iMonk on Brant on Worship Celebs

iMonk has some pretty cutting words here, but it probably needs to be said:

If you go to a Lifeway, you’ll notice that the new book section is regularly populated by books written- amazingly- by the guys and gals in Contemporary Christian Music. The chubby bald guy who sings “I Can Only Imagine” has a book. So do DC Talk, Michael W. Smith and David Crowder. One might suspect that someone is calculating how much we could make uh…..how much the body of Christ could be helped if singers wrote an accompanying book around the time their big musical projects came out. The Casting Crowns Study Bible is probably on the way.

If Pat Robertson were the pastor of a local church, he’d be preaching to crowds of several dozen, but because he’s a celebrity he gets to sit on television and say all kinds of stupid things about who God ought to kill off, how much weight he can lift and how he prays hurricanes out to sea. Just the other night, I heard him say J.K. Rowling was a witch deeply involved in the occult. That’s a lie, and he ought to be sued for saying it. He probably got the story off The Onion’s satirical send up of Christian reaction to the Potter novels, which means he’s also way too ignorant to be telling people what to think, but because he’s a celebrity, he gets a pass.

Some of my favorite celebrities are preachers and teachers adored by their various fan clubs. These are often people worth listening to and reading, but when they rise to celebrity status, their fans get very weird. Oddly, the reformed- who are supposed to believe in that total depravity stuff- are among the most drooling fanboys in all of evangelicalism.

Read the whole post here.