Things That Bother Me - When Pastors Become Brands

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]Welcome to my things that bother me presentation.

[00:00:08]I want to talk to you about when pastors become brands.

[00:00:14]And I want to name the burden.

[00:00:18]Because this indeed does trouble me.

[00:00:21]We're watching pastors increasingly become brands and churches become stages for those brands instead of altars where Christ is formed in the people.

[00:00:37]Now, I've lived long enough to see ministries rise and fall more than I care to have seen.

[00:00:45]And what grieves me is that visibility now is confused with maturity.

[00:00:53]And followership metrics are confused with spiritual authority.

[00:01:00]Phenomenology is the study of subjective human experience and psychology is the study of how we think and move in life.

[00:01:10]From a psychological and a phenomenological standpoint, we're living in an age where identity is curated.

[00:01:19]The self has become a project.

[00:01:22]And because the self has become a project, ministry can become a performance of that project.

[00:01:30]The dopamine loops of likes, views, and shares actually shape our nervous system.

[00:01:38]Over time, as pastors, we can begin to feel real only when we're seen, affirmed, and amplified.

[00:01:49]Our inner vulnerability then seeks constant external validation.

[00:01:56]In that environment, the congregation we care for stops being sheep to be cared for and become an audience to be impressed.

[00:02:07]Our anxiety about relevance quietly drives the culture.

[00:02:13]So, we end up with a crowd, not with a spiritual family.

[00:02:18]We have fans, but we're not raising up sons and daughters in God.

[00:02:25]Scripture doesn't give us celebrity pastors.

[00:02:30]Scripture gives us cruciform shepherds, those that take up the cross and follow Christ.

[00:02:37]Paul makes it clear we do not preach ourselves, but Christ Jesus is Lord and ourselves as your bond servants for Jesus' sake.

[00:02:49]The apostolic pattern is kenotic.

[00:02:52]Kenosis is self-emptying, self-sacrificial love. It's not self-promotion.

[00:02:59]The ancient fathers, the patristics, understood this.

[00:03:03]Gregory the Great in his Regula Pastoralis, the book of pastoral rule, one of the classics in the tradition, says the pastor is not the star of the show.

[00:03:15]Listen carefully. The pastor is a wounded physician whose authority is measured by their capacity to bear the weak, not by their capacity to attract the many.

[00:03:31]I don't know if we all see ourselves as wounded, but we really do need to see that for many reasons.

[00:03:36]From an ecclesial perspective, when we deal with the church, when the pastor becomes the brand, the church becomes a franchise. It becomes a delivery system for the persona, the mask that the pastor wears.

[00:03:52]But in a sacramental, sanctified imagination, even in Pentecostal, charismatic circles, the pastor is not the center.

[00:04:02]Christ present by the Spirit is the center. Christ is to have the preeminence. The pastor, the leader, is a pointer, not the point. A cruciform, cross-shaped leader is willing to decrease so that Christ might increase in the saints, not merely in the metrics.

[00:04:25]Listen, I'm not opposed to the use of media or stewarding visibility. I've been involved in media for four decades.

[00:04:33]Right now, I'm talking to you through a camera.

[00:04:36]But, I want to ask you as a brother and a sister in Christ, when was the last time you let yourself be hidden?

[00:04:43]When was the last time you gave time to the one broken sheep nobody sees with the same energy you give to the crowd that everyone sees?

[00:04:55]And to all the saints, don't confuse charisma with character, and certainly don't confuse giftedness with godliness.

[00:05:06]Be more impressed with the pastor who knows your name, prays for your tears, and walks with you in your pain than the one whose clips go viral.

[00:05:20]The kingdom isn't advanced by our fame.

[00:05:24]It's advanced by our faithfulness.

[00:05:28]I pray that we recover cruciform pastoring in an age of celebrity platforms.

[00:05:36]And may we raise up leaders who are more shaped by the cross than by the camera, and churches that are more like families than followings.

[00:05:49]It's one of the things that bothers me.

[00:05:51]I wanted to share it with you.