
As I have mentioned before, there are good things about television. All I am saying is that we need to be careful how we use it. Instead of simply turning on the television to pass a bit of time (which I am frequently guilty of), pick up a book and read a few chapters. Go for a walk with your spouse and talk with each other. Sit on your front porch and spend some time praying and meditating. Again, when we intentionally limit our access to something like television, we are less wont to use it to fill our time. In the end, we can look at John's teaching in the passage above in this way: does our use of the television reflect our love for the things of this world, or does it reflect our desire to grow in the wisdom and knowledge of God, to do His will and to seek His glory?
This post continues a series that will address many of the points on the list compiled by John Muether entitled, "Resisting Modernity: a How-to Guide." You can find the list in full here, and all the posts in this series here.
3. Therefore, don't shop at malls or eat at chains: patronize mom and pop stores wherever possible. 4. Okay, #3 is nearly impossible, especially in Orlando [and other big cities]. But resolve to take smaller steps, like not frequenting "convenience stores" between 8pm and dawn.We're addressing two points on the list this week, and these two points are closely connected with last week's thought. And here I must confess that I am frequently in violation of Muether's suggestions. I try to excuse it by reminding myself that I am a poor student, which temporarily alleviates my guilt. Also, in my defense, I do live in Orlando and as Muether rightly acknowledges, there is a noticeable lack of mom and pop stores here. Part of that has to do with Orlando's history, but that's another issue. Nonetheless, I know I should do more to support local business.Why? Well, local businesses play a pivotal role in the cultivation of a local community and culture. Frequently shopping at the so-called "big-box" stores hurts those businesses. Within the realm of suburbia, this is all too common, and in part it accounts for the distorted cultural identity frequently found in suburban areas of big cities. I know among economists, especially those who are strongly free market-oriented, businesses like Walmart commend respect for delivering products at low cost while making huge profits. As I say frequently, I am not an economist. But I do maintain the conviction that when community suffers because of our economic structures, the latter needs to be rethought. A further consideration here, which I won't get into, is how these business models have influenced the American Church. Think about that connection. What has this done to the community of believers?Muether's point about covenience stores is also helpful. There are a couple of things to consider. First, with many of these stores being open 24-hours, it only helps to feed the consumerist mentality that this culture has. We can get whatever we want whenever we want. There is no restraint imposed upon us, and goods can be had in the blink of an eye. We have no need to stop and think about what we are buying, even though the passing of time often leads us to rethink the purchase of needless items.Second, this also has a debilitating effect on community, right down to the very foundation of community—the family. Most of us are occupied during the day with our jobs and the various other parts of life, and so we use the evenings to run around to all kinds of stores. However, when we do this, we take precious time away from the cultivation of a healthy family life. If there was no reason to leave the house in the evening, we could take our time with dinner and strengthen the bonds between our loved ones. We could spend time in family worship, or invite friends and neighbors into our homes for an evening of fellowship.Again, I think this all boils down to the notions of culture and community. Part of the cultivation of a healthy culture and community begins with local businesses. What do you think?
