Ministry is not a way to become famous. Ministry is not a show where some perform while the rest are entertained. There should be no ministry celebrities. All believers are workers together for God in His field and in the building of his church. In Lystra, when people tried to make Paul and Barnabas celebrities and treat them like gods, even offering them gifts and sacrifices, Paul protested and pointed them to the one true God.

One of the most talked about sections of De-sizing the Church is chapter 7, Inevitable: Why the Christian Celebrity Culture Guarantees Moral Failure. This is obviously a crisis that has become far too evident in recent months.
Rich Brown shows us that our obsession with celebrity is nothing new. It happened in the first century church, as well. Because of this, the New Testament offers wisdom about its dangers, along with some helpful solutions.
— Karl Vaters
Our youthful fascination with celebrities doesn’t end as we get older. We may go about it a little differently, but adults can still be enamored with the rich and famous.
In the American church we have developed our own born-again celebrities and evangelical superstars. What Karl Vaters identifies as the Christian celebrity culture can affect how the average Christian thinks about and lives out their Christian life.
Much of what is written about the repercussions of the Christian celebrity culture addresses the celebrities’ tendencies toward spiritual abuse, narcissism and excessive lifestyle. But it can also create a Christian celebrity mindset in the American church-goer that has severe consequences — of our own making.
Biblical Precedents
In the middle of the first century AD, even though there was no media to hype people, and when men like Paul, Peter, and Apollos were not seeking to be religious stars, some of the believers in the Corinthian church had become fans of one or another of these religious leaders (see 1 Cor 3:4 “I follow Paul, Apollos”; 1 Cor 1:12 “l follow Peter, I follow Christ.”).
Paul would eventually have something to say about those who were considered celebrities and “super apostles” (see 2 Cor 11:5; 12:11), but first he had something to say to the followers of those man-made religious celebrities.
In 1 Corinthians 3 he dared to talk about the consequences that a first-century Christian celebrity mentality was having on the lives of the Corinthian Christians.
Not surprisingly, these consequences look all too familiar twenty centuries later.
Consequence #1: A Christian celebrity mentality stunts our spiritual growth (1 Cor 3:1-2)
When the Corinthians were new believers and infants in Christ, Paul gave them milk. He did not blame them for needing infant-level teaching.
But when Paul wanted to speak to these Christians as spiritual adults, (people controlled by the Holy Spirit), he couldn’t.
Initially, Paul said they were just sarkinos (people made of flesh). Then he said they were sarkikos (people dominated by the flesh). They ought to have been able to ingest solid food, but their pre-occupation with Christian personalities had arrested their spiritual development.
Eugene Peterson wrote, “Fan clubs encourage secondhand living.” We become spiritual adolescents engaging in “compensatory heroism.” We quit aspiring to grow and have settled for watching our Christian heroes do it all.
In today’s Christian celebrity culture, we experience what has been called “the vicarious voyage of identity.” We substitute the fame of our Christian stars for our own personal spiritual growth.
Consequence #2: A Christian celebrity mentality promotes immature behavior (1 Cor 3:3-4)
One of the words Paul used to describe the Corinthians was nepios (infant, 3:1). This word implies that the Corinthians were adults who were displaying the irresponsible characteristics of a child.
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In a world of dizzyingly disposable trends, so much seems to collapse as quickly as it arrives: brands, celebrities, movements, institutions, ideas. When we misconstrue faith as just another thing in the consumerist stew, it too becomes a flash-in-the-pan fashion, as fragile and fickle as the latest viral trend on TikTok. The life of Christian faith should be altogether different: a long obedience, a slow burn, a quiet diligence to pursue Jesus faithfully, with others in community, in good times and bad, for better or for worse. 

“Hillsong, Once a Leader of Christian Cool, Loses Footing in America.”
By now, headlines like this one (from a March 29 New York Times article by Ruth Graham) have become sadly predictable. It seems almost every “leader of Christian cool”—whether a tattooed celebrity pastor or a buzzy nightclub church—flames out and loses its footing fairly quickly. Which is not at all surprising. By their very nature, things that are cool are ephemeral. What’s fashionable is, by the necessity of the rules of fashion, quickly obsolete.
This is one of many reasons why chasing cool is a fool’s errand for churches and pastors, as I argue in my book Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide. If you prioritize short-term trendiness, your ministry impact will likely be short-lived. If you care too much about being “relatable” and attractive to the fickle tastes of any given generation or cultural context, the transcendence of Christianity and the prophetic power of the gospel will be shrunk and shaped to the contours of the zeitgeist. Relevance-focused Christianity sows the seeds of its own obsolescence. It’s a bad idea. It rarely ends well.
Lament and Learn
From the Mars Hills to the Hillsongs (and countless others), it’s tragic to see churches fail—however predictable and ill-advised the “cool church” arc may be. We don’t rejoice over this. We should lament and learn.
What are the lessons?
For one, these headlines ought to remind us that relevance is no substitute for reverence and indeed may compromise it. The Christian life shouldn’t be oriented around being liked; it should be oriented around loving God and loving others. Far more important than being fashionable is being faithful. Far more crucial than keeping up with the Joneses is staying rooted in God’s unchanging Word.
Things like confession and repentance, daily obedience to the whole counsel of Scripture, and quiet commitment to spiritual disciplines aren’t cutting edge and won’t land you in a GQ profile about “hypepriests.” But these are the things that make up a healthy, sustainable, “long obedience in the same direction” faith. And with every hip church that closes and celebrity pastor who falls, more and more Christians are hopefully waking up to this fact.
Maybe boring, uncool, unabashedly churchy church is actually a good thing. Maybe a Christianity that doesn’t appeal to my consumer preferences and take its cues from Twitter is exactly the sort of faith I need.
Short-Term Success, Long-Term Failure
It’s counterintuitive, though. In the moment, a large church crowded with 20-somethings—eager to hear the celebrity pastor’s sermon and enthusiastic in their singing of arena-rock worship songs—seems like an unassailable triumph. Because our metrics for success in the American church have for so long mirrored the metrics of market-driven capitalism (bigger is always better; audience is king), we assume if a “cool church” is packed to the gills with cool kids, it’s working.
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Not only is it bad exegesis and bad logic to make unrepentant homosexual practice less severe than feelings of pride or possession of wealth, akin to an act of disobeying one’s parents, but it is also bad pastoral theology. In the story of the sinful woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears, wiped his feet with her hair, and kissed them with her lips, Jesus explained to the Pharisaic host that the one who was forgiven more, loves more (Luke 7:36-50). One doesn’t have to lower the severity of sin in order to reach out to an offender. In fact, the greater the need, the greater should be the loving outreach.

Megan Basham, in her new book Shepherds for Sale, was right to be critical of the views on sexuality and homosexuality presented by Rev. J. D. Greear, who is Neil Shenvi’s pastor (note: Neil has attempted to take Meg to task over her statements about Greear) at The Summit Church in Durham, North Carolina and president of the Southern Baptist Convention from 2018 to 2021.
The 2019 Sermon Controversy
Greear tried to diminish the significance of the issue of sexual ethics in general and homosexual practice in particular in a 2019 sermon. Then when a furor arose, he issued a correction that left many erroneous views intact and largely blamed others for misrepresenting him.
His slippery attempts at rescuing himself from critique in the SBC in this matter (another was his initial endorsement of Preston Sprinkle’s erroneous “transgender pronoun hospitality”) have a Clintonesque quality in which every sentence must be carefully parsed.
The “Whisper” Statement
Greear declared in a widely publicized sermon in Jan. 2019 that the Bible only “whispers about sexual sin,” with homosexual practice especially in view, while it shouts about “materialism and religious pride.”
Much controversy erupted over this wrongheaded claim, leading Greear two-and-a-half years later (June 26, 2021) to issue “A Statement about My Sermon on Romans 1” which some took as an apology for his previous remark. A careful read of the statement, however, shows that Greear ended up more blaming those whom he alleged “misrepresented” him, perhaps intentionally, than apologizing and correcting his errors.
What Greear had said in the 2019 sermon (among other missteps) was this:
“In terms of frequency of [Paul’s] mention and the passion with which he mentions it, it would appear that quite a few other sins are more egregious in God’s eyes than homosexuality. Jen Wilkin, who is one of our favorite Bible teachers here and who is actually leading our Women’s Conference, said, ‘We ought to whisper about what the Bible whispers about and shout about what the Bible shouts about.’ And the Bible appears more to whisper when it comes to sexual sin compared to its shout about materialism and religious pride. In fact, Jesus not one time ever said that it was difficult for the same-sex attracted to go to heaven. He did say that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it was for a religiously proud or materially successful person to enter into the kingdom of God.”
2021 Clarification
Greear’s “clarification” in 2021 was not entirely successful. He stated:
“I applied that quote to the difference in the emphasis Jesus places on the dangers of pride and greed versus sexual sin and said that given the sheer number of times Jesus talks about pride and greed, it is as if he saved most of his volume to warn about pride and greed. Thus, I said, we should look more fearfully at our own prideful, greedy hearts than we do haughtily at the sexual dysfunctions of others. The key word in the point was ‘compared.’ ‘Compared to what he said about pride and greed… it is as if he shouts about… and whispers about.’
“It was a rather clumsy way of making the point. However, I was in no way trying to imply that sexual ethics are muted in Scripture, that we should not speak clearly about them, or that we should [not?] be embarrassed by them. The preceding point of that message, in fact, which was not included in the clips that got passed around, makes that abundantly clear. In that point, I state plainly Scripture could not be clearer about these matters and that rebellion in sexual sin, as 1 Cor 6:9–11 states in no uncertain terms, is a matter of eternal destiny.”
Persisting Misconceptions
As we shall see, Greear was still wrong about important things: (1) Determining the severity of a given sin by counting up the number of explicit mentions in the Bible; and (2) contending that the universal struggle with pride and materialism is worse than engaging in homosexual practice.
Moreover, (3) his claim in 2021 that he presented “rebellion in sexual sin” in that 2019 sermon as “a matter of eternal destiny” is at conflict with that sermon where he denied that homosexual practice could send someone to hell and depicted homosexual practice as no worse than any other sin, including an outburst of temper, a feeling of envy or greed, a boast, or a rebellious attitude toward one’s parents.
He apologized “for any confusion that my clumsy wording may have caused” but devoted the rest of his comments to blaming others for misrepresenting him and did not rule out that the misrepresentation may have been intentional. In the end, his statement was more about those misrepresenting him than about what he stated, which was not merely “clumsy” but also incorrect on its face.
Response To Criticism
At one point, he blamed “Tom Ascol and a few of the same pastors seemingly looking to trap me in my words” for not reaching “out to me for clarification.” It was Tom’s Founders Ministries that produced the video in which I had a short appearance addressing the “whisper” statement.
Let it be said that I sent Rev. Greear an email on June 11, 2019, regarding my assessment of the entire sermon in question, stating: “I have written an open letter to you that appears on my Facebook and may soon be appearing elsewhere. For the moment you can view it at [then supplied the Facebook link].” I left not only my email address but also my cell phone. If he had had any issue with what I wrote, he could easily have contacted me. He never did.
Here were my observations in a 2021 post (modified slightly to adjust tenses for a 2024 reissuing) on Greear’s 2021 statement and on his 2019 sermon.
1. Jesus’ Silence On Same-Sex Attraction
Let’s begin by looking at Greear’s claim in his 2019 sermon that “Jesus not one time ever said that it was difficult for the same-sex attracted to go to heaven.” We wouldn’t expect Jesus to address “the same-sex attracted” specifically since homosexual practice was not an issue among the Jews of Jesus’ day. Nor would we expect him to condemn people for experiencing (but not acquiescing to) an involuntary impulse.
What Jesus did do is warn that sexual sin could get you thrown into hell. Matthew placed the Jesus saying about tearing out one’s eye or cutting off one’s hand if it threatens one’s downfall between Jesus’ prohibition of adultery of the heart and remarriage after (at least invalid) divorce, offenses that he obviously didn’t regard as severe as the violation of the male-female prerequisite that he treated as the foundation of sexual ethics (5:27-32; cp. 19:4-6). Granted, he didn’t use the precise expression “eye of a needle” here but that is a pedantic, not substantive, point.
2. Misguided Hermeneutics
In his 2021 statement, Greear still operated with the erroneous hermeneutical premise that the severity of sins is determined by the number of mentions that they get by Jesus or by the Bible generally. He reiterates:
“I applied that quote to the difference in the emphasis Jesus places on the dangers of pride and greed versus sexual sin and said that given the sheer number of times Jesus talks about pride and greed, it is as if he saved most of his volume to warn about pride and greed.”
In his sermon, he also made the same point about the apostle Paul.
Counting often gets the interpreter to the wrong conclusion. Some sexual sins are so egregious and corrupting to the young, and thus so infrequently committed in Israel by Jews, that the very mention of them in Scripture is kept to a minimum.
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