It was meant to be a sermon on the importance of having faith in God’s vision, even when that task seems difficult. An object lesson from the book of Mark, in which Jesus heals a blind man by spitting on his eyes. But it’s how Pastor Michael Todd brought this message home that made the sermon unforgettable.
Addressing congregants and a live-streaming audience, Todd placed one hand on the shoulder of a closed-eyed worshipper on stage before letting out a deep snort and twice hacking phlegm into his other hand. The audible gasps inside the Transformation Church, a Tulsa, Oklahoma-based mega ministry rooted firmly in Black Baptist tradition, turned to full on outcry when Todd smeared said loogie on the worshipper’s face.
“How you just reacted is how people in your life will react when God is doing what it takes for the miracle,” the pastor reassured horrified onlookers. That the man playing blind on stage turned out to be Todd’s brother Bentom didn’t make the pastor’s, erm, heavy-handed demonstration any less revolting.
The internet broke into fits at first sight of this clip. “God wasn’t nowhere near that,” snarked the Root’s Shanelle Genai. “If your pastor rubs spit on your face”, quipped the Rev Dr Chuck Currie, a United Church of Christ minister, “find a new pastor.” Still, a fair few came to Todd’s defense, some making a case for saliva’s medicinal properties and others making a broader case for nastier offenses other shepherds have committed against their flocks. (See Commandments 8 and 9.)
Within days, Todd predictably reappeared on camera to apologize for his “too extreme and too disgusting” example. “It’s never my intention to distract others from God’s Word and the message of Jesus … even with illustrations!”
In this Covid-addled chapter of the internet age, the 35-year-old Todd epitomizes a new brand of holy man – the preacher-influencer. In South Carolina, there’s the Oprah-approved John Gray. In Georgia there’s Jamal Bryant, a preacher’s kid turned megachurch leader who sometimes appears alongside his ex-wife on The Real Housewives of Potomac.
But none is as of-the-moment as Todd – whose second book, Crazy Faith: It’s Only Crazy Until It Happens, could just as easily describe his viral clip. He promotes family on TikTok and parades fashion on Instagram. When memes like the Silhouette Challenge go viral, Todd isn’t just aware; he has a whole tangent in a sermon about “men anchoring their families” in which he discourages young ladies from “being impressive” with their bodies – an aside met with considerable pushback from secular feminists who’d long written off the Black church as overly paternalistic. It’s definitely not the kind of thing you can imagine hearing from Jesse Jackson.
How social media became a new stage
For more than a decade, these preacher-influencers have been spreading the gospel to reach souls spending more of their lives in front of screens. And it was only a matter of time before Todd reached them. “The principle of what he’s doing is very, very difficult,” says Cean James, the 47-year-old leader of Philadelphia Salt & Light ministries.
It used to be that the Baptist preacher didn’t need much in the way of frills; he (usually a he) was the show – needing only a bit of gospel organ, a catchy refrain and a dash of the holy spirit to move the crowd. With his father as a pulpit mentor, Martin Luther King Jr elevated this elocution style into an historic second act as a civil rights icon and touring public speaker. It’s a style that Black politicians – not least Barack Obama – often drop into when preaching to the choir on the campaign trail. And even though African Americans remain the most church-going demographic – with a 40% attendance rate that’s almost 10 points higher than the national average, according to a Barna survey – young Black people lag well behind older generations in their weekly church engagement.
Well before the pandemic, Black churches were scrambling to capture these short attention spans with flashy PowerPoints, studio-grade musicianship, concert-quality light displays and similarly high production values. Increasingly, they’re finding themselves pitted against the mainstream likes of Kanye West, whose viral Sunday Service productions have only further blurred the line between spiritual and secular.
Todd’s Sunday sermons, which have seen him set against an Imax-quality display, sometimes while standing on a stage pooled with water or in a driving artificial rain – are as ambitious as anything you’d see on a Vegas proscenium. Parishioners don’t just want a silver tongue, holy hands and a whiff of fire and brimstone. They want to feel it.
There’s always been a performance expectation in the Black church. “I know stories of preachers who Palm Sunday rode donkeys into sanctuaries, hoping that the donkeys had cleaned their bowels before going on stage,” says Bill Lamar, pastor of Washington DC’s Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church. Lamar doesn’t apologize for or excuse Todd’s behavior. But as an incisive historian of the Black church and its preaching traditions he argues that technology has played a part from the dawn of print publishing. “The only difference between this young man [Todd] and the others is we’ve got technology now that makes stuff go viral.”
Social media is just another stage. Gone are the days when pastors got by by penning bestsellers and hawking sermons on CD. The competition to win souls became more intense once Covid hit and church services were forced to shift to a streaming-only setup. “Churches that had younger clergy or younger people who were already leaning into a lot of the technological advances before Covid were really at an advantage,” says James, who also serves as associate conference minister for southern Pennsylvania’s United Church of Christ’s 66 affiliate members. “I had been encouraging our congregations to go virtual as far as worship services and giving three years before Covid.”
Still, it’s not enough simply to minister to the internet. A preacher-influencer has to appeal in other ways. The Instagram account @PreachersNSneakers, which posts screenshots of pastors in their sneakers with the market price appended, boasts more than 269,000 followers. Among other clothes horses, the account has featured Todd in his Nike Air Fear of God 1s (up to $760 at post time). Even Paula White, Donald Trump’s one-time spiritual advisor, was singled out for wearing $785 Stella McCartney sneakers; in fact, this trend is hardly exclusive to Black preachers. To those who say the fashion photos images are just as likely to offend as inspire, recognize the posts for what they are: the new prosperity gospel.
Not every preacher-influencer can pull a Creflo Dollar, a notorious old-school televangelist who raised eyebrows seven years ago with a six-minute video soliciting donations for a $65m private jet – a goal he had no problem meeting, by the way.
Before cracking social media, some pastors attempted to proselytize through reality TV projects like Oxygen’s Preachers of LA, a sort of real husbands of the cloth that ran for two seasons less than a decade ago (and spawned a Detroit-based spin-off). But that can just as easily destroy an image as burnish it. Gray and Bryant’s separate forays into reality television have only invited tabloid scrutiny on personal indiscretions that contradict their stated beliefs.
‘Church is hybrid now’
Todd, though, isn’t merely telegenic and tapped in. He can also deliver attention-arresting sermons that would seem to defy the evangelical practice of sermonizing with metaphors and parables “the way Jesus did”, says James, who believes He might have been leaning on visual aids too. “Think of the parable of the sower. Just imagine Jesus standing next to a field. So the people listening to that sermon might have literally been watching someone sow seeds. Or at least they were familiar with that process. If He did not have the physical illustration right there, He was painting a picture in their minds. That’s really been the old technique of preaching.”
But these days, James says, preacher-influencers rely on visual examples to appeal audiences in the room and the online following. And each time one of James’s peers asks him how to strike that delicate balance, he offers the same recommendation: watch old-school televangelists work.
“Whether you agree with their theology or not, they were really good at being present for the crowd that was in person and present for the crowd that’s on camera,” says James, adding that the video stream is just one piece of the internet play. “The chat section has really become the new Amen Corner for worship. At our church, we have a group of people in our production room who are literally just going through the chat responding to what people are saying. People will put prayer requests in the chat. Church is hybrid now, and you can’t make either group feel like they’re auxiliary.”
Nor can a preacher-influencer get too shocking on the pulpit, at the risk of overshadowing their good intentions. Far less circulated than Todd’s expectorated miracle attempt was his efforts to raise more than $1m for the survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. “God is a God of reparations,” he told parishioners last year during an outdoor service held over the weekend of Juneteenth. “Reparations means that somebody is going to take up the mantle and actually put into action the process of repairing something that was destroyed. If God is the God of reparations … and I’m one of God’s people … then I am responsible for being part of restoring what has been torn down.”
That sermon would seem to prove this much about the modern preacher-influencer: their most meaningful impacts don’t have to be quite so heavy-handed.
