Why We Need a @PreachersNSneakers Book
I’d never heard of Pastor Kevin Gerald until last week, and as it turns out, I wasn’t missing out on much.
Gerald is the lead pastor of Champions Centre, which is the name of a church and not a community kickboxing gym as the name might lead you to believe. The church boasts five locations across the state of Washington and an online campus as well, where congregants can attend services virtually.
The church’s website offers straightforward faith statements and missional fervor punctuated with photographs of crowds of worshippers with raised hands and stages bedazzled with multi-colored light bars and a synthetic cloud made by fog machines. It all seems unremarkable for those of us familiar with evangelical megachurch culture.
But last week, something interesting happened when the @Preachersnsneakers Instagram account posted about Gerald for their 209,000 followers:
1,681 Likes, 208 Comments - PreachersNSneakers (@preachersnsneakers) on Instagram: "🐅"
If you’re not familiar with @Preachersnsneakers, it is an instagram account that went viral last year after the account’s anonymous owner began to post photos of pastors and other religious leaders wearing shockingly expensive sneakers. (Read “Let He Who is Without Yeezys Cast the First Stone” at The New York Times for more.) It has even gained the attention of numerous celebrities, such as drummer and DJ Questlove and actor Joel McHale.
The account’s owner who has operated under the pseudonym “Tyler Jones” has pointed out that he does not believe money or fame is bad. Rather, he is trying to raise questions like, “Is it moral or right for someone to get stupid rich off of tithes and offerings?” While church leaders have the platform to wrestle with such questions, they are also incentivized against it.
As Upton Sinclair famously said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Suffice to say that the pastors who have been featured—like Gerald in his $495 Kenos sweater, relatively modest compared to the gear donned by some of his colleagues—haven’t always responded well to the unwanted attention that the account has brought them. Cue this bizarre response posted to Gerald’s account:
218 Likes, 13 Comments - Kevin Gerald (@kevingerald) on Instagram: "There are too many critics without credentials. On the other hand, you can benefit greatly from..."
As a journalist who has been writing about American religion for more than a decade, this kind of fragility is not foreign to me. But that doesn’t make it less troubling. Many of America’s top pastors spend their careers criticizing people and groups of people and boogeymen like “Washington” and “Madison Avenue” and “Hollywood” from their well-lit perches, but if anyone dares to raise a question or offer a critique about their beliefs and behaviors, they melt into a puddle of fragility and anger. This is not what Christian courage looks like, folks.
For more on this, check out my interview with the account’s founder on the Preachers N Sneakers podcast.
While the @Preachersnsneakers is imperfect—as all social experiments are—it is raising necessary questions about consumerism, capitalism, and (wannabe) celebrity culture. The more I thought about it and the more I witnessed the visceral responses from thousands of ordinary believers, the more I was convinced that this conversation needed an even bigger platform.
In addition to writing, I decided to begin partnering with The Christopher Ferebee Agency—a firm that represents remarkable voices such as Richard Rohr, Rob Bell, and Shauna Niequist—to serve a handful of especially remarkable clients as a literary agent. I quickly realized that this was exactly the type of project I was interested in.
The post about Gerald coupled with his bizarre response demonstrates the importance of these questions and why they can only be raised by someone who is financially untethered from the institutional church. I’m excited to announce that the account’s founder and I successfully developed and sold the book that concept to W Publishing Group, a division of Harper Collins, and it is expected to arrive in a bookstore near you in 2021.