Two somewhat prominent evangelical figures have recently announced their apostasy via social media. One, Marty Sampson, has led worship and recorded with Hillsong for decades. The other, Joshua Harris, was a pastor and author of "I Kissed Dating Goodbye," a book with inestimable influence on the courtship habits of two generations of evangelical young people. Both have had successful careers and made enormous amounts of money producing content for evangelical culture since its heyday in the 1990s.
We who follow Jesus should grieve the loss of faith for each of these men. We should earnestly pray for them to find authentic discipleship and to find healing for whatever has caused their need to break with the faith.
It's also wise, as much as possible, for the Christian community to do exit interviews with those who walk away from us. We would do well to not only hope for repentance for those who abandon the faith but also to seek redemption for ourselves for whatever signs of brokenness in our community these apostasies reveal.
Perhaps a good place to begin would be to question whether we should have Christian celebrities at all. From the very beginning of the faith, we have had prominent Christians. But most of history's famous Christians have, at the very least, become famous as an accidental by-product of doing something purely for the Gospel's sake. Many of them have run from celebrity and self-promotion. In the early church, many bishops had to be seized by force and made to serve because their humility caused them to run away and hide rather than be promoted.
Jesus himself continually ran away from celebrity. Jesus was the only person ever worthy of worship, and yet he continually commanded those whom he healed to keep quiet. Whenever he sensed that the crowds wanted to make him king, he would run and hide. He lived his life very carefully in humility with actions that determined that he would die a shameful death and be completely dismissed by the greater culture. Most Christians throughout time have recognized that an attention-seeking Christian leader who actively self-promotes in an effort to build a career in Christian ministry has completely missed the point of what it means to follow Jesus.
I am a pastor, and so I can't help but be a public person. I can't help but earn my living and making a wage through leading others in Christian practices. I have always understood that my vocation is filled with spiritual peril. I've made many intentional choices to undermine my own capacity for building myself as what our culture would call a "brand." Sometimes painful choices to sabotage my career in ministry for the sake of my soul and the integrity of my ministry. But I am always aware that in living as a public Christian, even for a person like me, a mediocre, mainline, traditional, small-town pastor, I am seeking to pass a proverbial camel through the eye of a needle.
Soren Kierkegaard was keenly aware of this danger to his discipleship. He went out of his way to avoid attracting admirers. He wrote under pseudonyms. He would leave his study and allow himself to be seen at the opera so that people would think he was lazy and shallow. When he felt that he needed to break an engagement, he made himself appear to be a jerk to his fiancee so that no one would think him noble and so that his fiancee would have easy closure from the relationship. He would be horrified that so many people would eventually become admirers of him and his work. He tried hard to keep this from happening, because he only wanted his work to inspire others to encounter Christ and never notice himself. Kierkegaard's way is unknown in a world of self-promoting Christian celebrity.
I cannot begin to understand what it would be like to be a famous Christian "influencer" filling an arena of adoring "worshipers" in a massive concert-style "event," dressed in the hippest clothes, projected on a jumbotron, and at the same time be expected to authentically maintain a living relationship with a God who shows his values by becoming a peasant murdered by an illegal lynching. I cannot imagine the pressure put upon the marriage of a man who earns millions of dollars and creates a personal industry around identifying himself with a purity movement. How can people in these circumstances not become victims of this celebrity culture? What relief these men must feel after freeing themselves from such a terrible burden.
I have no judgment towards these two men or the many, many more who have likewise walked away from a faith that was so vapid. They are all victims of a culture, even if they unwittingly helped produce it.
My sincere hope is that these two men have not truly abandoned the faith, even if they think they have. My hope is that they have merely abandoned a brand of Christian culture and pseudo-discipleship that cannot help but be fake. I can't help but think that many, many people who live as Christian celebrities are already apostate without realizing it. My prayer is that these two will encounter the real thing. My prayer is also that we all in this American-individualistic, selfie/insta/Kardashian, cult-of-personality culture will likewise lose faith with Christian fakery and be seized by a true savior who invites us to join him on the lonely but satisfying path to the cross.
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