Like so many thousands across our country, and even the world, many of us are reeling with the news of Ravi Zacharias and his shocking, hidden sexual predatory behavior. I remember countless times, before the age of smart phones and podcasts, the Christian radio station in Atlanta would play a sermon from Ravi Zacharias once a day in the afternoons, and I could listen to it driving home from school every day. To say that he was impactful in my life is an understatement – he is one of the primary influences who taught me to think more deeply about my faith, and he sparked my first real interest in the realm of apologetics as a teenager.
Yet, in spite of decades of popular and a ministry of worldwide influence, the witness of his life is now marred with what now has been proven: he is guilty of obscene sexual actions and crimes, deep spiritual abuse and manipulation to weak women, and even financial extortion, stridden throughout years and years behind closed doors.
I am exhausted by the news. I am exhausted, because it has become an all-too familiar tale in the evangelical world in recent years that I grow tired of hearing. A major personality and influence in the evangelical Christian world has fallen - again. He even had the accusations rise years before his death to publicly face his own sin, and he refused the opportunity of repentance and like Solomon, denied it time and time again.
His fall has spurned yet again my thoughts on the Christian celebrity culture: our obsession with it and the public influence it brings needs to come to an end.
I remember many years ago, I shared dinner with a very popular church leader who was the right hand man of an even more globally famed evangelical superstar pastor. I was in my early twenties, young and still in Bible school. This superstar pastor seemed to really be putting his own name and brand out there, and causing the success of his ministry to be heavily dependent on his mega-personality, and he did this almost unashamedly. We all saw it, we all admired this superstar pastor, but deep down, I had a troubling thought about it all.
I proceeded to ask this man I was eating with, who was the superstar pastor’s right hand man – “why does he brand himself like this, using his own name and face for so much of his ministries and advertising of his ministry?”
The response:
“Well, he thinks that he can leverage his own personal fame for the gospel.”
Even then, in my youth, that response never sat well with me, and I stored it in my back of mind.
Nevertheless, I still trustingly followed this superstar pastor’s ministry and even modeled some of my own early pastoral ministry after his.
Soon after, the man I had dinner with was fired from his position. Ten years later, this evangelical superstar pastor we all loved and looked up to took a hard and very public, and unrepentant fall through pride, arrogance and shady financial dealings, and his megachurch of 15,000 vanished overnight. This leader hardly skipped a beat afterwards, and still continues in ministry elsewhere almost as if nothing ever happened.
Why? Why do we keep coming here, time and time again? I could proceed in a long paragraph with a laundry list of other popular evangelical pastors and leaders who have fallen in recent years. Why is this list getting longer and longer?
I cannot speak personally for these people. I did not directly know them. However, I want to join the rising chorus of men and women who are pointing out the necessary truth that we must embrace:
Successful Christian ministry is not determined by how popular and influential it is.
Rather,
Successful Christian ministry is marked by daily faithfulness, all the way to the end.
This obsession with popularity in the evangelical church is a plague upon our Gospel witness. We have become convinced that, as long as we hold and fall into some position of massive cultural influence, that we are successful and people will finally become Christians. We prove this by how much we flock to this big personalities, uphold them and support them – and often times even find ourselves justifying away their behavior and sin because from one corner of their mouth, they still talk about Jesus.
We saw this even with our own presidential office. When I was a kid, I remember my own grandfather, my mother’s father, only one of the handful of memories I have of conversation from that noble yet quiet man, a world war II veteran, sitting on the couch and watching his old tube TV. I guess the president was on the television, I don't exactly recall. But he told me how important the character of our president is, and how that is such an important part of what makes the office so great and meaningful to our nation and to the world. This was a ringing truth throughout my childhood, through most little boys and girl’s childhood.
Until recent times.
Fast forward about 25 years. “No, the character of the president doesn’t matter as much as their policies," says most Christians in our country, admitting that they value the influence of the office more than the character and witness of its occupant.
How did we get there?
Yes, our obsession with fame and influence has seemingly become, in some ways, more important than the kind of person our leaders are.
Evangelicals are susceptible to this because we have played into the world’s obsession with celebrity-like power and influence for decades. With the growth of the internet and global connectivity and like buttons on social media, its only gotten worse and worse and worse.
Jesus is not looking down on the church, seeking to bring up the ‘favored’ ones into fame and influence in his church through mass popularity in order to bring about a renewal of the Church.
Mark my words: The renewal of the American Church will not come about through cultural fame, or having some of our own in positions of high influence in our nation.
The paths towards renewal are far more simple, more ancient, more humble, carved out by generation after generation of men and women who have lived and died largely unknown lives. Right now, I believe Jesus is looking down on our American Church, and he is screaming at us through his Holy Spirit one simple question:
“Where are my faithful ones?”
Take care, brothers! Lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. [13] But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. [14] For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end.” (Hebrews 3:12–14)
Give me a million quiet mothers who faithfully care for her children day after day, and even in their messiness in life, have a heart that is longing after Jesus and with quiet desperation pray regularly that their children may grow to be men and women who in faith are true image bearers of Jesus.
Give me those women before another confessed Christian who lives a very sloppy, public and influential life whom I do not want my children in the least to imitate, takes the highest office of our land.
Give me hundreds of thousands of people who go to their regular job, day after day, and with care loves those around them like Jesus, works with all of their might, and is a blessing to all of those around them, before another young evangelical Christian rises to fame, to crash hard with sexual sin and financial impropriety yet again.
Give me ten thousand faithful ones you never heard of, serving the homeless and serving the elderly widow next door who has no family, reading the Bible and praying with her, before another Christian leader seeking fame through his YouTube channel or podcast who buckles beneath their pseudo-fame.
Give me the man or women who in their old age, and faces their final days, even in their lifelong imperfections, leaving a testimony of humility, who were quietly steadfast in life, love and faithfulness to their family and those around them, and left a firm testimony of Christ to all who knew them.
Give me a a small church on the corner in a local community who is a faithful presence of Jesus to their town, who are a consistent witness of the Gospel, filled with normal yet strong and humble leaders who do not feel the cultural pressure to write books or have a large online presence to make a meaningful impact for the Kingdom.
We need a drastic rework of our metrics of success concerning endless church growth models, the drawing of crowds at all costs, and the need to write more books and have large online followings if we are to consider ourselves ‘successful.’ This is what causes leaders, denominations and churches to refuse public repentance when sin surfaces because their “image might be harmed” – once again almost backhandedly admitting that they value public influence more than faithfulness to Jesus as he defined it.
I am thankful for the book writers, for the influential pastors and leaders – we need them. We need the mega churches who are faithful. It’s not a sin to be those things. They have resources that few of us have, and they have always been around.
But we must not overvalue those things as the goal we must attain or achieve. Rather famous or not, large church or small, worldwide, global ministry or just a regular young man or woman in their twenties trying to love Jesus, we need to value the faithful Christian witness, that witnesses that is firm to the end, as Hebrews stated.
Something tells me that, according to this metric as given to us by Scripture, it may not be Billy Graham who is standing at Jesus’ right hand. Rather, it will be someone’s grandmother who everyone already forgot about on earth, but is famous for her faithful, yet unknown life on earth, in the Kingdom of Christ.
The evangelical Church is in need of deep spiritual renewal. However, this renewal needs to be a quiet one, locally focused, person to person through millions of ordinary, faithful Christian's witness, and it must be under the radar. If we do this, as we always have in Church history, it will cause mass public change because our nation will be deeply impacted as people meet Jesus. This is a bottom-up work – that has always been the true work of the Church when it is the most healthy.
Let’s drop the obsession with the top-down work, roll up our sleeves in our local cities and communities, and get to work.