How To Avoid Personality Cults in the Church!

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The Church and Its Leaders

3 Brothers and sisters, I could not address you as people who live by the Spirit but as people who are still worldly—mere infants in Christ. 2 I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready. 3 You are still worldly. For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere humans? 4 For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not mere human beings?
5 What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through whom you came to believe—as the Lord has assigned to each his task.6 I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow. 7 So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. 8 The one who plants and the one who waters have one purpose, and they will each be rewarded according to their own labor. 9 For we are co-workers in God’s service; you are God’s field, God’s building.
One of the issues Paul needed to address with the Corinthian church is that they were putting their faith in a leader, not Christ.  They were following individual personalities not the gospel.  This is the last thing Paul wanted.  Not only did he not want to be compared to Apollos, because they had very different gifts. But he also saw the following of an individual to be very divisive for the church.
And the same is true today.  Many church squabbles and divisions come when members of a church get more attached to a particular pastor, then the vision and direction God has for a particular church.  Getting attached to a certain pastor or leader over another creates a consumer mentality, where I go when so and so is preaching, but I don't like so and so's style as much so I sit home that Sunday.  This is what Paul wanted to avoid and stop right away in the Corinthian church, because he knew it was so detrimental to the health of the church.  One symptom of this is when I hear someone say, "I go to so and so's church", rather than saying I go to Church "x".  It is Jesus' church and we serve him.  
Paul shows we all have different purposes in the church. One plants another waters but importantly it is God who makes these growth.  If because I am a "waterer", I think I am more important to a church that is called "pride" and God does not bless it.  
Writing as a pastor unfortunately our achillles' heal can be wanting people to like us, so we get sucked into this as well. We pastors often don't set appropriate boundaries to counter this tendency.  So both pastors and parishoners need to take Paul's teaching today seriously for the sake of the church!  After all who is any of us but "servants of Christ".  

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