Episode 143: Katelyn Beaty – Celebrities for Jesus
In this episode we sit down to talk with Katelyn Beaty about her book Celebrities for Jesus—on the perils of celebrity in the evangelical world and what we can do to counteract it.
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My goal in writing this book was to help the church heal and better reflect the integrity and wholeness of the gospel…
I’m tired of seeing the headlines of celebrity pastors failing and the damage that does to people… I’m trying to help people see the dynamics of celebrity so that we can better guard against it…
As someone who grew up in an evangelical context and is very grateful for it, it’s important to say that we tend to be kind of pragmatic in our approach, which usually means that we’re early adopters for the use of media in sharing the gospel…
In that milieu, celebrity has been seen as a neutral tool for sharing the gospel… if we can turn our pastor into a celebrity, maybe we can reach more people… I’m trying to argue that while celebrity an EFFECTIVE tool, it’s not a NEUTRAL tool…
The quest for celebrity and platform can (and has) shaped us from the inside out, often by drawing more attention to the celebrity than the person of Christ…
Celebrity has a way of creating distance between the person on the platform and the crowds… but as Christians we know that we’re called to live in proximity to one another… people knowing the good and the bad about us isn’t always fun, but it does lead to our flourishing…
Celebrity is sought and garnered for its own purposes, using the tools of mass media to project an image of importance… it becomes social power without proximity… we ought to be able to know the people who are shaping us week in and week out—celebrity makes that impossible…
People who have celebrity talk about the loneliness and isolation at the top… it’s not good for us… I’m trying to caution people not to seek celebrity status… if you end up famous for doing something good—fine; but don’t seek it out…
I’m a millennial and totally get the allure of screens and the desire to build platform… one of my “checks” is asking, “How much time am I spending in front of a screen?” vs. “How much time am I spending with real people in my church?”
We need to be surrounded by people who are not impressed by me and can speak the truth in love, asking hard questions about motives… we all have blind spots, and we need those people in order to stay in the process of transformation…