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.