Friday, March 14, 2014
It Is MORE Than The Internet
Jake Meador at Mere O wonders about the "Evangelical Industrial Complex" and concludes:
He's right, if the current superstars quit, new ones will rise up. The answer lies in having differing values Christianity is about intimacy - with God, and modeling that intimacy with each other. That'll never produce a superstar - except to his/her intimates.
That does not mean the speakers and writers are not doing something good. It's just not the heart of the matter.
intimacy superstar
But because of the many other factors in play, that good desire gets twisted and they find themselves a member of the complex. In those cases… what do we do? I agree with Matt’s recent call for more pastors to embrace downward mobility, but even when they do that, they end up in the spot light. Francis Chan decided that he needed to get out of the celebrity rockstar role, which just became another reason that people followed him and hung on his every word. So what do we do? It seems like a classic damned if you, damned if you don’t situation.Look at that laundry list in the final paragraph - publishing, interviews....Jesus did not do any of those things. Even Paul did not write for publication.
We can’t change the fact that the internet is the dominant communications medium today. And we can’t immediately change the thin ecclesiology that marks American evangelicalism, though that should definitely be a long-term project. So is the only way to solve the problem for all the rockstars to simply stop publishing books, stop speaking at conferences, put their sermons behind paywalls, refuse every interview request, and start pastoring small congregations of 200 people? Even if they did do that (and I’m not sure it’d be a good idea to do so anyway)… what’s to keep some other group of pastors from simply taking their place? I’d love to hear from readers on this one because I’m clearly long on questions and short on answers.
He's right, if the current superstars quit, new ones will rise up. The answer lies in having differing values Christianity is about intimacy - with God, and modeling that intimacy with each other. That'll never produce a superstar - except to his/her intimates.
That does not mean the speakers and writers are not doing something good. It's just not the heart of the matter.
intimacy superstar
