Do you have a fish bumper sticker on the back of your car? A worship song set as your cell phone’s ringtone? Perhaps posters of Christian artists plastered on your room walls? Then maybe, just maybe you are a fan and not a follower of Jesus Christ.
“One of the symptoms [of a fan] is that you think you are a follower,” Pastor Kyle Idleman shared with The Christian Post.
His new book, Not a Fan, explains the difference between being a fan of Jesus and being a devoted follower to him and his gospel. The book offers a diagnostic to see whether or not a person is a fan – something most fans deny being, Idleman noticed.
“We have all kinds of funny ways to measure our relationship with God and have things that we point to as evidence, like the fact that there is a fish on our bumper or people will talk about the fact that their grandparents went to church or that they have four Bibles in their house.”
Idleman, a preacher’s son himself, shared that when he was young he fit the description of a fan. He wore the t-shirt saying “this blood is for you,” and next to a poster of Michael Jordan he had a picture of Jesus. “I wanted to be like Jesus but I wanted to be like Mike,” he said in a video.
While working on a message to preach to 30,000 attendees at Southern Christian Church, he realized the celebrity-driven fan culture is permeating Christianity. But “Jesus doesn’t want fans, he wants completely committed followers.” Since then, what began as a sermon evolved into a movement that got people evaluating their relationship with Jesus.
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