Judah Smith Is More Interested in Reaching the World Than Building a Bigger Church

Years ago, Judah Smith was reading Luke 7 when a detail stopped him.

Jesus is eating at the home of Simon the Pharisee when a woman comes in, pours perfume on His feet and wipes them with her hair. Simon is scandalized. Jesus answers him, but Luke makes a point of saying Jesus is looking at the woman.

“God, why are you talking to Simon but looking at the woman?” Smith remembers asking.

“God said, ‘This is what I’ve asked of you. I’m gonna ask you to face the world. You’ll still speak to the Church, but I want you to face the world.’”

For years, the Churchome pastor has occupied an unusual place in American Christianity. He preaches to packed rooms and built a massive digital audience, and he’s also known for his friendships with some of the most famous people in entertainment and sports. Justin Bieber has spoken openly about Smith’s influence on his faith. Lana Del Rey recorded part of a Smith sermon at church and put it on an album. Behind the scenes, the list goes on.

Those relationships have made him an easy target. “Celebrity pastor” is rarely meant as a compliment.

Smith knows the criticism, and he thinks it misses what he’s actually trying to do.

“I’ve always felt called to Rome,” he says, using the empire as shorthand for the wider culture. “I’ve always felt like I wanted to win with Rome. I always felt like Rome are my people.”

He still obviously considers himself part of the Church. He’s just stopped measuring his ministry by how many people it can get into one room on a Sunday.

“I’m not really hung up on, I wanna fill a bunch of churches,” he says. “I want people to be in community, but man, we gotta get the message out. We’ve got the greatest story to tell.”

He has spent the last several years experimenting with what that looks like. Churchome went hard into digital ministry and put millions into an app. Smith has hosted gatherings outside traditional church settings, and he’s now working on a sprawling first-person retelling of the biblical story.

“What if we took all the traditions off and what if we took a lot of the rules off?” he says. “What if it wasn’t moralism and elitism? And what if it wasn’t colluded with the policymakers of particular countries or continents? And what if it was just, let’s just give them Jesus?”

It’s also why he doesn’t apologize for spending time with people who have enormous platforms. Some of his famous friends tease him for how little he posts about them.

“Protection is primary,” he says.

Sometimes that’s a text. Sometimes it’s listening to someone unload something painful and never repeating it to anyone. Mostly it’s being a safe presence for someone whose life has very few private corners left.

“If the platform grows, the pain grows,” he says. “It is a parallel every single time.”

He’s watched people get the thing everyone assumes will make life easier, and then discover the bigger the audience, the harder it is to find anyone they can trust when the cameras are off.

It changed the way he pastors, too.

For years, he says, he took the expectation of being “the leader” too seriously. Relationships ran one direction. He was the one with the answers, the one doing the encouraging, the one who was fine.

“At some point, I need to connect with them too as a follower, and I need to open my heart,” he says.

Now he tries to let relationships move both ways, including with people he once saw only as people he was supposed to lead. That means admitting when he’s struggling instead of keeping up the idea that pastors have somehow graduated from ordinary human emotion.

“It’s impossible for me to be OK every day,” Smith says. “That’s not even real. There’s no chance that’s real. I get the sense sometimes us preachers, we feel like we gotta be OK every day. No, we don’t. Says who?”

That shift has a starting point. In October 2007, he says, a phrase came to him while he was wrestling with how he understood ministry: “Grace grows the church.”

“And everything changed for me,” he says. “It started to just unwind.”

What unwound was the performance-driven version of Christianity that Smith now believes his generation of pastors helped reinforce without meaning to.

“We live in a do-good, get-good scenario,” he says. “I don’t think anyone ever intended to dilute the glorious message of Jesus, but we did.”

Churches got good at practical preaching, he argues. People learned how to improve their marriages, manage their lives and become better versions of themselves. None of it was bad. But Smith worries about what people heard underneath it.

“I need to try a little harder. I need to pray more. I need to give more. I need to serve more.”

“God is not the football coach,” he says.

Smith’s book Bad Thoughts, written with psychologist Les Parrott and published last fall, grew partly out of his own effort to untangle those patterns. He and his wife, Chelsea, began meeting with Parrott, and Smith eventually joked that they should write a book about “all the things you fixed in me.”

The book lands roughly where his thinking about ministry has: “Stop earning credit with God and just receive His gift.”

Smith still wants people in churches. He still preaches, and he still pastors. He’s just not interested in building a ministry that ends at the church door.

“I want people to know His story,” he says.

These days, he’s mostly trying to make sure he’s facing the right direction when he tells it.