Celebrity Congregants

People complain about celebrity pastors. Fame can make a pastor unaccountable, a lone ranger. It can also make ordinary pastors look just that — average.

But what about the people — you and me — who fall for celebrity? It’s not as if a person can decide to be a celebrity. She has to do something that people — lots of them — find appealing. In which case, celebrity is as much a problem for the ordinary believer as it is for pastors who get too big for their studies.

Think, for example, of two recent celebrities, both graduates of Wheaton College, in the news. The first, Dennis Hastert, the former Speaker of the House, lost his mojo after revelations of sexual misconduct and payments to keep the activities secret. This was a problem for Wheaton College since it had named a center after the Congressman. According to the College:

It is with sadness and shock that the Wheaton College community learned of the indictment by the U.S. Department of Justice of alumnus and former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives J. Dennis Hastert, and of his resignation from the Board of Advisors of the J. Dennis Hastert Center for Economics, Government, and Public Policy at Wheaton College.

In light of the charges and allegations that have emerged, the College has re-designated the Center as the Wheaton College Center for Economics, Government, and Public Policy at this time.

I don’t bring this up to pick on Wheaton. Villanova University faced similar problems when it had to change the name of one of its athletic facilities after its donor, John Eleuthère du Pont, committed murder. Every institution has this problem or its potential. And the problem has everything to do with a constituency — you and me again — that looks for power, or fame, or money, or status as an indication of worth or goodness. Since most Christians have a pretty good understanding of sin, you wonder why we let ourselves in for this.

And imagine if Wheaton College had named it Center for Economics, Government, and Public Policy after the other alumni celebrity recently in the news, Elisabeth Elliot, who died earlier this week. According to the Times’ obituary, Elliot appears to have led the kind of life that would not have embarrassed Wheaton:

Elisabeth Elliot, a missionary who inspired generations of evangelical Christians by returning to Ecuador with her toddler daughter to preach the Gospel to the Indian tribe that had killed her husband, died on Monday at her home in Gloucester, Mass. She was 88.

Lars Gren, her third husband, announced the death on Ms. Elliot’s website. She had had dementia for about a decade.

Ms. Elliot wrote two books stemming from her experience in Ecuador, and together they became for evangelicals “the definitive inspirational mission stories for the second half of the 20th century,” said Kathryn Long, a history professor at Wheaton College in Illinois.

The first, “Through Gates of Splendor,” published in 1957, recounted the ill-fated mission of her first husband, Jim Elliot, and four other American men to bring Protestant Christianity to the remote Waorani (also spelled Huaorani) Indians. It ranked No. 9 on Christianity Today’s list of the top 50 books that shaped evangelicals.

Of course, an Elliot Center for politics and economics wouldn’t necessarily make much sense. Maybe an Elliot Center for Missions or an Elliot Center for World Christianity.

Or maybe, we drop people’s names for institutions altogether. Elisabeth Elliot may not have committed the sins that afflict Dennis Hastert, but I’m betting she would have admitted that she had plenty of vices to keep her from being some sort of revered brand or seal of approval. I suspect as well that she would have said the only seal of approval available to fallen humans is the one that comes from Jesus. Maybe every Christian institution or donor should think about that before using or lending a name.

Jesus Center for Economics, Government, and Public Policy?

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