The Sad Irony of Celebrity Pastors | Spectator USA

At that point, I began to observe that our politics and culture had changed. I began to feel differently about our surrounding secular culture, and noticed that its attitude toward Christianity was not what it once had been. Aaron Renn’s account represents well my thinking and the thinking of many: There was a “neutral world” roughly between 1994–2

And don’t think for a moment that these failings are isolated to Zacharias alone or to people like Liberty University’s Jerry Falwell Jr. or Hillsong’s Carl Lentz. These powerful men were coddled and enabled by other powerful men and then automatically and reflexively defended by thousands upon thousands of angry and loyal Christian followers until

Humans disappoint, especially those we expect to share our beliefs and values. We see other believers fail to display the deep love for one another and the stranger that is commended in our sacred texts. We witness others compromise our deepest values, sacrificed for access to power. Integrity seems in short supply. We attend services where the peo

The Jericho March represented a different kind of Christian scandal—fanatical Christian nationalism. Vischer and Jethani argued that the American church needed to hear less from popular celebrities and more from courageous prophetic voices, from people who boldly seek justice and call us to turn, individually and institutionally, from sin.

Christian celebrities will continue to fall. But they don’t have to fall so often. They don’t have to inflict so much pain. Change will only come when Christian leaders remember a few painful truths. Their hearts are deceitful. They do not deserve their fame. God does not need them. Instead, they need Him. And they need to remember those truths eve

Soon enough, the most central question for both mainline and evangelical pastors was, How can we reach more and more people? They did not ask how they could testify to God’s eternity breaking into time. They asked how they could keep from losing pace up against the threat of secular 2.

And I started to recognize another danger to this approach: If we assume that winsomeness will gain a favorable hearing, when Christians consistently receive heated pushback, we will be tempted to think our convictions are the problem. If winsomeness is met with hostility, it is easy to wonder, “Are we in the wrong?” Thus the slide toward secular c