Prioritizing Celebrity Pastors Over Faithfulness in the Local Church

The Garrett Ashley Mullet Show

A video was sent me by my neighbor two houses down yesterday. Together for the Gospel published it to their YouTube channel back in 2016 of a panel discussion at one of their conferences. Titled 'Celebrity Pastor: Indecent Exposure?' and starring C.J. Mahaney, Carl Trueman, David Platt, Ligon Duncan, Matt Chandler, and Thabiti Anyabwile, the topic at the center of their dialogue was celebrity pastors in the contemporary American Church.

The question was asked: Do we assign too much authority and power to pastors who shepherd large churches, or who otherwise possess a great deal of notoriety on the national stage?

Undeniably so. We do give too much power and authority to these men. And we should stop that. But why is this true? And what are the consequences of failing to recognize it?

For one, as Trueman speaks to, we have the trouble of burnout. Many pastors lose heart because they are measuring their success against the likes of Mahoney, Platt, or Chandler. This leads to discouragement and despair due to unreasonable expectations, particularly if they only ever preside over a flock of 50-100 congregants.

Ask many young ministers in training who has been the greatest influence in their own sanctification and discipleship, Trueman says, and the names of celebrity pastors are almost always their answer. Rarely will they say the names of the local pastors whose preaching and teaching they sat under before they began training for full-time vocational ministry.

But in addition to the points Trueman makes, I want to add still more. For instance, what assumptions do we make about the faithfulness of a celebrity minister based on faulty metrics - most notably, their ability to attract and retain a crowd of followers, listeners, viewers, attendees, or members? And how much do we unreasonably infer about their track-record in their own home and local church body from the fact that they are up on that stage or screen?

Related to this, what dynamics come into play in their local churches and homes which, if our priorities are out of order, potentially delay needed accountability in the case of sin and folly?

If any pastor is rushing off to serve their local church instead of loving and leading their wives and children well, that is unhealthy. But so also, if celebrity pastors are preoccupied with the Christian conference speaking circuit, or a book promotion tour, and thereby neglect their local body except to lend it a kind of star power by their association with it, does this lead to a chilling effect where only the local church family is in a position to recognize and confront an indiscretion or discrepancy?

By this, I do not mean only that celebrity pastors must reckon with opportunity cost. That is, they cannot be everywhere all at once, attending sufficiently to all matters under their purview equally well at the same time. What I mean more is to ask whether at a national level we presume overmuch that celebrity pastors are in good standing in their own churches and homes when at the same time a general disordering of priorities will cause the same to be reluctant to potentially jeopardize a national influence for the sake of concerns which will be called relatively trivial or unimportant.

If the conviction which I share with Trueman is correct, we may have our assessment of faithfulness exactly backwards in many cases. We assume that the one who is faithful with much is proven so by the size of the crowd which follows him. He must have been faithful with the little of his local church and his household. Yet what does God say? We must first look at his management of the home, then the local church. And only after this should we give his remarks and guidance a greater weight of influence in our considerations from a distance.

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