Any movement primarily driven by online lifestyle gurus, whether secular or religious, cannot give us the human love and discipleship we need to grow and mature in our faith. They can, however, manipulate our emotions and sell us a lot of swag.

Recently, the much disgraced and desperate to regain relevance Mark Driscoll tweeted the following:

God has bypassed the church pulpit and given His gospel to influencers, politicians and podcasters, and it’s because most pastors have become useless motivational speakers.

On the surface, Driscoll is justifying his own turn to “influencer” and “podcaster” after the disgrace of his ministry, as well as riding the popularity of numerous right-wing theologically and political conservative figures who seem to spend an inordinate amount of time tweeting, making YouTube videos, and publishing podcasts. And on that level his claim is perverse and wrong. God has not “bypassed” pastors. There are many faithful pastors preaching the gospel. If anything, many of the “influencers” he has in mind are motivational speakers, they just are motivating people toward self-improvement through a political agenda!

But on the other hand, Driscoll’s comments resonate with some realities that must be reckoned with. For one, I have heard from pastors across the country for years that they have struggled to disciple their congregations when 24 hour cable news and talk radio disciples them 6 days out of the week. That concern has only dramatically accelerated through the proliferation of YouTube and podcasts and social media. A pastor may have 45 minutes to preach a sermon a week; meanwhile, influencers, politicians, and other lifestyle gurus have hours of access a day to their congregants.

So what? You might be asking. Maybe these influencers are bringing insight into people’s lives, and in some cases that’s true. But without discernment and prudence, the temptation to be pulled into an ideological bubble is tremendous. The algorithms promote this. In addition, these influencers are outside of our communities, where as our pastors know our local context and needs. Influencers and lifestyle gurus are great at making sweeping generalizations (like I often do), but they cannot replace the wisdom of your local pastor (please do not replace your local pastor with me).

But the major distinction I want to focus on is the modern Internet “Influencer” and a model for imitation in Christ (1 Corinthians 11:1), particularly as pastor or elder.

The Internet Influencer has certain qualities and perverse incentives:

• They are inspired to promote themselves, their brand, their image, and their name.
• They are drawn to controversy because the algorithm favors and rewards it.
• They are addicted to audience capture, the need to please certain audiences.
• They have a perverse incentive not to apologize, correct mistakes, or go against their “side.”
• They tend to calcify into a narrow ideology.
• They are rarely held accountable, except by mobs.
• They tend to spend more and more time engaged with producing, commenting on, and critiquing content.
• They tend to sell swag.
• Social media platforms are perfectly built for their growth.

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