What this is about
The author of this site wanted to test a suspicion: that the modern pulpit attracts more than its fair share of people with an inflated sense of their own importance. His evidence was a set of remarks he had heard from various pulpits over the years. They come from more than one preacher. They are attributed to no one, and nobody should try to guess who said them.
He set a firm limit. The page looks at the pattern, not the person. It does not try to diagnose anyone as a narcissist; nobody can do that from a list of remarks. It asks whether the remarks fit the Bible’s picture of a minister, and whether today’s setting makes them more common.
What this page is not doing
It does not say who made any remark. It does not diagnose anyone. It does not claim that preachers are vainer than other people; nobody has reliable figures for that. It does not judge anyone’s faith or standing before God. Every made-up example is labelled. A companion dossier, Proud of Our Humility!, looks at a related pattern: humility that announces itself.
The short answer
- Nearly every remark makes the preacher the subject. His worthiness, his reach, his family, his success, his church, his courage, his verdicts on others.
- The Bible’s minister is a servant. Jesus said the greatest must be “servant of all.” Paul wrote, “we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants.”
- When the Bible boasts, it boasts of weakness. Paul boasted only when forced, called it foolish, and listed beatings and shipwrecks. Praise of a godly mother is given by others, not by the son.
- Putting others down, and “God told me” about another man, are the most serious. The first is the Pharisee’s prayer: “I am not as other men are.” The second puts God’s name on a private opinion nobody can check.
- The old Church saw this coming. Its great preachers warned that every preacher is tempted by praise, and it built checks: outside oversight, public vows, and a service centred on Christ rather than the preacher.
- Where those checks are missing, the setting rewards it. Whether the pulpit also attracts vain people more than other jobs cannot be shown from remarks, and no reliable study shows it.
Who is the subject?
Here are eight of the sixteen remarks the author recorded. Some he remembered word for word (in quotation marks); others he remembered in substance. For each one, ask a single question: does it point mainly to Christ, mainly to the speaker, or is it mixed? Then see how the page reads it.
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On the page’s reading, all but one of these make the speaker the subject. One remark proves nothing. Many running the same way are a pattern, and the Bible gives us the tools to test a pattern.
Servant, not subject
The disciples argued more than once about which of them was greatest. Jesus answered: “whosoever will be great among you, shall be your minister: and whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be servant of all. For even the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister” (Mark 10:43–45). Peter told church elders not to act “as being lords over God’s heritage, but being ensamples to the flock” (1 Peter 5:3). When a crowd tried to worship Paul and Barnabas, they tore their clothes and shouted, “We also are men of like passions with you” (Acts 14:15).
Paul is the one apostle who boasts at length, and he tells us why. False teachers were impressing the church at Corinth with their boasting, so he agreed to “play the fool” and boast too. Then he boasted of the wrong things: whippings, beatings, shipwreck, hunger, sleepless nights, and being let down a city wall in a basket. “If I must needs glory, I will glory of the things which concern mine infirmities” (2 Corinthians 11:30). His strongest boast ends with a disclaimer: “in nothing am I behind the very chiefest apostles, though I be nothing” (12:11).
Compare the remarks about being spared ordinary struggles, or making converts where others failed. Paul boasted of struggle. And of his own successful work he said: “neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase” (1 Corinthians 3:7). Jesus added, about a harvest his disciples were about to reap: “other men laboured, and ye are entered into their labours” (John 4:38). If a place was called a graveyard for missionaries, it was because missionaries died there. Their graves are part of the harvest.
On upbringing the Bible is gentle, and so should we be. Paul praised “the unfeigned faith … which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice” (2 Timothy 1:5). But notice who is speaking: Paul, about Timothy. Timothy never says it about himself. Proverbs had already drawn the line: “Let another man praise thee, and not thine own mouth” (27:2).
Who is doing the praising?
Six texts. For each, is the person speaking about himself, or is someone else speaking about him?
In the Bible, praise of a person’s family, faith or reliability is spoken by someone else. When a person speaks of himself, it is to count it as nothing, to confess, or, in the Pharisee’s case, to be corrected by Jesus.
Other believers, God’s comfort, “God told me,” and money
Other believers. Several remarks put others down: other songwriters compared to a pig’s litter, another preacher who “should not be preaching at all,” a woman whose music video he criticised and who, in his telling, thanked him for opening her eyes. The New Testament asks the opposite. “Who art thou that judgest another man’s servant?” (Romans 14:4). When rivals preached Christ to make Paul’s life harder, he said, “Christ is preached; and I therein do rejoice” (Philippians 1:18). When the disciples stopped a man because “he followeth not us,” Jesus said, “Forbid him not” (Mark 9:38–39). Correction belongs “between thee and him alone” (Matthew 18:15), in “the spirit of meekness” (Galatians 6:1). The New Testament even has a short portrait of a church leader with this pattern: Diotrephes, “who loveth to have the preeminence,” who spoke against others and put people out of the church (3 John 9–10).
God’s comfort. One preacher mocked songs about God’s comfort: “You’ve turned the Lord of Hosts into a nanny!” A thin song may deserve criticism. But the Bible never sets God’s power against his tenderness. “I, even I, am he that comforteth you … The LORD of hosts is his name” (Isaiah 51:12, 15). “As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you” (Isaiah 66:13). Jesus, at the end of his fiercest words to the religious leaders, said he longed to gather Jerusalem “as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings” (Matthew 23:37).
“God told me.” One preacher said God had told him that a former employee’s calling was “completely bogus.” Nobody can test that. There is no event, Bible verse or record that could show it wrong. Yet the Bible tells listeners to test what is said: “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Another preacher hinted that, like Samuel’s, his words would not “fall to the ground.” But 1 Samuel 3:19 is the narrator speaking, not Samuel, and it says that the LORD let none of Samuel’s words fall. It was known by what happened afterwards. Dossier 37 looks at this move in detail.
Money. One preacher said, “We have never lost a penny due to fraud,” at a time when, as the author recorded it, there were serious signs the church might have been scammed. The page makes no claim about what happened. But being cheated is not a sin; denying it is a choice. “He that covereth his sins shall not prosper” (Proverbs 28:13). Paul arranged for gifts to be handled so that they were honest “not only in the sight of the Lord, but also in the sight of men” (2 Corinthians 8:21).
What the old Church knew, and what has changed
The Bible treats pride in a church leader as serious. A new convert should not be made an overseer, “lest being lifted up with pride he fall into the condemnation of the devil” (1 Timothy 3:6). Teachers “shall receive the greater condemnation” (James 3:1).
The great preachers of the early Church knew the temptation from the inside. John Chrysostom, perhaps the finest preacher of his age, wrote: “I know not whether any man ever succeeded in the effort not to be pleased when he is praised.” Gregory the Great warned that after a good sermon, “the mind of the speaker is elevated in itself by a hidden delight in self-display.” They did not think vanity was a rare fault of bad men. They thought it was every preacher’s temptation.
So the Church built checks. A bishop or synod could correct or remove a minister. Others called and ordained him. He made public vows to teach the Church’s faith and to accept oversight. A creed bound what he preached. And the service followed an order centred on Christ, not on the preacher. None of these made anyone humble. They kept the office bigger than the man, and gave the people somewhere to go.
Where those checks are missing, the setting can reward exactly what the remarks show. Growth rewards personality. The founder owns the platform, so the church’s reputation is his. No one outside can say no. Those who disagree eventually leave, and the room fills with admirers. And “God told me” settles every argument. Does the pulpit also attract vain people more than other jobs? That is plausible, but nobody has shown it. A widely shared claim that nearly a third of pastors had a narcissistic disorder came from a book its publisher later withdrew.
The old Church treated the love of praise as every preacher’s temptation and built checks around him. Where they are missing, the modern setting rewards self-display and removes the brakes. Whether it attracts the vain at a higher rate is unproven.
The case for the other side, and an answer
The other side has real points. Paul did boast that he was “not a whit behind the very chiefest apostles.” Jesus did call religious leaders “whited sepulchres,” and Paul called opponents “dogs.” Reporting what God has done is biblical: Paul and Barnabas “rehearsed all that God had done with them” (Acts 14:27). Preachers use humour, and a joke written down years later sounds worse than it did. Remarks lose their context. Outrageous remarks are the ones people remember, while thousands of humble pastors go unnoticed. And pride tempts everyone.
The page grants most of this. But Paul’s boasting was forced, called foolish, about weakness, and ended “though I be nothing.” Jesus’ sharpest words were aimed at powerful men who “shut up the kingdom of heaven against men,” not at other believers’ songs or a woman’s music video. In Acts, the subject of the report is God: “all that God had done.” And the problems of context and memory are exactly why this page looks at a pattern, names no one, and claims no figures.
The same remark, two ways. “People tell me our church is unique; nobody else does what we do.” Or: “I’m often humbled that God has let this small church do some things I don’t see many others doing. I don’t know why he chose us. Pray we’d be faithful with it, and that we’d learn from the many churches that do other things far better.” Both report the same facts. Only one makes God the subject.
What does this prove?
It is easy to claim too much for a list of remarks, and easy to dismiss it too quickly. Six claims. Does the argument of this page show each one?
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A list of remarks diagnoses no one and measures no rate. What it does is make a pattern visible. The Bible supplies the tests: who is the subject, who gives the praise, how are other believers spoken of, can the claim be checked, and is the truth told when the image is at stake?
Check it yourself
Five things. The first takes half an hour. The last is the one that matters.
- 1. Read 2 Corinthians 10–13. Mark every place Paul says he is speaking as a fool, and list what he actually boasts of.
- 2. Read Mark 10:35–45 and Luke 22:24–27. What did Jesus say about who is greatest?
- 3. Read Luke 18:9–14 and 3 John. What did the Pharisee and Diotrephes have in common?
- 4. Read Isaiah 40:1–11 and 66:10–13. How does the Lord of hosts describe his own comfort?
- 5. One sermon. Do this one. In the next sermon you hear, notice every sentence in which the preacher is the subject. For each, ask: is he telling of his weakness, or of his standing? Then try the same on your own conversations about church.
Want the whole thing?
The full dossier weighs all sixteen remarks, counts the pronouns in any sermon you paste in, runs the remarks against the portrait of Diotrephes, lets you check a church you know against the old Church’s safeguards, states the other side’s case at full strength, gives you a seven-question test to take into church, and publishes the prompt that produced it all.
Read the full dossier → Simple English →