How Influencer Culture Destroys Pastors

The cost of platform over people in pastoral life

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how influencer culture is undermining the very nature of pastoral ministry...

I’m a pastor. And I’m also a pastor who has participated in influencer culture. As Reformed Christians go, I’ve had a fairly well-listened-to podcast and a decent-sized presence on Twitter, Substack, and Facebook. I’ve been on plenty of other podcasts. I’ve spoken at conferences. I’m friends with, or at least acquainted with, a number of well-known influencers. This is something I have firsthand experience in.

So, this is self-criticism. And it’s driven by a simple desire: I want to finish well. I do not want the very real temptations of social media’s reach to undermine my God-given calling to the pastorate. But to explain where I’m coming from, I need to say something about how I understand pastoral ministry in the first place. And that starts with a scene from one of my favorite documentaries.

Several years ago, I watched Happy People, a documentary about life deep in the Siberian wilderness. Early on there’s a scene that’s stayed with me. A trapper named Mikhail Tarkovsky, preparing for trapping season, begins making new skis. Factory-made skis, in his judgment, aren’t good enough. Because of the long distances he must cover, using them leaves him exhausted. So he makes his own, because he believes they are better. After watching him make them, I believed him.

The scene is captivating. Everything he does is deliberate, even when he’s using force.

And at one point he says this:

As they say, you can take away anything from a man, his wealth and health and suchlike but take away his craftsman skills. Once you’ve learned a trade, you’ll always know your trade for the rest of your life.

If I had read that in a tweet or an online post, I probably would’ve quibbled with parts of it. But in context, what he was getting at was clear. Learning a craft shapes you. The skills required to become genuinely good at something change who you are. They form instincts and habits that stay with you. They become a kind of personal treasure.

That scene made me to ask a question: what are my crafts?

I’ve always been a creative. As a kid I drew constantly and illustrated my own comic books. As an adult I developed real skills in sales, collections, and marketing. And as I was discipled by older men and prepared for ministry, I began to learn another craft, the craft of pastoring.

Pastors are not mere teachers. We don’t just pass along information about the Bible. Yes, we must know the Word and divide it rightly. But our work goes beyond explanation. Pastors are craftsmen of the human soul. Our task is not only to explain the Word, but to apply it wisely in real situations.

We are shepherds. And like real shepherds, we don’t tend random sheep in random fields. We shepherd the sheep entrusted to us. That means the application of God’s Word is never generic. It’s always aimed at a particular people, in a particular place, at a particular time. The same pastor preaching the same text will not preach it the same way to different congregations in different seasons. He can’t help it. He applies the Word to the people standing right in front of him. He’s dealing with the needs of the day for the people God has given him.

If you don’t share this understanding of pastoral ministry, then this article is not for you. But if you do, then the concerns I’m raising will make sense.

First, social media, like most media with global reach, delocates us. Media has always followed the story that gets the most eyes. Social media just sharpens that instinct by rewarding whatever generates the most engagement. And it’s very rare that the most engaging story in the world is coming out of Batavia or Cincinnati, Ohio. If it does, it’s usually a one-off.

Now that we have access to the entire world, we can talk endlessly about earthquakes in one place or cultural trends in another. And because so much is always happening everywhere, the news cycle shifts constantly toward whatever is newest, loudest, or most interesting. If you’re trying to grow a platform as an influencer, the path is pretty clear: keep commenting on whatever is most engaging at the moment, or stick to a handful of evergreen controversies that reliably generate attention.

Either way, those topics often have very little to do with the most pressing needs of the sheep entrusted to our care. No doubt, people in our churches may want to talk about the same things the rest of the country is talking about. But the most serious struggles they face are often not matters of national or global concern. They’re local and personal.

In fact, most of the real work of pastoral ministry is local work. That’s why we call it the local church. And because that is the pastor’s charge, his default posture must always be local, local people, local problems, local sins, local sufferings. Some of those concerns will intersect with government or public life, but the most important issues live in the actual lives of his congregation.

If a pastor is constantly being trained by social media to speak on issues with little local relevance, then he is being pulled, at least mentally, away from the very place God has put him. He is locally present in body, but not in spirit.

Second, social media encourages a pastor to pander. Influencers live and die by their audience. One of the driving goals is always to grow that audience, and you do that by giving people what performs well. Over time, you learn what your audience craves, and you keep serving it to them.

In my experience, it’s rare to see influencers confront their own audience in any serious way, especially in ways that rebuke a negative tendency. Instead, their default is to flatter and pander. That’s not because they’re uniquely dishonest people. It’s because that’s what grows a platform.

A pastor, by the very nature of his calling, cannot operate that way. His responsibility is not to please the sheep, but to care for them. Yes, he must encourage them and strengthen them in their fight against sin. But that same responsibility also requires rebuke, both from the pulpit and face to face. A pastor cannot simply give people what they want unless what they want is also what they need. And those two things are often very different.

The influencer builds an audience by cultivating content people want to hear and will reward with attention. The pastor is aiming at holiness. He wants his people to grow in their pursuit of Christ. And that sometimes means telling them no. It means calling them to set aside vain curiosities and far-flung political intrigue and deal with their own lives, marriage, work, habits, repentance.

In that sense, social media slowly strips the pastoral ministry of its prophetic voice. By “prophetic,” I don’t mean predicting the future. I mean the willingness to address the people in front of you, to name their sins plainly, and to say, without leaving them hopeless, you are the man, as Nathan said to David.

Third, influencer culture trains pastors to become personalities rather than simply people. It encourages the cultivation of a personal brand, inside jokes, catchphrases, quirks, and a recognizable online persona. I know this can happen outside of social media, but it’s much harder to pull off a performance in real life.

It’s hard to maintain a carefully curated image when you live among your people. When your kids are friends with their kids. When your wife is friends with their wives. Proximity has a way of stripping away pretense. Real life gets in the way of curation.

The worst version of this is when a man starts to believe his own press. He begins to think he’s smarter or more important than he actually is. And to be fair, people often encourage this. They want a hero. They want someone impressive. They want a polished, elevated version of themselves to admire. They want an avatar to live through. And if you’re willing to give them that, and tightly control the narrative, you can build a sizable following. That approach collapses in real pastoral ministry. People are too close. They will see the cracks. And when the image finally breaks, they won’t just feel disappointed. They’ll feel deceived. You’ll be exposed as a pretender or a fraud. And fans are quick to turn into haters.

The word authentic is overused, but the instinct behind it is right. People want real men. Social media, by its nature, allows us to present exaggerated or carefully edited versions of ourselves. And that is deadly to pastoral ministry.

Pastors are meant to model what a mature, sanctified Christian life actually looks like. Turning that into something untouchable, something your people could never realistically pursue, is not the way of a shepherd.

Fourth, wherever you invest your best energy, especially your most focused creativity, that’s where your heart will go. Instead of thinking about the church member who’s been very sick, stuck in bed with heart trouble, your mind gets consumed by some social media argument raging at the moment. Instead of wondering about the couple you haven’t seen for three weeks, you’re deep into creating content for strangers.

It is possible to fall more in love with the attention and supposed needs of strangers than with the people God has actually given you. Some of this is just plain pride. A lot of it is a deep hunger for validation. Men want to be a big deal.

Listen to me, fellow pastors: if you are the pastor of a church, you are a big deal. You are a shepherd. In most American churches, you are the only shepherd those people have. People will come to faith through your preaching. Marriages will be saved. Souls will be steadied. By God’s grace, I’ve accomplished more numerically than several of my former pastors, but without them, I would be nothing. Most of you wouldn’t recognize their names. I know their names. They still know mine. They mean the world to me.

To be impressive to strangers while growing distant from those entrusted to you is a real failure. It’s not just unfortunate. It’s a betrayal of the calling.

Lastly, at least for now, I believe influencer culture becomes an echochambers which impairs a pastor’s ability to discern. It is an artificial environment. In a very real sense, it’s a kind of matrix.

I’ve had wives reach out to me online describing their husbands as monsters, only to meet the husband and find he’s a decent man and she’s unbearable. I’ve had husbands tell me their wives were radical feminists, only to sit down with both of them and discover the man is a wreck and a terrible leader, and the woman is actually patient and kind.

People lie when there’s no accountability. Sometimes they lie without even realizing it, because they lack self-awareness, and they lack a pastor close enough to help them see clearly. Online, there are entire echo chambers telling women they are never at fault. Now there are parallel communities telling men the same thing. Pastors who cater to these audiences begin to care for them. And over time, their discernment gets warped as they become immersed in the echochamber.

Social media exaggerates everything. Rarely is anything stated plainly and with proportion. That doesn’t perform well. And a man who lives in that world, breathes its air, and drinks its water will slowly have his judgment twisted by it.

So these are some of the ways I see influencer culture destroying pastoral ministry. Pastors must be experts in the Word, yes, but more than that, they must know how to apply it to actual people. That requires time, presence, and discernment.

Can a pastor have a social media platform? Obviously. You’re reading this because I posted it online.

I think pastors today need some level of online presence. That’s just the reality of the moment we’re in. The shepherd needs to be where the sheep are. That should be lived out primarily in a local, embodied way, but the sheep are also online. To some degree, that can be as simple as posting sermons to YouTube or having a couple of social media profiles that point people there. It’s also useful, frankly, to see what people are talking about.

Twitter and Facebook are great revealers, not necessarily of who a person is, but of who they want to be. People say things online they would never say in person. They present a version of themselves that often has little to do with their day-to-day life. That’s actually helpful to know when you’re trying to shepherd people toward growth in Christ.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been forced to ask a harder question: What do I actually want to do with whatever platform I have? I want it to function as an outpost of the ministry I’m already doing. I want it to magnify that work. The moment it distracts from that calling, it stops being an asset and becomes a liability.

That’s why I think online ministry and writing should largely arise out of local ministry. Pastoring sharpens your preaching. It makes it more precise, more grounded, more honest. And that, in turn, makes any online content stronger. Most online material today is recycled, people remixing their own old takes or someone else’s ideas. Very little of it comes from the ordinary, grinding work of everyday pastoral life. If you love writing and creating, fine, but the best content will come from keeping your actual people first.

That kind of faithfulness creates limits. And limits are good. When I was a kid, I thought I could cook a pizza faster by turning the oven up to 500 instead of the 425 on the box. All I did was burn it. Speed limits exist for a reason. At a certain point, a car becomes impossible to control on a curvy road, and the internet is a very curvy road. Better to drive a little slower and actually arrive.

Is 100,000 followers better than 10,000? It depends on who the followers are and what you’re trying to do. Limits aren’t the enemy. I’ve passed on opportunities that could have grown a platform significantly if all I wanted was to be a content creator or talking head. But I said no because they pulled me away from my first callings: husband, father, pastor, and businessman. You can only do so much.

I’m writing this partly out of personal reflection, but also out of concern. Where will the next generation of pastors come from? If pastors become primarily talking heads, where will they learn the craft of caring for human souls? From podcasts? From men who posture wisdom online but have never lived the life that produces it? That’s a real problem. And it’s a threat to the work shepherds are called to do.

It’s a problem we can address, but only if we’re honest enough to name it.