The cult of celebrity

I read a blog post the other day called Leadership Idol. The point was that there are tons of conferences on leadership that basically focus on leadership strategies promoted by the latest "it" speakers. The author of the post seems pretty dismissive of both the conferences and the topics being covered. I would agree that many of these “leadership” conferences amount to fanboys flocking to hear the latest popular speaker and that only fans the flames of a cult of personality or perhaps more appropriately a cult of celebrity. You can glance at the screenshots of the webpages for these conferences and they are all glitz and glam, very professional looking as you would expect when you are advertising a conference that is competing for scarce dollars with lots of other, very similar looking conferences.

Having said that, how is that different from the way that the most orthodox and conservative among us react? It seems that this cult of celebrity is bad when it is directed at people we disagree with but perfectly defensible for those with whom we agree. Exhibit A is Together for the Gospel, the banner is shown below:



What attracts people to Reformed theology conferences are the speakers and the line-up is very appealing to people like me: Mohler, Dever, Mahaney, Duncan, Piper, MacArthur, Sproul, Anyabwile. It is a who’s who of Reformed teachers and I have books by every one of them on my book shelf. These men are modern day heroes of the faith to many of us and they are the reason that men flock from all over the country to Louisville, Kentucky by the thousands. If Together for the Gospel 2012 were going to feature 8 local pastors that no one had heard of, I can guarantee you that there won’t be 5000+ men in attendance. I used to go to the Toledo Reformed theology conference and while it had some recognizable speakers like Steve Lawson and Tom Ascol and the topics were interesting and the speakers engaging, it simply couldn’t compete with the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology in Grand Rapids or Together for the Gospel in Louisville or the Gospel Coalition in Chicago. It eventually went out of business. We are attracted like moths to a flame when it comes to celebrity and that is at least as true among the Reformed as it is among the emergents or seeker-sensitive or whatever the group.

I haven’t been to a theology conference in a while and don’t anticipate going to one outside of Michigan anytime soon (I am going to a conference in August in the Detroit area, a one day conference that has free registration). I would rather spend the time and money with my family and with my brothers in Christ that live here locally. Better to get to know these men right around me and learn from their lives instead of listening to someone I will never meet in person talk about theology for an hour and a half. Lots of people can give an engaging talk but we are called to emulate and imitate lives, not take notes at a conference. That is not to completely dismiss any value from prepared talks but we need to be very careful that a) we don’t miss the very real influence of the cult of celebrity that has existed since the earliest days of the church (see 1 Cor 1: 10-17) and b) we don’t see going to conferences as the pinnacle of edification.