Written by Dr. Kiefer Likens, Th.D.
You’d think the job description of a pastor would be pretty straightforward.
Shepherd the flock. Preach the Word. Guard the sheep. Rebuke the wolves. Live among the people. Pray like a man possessed. Weep with the broken. Bleed for the Body.
And yet somehow, in the fog machine haze of modern evangelicalism, we’ve managed to trade that sacred calling for a business model.
The office of pastor has been slowly gutted, rebranded, and replaced with a CEO in skinny jeans. He casts vision, scales ministries, builds the brand, posts inspirational reels, and networks with other influencers at leadership conferences. His sermon is tight, his merch is fire, and his hair is never out of place.
But his soul? That’s another matter.
Somewhere between the rise of the church growth movement and the fall of biblical literacy, the role of the pastor was hijacked. Hijacked by metrics. Hijacked by marketing. Hijacked by the need to be relevant, impressive, and successful.
And now we have a generation of churches led by managers, not shepherds. Motivators, not overseers. Content creators, not men who tremble at the Word.
This isn’t just a leadership crisis. It’s a theological one.
Because when you lose the biblical office of pastor, you lose the church. And what’s left isn’t the Body of Christ—it’s a brand. A franchise. A spiritually themed entertainment venue with a sermon slot between two sets of lights and fog.
It’s time we recover the forgotten office. Not with nostalgia. Not with bitterness. But with conviction, clarity, and courage.
The Church needs pastors. Not CEOs.
Let’s talk about why.
You can keep your merch table and your blue checkmark.
The New Testament vision of a pastor has nothing to do with social media strategy or conference keynotes. He isn’t a brand. He isn’t a content creator. He isn’t a team visionary. He’s a shepherd of souls—one who bleeds for the flock and trembles before the Word.
Let me say it like this: A real pastor isn’t worried about going viral. He’s worried about his people getting to heaven.
When Peter wrote to the elders of the early church, he didn’t give them marketing strategies. He didn’t offer tips for building an audience or expanding their reach. He simply said: “Shepherd the flock of God that is among you.” (1 Peter 5:2)
Do you see the tenderness in that? The weight of it? A shepherd doesn’t give a TED Talk and disappear into the green room. He lives among the sheep. He leads, feeds, protects, corrects, and yes—suffers alongside them. Peter makes it painfully clear that this isn’t a platform gig. It’s a calling. One that demands humility, willingness, and an unwavering example.
But in the modern church? We’ve traded that sacred calling for corporate jargon. The pastor isn’t a shepherd anymore. He’s an executive leader. A visionary. A content strategist. Someone who drops sermon series like product launches and builds his team like a brand.
Let me put it plainly: we don’t need more platform-driven personalities. We need pastors who smell like sheep.
Paul’s instruction to Titus confirms this. In Titus 1, Paul tells Titus to appoint elders in every town—men who are above reproach, grounded in doctrine, able to teach truth and refute error. That last part is key: refute error. In an age where everyone just wants to be nice, Paul says a pastor better be able to call out lies and protect the sheep from spiritual wolves. Not with clever slogans or passive-aggressive tweets, but with the Word.
How many pastors today can do that? Better question: how many even want to?
The uncomfortable truth is, we’ve trained a generation of church leaders who care more about being liked than being faithful. We measure success in attendance, not obedience. We glorify charisma and sideline character.
But then Hebrews 13:17 hits us like a ton of bricks: “Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account.”
An account. To God. For souls.
Let that haunt you for a second.
Pastors aren’t just playing church. They are accountable before the throne of God for how they steward the souls under their care. If that doesn’t make a man tremble, he has no business in the pulpit.
This isn’t a stage. It’s a battlefield.
So yes—we need to burn the stage and reclaim the shepherd. Enough with the influencers. Enough with the leadership pipelines that function more like Fortune 500 internships. Enough with pastor-as-CEO.
What we need are men who:
God help us if we don’t.
Because the Church doesn’t need more brand ambassadors. It needs men who will bleed for her.
Let’s stop pretending.
Somewhere in the last 30 years, we stopped ordaining pastors and started hiring executives. We stopped examining character and started recruiting charisma. We traded theological depth for strategic vision. The result? We now have churches led by platform builders, not cross bearers.
The modern evangelical landscape is littered with “pastors” who are better at pitching a sermon series than shepherding a soul. They’re conference speakers, leadership podcast hosts, Instagram influencers with a Bible verse in their bio and a brand deal in their inbox.
And we wonder why the Church is sick.
We replaced the pulpit with a stage, and the man of God with a master of ceremonies. The gospel became a hook for emotional response, and the church became a content delivery platform.
And let’s be honest—we liked it that way. We liked the performance. The branding. The hype.
But it was all cotton candy: sweet, puffy, and utterly hollow.
The CEO model works great if your goal is growth. It works terribly if your goal is godliness.
A CEO thinks in terms of expansion, scalability, ROI. A pastor thinks in terms of faithfulness, repentance, and sanctification. A CEO leads with vision casting and metrics. A pastor leads with prayer and the Word.
One builds an empire. The other builds up saints.
And yet evangelicalism seems addicted to empire-building. Mega-campuses. Vision Sundays. Staff re-orgs. Multi-site franchising. Branding initiatives that rival Silicon Valley start-ups.
We launch ministries like tech products. We design sermon series like ad campaigns. We measure spiritual health by analytics and page views.
And the shepherd? He gets lost in the fog machine.
You know what the early church never did? Hire a visionary leader to take them to the next level.
You know what they did do? Appoint elders. Lay hands on men who met strict biblical qualifications. And those men didn’t run the church like a company. They wept over sin. They contended for the faith. They broke bread, suffered persecution, and pointed people to a risen Christ.
The CEO pastor doesn’t do any of that. He doesn’t have time. He’s too busy networking.
And here’s the danger: when a pastor becomes a CEO, the gospel becomes a product.
You stop calling people to repentance and start offering them personal growth plans. You stop preaching sin and start preaching self-actualization. You stop shepherding the flock and start segmenting your audience.
Wolves love this model, by the way. Because nobody guards the sheep when everyone’s staring at the analytics dashboard.
Let me be clear: leadership skills aren’t the problem. But when those skills replace the shepherd’s calling, we’ve committed a hostile takeover of Christ’s design for His Church.
It’s time to shut it down.
Tear up the CEO job descriptions. Burn the KPIs. Cancel the vision-casting seminar.
And get back to the Book.
Let the men of God preach the Word, shepherd the flock, rebuke sin, weep with the broken, and carry the cross.
Because the only model that works is the one Christ gave us. And He didn’t wear a headset mic and pitch merch between songs.
Let’s be clear from the jump: you don’t become a pastor because you can speak well. You don’t become one because you started a podcast. And you sure don’t become one because you have a “burden” for ministry that conveniently aligns with your dream of building a brand.
A pastor is not self-appointed. A pastor is not self-made. A pastor is not self-serving.
A pastor is called, tested, recognized, and ordained.
Period.
The Bible doesn’t give room for freelancers with charisma. It gives qualifications. And they’re not soft suggestions—they’re hard lines.
Let’s look at what makes a pastor, according to God’s Word.
Paul doesn’t leave the church guessing. In 1 Timothy 3:1–7 and Titus 1:5–9, he lays out what an elder (pastor, overseer) must be.
Notice: the emphasis is on character, not gifting.
In Titus: he must hold firm to the trustworthy Word, able to give instruction in sound doctrine and rebuke those who contradict it.
You get the point. God cares more about the man’s holiness than his hype.
Paul’s charge to the Ephesian elders in Acts 20 is thunderous:
“Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood.”
A pastor has been made a steward of a blood-bought flock. This isn’t just a community group or content channel. These are souls purchased by Christ.
That’s why Paul warns them: false teachers will come. Wolves will rise up. And the pastor’s job is to guard the flock with his life.
Throughout church history, pastoral ministry has never been something someone just “starts doing.”
In the early church, elders were raised up from within the local body, tested, trained, and affirmed. By the time of the Reformation, the office of pastor was seen as one of the three key marks of the true church: the right preaching of the Word, the right administration of the sacraments, and the exercise of church discipline under qualified elders.
Calvin, Luther, and the Westminster Divines all treated the pastorate as a sacred calling—not a gig, not a hustle, not a personality-driven pursuit.
Today we ordain someone because they have a YouTube channel.
Church history would laugh—and then weep.
Peter again hits the mark:
“Shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight… not for shameful gain, but eagerly; not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock.”
What does a real pastor do?
It’s not glamorous. It’s not lucrative. It won’t land you a book deal.
But it will make you like Christ.
A pastor is a man who:
Everything else? Irrelevant.
If he’s not that, he’s not a pastor.
Reclaiming the Pulpit: How the Church Can Recover True Pastoral Ministry
We don’t need another celebrity pastor scandal to remind us the system is broken. We’ve had enough.
Enough pastors falling morally while their ministries keep the lights on like nothing happened. Enough sermon series pulled from leadership books instead of Scripture. Enough churches that look more like a Netflix studio than a New Testament gathering.
If we want reformation—real, Spirit-born, Christ-exalting reformation—it starts at the pulpit.
Because when the pulpit is reclaimed, the people are reformed.
We have to stop hiring pastors like we’re staffing a Fortune 500 company. The question isn’t, “Does he have vision?” It’s, “Is he faithful?”
Faithful to the Word. Faithful in prayer. Faithful in suffering.
That’s it. That’s the pastoral résumé. Everything else is just decoration.
You don’t need a pastor who preaches at conferences. You need one who knows your name and prays for your soul.
Real pastors aren’t platform climbers—they’re trench dwellers. They know what it’s like to sit by the hospital bed, weep over prodigals, and stay up until midnight answering questions about doctrine and doubt.
We reclaim the pulpit when we stop rewarding celebrity and start honoring obscurity.
The local church must recover the sacred duty of raising up elders from within.
Paul tells Timothy: “What you have heard from me… entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.” (2 Timothy 2:2)
We’ve outsourced pastoral formation to seminaries and podcasts. But the local church is the forge where men are tested, trained, and tried.
Don’t send boys to the wolves. Train men in the Word. Let them watch your life. Let them fail and repent. Let them bleed for the bride.
That’s how you make a shepherd.
Pastors must return to expository preaching. Line by line. Book by book. Bible over buzzwords.
Paul tells Timothy:
“Preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching.” (2 Timothy 4:2)
Trendy series won’t disciple your people. Emotional anecdotes won’t sanctify the saints. The Word of God alone builds the Church.
If the pulpit is a stage for your story instead of a herald’s platform for Christ, step down. Immediately.
This one’s not popular—but it’s essential.
A true pastor will suffer.
He will be misunderstood. He will be slandered. He will lose people he loves.
And he will persevere.
Why? Because Christ is worth it.
A shepherd doesn’t quit when the sheep bite. He lays down his life. That’s what Jesus did. That’s what Paul did. That’s what every true shepherd does.
We reclaim the pulpit when we embrace suffering as part of the call, not a glitch in the system.
We can’t keep doing business as usual. Not if we care about the Church. Not if we fear God. Not if we love Christ.
The pulpit must be reclaimed. By men who fear the Lord. By churches who demand holiness. By a generation who is sick of pretending.
This isn’t about style. This is about souls.
It’s time to burn the smoke machines and pick up the Scriptures.
The Church doesn’t need visionaries. It needs shepherds.
God help us raise them up.
Dr. Kiefer Likens, Th.D. is a Reformed pastor, author, and creative director based in Texas. He leads Redemption Ranch, a church committed to Scripture-centered worship, and holds a doctorate in Biblical Exposition. Kiefer is the author of For Christ and Covenant and Measured by Grace, blending deep theology with pastoral insight. He also runs a creative agency, specializing in design, branding, and web development.
