Our OBSESSION with Celebrity Pastors is Killing Us – The One Ring Problem

[0:00] Honest to God, I did not want to make this video. Another pastor falls, another ministry crumbles, another community left in pieces. The pattern is so predictable that at this point it's almost benol. It's almost expected. Power, recognition, authority, they corrupt every single time. My heart is broken over the Josh Bice situation at G3 Ministries and of Michael Brown and Steve Lawson before him and all sorts of other people before them and all kinds of different denominations. Of course, it's not only Christians. Power corrupts the unbeliever just as effectively as it does the believer. But it got me thinking in the Lord of the Rings, there's this moment that just perfectly captures what I think is happening in the church today. Frodo is offering the one ring to Gandalf. And Gandalf, wise, powerful, good-hearted Gandalf, recoils

[0:49] in horror. He says, "Don't tempt me, Frodo. I dare not take it, not even to keep it safe. Understand, I would use this ring from a desire to do good, but through me, it would wield a power too great and terrible to imagine." Gandalf understood something that I think we've forgotten in this church age, especially here in the West. The problem isn't just that some leaders are corrupt. The problem is that power itself corrupts even the best of us. Our obsession with celebrity pastors is killing us. And it's time we had an honest conversation about why Jesus warned us against creating these sorts of power structures in the first place. It brings me no joy to be making this video, but it's something that we do need to talk about and I'm hoping we can work on charting a path forward. So, let's get into the video. Let's talk about the corrupting

[1:36] nature of power. Not just in Tolken's world, of course, but in ours as well. What makes The One Ring so brilliant as a literary device is that it embodies a truth we see play out in real life constantly. Power changes people and rarely for the better. Jesus couldn't possibly have been clearer about how leadership would work among his own followers. In Mark 10, we find this incredible scene between Jesus and the rest of the disciples, especially James and John. They're like jockeying for position saying, "Hey, it says James and John, the sons of Zebedee came to him." Teacher, they said, "We want you to do for us whatever we ask." Bold words, James and John, what do you want me to do for you? He asked. They replied, "Let one of us sit at your right hand and the other at your left in your glory." And rather than decking them, Jesus says,

[2:23] "You don't know what you're asking. Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?" "We can," they answered. I just imagine the meme of like putting on the clown nose and then like applying the rainbow wig. And Jesus said to them, "You will drink the cup I drink and be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with, but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared." And so then when the 10 heard about this, they became indignant with James and John. Jesus called them together and said, "You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lorded over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant. And whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. So James and John are

[3:12] jockeying for positions of authority in Jesus's kingdom. The others disciples hear about it and they get indignant, not because they disapprove, but because they wanted those spots for themselves. And Jesus gathers them together and says, "You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them." and their high officials exercise authority over them. That word exercise authority, we talked about it in previous videos, is just kx uso and it literally just means the implementation of a system where one is over another so that this authoritative person has the right to tell the other person what to do. Jesus says not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. This is not simply a suggestion he's making. This is a fundamental reimagination of what leadership looks like in God's kingdom. Not so with you is about as direct as it

[4:01] gets. The hierarchical top- down power structures that define worldly organizations should have no place among the followers of Jesus. And yet, what is it that we've built? Entire systems where individual men wield enormous influence, minimal accountability, and unquestioned authority over thousands or even millions of Christians. the exact model that Jesus explicitly rejected. And here we run into another idea that might be helpful for us that comes to us from the Lord of the Rings. We might call it the Boramir complex. You remember Boramir? He's the noble warrior of Gondor who wanted to use the ring's power against Sauron. He says, "What if the ring should go to Gondor? Give Gondor the weapon of the enemy. Let us use it against him." His intentions were good. His homeland was suffering. He wanted to protect his people. Who could

[4:48] blame him? That is exactly the trap. Power doesn't care about your intentions. The ring corrupts everyone, even those who want to use it for good. Maybe especially those who want to use it for good because their righteousness is blinding them to their own corruptability. Unfortunately, we see this in church leaderships constantly. The pastor who starts taking a bigger salary because the worker deserves his wages and I need this to reach more people. The leader who surrounds himself with yesmen because I need a supportive team. the celebrity who effectively blocks all criticism because they're just haters distracting from the mission or touch not God's anointed or however they put it. All of these start with plausible semi-noble justifications, but step by step power works its magic. The ring slips on and the transformation begins. What makes the one ring analogy so perfect is that it illustrates three

[5:37] specific aspects of power's corruption that we see in church leadership. Unfortunately, first, it's gradual. Nobody puts on the ring and instantly becomes Gollum. The corruption happens so slowly you hardly notice it until one day you're justifying behaviors you once would have rightly condemned. Second, it's isolating. You will not meet a single person who feels more lonely, misunderstood, and unseen in their actual private life than a pastor of a church or a Christian celebrity. Because being a professional Christian means you've just got to be on all the time and there's no downtime. And if you actually have a failure or a slip up, there's nobody around who's going to be kind to you, who's going to be loving to you, or at least that's how it feels, whether that's true or not. So, it isolates. The ring bearer grows suspicious, paranoid, protective of their precious. And we see this when

[6:25] church leaders build systems where they're untouchable, where questioning the pastor is equated with questioning God himself. Third, it's selfdeceptive. The most dangerous thing about the ring is that it convinces you that you're still in control while it's controlling you. It masks its corruption as wisdom, as strategic thinking, as what's best for everyone in the long run. Think about how many fallen pastors, once they have come around to the truth, have said some version of, "I never thought this could happen to me." Of course not. That's how the ring works. That's how power works. But Tolken knew, and Jesus knew long before him, that power functions this way. Not just occasionally, not just with weak people, but as a fundamental reality of human nature. And this is why the only solution isn't better ringbearers, it's destroying the one ring itself. So why

[7:14] do we keep creating these corrupting power structures in the first place? That is to say, if Jesus explicitly warned against these power structures and we can see that they consistently corrupt even well-intentioned leaders, why do we keep creating them? What drives our obsession with celebrity pastors? Human psychology, interestingly, contains a deep attraction towards strong and charismatic leaders. We yearn for someone to tell us what to do. Simplify complex spiritual realities and serve as the hero so we can remain comfortable spectators. This is a temptation that some of you are facing with me. And I'm going to ask you with respect and love to refrain from treating me that way. I'm another pilgrim on this same journey that you're on. And if I ever gain power, I am just as vulnerable and just as susceptible to this. YouTube at its best gives me an opportunity to just

[8:02] talk to a lot more people. But I am not over you authoritatively in any way. But it's not just us. In this day and age, Israel's history reveals this exact same pattern with painful clarity. God established a system where he alone reigned as king, distributing leadership among judges who served specific functionally decentralizing power. Yet the people demanded, "Give us a king to lead us such as all the other nations have." God warned them through Samuel about the consequences. This is what the king will do. He'll take your sons. He'll take your daughters. He'll take the best of your fields. He'll take the tenth of your grain. You yourselves will become his slaves. And still they insisted. Why? Because centralized leadership offered an easier path than the demanding work of distributed responsibility and a family model. Because visible authority provided a

[8:50] false sense of security because they craved conformity with the surrounding cultures. The Bible itself tells us. And today we mirror ancient Israel. We elevate celebrity pastors because personal responsibility for our own spiritual growth demands effort that we're not willing to give. Because questioning and discernment require more energy than outsourcing our faith to an expert requires. Because charismatic figures create an illusion of certainty in our uncertain world. And because we're so afraid to be alone with our own Bibles, with our New Testament, and with the God that they reveal. Heck, we're afraid to be alone with our own thoughts in this day and age. If we can punt all of that to someone else to just tell us what to think, solves a lot of the things that we consider problems. Social media has transformed our tendency toward hero worship into an industrial

[9:38] strength celebritymaking machine. The reputation building process that once required decades now materializes in as little as months with a few viral moments. Many pastors or social media commentators, they basically function just as content creators and influencers. Their ministry success appears in the metrics that they are measuring of followers, likes, shares. The platforms reward provocative statements, polished presentations, and personalitydriven approaches over depth and substance. And not just depth and substance of content, but depth and substance of relationship, interpersonal mutual loving relationship. Instead, the people that get clicks are the ones who are these discernment ministries dragging other people, dragging the names of other fellow believers in Christ through the mud. Honestly, bordering most of the time on slander of another believer. You know what diabolas

[10:28] means in Greek? The word from which we get the devil, it means the slanderer, the accuser of the brethren. How many of us mirror the behavior of our devil, the enemy in so doing? Perhaps most alarming, social media generates parasocial relationships, one-sided connections where followers develop feelings of intimacy with leaders they've never actually met. These virtual relationships isolate celebrity pastors from genuine accountability while simultaneously granting them unprecedented influence over people's spiritual formation. And that happens even in-person ministries, too. If you've got a mega church of 1500 to 5,000 people and they all know the pastor, but the pastor doesn't know all of them, can't have one-on-one relationships with that many people. If he sat down and had dinner with every family in his church, let's just say there was 2,000 families in his church, and he sat down every single night of

[11:16] the week to have dinner with all of those 2,000 families, it would take him more than six years or around 6 years to get that many families into a meal together. There's no room for accountability there. There's no room for closeness and real relational intimacy to be built. It's all going to be a mile wide and an inch deep or an inch wide and an inch deep. They don't have the time for anything more. Your favorite online pastor exists as a carefully curated persona. You'll never witness how they treat restaurant servers or speak to their spouse during stressful moments. You'll never observe their day-to-day integrity or lack thereof, the real measure of their character. And so, what emerges? This dangerous combination of perceived intimacy without actual relationship and an isolating mechanism that keeps them in a position of power and influence without anyone to have actual intimacy and ability to check and hold them accountable. Not really. Fertile soil

[12:05] for unchecked influence and eventual abuse. Our celebrity pastor addiction exposes a pretty profound misunderstanding of the church's fundamental nature. We've been harping on this for weeks now, but when Jesus described the eklesia, the community of believers, he never portrayed an audience gathered around a superstar communicator. He spoke of a body with many members, each serving different functions with equal importance, so that the entire body is built up and functions together. He illustrated a family where greatness manifests through honest to God genuine service, not calling it service while standing on an elevated platform with a three-piece suit and tie standing behind a pulpit with everybody looking at you and spotlights on you. He envisioned a radical community standing in stark contrast to worldly power structures and hierarchies. Paul developed this vision even further in 1 Corinthians 12 where

[12:53] he emphasized that the I cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you. Every member matters. Every member, all of them are supposed to contribute. Leadership works as a function within the functioning of the body rather than position or status over it. The only king and head of the church is Jesus Christ himself. And yet, our celebrity model completely abandons this vision. We've constructed Christian TED talks instead of communities practicing mutual submission. We've prioritized the platforms of a few over the tables of every single member. And through this transformation, we've abandoned the heart of Jesus's intention for his own church. The beautiful complexity of interdependent community has given way to the familiar hierarchy of passive audiences adoring charismatic performers. This is an irony that cuts pretty deep. While we believe these

[13:43] powerful leaders strengthen our churches, they actually systematically weaken them by creating passive consumers rather than active participants in God's mission. Go read Ephesians 4. It couldn't be any clearer. God gave some gifts to the church community to equip them to do the work of the ministry. Not so that they could do the work of the ministry and then be elevated above everyone, but so that all of the work of the ministry is democratized across every member of the household of God. Every person who can rightly be called a saint, is a minister of the gospel, is someone who is working with the ministry to help one another reach the same measure of the stature of Christ's own character and maturity. At its core, we are facing what I would call a fundamental ecclesiology crisis. I know I am not making friends with

[14:29] statements like this, and it comes across as very inflammatory, but I can't help it. We have abandoned what I think the church was always meant to be. But hope remains. While all the company is true, Jesus offered more than warnings. He demonstrated an entirely different way of forming a community. Jesus never leaves us with criticism alone. His warnings against worldly power structures come paired with a revolutionary alternative, a complete reimagining of how human communities can function. If you want to know how authority worked, you had no better place to look than ancient Rome itself. They had hierarchical tree top-down authoritative structures down to a science in a way that we can't even imagine. If Jesus wanted to replicate that same system, he would have had a really easy alternative right there ready at hand that he could pull from to

[15:16] teach and to use as a constraining metaphor. But instead, Jesus gives us this upside down kingdom. And he offers us a way forward beyond something like a celebrity leadership model where you're a leader building leaders, building leaders, building leaders, building leaders, and it just comes this honestly pyramid scheme. Hadn't thought about it that way. But in John 13, we witness one of the most profound leadership demonstrations in human history. It's so familiar to us as followers of Jesus that it is almost trit to the point of being overplayed, which means it's exactly the kind of thing that we need to dig deep and look into again and defamiliarize ourselves with. Jesus, knowing his divine authority, aware that the father had put all things under his feet, removes his outer clothing, wraps a towel around his waist, and washes his disciples filthy, poopcovered, disgusting bare feet. Peter

[16:05] recoils. This violates every cultural norm about how power should app should operate. The rabbi does not serve the students. The leader doesn't kneel before the followers. Authority moves downward, not upward. And yet Jesus insists, I have set before you. He says, when he had finished washing their feet, he put on his clothes and returned to his place. Do you understand what I have done for you? He asked them. You call me teacher and lord and rightly so. For that is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another's feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you. Very truly I tell you, no servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him. Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them. Jesus insists, I have set you an example that you should do as I have

[16:55] done for you. Try to defamiliarize yourself with this passage. Consider this is a radical inversion that's going on here. The one with the ultimate local and universal and certainly among these people who give him their allegiance. But even cosmic authority, he's demonstrating that authority that even he has been given through service, through taking the lowest position, through doing the dirty work that no one else wanted to do. This completely redefineses what leadership means. He's setting himself below those he's serving, not above them. In the kingdom of Jesus, authority flows from service rather than commanding service be done to you. The true leader empowers others from their same level, maybe even below them rather than building his own personal empire and platform. Spiritual

[17:42] maturity manifests as greater humility, not greater prominence. Remember back to James and John jockeying for power positions. Jesus responds with this stunning challenge of whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant and whoever wants to be first must be the slave of all. For even the son of man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. The leadership model that Jesus demonstrated offers a genuine solution to power's corruption fundamentally reorienting what leadership even means making it about empowering others rather than elevating self. Jesus shows how authority can function without becoming the one ring. Power the way that the world does it. Power of authority, of institutional sway, of being over others, of being elevated, of being viewed as this great and wonderful person and then letting

[18:29] that go to your head and then telling other people what to do. That corrupts. It makes you into what you hoped to avoid becoming. But the early church took Jesus's servant leadership model and developed a radically different community structure than the hierarchical institutions we see today. Throughout the New Testament, we observe a beautiful organic approach to distributing the authority. Cursory glances through Acts 2 and Acts 4. They'll show you that early believers shared resources, met in homes, broke bread together, studied the apostles teaching, and sold possessions to meet needs. Leadership existed in the sense that it was the mature among them leading a group forward, not the mature ones standing over them and telling others what to do. This is authority that flowed through relationships, not positions. Paul describes church functioning in 1 Corinthians 12, emphasizing again how every member contributes. When you come together,

[19:17] each of you has a hymn or a word of instruction, a revelation or a tongue or an interpretation. Everyone participates, everyone contributes. Everyone ministers to one another. There's five ways that this function five sort of key principles for how this works. First, the gifts determine the function. Leadership emerges naturally through serving, not through titles or positions. The leader is the one who leads by example by serving and loving others. That's what a leader does. You don't appoint him and then listen to every command he sends from on high. Those who demonstrate their gifts receive recognition for how those gifts build up the body, not for their own stature and platform. Second, authority remains distributed. Even the apostles like Paul did not command obedience, but appealed to reason, scripture, and even conscience. Just read the book of Phileiman. If Paul had the ability to

[20:04] tell anybody what to do, Phileiman was one of those people. He could have written this letter and told him exactly what he wanted him to do and expected him to do it with the full backing of being an apostle of Jesus Christ sent with the gospel itself. Instead, he appeals to him as a friend and as a brother to do the right thing. No single leader controlled the community. And if it could be said that any leader did, it would be Jesus himself, the rightful king. Third, mutual accountability prevailed. Paul publicly confronted Peter to his face when he was straying from gospel principles. Every leader remained accountable to the community and to other leaders. Again, from within the flock under the reign of Jesus Christ as King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Fourth, relationships formed the foundation. Leadership happened within authentic community where people knew each other intimately, breaking bread in homes, sharing daily life. There was not

[20:53] this other context where they're a performer elevated above everybody else and then you only get some access to them in other contexts. I can't even say it was mushed together. This thing didn't exist. All you had was the daily life of people living as if Jesus is king in community with one another. And fifth, the focus stayed on equipping others. Success meant developing everyone's capacity to minister, not gathering followers around one gifted communicator. This organic approach to the church gives us a model for community where authority serves a function without creating the dangerous concentration of power that leads to the corruption so common among those drawn to the one ring. But perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of Jesus's new creation community appears once again in Paul's instruction about mutual submission. These verses got me in so much trouble when I would bring them up.

[21:41] But in Ephesians 5, starting in verse 21, before any discussion of specific relationships, Paul establishes a fundamental principle. Submit to one another out of your reverence for Christ. Some of us need to read that over and over and over again and drill it into the very base of our skull so that it gets into every fiber of our being. Submit. Put yourself below. A base yourself for the other person. Submit to one another. No qualifications given out of reverence for Christ. Mutual submission really truly radically departs from every worldly power structure. In God's kingdom, authority becomes reciprocal rather than unidirectional. Every member submits to every other member in appropriate ways

[22:28] of course, but according to their gifting and their function. My wife is a member of the body of Christ and I submit to her. In fact, the very next verse, Ephesians 5:22, is the one that says, "Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord." The word submit is not actually there in the Greek. Did you know that? It just says, "Wives to your own husbands." Meaning that is an illustration of the principle of submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Which means there is a reciprocal corlary obvious application to draw that the husband himself is also supposed to submit to the wife out of reverence for Christ. In mutual submission, leadership serves the community rather than ruling over it. Leaders remain accountable to those that they lead forward, not lead over. The community recognizes and affirms gifts without creating untouchable celebrities. In mutual submission, gifting creates responsibility rather

[23:17] than privilege. Those with teaching gifts bear greater accountability rather than greater status. The more influence that someone has, the more they submit to community feedback and correction. In mutual submission, we recognize Christ alone as head. Every other human leader stands on level ground at the foot of the cross. No intermediaries exist between believers and Christ or his father. All have direct access to God through Jesus. This mutual submission model, it is designed to create a community resistant to the corrupting influence of concentrated power. By distributing authority, maintaining accountability, and keeping Christ alone as head, we develop a spiritual community where the one ring cannot take hold. where the one ring has been destroyed and what's left is the kingdom of God and of his Christ. The beauty of this new creation approach, we've seen

[24:04] glimpses of it working throughout church history whenever communities have returned to Jesus's original design. From the early church, various renewal movements, whenever believers embrace mutual submission, and actual honest to God servant leadership, authentic community flourishes. This approach is going to feel messy, inefficient, and even chaotic compared to our streamlined celebrity pastor models. But you know what? Your system is perfectly designed to get you the results that it's currently getting you. Are you happy with those results? Are you happy with spending billions of dollars on buildings and professionals and budgets and programs? Where only 1% of institutional churches in the United States are growing because of actual evangelistic growth and people coming into the community because they're coming to Christ. Where other churches are just growing because this church

[24:51] dissolved, probably because of a scandal, and then all the people are leaving for another church in their same town. and 3,500 people leave the ministry every single year because they're burnt out and they're getting destroyed because they're turning into Gollum because of the one ring and its pressures and its demands upon them and it's destroying people. Is that the system that we're happy about? I'm not happy about it. Are you really happy about that? Whatever we might sacrifice in terms of efficiency, and that's questionable at best if your goals are what God is indexing on, we gain in faithfulness, in sustainability, and spiritual health. The new creation community that Jesus himself envisioned has never been about maximizing the result. It's about embodying the upside down values of the community of the upside down kingdom, which counterintuitively is actually what we really want in the long run. Anyway, so

[25:39] let's return to where we started with Gandalf's profound wisdom about power. When offered the one ring, he recoiled because he understood a truth that we desperately need to recover in the church today. Don't tempt me, Froto. I would use this ring from a desire to do good, but through me it would wield a power too great and terrible to imagine. The problem with celebrity pastor culture runs deeper than a few bad actors or insufficient accountability structures. The problem lies in the very nature of concentrated spiritual hierarchical authority itself. Unilateral power corrupts. No matter how good your intentions, no matter how strong your character, no matter how deep your theology, when we create systems that concentrate influence, platform, and authority in individual leaders, we set them up for corruption

[26:27] and ourselves for disappointment. Jesus knew this. Tolken illustrated it beautifully. History has proven it repeatedly, and the scandals we see today simply continue this predictable pattern. So, what do we do now? First, we, and I'm pointing directly at myself with this, we must recognize our own complicity in creating these systems and desiring these systems. Our desire for spiritual heroes, our reluctance to take responsibility for our own growth, our attraction to charismatic personalities. All of these tendencies contribute to the celebrity pastor phenomenon. Repentance starts with acknowledging our role in building what Jesus explicitly warned against. Second, we need to reimagine church beyond the personalitydriven models that dominate our landscape. This means embracing smaller, more participatory communities where authority remains distributed,

[27:16] where leadership emerges organically through service rather than platform building, where mutual submission replaces hierarchy. Of course, I know that this is something of a revolutionary clarion call, and this might not be recognizable for most people. This might not be something that you can implement for most people, but at least look for a church community where it's a plurality of elders where they can disagree with each other, where it's not one guy at the top telling everyone what to do and casting vision. That's the one ring. If we're looking at a practical way to flesh this out, it might mean gathering in homes where everyone contributes according to their gifts rather than attending performance centered services run by professionals. It might mean supporting teachers and leaders who deliberately avoid the trappings of celebrity who refuse book deals, speaking tours, and personal branding opportunities that would develop that would elevate them above the community. It might mean forming

[28:03] communities where leadership rotates, where multiple voices regularly teach and guide, where no single personality becomes the focal point. It might mean embracing the messiness of truly participatory gatherings over the polished efficiency of highly produced church services. Most importantly, it means taking Jesus at his word when he said, "Not so with you." It shall not be so among you. The patterns of authority in God's kingdom must fundamentally differ from the world's power structures. We cannot simply baptize worldly leadership models with Christian language and expect different results. The results we are currently getting are a perfect one:1 ratio are a perfect 1:1 representative of the strategic approach behind the story and of the strategic approach behind the system we've built. The system we've built is perfectly

[28:50] producing these results every time. In Tolken's story, the ring could not be wielded even for good. The only solution was destroying it in the fires of Mount Doom. And similarly, I believe our current model of celebrity Christian leadership can not really truly be reformed. It must be replaced with communities built on Jesus's own revolutionary vision, elevating him, the only single leader who will never fail. The only one who was not taken in by the temptation of the one ring. The one who did not bow to the way of the serpent. One who when offered all of the kingdoms of the world by the devil, by the prince of the power of the air, by the god of this age, was the only one who in the same situation would have been able to say no. This is a path that's going to demand courage. Stepping away from familiar models, questioning popular

[29:39] teachers, swimming against the cultural current. None of this comes easily. But the alternative just costs us too much. We've seen the devastation caused by fallen leaders, the disillusionment of those who trusted them, the damage to Christ's reputation in the world. So, here's my challenge. And if I'm pointing it at you, there's three fingers pointing right back at me. Start asking hard questions about your own church communities. Who holds power? How did they get it? What would happen if they left? Who has insight into their lives? Really, are you developing as a full participant in Christ's body, or are you merely consuming religious content created by professionals? Then look at your own heart. What draws you to certain leaders? Do you rely on them in ways that rightfully belong to Christ alone or to the broader community? Have you outsourced your spiritual responsibility to celebrity voices? And let's finally begin exploring what

[30:27] faithful alternatives might look like in your context. I want to be candid. I want to be kind. I know you might be in a different situation than I am. It's all well and good for me to be talking up here about my pronouncements, about what I think you should be doing, but it's up to you to look for this in your own context. How could you take small steps toward a more participatory, distributed model of spiritual community? How might you embody Jesus's servant leadership approach in your own spheres of influence? The new creation has begun in Christ. His resurrection launched a revolution that continues to transform how humans relate to each other and to God. And part of that transformation involves reimagining leadership and community beyond the corrupt patterns of this world. May we have the courage of Gandalf to recognize power's corruption, the wisdom to create communities resistant to its allure,

[31:14] fellowships, we might call them, and the faithfulness to follow Jesus's upside down kingdom where the greatest leaders serve and no one lords it over one another. Because ultimately, we only await one true celebrity, Christ himself. until he returns to complete what he started. We gather even the leaders as equals around his table, not as audiences before stages run by professionals. In that humble gathering of all the saints, we glimpse the new creation community that he is forming for himself even now. And if we are kings, let it only be in such a way that we are all kings, a royal priesthood under the King of Kings himself, ruling alongside one another over a world that desperately needs the service of the kind that the King of Kings himself rendered to his own followers. The kind

[32:03] that stooped down on bended knee to serve those who even would later betray him. Judas was among the ones whose feet Jesus washed, knowing full well that betrayal was coming. And may we be like those brave, beautiful souls found at the center of the scroll in the book of Revelation 12, of whom it was once said, "Now have come the salvation and the power in the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Messiah. For the accuser of our brothers and sisters, who accuses them before our God day and night has been hurled down. They triumphed over him by the blood of the lamb and by the word of their testimony. They did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. Therefore, rejoice you heavens and you who dwell in them. But woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you.

[32:50] He is filled with fury because he knows that his time is short. May we be like those who loved not their lives even unto death. May we be like those who humbly rather than triumphing over him by their power and their might and their brilliance triumphed over the devil by the blood of the lamb and the word of our own testimony and our willingness to lay down even our lives for those around us. Whether brother or sister in Christ, whether outsider, whether even enemy, may it be said of