Your Podcaster Is Not Your Pastor
If your “Pastor”
1. Has never met you,
2. Has never had a meal with you,
3. Has never shepherded you,
4. Has never served the Lord’s Table to you,
5. Has never baptized your children or performed the marriages of people you actually know and love,
6. Has never looked you in the eye and told you to repent,
7. Has never stood beside your hospital bed or graveside,
8. Has never known your tears, your sins, or your story,
9. Has never bled, prayed, or wept over your soul—
And you have only ever “learned” from him through a screen on a device—
Then stop calling that man your pastor. He is not your shepherd, and you are not part of his flock. You are a nothing more than a number in his analytics. You are a view count, a metric in a dashboard, 1’s and a 0’s in someone’s algorithm, and a digital consumer feeding on the illusion of ministry. At best, you are a subscriber to a sermon factory—mistaking the consumption of content for the communion of saints and the covenant bride, the church.
That man online does not know you. He cannot shepherd you. He does not serve you. He cannot help sanctify you. He will not feed you Christ’s body and blood at the Lord’s Table. And he cannot minister to you in your moment of need. All he can provide for you is light illumined pixels in the form of Christian entertainment.
Because— A livestreamer cannot lay hands on you. A thumbnail junkie cannot bury your dead. A relevant podcaster cannot hold your hand when the doctor says, “It’s cancer” or “I am sorry ma’am he is gone.” And a popular (even “reformed”) influencer cannot baptize your children or marry them when they grow up and find love.
You may think you’re being discipled by the content, and that would be true if discipleship was only about filling your head full of religious ideas and dogma. But, real discipleship, is life on line, done in the trenches, not from a sofa and a wifi connection.
Again, you may feel well-fed intellectually, but it’s at best junk-food for the soul —heavy on dopamine, light on discipline, devoid of accountability, and incarnational presence. This is because short bursts of digital doctrines will never replace the long communal and relational growing into obedience and discipleship together.
These online talking heads will not build the local church. They will not produce humility, hospitality, or holiness. They will only breed a new generation of self-appointed purity-police, cage-stagers, event attenders, book buyers, patreon subscribers, and ecclesial snobs who sneer at their own churches as “not getting it” and being “out of touch.”
If that’s you—if you’ve spurned Christ’s blood-bought Bride for a podcast, or an endless stream of Christian content online, that leaves you checked out from the life of the local church then repent of that. In so doing you’ve traded the living fellowship of the saints for a cheap counterfeit. You’ve replaced local shepherds with celebrities, sacraments with soundbites, and fellowship with fandom.
Repent of that. Because Christ didn’t die to build that. He died to build churches. He didn’t tell Peter, “Go viral;” He said, “Go—tend My lambs.”
So find a real church.
With real sinners and real saints.
With real elders who know your name and will hold you to your vows.
With real bread, real wine, and real accountability.
Find a pastor who spends time with the sheep, smells like the sheep pen, not an aloof guy behind a camera who does not know you.
And to be clear—podcasts aren’t evil. I have one! And God has used to to share truth with a lot of people. So, clearly, I think they are a good tool. They can teach, equip, and bless, and praise God when that happens! But they can never replace for real embodied ministry at a local church. Real ministry is incarnational, covenantal, costly, and communal and it is essential!
Rant concluded.
