When the Worship Stage Gets Too Big

Ever notice how some Sunday morning services have a lighting budget that rivals a major concert venue?

I visited a megachurch a few years back. Not to criticize, just to see what all the buzz was about. The parking lot had its own zip code. Inside, there were coffee bars and bookstores and a lobby that could host a wedding reception. Then I walked into the sanctuary. Screens everywhere. Camera operators moving like they were filming a live network broadcast. Haze machines. Spotlights. And when the pastor walked out, the crowd erupted like he was about to drop his latest album.

I stood there in the back, coffee in hand, thinking about my little church back home. Our pastor sets up his own chairs on Sunday morning. Our worship team practices in a room that doubles as the nursery. We’ve got one screen and it flickers sometimes. And honestly? I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

But here’s an uncomfortable truth. A lot of us worship leaders feel the pull. The desire to be on a bigger stage. To have more reach. To matter more. We see the Instagram followers and the podcast downloads and the conference invitations, and something inside us whispers, “Maybe that could be me.” And that whisper? That’s where things get dangerous.

The Difference Between Fame and Celebrity

Let’s get clear on something. Fame isn’t the problem. Some people become well known because they did something worth remembering. They wrote a hymn that lasted four hundred years. They planted a church that became a movement. They served faithfully for decades and their godliness left a mark. Fame, in that sense, is just the natural echo of virtue. It’s a byproduct, not a goal.

Celebrity is something else entirely. Celebrity is when you’re known for being known. When the persona becomes more important than the deeds. When “building a platform” becomes indistinguishable from building the Kingdom. When your name recognition matters more than your actual shepherding.

Think about the circuit-riding preachers back in the Great Awakening. George Whitefield preached to thousands, sure. But he also knew people’s names. He stayed in their homes. He baptized their babies. There was proximity. There was relationship. The message was bigger than the messenger because the messenger never let you forget that he was just a messenger.

Fast forward to Billy Graham. Stadiums full of people. Mass media. Televised crusades. But still, there was a reverence for the gospel that kept Graham himself in the background. He pointed away from himself.

Now? Now we’ve got the influencer era. Pastors with verified accounts and merch lines and subscription models. And I’m not saying all of that is bad. But somewhere along the way, we started measuring success by metrics that Jesus never once mentioned. Followers. Likes. Reach. Engagement. When did the platform become a launching pad instead of a serving station?

The Illusion of Intimacy

Here is what’s interesting about celebrity culture in the church. It creates parasocial relationships. You feel like you know the pastor because you watch his sermons every week, you follow his family on Instagram, you’ve read his books, you’ve listened to him talk about his struggles and his victories. You feel intimate with him. Connected. But he doesn’t know you exist.

And that gap, that one-way street of relationship, does something to us. We start living vicariously through someone else’s passion and piety. We substitute their spiritual fervor for our own growth. We watch them worship and we think, “Man, I wish I had faith like that.” But we never actually do the hard work of cultivating it ourselves because we’re too busy consuming content about it. It’s a vicarious voyage of identity. And it’s hollow.

I see it in worship teams all the time. Musicians who can tell you every detail about their favorite worship leader’s life. What guitar they play, what pedals they use, what church they came from, what their wife’s name is. But they can’t tell you the last time they spent an hour in prayer. They can’t tell you their own story of encountering God in worship. We’ve become spectators in someone else’s spiritual journey instead of participants in our own.

The Role of Technology in the Cult of Celebrity

Let’s talk about IMAG. Image Magnification. You know what I’m talking about. Those giant screens on either side of the stage that show close-ups of whoever’s speaking or singing. The stated reason is usually accessibility, right? So people in the back can see. But let’s be honest about what else it does.

It turns the pastor into an icon. Literally. A thirty-foot face looking down at you. Concert-style video feeds that make the person on stage seem larger than life. And the subtle message becomes: this person is special. This person is set apart. This person is more important than you.

Then there’s the vibe economy. I’m not against good production. I’m really not. Thoughtful lighting can help people focus. A well-mixed sound system means everyone can hear. But when the haze machines come out and the lights drop and the music swells and everyone’s hands go up, we need to ask ourselves an honest question. Is this the Spirit moving or is this just really good emotional manipulation? Because the two can look identical. And that’s terrifying.

High production value isn’t neutral. It trains us to equate spiritual substance with emotional hype. It makes us think that if we don’t feel something big, then God isn’t present. And it makes your average Sunday morning in a small church feel lacking. Ordinary. Not enough.
And that’s when the comparison trap snaps shut.

When Everyone’s a Critic

Here’s what happens when celebrity pastors become the norm. Regular church members start evaluating their local shepherd against the most polished communicators in the entire Western hemisphere. Your pastor preaches faithfully every week, visits the sick, does hospital rounds, counsels marriages, buries the dead. But someone in the congregation is mentally comparing his sermon to the one they listened to on the way to church from the guy with the book deal and the three-point alliteration and the perfect hair. And your pastor, bless him, can’t win.

Worship leaders, you know this feeling too. Your congregation watches Bethel or Hillsong or Elevation worship on YouTube all week, and then they come to your Sunday morning rehearsal and wonder why you don’t sound exactly like that. Never mind that those teams have professional sound engineers and studio-quality recording and unlimited rehearsal time. Never mind that you’re working with volunteers who showed up after working fifty-hour weeks. The comparison isn’t fair, but it’s everywhere and it’s killing morale. It’s burning out pastors. It’s making faithful shepherds feel like failures because they’re not famous.

The Theological Danger We Keep Ignoring

Paul dealt with this. The church in Corinth had a celebrity problem. Some people said, “I follow Paul.” Others said, “I follow Apollos.” Still others claimed Peter. And Paul shut it down immediately. “Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized in the name of Paul?” (1 Corinthians 1:13)

His point was razor sharp. You’re building factions around personalities instead of centering your lives on Christ. You’re making celebrities out of servants. You’re confusing charisma with spiritual authority.

And then in 2 Corinthians, Paul warned them about the “super-apostles.” These were leaders who relied on their platform, their eloquence, their impressive credentials. They were all sizzle and no substance. They wanted to be admired more than they wanted to serve. Paul called them out because he knew exactly what they were doing. They were preying on people’s desire to follow someone impressive rather than calling people to follow the crucified Messiah. We’ve got super-pastors now. Same energy.

But here’s the problem. When a church is built on a personality, accountability evaporates. The leader gets surrounded by yes-people who are afraid to speak truth because they don’t want to lose access to the platform. Criticism gets reframed as “touching God’s anointed.” Oversight becomes impossible. And the leader, isolated at the top, starts believing his own press.

The biblical model of eldership assumes proximity. Shepherds are supposed to know the sheep. They’re supposed to smell like them. But when your pastor needs a security detail to walk through the lobby, when he only interacts with a curated inner circle, when his primary relationship with the congregation is through a screen, something has gone fundamentally wrong.

When the Icon Falls

Mars Hill. Hillsong. How many more examples do we need? When a church is built on a personality, the leader’s moral failure leads to institutional collapse. The whole thing comes crashing down because there’s no foundation underneath. It was all just one person’s charisma and vision and drive, and when that person implodes, everything goes with them.

But the real devastation isn’t the institution. It’s the people. I’ve sat across from worship team members who felt personally betrayed when their pastor hero fell. They’d spent years defending him, promoting him, believing in him. They’d tied their own spiritual identity to his success. And when the truth came out, when the abuses were revealed, when the lies were exposed, they didn’t just lose a pastor. They lost their faith.

The parasocial breakup is brutal. Because in their minds, they knew this person. They trusted him. And now they don’t know what’s real anymore.

Some of them deconstruct. Some of them leave the church entirely. Some of them spend years trying to untangle what was genuine and what was performance. All because we built a system that elevated one person too high.

Building Something Better

So what do we do? How do we push back against celebrity culture without becoming cynical or suspicious of every gifted leader? We return to the center. We make the service about the Word and the Sacraments, not about the smartest guy in the room. We structure our gatherings as the calling and sending of saints, not as fan club rallies. We use liturgy to remind everyone that we’re part of something ancient and bigger than any one person’s vision.

We prioritize ordinary faithfulness over national platform. We celebrate the pastor who’s been faithfully serving the same congregation for thirty years even though nobody knows his name. We value hidden obedience. We resist the pull of bigness.

And we put structural safeguards in place. Plurality of leadership. Shared pulpits. Multiple elders with real decision-making power. Financial transparency. Moral accountability that isn’t just performative. We widen the spotlight so that no one person becomes irreplaceable.

For worship leaders specifically? Stop trying to be a brand. Rotate who leads. Share the microphone. Give other voices a chance. Resist the urge to make yourself the draw. Point people to Jesus, not to your team’s tight harmonies or your guitarist’s Instagram presence.

What if we measured success by depth instead of reach? What if we cared more about the person in the back row who’s quietly growing in Christlikeness than about the podcast download numbers? What if we believed Jesus when He said that the Kingdom belongs to the least of these, not to the most impressive?

Here’s the liberating truth. You were never meant to be famous. You were meant to be faithful. And faithful doesn’t show up on a social media analytics dashboard. Faithful is the person who keeps showing up week after week, loving people nobody else notices, doing the work nobody else wants to do, pointing to Jesus when no one’s watching. John the Baptist said it best. “He must increase, I must decrease” (John 3:30).

That’s the whole game right there. Make less of yourself so there’s more room for Jesus. Because when we do that, when we embrace the freedom of obscurity, when we stop trying to build platforms and start trying to build people, something shifts. The pressure lifts. The comparison trap loses its power. We stop performing and start serving. We stop seeking applause and start seeking the Kingdom. And we discover that being unknown, being hidden, being ordinary in the eyes of the world but faithful in the eyes of God is better than all the followers and conference invitations and book deals combined.

Peter said it like this: “Shepherd the flock that is among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you; not for shameful gain, but eagerly; not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock” (1 Peter 5:2-3). Not domineering. Not building your brand. Not leveraging your platform. Just shepherding. Just serving. Just being an example.

That’s the way forward. That’s how we dismantle the cult of celebrity. Not with criticism or cynicism, but with a better vision. A vision where the stage isn’t the point, where the lights don’t matter, where the only name that gets lifted high is Jesus.

And that, my friend, is a very good gift.

John 3:30
He must become greater; I must become less.