S3E4 Vanity of Vanities: Celebrity

Matt and Dan begin with a mid-Lent wrist inspection, checking for spiritual pulse and early signs of influencer disease. It’s that penitential time of year when you ask: am I fasting from meat, or am I fasting from relevance?This episode they turn to celebrity, especially the Christian habit of baptising it and calling it evangelisation. Platform equals influence equals Gospel. Simple math but suspicious theology.The Asians suggest celebrity isn’t a neutral bamboo steamer. It’s more like hotpot broth: everything you drop in starts tasting like the algorithm. The influencer world doesn’t just spread the message; it reformats reality around visibility, scale, and engagement. Authority becomes follower count and community becomes audience.​While recognising  technology can serve the Church, platform tempts us to believe that big means blessed, instant means intimate, and online means incarnational enough.The deeper pastoral problem isn’t scandal or bad takes but that the Church’s imagination gets quietly rewired, reconfiguring even the conception of faith within the Church. The Body of Christ risks becoming a network. In the end, they offer the unfashionable answer: what nurtures Christian faith isn’t celebrity. It’s Word, Sacrament, and a stubbornly local people gathered in the flesh Asian style. The Gospel doesn’t need to trend; it needs to leaven.ResourcesMatthew Tan: Bobblehead Church Sherry Turkle: Alone TogetherJodi Dean: Blog Theory