The Suffocation of the Church through Personality Cult.

The famous American artist Andy Warhol predicted back in the 1960's, that, I quote, 'In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes'. Towards the end of his life he was quoted as saying ''I'm bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is 'In fifteen minutes everybody will be famous' "     With the explosion of multimedia and reality television, Warhol's vision of what he saw is closer than perhaps even he envisaged becoming a reality. Big Brother, Britain's Got Talent, and The Voice are three current media mechanisms that give opportunity for people to have their fifteen minutes of fame. Everyone gets the chance to be a famous personality.
    The personalities that run these shows have become cult figures in their own right. Men like Simon Cowell are given almost demi-god status by those appearing on his show. Sadly, so much of what we can see in these multimedia and reality television windows is mirrored in the church. In this multimedia age, the global church can be downloaded into my front room. We all have people that we admire and like to listen to, and there is nothing wrong with that.
      However, I have noticed a disturbing number of Christians who now talk about well known church leaders in terms and language that should only be used of our Lord Jesus Himself. I don't think this is necessarily intentional, and many of those leaders being admired are very good and godly role models. However, there are very real dangers of men and women being placed on a pedestal in believers lives that should be solely the place for Christ alone. I have attempted to list a number of principles we need to be aware of if we are to avoid the pitfall of worshiping the cult of Christian celebrity.

1. We can be blinded by a person's outward charisma. There is nothing wrong with having a larger than life personality, and some men and women have enormous charm and charisma. They are often delightful company, and can be wonderfully anointed people. However, it is the testimony of Jesus that should be left ringing in our ears and burning in our hearts.
  Honour the channel of that blessing and testimony, but never allow that channel to take the primary place of Christ in our heart. You may think that this is obvious, but even the apostle John got it spectacularly wrong on one occasion. In Revelation 19, John receives a wonderful revelation from God, mediated to him by an angel. He gets so caught up and excited that he falls at the feet of the angel to worship him. The angel had to correct him....'At this I fell at his feet to worship him. But he said to me, "Do not do it! I am a fellow servant with you and with your brothers who hold to the testimony of Jesus. Worship God! For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy." Revelation 19 v 10. If the apostle John can get it wrong, so can we. If John gets caught in the worship of celebrity angels, then how easy is it for us to get caught up in the worship of celebrity Christian leaders? Left uncorrected, we can drift into the worship of men. What is sobering about this passage, is that the revelation John had was authentic, supernatural, and glorious. However, he began to worship the channel of the blessing, rather than the source. We can experience amazing healings and know authentic touches from the Lord, and yet still be tempted, like John, to attribute more adoration to the channel of our blessing rather than to the source, who is God alone.

2. We need to remind ourselves that what is successful in God's eye is not always in line with how we see success. There is a subtle ABC of how to measure church success in the West. Attendance, Building, Cash. How big are you? How large and elaborate is your building? How much cash do you have? There is nothing necessarily wrong with being a rich, large church with a big building. In the right hands and with the right spirit, this can be of enormous value and blessing in the Kingdom of God. In the wrong hands and with the wrong spirit, it can bring enormous damage and devastation.
  In John 6, Jesus had no problem attracting a crowd, and no problem feeding that crowd with the help of five loaves and two fish. He equally had no problem dispersing the same crowd when turning up the heat on what it cost to follow Him. In John 6 v 53, Jesus says 'I tell you the truth, unless you can eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you'. Later on, in verse 66, we read that 'From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him'. Celebrity cults will often leave out the harder teachings of Jesus. They will win a crowd, and then keep that crowd by quite often teaching what their hearers want to hear-2 Timothy 4 v 3.

3. A local church may seem rather dull when compared to what is on offer in the global village church. However, the local expression is where we can invest meaningful time in our friendships and communities. It is where iron can sharpen iron in a meaningful and relational context. Talking through facebook and emails has its limitations. We may not have any celebrity members, but our friendships within the local family are God's gifts to us in our discipleship journey with him. Those friendships are like crystal glass, precious, expensive, and needing to be handled with care. When you need a shoulder to cry on, or a sounding board to reflect on, those crystal glasses in the local church are going to be your primary point of reference. Enjoy the authentic ministries that God has raised up on an international stage, but they are no substitute for the iron sharpening iron reality of local church friendships.

4. A correct culture of honour becomes one of dishonour when we attribute a place of authority in our lives to men, that should only be given to the Lord. We are the Lord's servant first, and only secondly the servant of men. The church in Berea are a wonderful role model in this. The apostle Paul was one of the big names of his day. His reputation would have gone before him as he came to Berea and preached the gospel. How did the Bereans respond to Paul's message? They 'received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true'..Acts 17 v 11. They put everything Paul said under the discipline of the Scriptures. We are the Lord's servant first. We test everything we receive on the litmus paper of the Bible. It doesn't matter how famous a person may be, or what reputation they have. The Lord is our reference point. Everything is to be tested with him. I find it alarming some of the things being said in the evangelical church today, and even more alarmingly how easily those things are received because they are coming from a celebrity cult leader. When we receive error into our lives, we become spiritually polluted, and that pollution spreads to others. In the end, heresy and error left uncorrected will suffocate those who live under it.

5. A definition of idolatry is the reconstruction of God in our own image, legitimising things we want to practice or admire. When we worship celebrity, we are really worshipping those things we either admire in ourselves, or would love to see become part of ourselves. There are times when an appreciation of a person's ministry can slide into idolatry. We can become wrongly attached to people in public profile, even referring to them in familiar first name terms, and yet we have never even spoken to them, let alone know them personally. We no longer pray for that person, or test what they are saying, because we have come to a place where we consider them to be near infallible. Sadly when some of these leaders fall, we may have indirectly contributed to their fall by not being vigilant watchmen over their lives. When we are talking about a person all the time, and that person becomes the only plumbline that we measure others by, we are in the amber warning zone. We need a plurality of ministries inputting into our lives,hopefully complementary ones, and several of them from the real world of our local church and friendship groups. Like the Berean Church, we also test everything on the plumbline of the Scriptures. It is the testimony of Jesus that is the spirit of authentic ministry.