God Needs Faithfulness, not Rizz
A reflection on value and effectiveness
Every Sunday morning, while my small church is setting up chairs at the local community building in Dobson, North Carolina, scores of church employees are preparing for a crowd of 1,800 an hour south of us. Janitors make the final cleaning round, the musicians practice for worship, and greeters prepare to welcome guests. Then at 9:30 the doors swing open and hundreds flock in. After the people settle into their seats, the band hypes the crowd with worship music, playing hits like “Won’t Stop Now,” “Do It Again,” and “LION.” Then the music is over and the pastor walks onto the stage, sporting designer clothes and a casual persona. He delivers a sermon reminiscent of a TED talk, littered with jokes and pop culture references.
This is Elevation Church, a multi-campus megachurch started by celebrity pastor Steven Furtick that sees a weekly attendance of over 17,000 across its nineteen locations. The church is widely known for its worship band, Elevation Worship, and the worship music they produce that is sung by thousands of churches worldwide.
Why do so many people attend Elevation Church? I’m sure there is no one reason. No doubt the Grammy-winning music team attracts many people. Others might like the festive party atmosphere. Still others may be genuine seekers.
Rizz
But I can guess another significant reason: Steven Furtick himself. Energetic, engaging, charming, the church is clearly built around his dynamic personality. He can preach well, he’s dressed in the latest style, and he even manages to keep a sense of relatability as he paces the stage.
It’s what we call charisma. While charisma is difficult to define, it’s generally known as a personal magnetism or charm that arouses enthusiasm, passion, or devotion in others. People who have charisma can influence and galvanize people to action, convincing them to invest in something larger than themselves. Charisma makes a person interesting and engaging.
Charisma can be used for good or ill. In Acts, Luke describes Apollos in a way that would surely identify him as one with charisma. Other leaders in both the Old and New Testaments were charismatic and persuasive.
Yet the same personality traits that enable someone to convince people to do good things can also enable that same person to convince others to do incredible evil. Charisma has enabled people like Adolf Hitler to manipulate individuals, crowds, and entire nations.
People have always desired charisma, but it seems to have become even more admired and sought after in recent years. In 2023, the Oxford word of the year was rizz, a shortened form of charisma. Largely because of social media, stage presence and style have become essential to being someone of significance. It’s pretty obvious nowadays that you will become famous much faster by looking good onscreen than you will by being humble and kind.
And this gets to the core of it: contemporary culture teaches us value charisma over almost everything else. Nothing is more important than being able to influence people with wit and personal charm.
It’s a mindset that’s easy to adopt; I am often envious of those who are better at speaking and writing. I wish for a magnetic personality like other people I know. I want to be able to make friends and influence people, to be somebody who others admire.
Faithfulness
In the middle of the culture’s swirl of influencers and celebrity it’s easy to forget Jesus’ thoughts about it all. While He uses charisma in His Kingdom, the people with charm aren’t the ones who are praised in Scripture. In fact, Jesus makes it pretty clear that he would rather work with people who are completely the opposite of the charming, attractive ideal.
Jesus’ disciples struggled with this upside-down concept even without TikTok. Matthew records the disciples asking who will be greatest in Jesus’ kingdom. Jesus surprises them with an answer that is simple and straight-forward: become like a child. He uses people who appear to be small, weak, and insignificant. I believe that familiarity with the words of Jesus has jaded us to how shocking the Sermon on The Mount really is. Blessed are the poor, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are those who are persecuted.
We see the principle of the last being first woven throughout the entire story of the Bible. God bypasses the strong, charismatic types and reaches for the weak people, the people that are—as Tim Mackie calls them—“powerless nobodies.”1 They are the people who may not have a trace of charisma but humbly recognize their problems and choose to follow Jesus. We all know this, but it’s hard to believe and easy to forget.
I have several distinct memories of going to church when I was young, one of them being of the church janitor. The janitor and his wife always arrived at church early, making sure the lights were turned on, the thermostats were adjusted, and the pews were clean. It was a job that took ongoing time and dedication and probably went unnoticed by most of the church members.
Yet according to every metric in the teachings of Jesus, the humble services that this janitor and his wife offered the church were every bit as important as Billy Graham’s crusade in Seoul, South Korea, in which 1.1 million people gathered for the final evening. God uses what we have to offer, and that is enough.
Charisma is vital to the world, but not to God. At the end of the day, He wants faithfulness more than fervor, godliness more than giftedness, childlikeness more than charm. God uses charisma, yes. But he much prefers faithfulness. Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise.
https://bibleproject.com/videos/intro-to-sermon-on-the-mount