I recently read through Carl Trueman’s book Fools Rush In Where Monkey’s Fear to Tread: Taking Aim at Everyone. As a Christian who prefers not to be identified with evangelicalism, I have always appreciated Trueman’s thought provoking essays. I was especially struck by the following quote in his book:
The American church reflects the culture: ministries built around individuals, around big shots; churches that focus on god-like guru figures, all of them pointing to one door. I have lost count of the conversations I have had with church people anxious to tell who they heard at this conference, which person the corresponded with, how this opinion or that opinion would not sit well with this demigod and is therefore of little value—and, of course, how anyone who disagrees with, or criticizes, this chosen hero must of necessity be morally depraved and wicked. People want the gods to do their thinking for them. All of the Pelagian/Manichean celebrity malarkey of the American political process is alive and well in the church as well. The question is: When it comes to churches and ministries built around messiahs who are supposed to point not to themselves but to the true door, who is going to have the guts to leave the temple?
I want to expand on Trueman’s thoughts briefly. Trueman points out how the church reflects the culture. Yet it does so in even more ways than he enumerates. One painful correlation between celebrity culture and the church is how it turns true Christians into powerless spectators. Just as we are consumed with magazines like Us, People, ESPN, Time and Sports Illustrated, so we are consumed with the lives of our guru’s and the various debates they are engaged in. American’s are enthralled with big names and spend countless hours following the happenings of celebrities, politicians, athletes and cultural icons. And Christians do the same thing with their “demi-Gods” as Trueman would call them. The blogosphere is the pitch on which we watch our favorite names go back and forth about largely trivial controversies that have nothing to do with our daily lives. We cheer them on in the comments section of blogs and on our Facebook walls. We are busy watching the big boys play, living vicariously through them. Then we gather with our friends to talk about them, what they said about this or that, to run down their theological “stats.” It rarely occurs to us that we ourselves are not playing the game but are in fact just watching and giving commentary.
All the while our own discipleship is emasculated.
The question is, as Trueman puts it: who will have the guts to walk away from this type of Christianity?
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