Celebrity pastor cult fosters sexual sin, analysts say


By David Roach - Posted at Baptist Press:

Published October 14, 2024

NASHVILLE (BP) – When Albert Mohler asked two Boyce College students how they were doing, the reply was stark: they were not well.

“What they were bearing was the burden of the news about a disaster that had fallen upon a church and a ministry,” said Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, “a pastor who was exposed as having what would be described as an improper relationship with a woman not his wife.”

The news caused Mohler grief too – so much so that he addressed the issue of pastoral infidelity late last month in comments to students at Southern and Boyce, the seminary’s undergraduate school. “I have no sense that there is an increase in number” of instances of pastoral sexual sin, he said, “but there is an increase in public damage to the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and the ministry of the church” as news of pastors’ sins spreads rapidly online.

Discussion of sexual sin among ministers has been stirred in recent months by news of falls by prominent pastors. But there is more going on than meets the eye, a Christian counselor and a veteran pastor say. Recent instances of ministerial infidelity are not merely sexual sin. The sexual sins are symptomatic of narcissism and a celebrity culture in the church.

“I’m not at all discounting their sin,” said Dwayne Milioni, pastor of Open Door Church in Raleigh, N.C., and a leader of the Pilar Network, a Southern Baptist group that helps equip, plant and revitalize churches. “But I am super concerned as to why we continue to have this tendency towards ministry idolatry.”

“Because we created this culture, then we are in fact to blame,” Milioni said. “We isolate a few individual church leaders. We make celebrities out of them. We idolize them, and then when they fall, we cancel them.”

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