The amount and the strength of the pushback on my last few posts leads me to conclude that either (a) I am completely wrong on the matter of conferences (and being completely wrong is not without -- ahem -- precedent in my bio) or (b) I am absolutely right on target (that would be unprecedented, thus unlikely but not impossible). The strength of feeling seems to exclude any moderate middle on this issue.  So let me simply conclude by saying that I am not opposed to conferences -- as I said, as of this moment, I am intending to be at T4G next year (unless I am now banned for life).  I simply want to make the point that there are dangers, real dangers associated with such for both speakers and audience, and unless we acknowledge these we can do nothing about them.  To deny that  the problems exist, as most seem to wish, is problematic, not least because it seems oblivious to the problem of sin in such gatherings -- not a very `reformed' position.

Anyway, to close my comments, I quote below an excellent analysis of celebrity culture which I received this morning from James Eglinton, a Free Church of Scotland minister now teaching systematic theology at the seminary of the Liberated Churches in Kampen.  A Bavinck specialist, he also has a keen eye for cultural issues.  Preachers should reflect upon what he says, particularly about aesthetics.

I read Thabiti Anyabwile's reply to you on Ref21.  I imagine that if the British church was as big as its American cousin, we would also produce more of our own idols - but I think that the cultures are nonetheless distinct and so the idols are also different.  We're also celebrity obsessed but the American variety is on a different level.  I struggle to think of many real 'celebrity' preachers in the UK.  John Stott is obviously a very significant figure, but he's so unglamorous that it's hard to think of him as a celebrity.  People seem to care far more about what he says, rather than who he is in saying it.  He has no "beautiful" wife to boast about in the pulpit etc.  Also he's old and his own formative context was far removed from the current celeb madness.  The Doctor had widespread influence, but I don't know if it's right to call him a celebrity, again because it's an anachronism: his influence doesn't necessarily mean the modern sense of 'celebrity'.  (I would define the current notion of celebrity, for example, around the categories of aesthetics carefully cultivated and public self-disclosure of personal details with the goal that the public then celebrates this person in public arena etc).  I think it's hard to fit Stott or MLJ into those categories, whereas it's pretty easy to say that some of today's preachers (consciously or not) mimic the paradigms of modern celebrity.  Sacrificing the difficult details of your private life in order to gain public adulation is a key part of secular celebrity, and I wonder if the way some of these preachers sacrifice the harder details of their private lives (or more often, the private sins of their wives/children - after all, shaming one's self isn't that good an idea as a preacher) in order to get public adulation is just the same thing.

If they tried to organise a British equivalent of, say, TGC or T4G or PCRT, it's hard to think who would be the evangelical British preachers who hold sway over most British evangelicals.  There are many who have huge influence over their own congregations but very few who are widely known or cared about.