I attended a megachurch in Southern California for about five years. It touted itself as being gospel centered, intergenerational, and multiethnic. The pastor seemed larger than life and had a gift for preaching. I thought I’d found a good church home.
It was successful, at least: A famous former wide receiver attended, and all of us got excited to catch a glimpse of him up front. I watched as leaders planted two more locations and telecasted the head pastor’s sermons to both church plants. Then he launched a podcast—and wrote books. He took a lot of high-profile speaking engagements. At one point, he preached a sermon about how, if we were expecting a church where the pastor would come over for dinner, we had chosen the wrong church.
He was becoming famous. I celebrated it at the time: Look how he was influencing culture!
But I eventually reached a tipping point. A guest preacher came to speak, also a high-profile pastor and author. He used his sermon as an extended sales pitch for his newest book. That was my last Sunday.
Since then, I have grown wary when the pulpit is a place of wealth and fame. What happens when the parishioners you are shepherding become customers of your products or brand? Does that inherently change your relationship with them? And when does building a platform for God become using God to build your platform?
“We have to be serious about the spiritual dimensions of wealth,” Katelyn Beaty, author of Celebrities for Jesus, told me. “It has a lure over our hearts, and we are all called to actively protect against it regardless of how much money we make.”
We see Jesus’ approach to money particularly in interactions with two people in the Gospel of Luke: the rich young ruler and Zaccheaus.
In Luke 18, the rich young ruler is unwilling to sell all that he has, as Christ asks him to, and he leaves Jesus disheartened. But in the very next chapter, another rich man—Zacchaeus—encounters Jesus and enters the kingdom of God after pledging to give back four times the amount of money he stole as well as half his wealth (19:8).
It seems a wealthy person can enter the kingdom of God with Christ’s grace, but that entrance will produce a not-of-this-world willingness to sacrificially give away money.
So when does a pastor cross the line into inappropriate wealth accumulation? After getting a six-figure advance for a book deal? After crossing a million dollars in revenue per year?
“A very clear line,” Beaty told me, “is as soon as you are treating talking to you as a pastor as a VIP thing, like something that only very important people get to do, you’ve completely lost the plot.”
Not far from my old church in Southern California, another megachurch pastor, Erwin McManus, has argued there’s nothing inherently evil in wealth.
He rebranded a Southern Baptist church in the ’90s into Mosaic, a church which attracts the influential, the fashionable, and the trendy. Some of his platform is typical for a megachurch pastor: many books sold, high-priced speaking engagements, VIP church conference tickets, and for $6,000, full training in his communication curriculum. But he’s also a fashion designer, and his church’s Instagram feed is filled with images of him wearing his own clothes, which he sells for large amounts of money.
(McManus also offers high-priced business coaching, but when asked for comment made it clear through a spokesperson that he has been doing this his entire career and originally used it as a way to build the church. He did not agree to an interview for this piece.)
In a 2024 podcast interview as well as in a sermon on generosity from 2022, McManus confessed to living like “a monastic” for years, believing wealth was evil, until one day, considering marriage, he concluded that God had given him permission to create wealth as a way to love his family and give away more money. He said he realized he was limiting himself with a false virtue: poverty.
God “does not make you wealthy,” he said in that sermon. “God is not a bank. But he will give you the ability to create wealth. You have to put the work in.” He went on to tell his congregation, “I want to challenge you to change your perspective, to not see creating wealth as evil but seeing it as a responsibility to do good in the world. I just want to challenge some of you to actually become millionaires and billionaires because you have the God-given capacity to do it and anything less is wrong… I just want you to make the world better.”
Of course, we are called to steward our resources well, to share with others, and to use our talents for God’s glory. The apostle Paul also writes that we should work with our “own hands,” that we may “have something to share with those in need” (Eph. 4:28). Wealthy benefactors also sometimes funded the early church, as McManus says he has done with his business ventures. But as he models the clothes he is selling on Mosaic’s official Instagram page and advertises his coaching and communication packages to a world that knows him from his pastoring, I worry the equation sometimes flips: his parishioners become both his customers and his benefactors.
The Bible doesn’t speak of wealth—or poverty, for that matter—as a Christian imperative. It speaks of cheerful giving and trust in God for our daily bread. Rather than directing us toward a specific financial state to achieve, Jesus points toward a life of radical dependence on God and radical generosity.
Jesus did not enter the world trying to attract the influential, the fashionable, or the trendy. In an ancient Roman world of ambitious building projects, important people, and wealthy religious elites, Jesus chose to live simply and modestly.
“Jesus ignored the world of power and accomplishment that was brilliantly on display all around him,” Eugene Peterson wrote in The Jesus Way. “He chose to work on the margins of society, with unimportant people, giving particular attention to the weak, the disturbed, the powerless.”
Jesus didn’t try to attract influencers in a trickle-down system of changing the world. Some evangelists and preachers are, of course, called, like Peter, like Paul, to testify before the influential, the powerful, and the wealthy. These apostles didn’t get rich, though. They were both killed for their faithfulness.
Some saints are called to write books and speak on national stages, too. But how do we do that well? How do we do it without succumbing to the seductions of wealth and fame?
“If my ministry out in the world begins to really impede my ability to do ministry locally, then something would need to change,” Hannah Miller King, an Anglican priest, told me of her own work. She serves a local church and just published her first book, Feasting on Hope: How God Sets a Table in the Wilderness.
I wanted to know how she balances the demands of a book launch and being a “public pastor” while pastoring a local community. Is that even possible?
“My family and my faith are first,” she said. “Then my parish, and then the extra stuff. … I don’t think it’s healthy for shepherds and leaders to be absentee pastors.”
I stopped attending that megachurch in Los Angeles after the book-sales-pitch sermon. Since then, my old pastor has continued to grow his national platform, and recently he began offering coaching services.
But not all the pastors at my former church shriveled in the glaring lights of fame or wealth. The youth pastor preached the gospel, sat with the brokenhearted, and tirelessly attended summer camps with teenagers in order to introduce them to the God-man, Jesus. She eventually spoke out about the unhealthy systems and obsessions around her. She is now a youth pastor at another, less flashy church.
There was the associate pastor too. He led my small group and, time and again, sought out service away from the lights and the action. He spoke with humility and acted not as a savant to be studied but rather a fellow pilgrim with whom to journey.
He now serves humbly as a college pastor in a different church.
I believe it is grueling work being a pastor in any context. Like Jesus in the desert facing Satan’s temptations, pastors face various temptations within the contours of the societies in which they live. In America, pastors face the twinned enticements of wealth and fame. It is easy to grow disheartened by absentee pastors seeking platforms for personal wealth and fame. However, I must remind myself—we must remind ourselves—of the countless women and men serving faithfully in local, nationally unknown bodies of believers, fighting for moderation and against fame, no matter the size of their churches.
Praise God for them.
Drew Brown is a writer currently pursuing his doctor of ministry degree at Western Theological Seminary. He writes on his Substack, Slow Faith.
The post Building a Platform for God—or Using God to Build Your Platform? appeared first on Christianity Today.
