The Celebrity-Pastor Syndrome - Christianity Today

I pastor a large church started in the early 1980s. Several years ago the founding pastor abruptly resigned, disqualified (in the opinion of the elders) from ministry.

Like most pastors of fast-growing American churches, the founding pastor had a charismatic personality. People swarmed to his church, irresistibly drawn to his warmth, and the church began its meteoric rise. But one Sunday morning, when he stood up and essentially said, “It’s been real, folks, but now I’m burned out. Good-bye.” The congregation went into shock. The full story behind his departure was not publicized.

Enter yours truly.

I arrived knowing about the turmoil that preceded my coming. But I wasn’t prepared for what I found. I naively thought that becoming the senior pastor of a large church with a fourteen-year history was like becoming president of General Motors: I would take over the GM legacy, give it a few distinctives, and ride its momentum into the future. I fully expected its people would be committed to the institution, that they would, in general, support their new leader. I thought they would hand me GM and, at the conclusion of my tenure, I would hand it back.

I was wrong.

The church I’m pastoring isn’t GM; it’s Delorean. Here’s why.

THE FOLLOWING

It didn’t take me long to recognize an unfortunate truth: a large percentage of people who attended here were not committed to Christ or this church. Their allegiance was to a personality.

I call these people “the Following.” For this crowd, the theological, philosophical, and directional distinctives of the church were wrapped up in the person of the founding pastor. When he left, the big question for the Following was “Will the new pastor be like the old pastor?” And, of course, it’s next to impossible to fill the shoes of the Following’s beloved.

Not everyone in the church was tied into the charismatic leader, however. There were those whom I call “the Church,” who, in contrast to the Following, are connected to the community of Christ and the institution of the local church.

When the smoke cleared, the people who called this church home were more likely to be part of the Church than the Following. They exhibited at least one characteristic of spiritual maturity: loyalty to the local church, not a personality. These are people who, if I resigned today, would stay on. They are committed to this institution and its people, not me. In general, they’re supportive of me, but to them, I don’t hang the moon.

Neither of these two invisible groups wear name tags. But their true identity is revealed in crisis.

Why do growing churches teem with Followers? I think one reason is that many of today’s churchgoers are not attracted to doctrinal statements or a particular philosophy of ministry. People look to the personality projected from the platform. They’re the “I’m of Paul, I’m of Apollos” crowd of 1 Corinthians.

Today’s intimacy-starved culture fuels this phenomenon. People who have no friends flock to our churches. Some have never experienced an open and trusting relationship and are looking for surrogate fathers. Many come from broken families where the pinnacle of intimacy was getting along with mom’s new boyfriend. They are the casualties of our shallow and relationally impaired culture.

So a sort of fatal attraction develops between church attenders and the celebrity pastor.

This person, who weekly gets up in front of the church and speaks from his heart, is more honest and direct (whether he’s feigning it or not) than anybody else in the lives of the Following. Sunday morning, then, becomes the most meaningful interaction they’ve had with anybody all week, however shallow it may be. Most of their other relationships and conversations are, at best, superficial. That the charismatic leader (at least in a large church) could pick only a few of them out of a police lineup doesn’t seem to matter.

“You’ve changed my life,” they say–and we’ve never seen them before.

Welcome to the age of cyber-intimacy.

FAIR WEATHER TICKET-HOLDERS

For the Following, church is a one-hour event on Sunday morning for which they’ve purchased season tickets. They consume that hour as they would a Boston Celtics’ game. If you’re winning, they’ll keep coming. If not, they’ll give you the benefit of the doubt–but only for a short while. If you continue to lose, they’ll stop buying their tickets. They move on. They switch team loyalties easily (especially if another celebrity pastor goes to a church nearby).

But I can’t place all the blame on our consumer culture.

The modern church is often the one selling the season tickets. It’s easy for the entrepreneurial pastor to fall into the trap of thinking Sunday morning is an event–that this Sunday has got to be better than last week, that unless people leave each week saying, “This is the best service ever,” we’ve failed.

But when I think like that, I reinforce a certain deadly mentality among those coming. Many of them believe they’ve got a line-item veto: “We liked the opening prelude but not the second song … .” If they exercise their veto often enough, they’ll soon be gone.

That’s like my kids judging my wife’s cooking: “Well, Mom, we’d have scored you higher, but tonight’s presentation is a little weak. You don’t have any green on the plate.” That doesn’t fly at our house. The only question that matters is “Will it nourish them and help them be healthy kids?” (And it doesn’t have to be better than last night for it to be healthy.)

In short, a lot of people who were coming to this church have stopped buying season tickets. Now, three years after the founding pastor resigned, church attendance is down by 50 percent.

EXORCIZING OLD GHOSTS

I’ve tried not to take it personally. But when you become the new pastor of personality-driven church, your worst moments are displayed in front of your most severe jury. The Following use worship time on Sunday mornings to measure you against their idol.

I received no four-star ratings my first two years here. On the weekends, I felt like a guest speaker. And during the week, I felt like a management consultant acting as the church’s CEO. But at the end of each day, I didn’t feel like its pastor. The church, in reality, was still being led by the former pastor’s ghost.

I felt terrorized by the unsigned letters, the signed letters, the people who came to my office saying, “I speak for a lot of people,” and the large numbers of people migrating to other churches. So shortly after I arrived, I attempted to rally the troops by refocusing the church on its mission–its vision, values, and priorities.

Gun-shy, I appealed to the past. When I unveiled my proposal to the church leaders, I said, “This vision for the church is reliable because it came from the eighties, from the former pastor himself. Honest to goodness. This was his mission, and it’s still our mission. We’re just trying to restate it.” Essentially I was saying, “If the founder said it, it’s legitimate, but if it’s set forth by me, the new pastor, it’s not.”

I regret that now. I had been emotionally bullied by the ghost of my predecessor.

I finally had to convince myself that, despite the attitude of the Following, I’d been called as their new pastor. I wasn’t some guy who just crashed their party. And if God had in store the same vision for the nineties that he did for the eighties, that would be fine by me. If not, so be it. I was not here to preserve a church built around a human personality. I was here to discover what God wanted this church to be now and in the near future.

I’ve since concluded that the megachurch church that loses its pastor (a relatively new phenomenon) is like a family that loses its dad. If the wife remarries, the new husband’s unique personality will alter the disposition of the entire family. That can’t be helped. The new dad is not like the old dad.

In step families, it’s not unusual for the first few months, even years, to be trying for all. Only after a period of adjustment is the family finally ready to ask, “What are our new dreams now as a new family?”

Likewise, a church’s chemistry will be a synthesis of the personality the church brought to the relationship and the new pastor. So, while this isn’t my church, it will inevitably–and legitimately–reflect my personality. The makeup of this church family has changed. And that’s okay. Emotionally, I had to come to terms with that truth before I could help this church discover their new dreams.

RIGHT-SIZING THE CHURCH

After a forest fire ravages a stand of timbers, the landscape is naked, blackened, dead, and strangely quiet, empty of life. Yet next spring, new shoots push up. The forest floor begins to green, and new life is born.

Likewise in our church, the ranks were thinned considerably, but new growth is slowly emerging. We’re experiencing a sort of springtime. That’s the good news. The bad news is I’ve just learned an uncomfortable truth about growth: I, too, am creating a Following. Many say they are attracted to this church because of my preaching. I’ve discovered I’m having an effect not unlike my predecessor (though on a much smaller scale).

“It ain’t right, but it’s so”–that’s what my friend’s grandmother used to say. Her witty saying is appropo to our culture’s crazy penchant for following the preacher instead of Christ. The phenomenon baffles me, but I can’t deny my leadership creates a Following. However, as John the Baptist said, “I must decrease, and he must increase.” I’m committed to making sure Christ increases in the lives of the Following.

One way I can decrease is by not playing the numbers game. I’ve stopped making numerical growth the goal of ministry (admittedly, this is easier to do when you’ve just lost half of your congregation).

In the marketplace, today’s corporations are becoming smaller. In fact, the nomenclature has changed from down-sizing to right-sizing. Down- sizing suggests that before it was right to be big but now it’s okay to be small. Right-sizing implies the corporation was too big in the first place.

The temptation for pastors is to do whatever it takes to swell the ranks.

Take something as simple as the worship service, for example. A popular preacher can tell the music pastor, “Placate the people. Give them what they want and don’t upset them. Then I’ll get up and do my thing.” The result will be a service without flow or unity, but if people like the music style, they’ll rave.

I took a more hands-on approach to planning the service. When I unified the style of music, a chorus of complainers grumbled in four-part harmony: “We don’t like the music anymore. And if it doesn’t return to our tastes, we may leave the church.” Their assumption was that purpose of worship was to please them. I found out quickly that no matter which direction I went with the music–more contemporary or more traditional–I couldn’t please everyone.

I felt threatened, quite frankly, when the prospect of losing more people seemed imminent. But I mustered the courage to say, “Well, let me give you the list of ten churches in the area I’d recommend. We don’t handcuff you here.”

And many left. Perhaps this church needed to be right-sized.

PREACHING INCONVENIENCE

Not only must we guard against a runaway fascination with numbers, we have to be intentional about converting our Following into the Church. In other words, we must help them grow up, to mature.

This necessary conversion is a chronic problem of all churches but especially of those intentionally targeting non-Christians. The sheer numbers of new believers puts an enormous load on the staff. Seekers are used to being catered to. That’s why they started attending in the first place.

But the mentality mutates into something like this: “The longer I come to this church, the more demands I have the right to make.”

These people enter our churches never having met Christ. Then, through multiple exposure to the Christian message in a non-threatening format, they invite Christ to be their master. That’s wonderful. But often, many drop out shortly thereafter saying, “I’m not getting enough on Sunday morning,” but what they mean is, “I want more inspirational, entertaining, biblical insights.”

In essence, they’re saying, “Now that I am more mature, it takes more to wow me, and I demand you meet my needs at my convenience or else … “

The New Testament message, however, is that mature believers will be more sensitive to the needs of those around them, not to their own desires. To experience fully the benefits of Christian community, they must serve. That’s what the Church does. You can spot easily those who have been converted into the Church. They are the ones saying, “My needs are great, but I’m willing to be inconvenienced.” (Paradoxically, when takers become givers, many of their unmet needs get met.)

So my preaching has become clear on this point: the more mature you become, the more you will be asked to be inconvenienced. We’re raising the level of expectations we have for Christians. For too long, the American church culture has expected the world to conform to a Christian lifestyle while lightening its expectations of Christians. People tend to rise or fall to the level of expectations.

Just as I have to be specific about how seekers can come to Christ, I must make clear the expectations Christ has of his followers. And, ironically, I’ve found most seekers are not turned off by a sermon challenging the comfort zones of the believer. In fact, they are more likely to regard highly the Christian faith if they really get an honest dose of what it’s all about.

My story is not over. The internal bleeding caused by this church’s founding pastor has stopped, but the damage to the internal organs is extensive. The patient needs lots of rehab and tender loving care.

And while that’s happening, I aim to decrease, and trust that Christ will increase.

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Bob Shank is pastor of South Coast Community Church in Newport Beach, California.