Real collaboration and cooperation should be part of the functionality of the pastoral leadership. There’s nothing wrong with having one guy provide most of the preaching in a church, but he shouldn’t provide it all. And the service shouldn’t appear as a one-man show. Behind the scenes, church elders ought to exercise the Bible’s permission to ask questions, challenge assumptions, and check each other’s hearts. Elders ought to say “yes” a lot, but they are not supposed to be yes-men. And it ought not be inordinately difficult to fire a pastor who has disqualified himself. Whatever a church’s pastors are, the church itself will become.

Every week one could write another post about another fallen pastor, because that appears to be the rate at which they fall. A great number of ministers without national or global platforms are counted in this number, but oddly enough, these falls only seem to hit “close to home” when it’s a guy with a big platform. It’s an odd phenomenon, isn’t it? We may not know the big name guys at all, but the fact that they are, in evangelical culture anyway, a “household name,” makes it more personal. (This is not just evangelicals, of course — newsstand tabloids regularly run photo features like “Celebrities: They’re Just Like Us!”)

In all the hand-wringing over the latest evangelical celebrity scandals, however, I don’t see much new that is said. To some extent, this is understandable, as the problems being faced are not new — pride, anger, lust, etc. — any more than they are limited to those in ministry. These old, universal problems require the same old, universal solutions — grace-driven repentance from us, grace-glorious deliverance from God.

And so we see the same usual formulas handed out in blog posts and tweets and sermons and podcasts — accountability and honesty, lots of talk about boundaries and “guard rails” and the like. Pastors are re-reminded to not be alone with women, etc. Most of these words are good words, advice that is tried and true. Within the gospel renewal movement, of course, we are moving deeper to heart issues and idolatry, and this is a good thing too. Figuring out how the gospel speaks to the idolatries and root sins that seem particular to the work of pastoral ministry is really important.

Yet, we are identifying something else here, something that runs across evangelical tribes. It is the “celebrity pastor” problem, where we participate in the highest elevation of a pastor’s platform as we can manage and then load him up with all the expectation we can muster. The result, naturally, is that he is top-heavy and prone to toppling. There are dangers in temptations in pastoral smallness and obscurity too, but the most prominent dangerous temptations in pastoral bigness are these idolatries — worship of the celebrity pastor by his fans and himself.

So let us accept the soundness of the typical boundaries and relational and ministerial guardrails that every pastor and his church ought to have in place. But what else can we do? What are some specific, practical things that can be done to work against the idolization of the successful pastor? I have a few ideas. They are not easy things to do, of course, but wise things rarely come easily.

1. Transition your “video venue” satellite campuses to church plants or at the very least install live preaching.

I have quite a few friends whose churches employ this medium for weekend preaching in their satellite campuses, so I tread lightly here, as always, but I have yet to hear a very convincing argument for the wisdom of this approach to the worship gathering. I say a lot more on this in my book The Prodigal Church, so I won’t rehash my critique here, but the argument seems to boil down essentially to: “The campus wouldn’t be viable without so-and-so on the screen.” And my response? “Okay. Maybe it shouldn’t be viable.” If they’re only coming because of so-and-so, you have a celebrity pastor problem. (Now, this happens in almost any church of any size. People come only because of the preacher, or only because of the music, or only because of the children’s program, or what-have-you. But when we franchise rather than plant, we cooperate with the idolatry of the consumer.)

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